More Lastrade than Holmes

Vain "Reconciliations"

There are plenty of professing Christians who, to all intents and purposes, are genuine believers.  But they have chosen to lay aside the first eleven chapters of the Bible as authoritative and divinely inspired.  Why have they done so?  Because they consider rationalistic science to be more inspired and more authoritative than the Bible itself.  When science conflicts with the Bible, the latter must give way. 

Others have sought to "reconcile" the teaching of  both the Bible and science.  They have devised all kinds of ingenious pretexts to make the early chapters of Bible say something other than what they actually do say.  Note, it is always the Bible which has to change under such tortuous procedures, never science. 

This is folly indeed.  We all know that science is not neutral.
We know that it is captive to dominant paradigms.  It is always necessarily biased towards certain theoretical pre-interpretations.  Given the rise of an anti-Christian paradigm in the West over the past 250 years, the prejudice against the Scripture is now strong indeed.  Science has cant.  It is now deeply partial when it comes to presupposing its own secularist world view.  Worse, science--at least hard, real science--is weak at the outset when investigating the origins of the universe in general and the world and sentient life in particular because its ability to experiment in a lab is necessarily constricted.  Hard science cannot replicate the conditions of the genesis of the cosmos.  It can only deal with things as they are now and speculate via extrapolation backwards in time. 

But every concession to scientific speculation by Christians brings with it greater contradictions with the text of Scripture.  For example, the day age theory of the six days of creation is an attempt to concede an extremely long period of time during which the cosmos evolved and life began upon earth. Each day represents a geological age in this bizarre rewriting of the text. 

Although the intent is to harmonize Scripture and science, the day-age view is just as much at odds with modern science as any other creationist view.  The geological ages do not harmonize with the days of creation and there are many discrepancies between the two.  [Andrew S. Kulikovsky, Creation, Fall, Restoration: A Biblical Theology of Creation (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications Ltd, 2009),  p.152.]

So, the Christian, trying to reconcile seven days of creation with purported geological time, ends up in a nonsense position--rejected both by the text of Scripture and by the evolutionists.  They have mixed water with wine and got sewage.

A similar devastating series of problems arise from attempts to deny the world wide deluge of the Noahic flood.  Despite there being is an widespread belief in a universal flood testified to by ancient peoples, the attempt has been made to argue that the text of Genesis 6-9 actually teaches a localised flood, restricted to the Babylonian plain.  In discussing some of the contradictions and flaws this "reconciliation" produces, Kulikovsky adds:

Several other objections to a local flood can be raised.  If the flood was only local, then why was there any need to build an ark?  Noah was given many years of warning, so there was ample time to leave the region and travel anywhere on earth.  Why build an ocean-liner sized ark to save eight people when they could have migrated as Lot and his family did after being warned about the impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  The animals would have been all over the earth not just in the Mesopotamian region, so why bother to bring them on board?  If any kinds were unique to this region then they too could have migrated.  Why bring birds on board when they are capable of flying hundreds of miles in a day? 

. . . Furthermore, the fact that the dove released by Noah could find no place to land because there was water over all the surface of the earth (Genesis 8:9) also stands in contradiction to a local flood--especially since doves are capable of flying hundreds of miles without setting down.

In addition, if the flood was only local, God has repeatedly broken His promise never again to destroy the earth and its inhabitants by a flood (Genesis 8:21; 9:11; Isaiah 54:9) since there have been numerous local floods throughout Mesopotamia which have caused great destruction.   [Andrew S. Kulikovsky, Creation, Fall, Restoration: A Biblical Theology of Creation (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications Ltd, 2009),  p.231f.]

 The attempt to ingratiate the Church with Unbelieving mammon ends up exposing God's Word to ridicule.  We Christians, however, believe the Bible to be true--the inerrant, infallible Word of the Living God, utterly reliable in all that it teaches.  The first eleven chapters of Genesis are overtly and deliberately written in the literary form of Hebrew historical narrative.  They are not Hebrew poetry.  They are not expressions of Hebrew wisdom literature.  They are simple, majestic, straightforward historical narrative.  Consequently, they should be taken at face value and read as an accurate, truthful historical account. 

Moreover, last time we checked there was not one modern secular, Unbelieving scientist present at the time of creation.  That's a rather debilitating limitation upon a discipline which depends upon empirical observation and experimental repeatability for discovery and verification.  In such conditions, vain speculation always lurks, desiring mastery.  And so it has come to pass.  More Lastrade than Holmes.