Here is a dumb news report on Genesis and Andrew Parker's use of Genesis. It is from the sensationalist Daily Mail:
The revalation [sic] came to Professor Andrew Parker during a visit to Rome. He was in the Sistine Chapel, gazing up at Michelangelo's awesome ceiling paintings, when a realisation struck him with dizzying force.
'A Biblical enigma exists that is on the one hand so cryptic it has remained camouflaged for millennia, and on the other so obvious one cannot miss it.'
The enigma is that the order of Creation as described in the Book of Genesis, and so powerfully depicted in the Sistine Chapel by the greatest artist of the Renaissance, has been precisely, eerily confirmed by modern evolutionary science.
'A Biblical enigma exists that is on the one hand so cryptic it has remained camouflaged for millennia, and on the other so obvious one cannot miss it.'
The enigma is that the order of Creation as described in the Book of Genesis, and so powerfully depicted in the Sistine Chapel by the greatest artist of the Renaissance, has been precisely, eerily confirmed by modern evolutionary science.
Read it all here.
Andrew Parker is a biology professor from Oxford whose area of study is the evolution of the eye. He claims to be an atheist and stirred the ire of fellow atheists when he asserted that evolution and Genesis can be reconciled. In his The Genesis Enigma: Why the Bible is scientifically accurate he asserts that the people who gave us the book of Genesis understood evolution 3000 years ago. Parker fails to identify who those people were. Would he think them so clever were he to recognize that they were ruler-priests who saw a fixed hierarchy in creation? Or that they were Nilotic peoples who knew a great deal more about water creatures that Parker and over thousands of years never saw one species evolve from another species? Had they done so they would have remarked on this fascinating observation in Genesis.
Parker has no friends among Young Earth Creationists either. He has said that, "Creationism is totally unfounded. It is as dangerous as fundamentalism in other religions." He lost the literalists when he posited that the creation of lights in the sky to mark the seasons is a poetic description of the formation of vision. In Parker’s Day Five abundant sea life evolves in direct response to the evolution of vision. He writes, "Almost overnight, life suddenly grew vastly more complex. Predators were able to hunt far more efficiently, and so prey had to evolve fast too–or get eaten.”
Nor has he many friends among Christians who believe in theistic evolution because Parker fails to place Genesis in the theological context of divine creation. For him, life on earth developed according to the mechanism of evolution, not because the Creator created through the Generative Word.
The most important criticism of Parker's correlation of the days of creation with evolution is simply that Genesis holds to a fixed order in creation. To impose an evolutionary scheme on Genesis One is to make it say exactly the opposite of what it states: that life is organized within fixed genetic boundaries called "kinds."
Further, Genesis is not about the origins of life, but about the origins of Messianic expectation.
For a man of Parker's academic caliber, the book is disappointing. He should have stayed with the subject of vision and its development. Perhaps he hoped to cash in on the Bible busting trend that has put plenty of cash in the pockets of fellow atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins.
Related reading: Genesis and Genetics; Hierarchy in Creation: The biblical view; The African Context of Genesis
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9 comments:
Now fixed!
Alice,
I do agree the universe can be observed, but for God one day is like a thousand years. So what these people are opposed to is the literal six days argument.
Savvy
This made me laugh. It is hilarious (as well as sad and pitiful) that he finally 'discovered' the answer: that people 3000 years ago knew the truth about the order of creation, yet he manages to misinterpret it completely to make it fit into his static world view.
And then proceeds as though he is the first person in the history of the world to notice the order given in Genesis. Ha!
Keep up the Good work Alice. :-)
Have you, are you or will you be writing a book consolidating and streamlining your research and conclusions?
As a conservative, "evangelical" Christian of the Protestant derivation who has long dogmatically held to the 6 day, Adam and Eve only view, I must say, your writings are making me seriously sit back and think... and think some more. Some things don't sit right, but that's okay for now.
If you haven't written a book compiling your studies, I certainly encourage you to do so. I'd readily buy it and read it, as well as pass it around. Ground-breaking and thought provoking indeed!
Tina, Atheists are generally an arrogant lot, and their pronouncements are often humorous!
Savvy, The seven days correspond to the seven visible planets and to the seven-tiered heaven. Saturn (Saturday) is the day of rest when Christ rested in the grave. It gives way to Sunday, the sun being the oldest known emblem of the risen God.
Wading Across, thanks for the encouraging words. I'm working on four manuscripts. The first - Ten Myths About Abraham - should be ready by Christmas. Then to find a publisher... probably the hardest part of the whole undertaking!
Aren't those paintings of Michel Angelo racist?
Don't those paintings depict the Roman Catholic authorities as racist?
Aren't they blatant violations of the 2nd commandment?
YT (Ijebu-Remo)
Adam (edom/odom) means reddish-brown, so in that sense Michelangelo's depiction of Adam as a light-skin European is not historically correct. Yet each culture tends to depict God and Adam in their own likeness. I suppose it is natural and not necessarily racist.
I once saw a poster that depicted Jesus Christ as a Sioux warrior in full buckskin with feathers and war paint. His skin color was reddish-brown and his hair very black and straight.
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