Phil Jones on Burnet's Sacred Theology of the Earth

Over at Genesis and Geology, Phil Jones has written an interesting piece on Thomas Burnet's Telluris Theoria Sacra, or Sacred Theory of the Earth. It was a speculative cosmogony, in which Burnet suggested a that the Earth was hollow and filled with water until Noah's flood. He calculated the amount of water on Earth's surface and recognized that there is not enough to account for a worldwide Flood. Burnet was influenced by Descartes who had written on the Earth' creation in Principia philosophiae (1644).

Thomas Burnet (1635-1715)

At Just Genesis I have written about the problems that arise when we read Genesis as an account of world events, rather than events involving the Afro-Asiatic populations from whom we receive these accounts. I am not as critical of Biblical literalism as I am of those who ignore the original cultural context of the material. This is one reason I oppose Young Earth Creationism.

Jones takes up another point. He writes:

"But Mortenson’s [read Young Earth Creationists here] arguments also seem to imply that once upon a time Christians studied nature through the lens of an uncompromising scriptural worldview, with the Bible in one hand and their scientific instruments in the other. One point I am trying to make is that such a golden age of heroic Biblicism never existed.”

Read the whole article here.


Related reading: Between Biblical Literalism and Biblical Illiteracy; Was Earth Repopulated After Noah's Flood?; How Big Was Noah's Flood?

St. Basil Engages the Pagans

"Do not then imagine, O man! that the visible world is without a beginning; and because the celestial bodies move in a circular course, and it is difficult for our senses to define the point where the circle begins, do not believe that bodies impelled by a circular movement are, from their nature, without a beginning. Without doubt the circle (I mean the plane figure described by a single line) is beyond our perception, and it is impossible for us to find out where it begins or where it ends; but we ought not on this account to believe it to be without a beginning. Although we are not sensible of it, it really begins at some point where the draughtsman has begun to draw it at a certain radius from the centre. Thus seeing that figures which move in a circle always return upon themselves, without for a single instant interrupting the regularity of their course, do not vainly imagine to yourselves that the world has neither beginning nor end. "For the fashion of this world passeth away" and "Heaven and earth shall pass away." The dogmas of the end, and of the renewing of the world, are announced beforehand in these short words put at the head of the inspired history." --Excerpt from Homily I of St. Basil the Great's Hexaemeron

Read St. Basil's first sermon of his Hexaemeron here and then listen to Fr. David Smith discuss it on Harmony of Thunder.


St. Basil and his wife, St. Macrina, suffered under the persecution of Maximinus Galerius (305-314). They fled to the mountains where they suffered many privations, thereby St. Macrina is regarded as a "Confessor of the Faith". Their son, St. Basil the Elder, married St. Emmelia, the daughter of a martyr, and among their ten children were St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Peter of Sebastea, St. Macrina the Younger, and the man who wrote the homilies that you have been reading. St. Basil the Great wrote nine homilies on the six days of creation, known as "The Hexaemeron."

St. Basil the Great was born around A.D. 329, and died on January 1, 379. He studied in Caesarea, Constantinople, and later in Athens, where he became friends with St. Gregory of Nazianzus. They joined their efforts in confronting heresies, especially Arianism. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Basil the Great, and Basil's brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, became known as "The Three Cappadocians." St. Basil became Bishop of Caesarea in 370, and greatly influenced theology in both the East and West.

St. Basil's insights into the first chapters of Genesis are remarkable for their clear apologetic of the biblical doctrine of creatio ex nihilo by the Creator of the Universe.


Related reading:  Answers to Questions About God; Answers to Questions About the Creation of the Earth

Enns Casts Evangelicals as Anti-Darwin

I recently read this article by Peter Enns and, while I agree with much that he says, his premise - "If evolution is right about how humans came to be, then the biblical story of Adam and Eve isn't." - is false and misleading.  Enns needs to learn the facts about human origins.

One wonders what Enns means by the terms "evolution" and "Evangelical" and does he recognize that Evangelicals who hold an evolutionary view of human origins are equally guilty of imposing a foreign notion on the ancient text?  The Biologos crowd, with which he is associated, is characteristic of that position.

Then there is the evidence of molecular genealogy which supports the biblical assertion that humans appeared suddenly and unheralded in East Africa (the point of origin of Abraham's ancestors) many thousands of years ago. When Enns speaks of Adam and Eve as first humans he should clarify that this story comes from Abraham's Nilotic ancestors and is about their first parents who they believed to have a red skin tone (adam, edom, dam - red).


Peter Enns


Evangelicals have been butting heads with evolution for 150 years. A lot is at stake.

If evolution is right about how humans came to be, then the biblical story of Adam and Eve isn't. If you believe, as evangelicals do, that God himself is responsible for what's in the Bible, you have a problem on your hands. Once you open the door to the possibility that God's version of human origins isn't what actually happened -- well, the dominoes start unraveling down the slippery slope. The next step is uncertainty, chaos and despair about one's personal faith.

That, more or less, is the evangelical log flume of fear, and I have seen it played out again and again.
In recent years, the matter has gotten far worse. Popular figures like Richard Dawkins have done an in-your-face-break-the-backboard-slam-dunk over the heads of defenders of the biblical story. They've taken great delight in making sure Main Street knows evolution is true, and therefore the Bible is "God's big book of bad ideas" (Bill Maher) and Christians are morons for taking it seriously.

Evangelicals have been on high alert damage control mode.

Then you have the mapping of the human genome. It's a done deal: humans and primates are 90-something percent related genetically. The best explanation for it, geneticists tell us, is that humans evolved from primates. Since my greatest scientific achievement is doing puppet shows with dissected feral cats in high school biology, I feel I have no right to contest -- and I likely speak for many other evangelicals in that regard (sans puppet show). And it doesn't help things that an evangelical, Francis Collins, was the one who pointed all this out, got the Presidential Medal of Honor for it, and talked about it (twice) on "The Colbert Report."

If that wasn't enough, evolution is being used nowadays to explain all sorts of things about us humans -- including why we believe in God. If God is a product of evolution, like bipedalism and tool making, well, the jig's up (and not just for evangelicals).

Evolution is a threat, and many evangelicals are fighting to keep Adam in the family photo album. But in their rush to save Christianity, some evangelicals have been guilty of all sorts of strained, idiosyncratic or obscurantist tactics: massaging or distorting the data, manipulating the legal system, scaring their constituencies and strong-arming those of their own camp who raise questions.

These sorts of tactics get a lot of press, but behind them is a deeper problem -- a problem that gets close to the heart of evangelicalism itself and hampers any true dialogue.

It has to do with what evangelicals expect from the Bible.

Evangelicals look to the Bible to settle important questions of faith. So, faced with a potentially faith-crushing idea like evolution, evangelicals naturally ask right off the bat, "What does the Bible say about that?" And then informed by "what the Bible says," they are ready to make a "biblical" judgment.

This is fine in principle, but in the evolution debate this mindset is a problem: It assumes that the Adam and Eve story is about "human origins." It isn't. And as long as evangelicals continue to assume that it does, the conflict between the Bible and evolution is guaranteed.

Since the 19th century, through scads of archaeological discoveries from the ancient world of the Bible, biblical scholars have gotten a pretty good handle on what ancient creation stories were designed to do.

Ancient peoples assumed that somewhere in the distant past, near the beginning of time, the gods made the first humans from scratch -- an understandable conclusion to draw. They wrote stories about "the beginning," however, not to lecture their people on the abstract question "Where do humans come from?" They were storytellers, drawing on cultural traditions, writing about the religious -- and often political -- beliefs of the people of their own time.

Their creation stories were more like a warm-up to get to the main event: them. Their stories were all about who they were, where they came from, what their gods thought of them and, therefore, what made them better than other peoples.

Likewise, Israel's story was written to say something about their place in the world and the God they worshiped. To think that the Israelites, alone among all other ancient peoples, were interested in (or capable of) giving some definitive, quasi-scientific, account of human origins is an absurd logic. And to read the story of Adam and Eve as if it were set up to so such a thing is simply wrongheaded.

Reading the biblical story against its ancient backdrop is hardly a news flash, and most evangelical biblical scholars easily concede the point. But for some reason this piece of information has not filtered down to where it is needed most: into the mainstream evangelical consciousness. Once it does, evangelicals will see for themselves that dragging the Adam and Eve story into the evolution discussion is as misguided as using the stories of Israel's monarchy to rank the Republican presidential nominees.

Evangelicals tend to focus on how to protect the Bible against the attacks of evolution. The real challenge before them is to reorient their expectation of what the story of Adam and Eve is actually prepared to deliver.

These kinds of conversations are already happening, though too often quietly and behind closed doors. Evangelicals owe it to their children and their children's children to bring the discussion out into the open.

From here.


Related reading:  Biblical Anthropologist Discuss Darwin; Q and A on Creation and Evolution; Christians Debate Genesis and Evolution; Is Genesis Really About Human Origins?; Genesis and Genetics; Parsing Genesis 1:1-2; A.S. Haley Series: Did Adam and Eve Exist?; Science Teachers and Creationism; Brief Overview of Human Origins