Genesis

[grannymh]

Why do you suppose it’s listed that people in the OT lived to 900+ years?

Here is the link to Catholic Answers from an earlier post.

Full Question
Can you give me a logical answer about the people’s ages in the book of Genesis? Some of them lived to be 900 years old. What is the Catholic Church’s teaching about this?

Answer
The Church has no teaching regarding whether these ages are to be taken literally or not. The Church will say that whatever Scripture says is inerrant but must be understood in terms of the conventions of literature that were in use at the time.

It is known that, in many ancient cultures, fantastically long lives were assigned to famous forebears. This could be an indication that the ages are to be taken as symbolic of the greatness and venerability of the individuals.

However, this is not something the Church has taught. God can keep people alive as long as he wants. If he wants someone to live to be 900 years old, then that person can do so.

 

[juliamajor]

Why do you suppose it’s listed that people in the OT lived to 900+ years?/QUs

SO they can enjoy their social security benefits.?!
?

 

[Faith1960]

Faith1960;10184031:

Why do you suppose it’s listed that people in the OT lived to 900+ years?[/QUs

SO they can enjoy their social security benefits.?!
?

[/quote]

 

[Gorgias]

I numbered your points as best I could divide them for ease of reference. I won’t be able to hit all nine in this post, I think. I’d like to ask up front that you expand upon especially:

(7), so I might get the book in which it is written (and see if yet someone else can try to prove that the Fathers were not young-earth, and not fail). I will admit that even if he could open the door, it could not be proved to my satisfaction by any mortal means (I am a creationist and a creationist I will stay). But, if the door could be opened, I would be much happier, in the sense that I could admit that other rational individuals could see the evidence differently, without feeling the need to bash my head against every brick wall in sight.

Georges Lemaitre was a Catholic priest who first developed the “Big Bang” theory. In other words, it’s possible to be a faithful Catholic and yet still reject creationism.

(1) I reject this categorically. Whenever the Bible it speaks, it speaks inerrantly:

Inerrency does not require strict literalism. The literal sense of the Bible speaks only to the truth of Scripture, not to its potential historical accuracy.

There are no “obiter dicta” which are not inspired or can be in even the slightest error due to their distance from matters of faith and morals: the Holy Spirit is the author of it all.

The Holy Spirit is an author of Scripture, not the only author – the human authors, and their contributions (including their modes of speech), must be taken into account as well.

(2) Your point is taken. As it was written, I was incorrect. Let me now attempt to reformulate more precisely my hermeneutic here: Anthropomorphisms are not strictly metaphorical or hyperbolic. They are a class unto themselves. They have nothing in the text that implies they are counterfactual; they are stated simply and plainly.

‘Metaphorical’ does not imply ‘counterfactual’ – the fact that a metaphor expresses, however, is not a literal one. When David, in 2 Samuel 22, states, “my God, my rock of refuge! My shield, my saving horn”, there is truth in that statement! However, the truth that David expressed is not that God is a literal ‘rock’ or ‘shield’ or ‘horn’; rather, the truth is expressed through the use of the metaphor. When we say that Genesis contains metaphor, we are not saying that it is untrue or counterfactual; instead, we are merely saying that they are expressions that describe truths in a way that is not the same that a physics textbook describes truths.

I would recommend that you read Davies’ discussion of the difference between univocal, equivocal, and analogical expressions in his The Thought of Thomas Aquinas. Although the particular matter there expresses the ways in which we speak of God, it applies to our discussion here.

I rely not on myself here (although I see no hyperbole) … but on every commentary in existence

There’s a certain irony here: are you really saying that there is no “commentary in existence” that says that the events we’re talking about contain metaphor or hyperbole? Or are you just teasing me and using hyperbole of your own? C’mon now…

But, just in case you really think that there is no reasonable theologian who argues against your point, I direct you to In the Beginning, by Ratzinger; I especially recommend that thou readest his discussion on the differences between ‘form’ and ‘content’ in the context of Genesis’ pericopes. I hope that we can agree that, as a theologian, Benedict XVI is a reputable source.

(4) Please expand on this: for now I would say you demonstrably mistaken, and that this is shown by a foundational law of non-fuzzy logic: the excluded middle. If a statement is made, it is either true or false.

Certainly; but it may be true in ways that are neither literal nor historical. You seem to be setting up a false dichotomy: that Scriptural truth is only true if it is historical. This is the claim that I assert runs counter to Catholic principles of the interpretation of Scripture.

(5) My program has been to attempt to show that those who make the first claim that you make, are logically inconsistent if they do not continue to the second, that the Bible, or, at least the first chapters, are mirrors for the fashion of the day.

Sorry – I’m not following your firsts and seconds. Could you humor me and tell me what your referents are?

With respect to the “mirrors for the fashion of the day” notion, though, I think you’re being far too dramatic. Do the human authors of Genesis (and all Scripture) use forms that are familiar to them and to their intended audiences? Of course! Does their use of these forms – which they may have believed to have been literally or historically accurate, but which today are more plainly seen to be true as Divine Revelation when taken in a metaphorical sense – mean that they spoke untruths? Of course not! God speaks Revelation – inerrantly – even when speaking it through human authors!

 

[Gorgias]

quote=Khalid See above: it has been my project to show that only one hermeneutic (interpretive stance) is consistent with the whole of scripture and leads to a self-contained and consistent system of interpretation, namely, one that is a super-set of the interpretations I have given here (which are but a small sub-set of it). I have named this by name: the historico-grammatical method, and have demonstrated that the other three senses of Scripture do not exist, if the historical/literal sense does not exist or is false.
[/quote]

This may be the case; but, your notion of ‘false’ – that is, a lack of literal historical factuality – undercuts your whole project. Scripture is capable of being true without being historically factual (not in its entirety, of course; but certainly, there are narrative passages in Scripture which are true without being historically accurate).

it really isn’t rebuttable; I read it as a non sequitur. If you would like to rephrase (9) in such a way that it makes more sense to me, I would be willing to tackle it, as I have shown.

Certainly. You assert that, because we believe in creation ex nihilo, the Incarnation, and the nature of humanity (in the image and likeness of God), that we must take literally “the prosaic … details that God chose to share with us.” I find this ludicrous. You’re stating, in effect, that since God acted within His creation, therefore He is limited to making statements that are strictly historically accurate; your claim seems to be that God’s direct intervention within history requires all God’s revelation to be of a certain type. That sort of limitation on God’s ability to speak in a variety of ways, and through the limitation of human (inspired) authors, is at least mildly offensive. If we expect God to speak in obvious ways – through strong winds, earthquakes, and fire – then we will always be unable to recognize Him in a still small voice…

 

[Khalid]

Georges Lemaitre was a Catholic priest who first developed the “Big Bang” theory. In other words, it’s possible to be a faithful Catholic and yet still reject creationism.

Oh. I’m a (bit) busy, so it may be a day before I get back to your actual points (I’ve not even finished essay on #8 yet), but I’ve never heard him referred to as Georges - I know who “Lemaitre” is, though. I won’t cast aspersions on his orthodoxy (working within a uniformitarian naturalistic framework, as all modern, post-Newtonian and pre-Bohrian [QM] science has been, if one sees the expansion of the universe [it is expanding], it demands that one extrapolates back to a point where it could contract no more, the point from which it started its expansion - the inaptly-named “big bang”), nor will I cast aspersions on the orthodoxy of those who reject my specific brand of creationism, but it is undoubted that (Deistic [commonly and incorrectly called “theistic”] and/or Darwinian) evolutionism is impossible to hold in good faith, and without contradiction with the truths of Christianity (original sin, resurrection, God-in-history, atonement). Now, I do not say that one can not hold it either in bad faith or with contradiction, or both, even while consciously unaware of the massive dissonance.

For this, I put forth as a counter-example of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, which, no matter how much de Lubac would like to try and rescue his confrere, and no matter how many hierarchs recommended him, was a material heretic at the very least, and much more likely an apostate who couched his “New Christianity” in terms of the “old”: a “ravening wolf in sheep’s clothing”. Note that I do not say he was a formal heretic, as he may have not realized the grave contradiction between his teachings and Christianity.

Not that life-stories of given individuals of greater or lesser orthodoxy has any bearing on the truth of anything whatsoever, except whether those individuals were orthodox to a greater or lesser degree. I believe we both agree on this, that one can’t put forth a pious and observant Muslim to disprove Christianity, or mutatis mutandis, a pious and practicing Christian to disprove Islam, or a first-grade student to disprove predicate algebra.

Further, I have no delusions of grandeur that I will convert everyone to a decidedly minority viewpoint - strict creationism - even if I believe the Church - all of them - will constantly fade until it accepts it univocally, whence again religion - as God acting in this material world - can become relevant again to our daily lives, and that we can take all of the Bible with a straight face (see the first line in my signature), including the moral commands that are today a stumbling-block to the Jews, insanity to the Gentiles, and a laughingstock to all: for we gain to respect for any of our views, when we try so desperately to ignore what our own holy book says on its very first page, and to re-interpret it after the exact same fashion as some such as John Spong would re-interpret the rest. Although, for the Church in general, I do believe, with complete frankness, that this is one of the two era-, religion-, society-, and future-defining debates of our day (one could say merely definitional, defining the path for everything) where the promise of Christ must come in to effect or the Church to fail: creationism (if it is abandoned, so is religion as an actual living and vital force), and the egalitarian-complementarian debate (if the latter is abandoned, so are valid sacraments, and thus religion). Now, on a proofread, that sounds a bit more millennarian than I actually am, but it’s close enough.

Edit: insofar as my statement on commentaries, I have read a good deal ranging from the conservative (NAC) to the liberal (ICC, Anchor), and I am unaware of a single commentary beyond those two, or possibly three, that I listed in my next post (the one starting with, “Lest you think I be dishonest…”) that disagree with the general contours* of my thesis. No, not hyperbole: but I may have managed to read the 9 commentaries from left to right that agree with me, and have missed all 20 that don’t. I merely find that prima facie doubtful due to the laws of statistics (which would tend to say, at the least, that roughly 7/10 commentaries agreed with the rough contours of my exegesis).

*That is to say, the author of Genesis was attempting to teach what I believe and what I am attempting to exegete, even if the author of the commentary himself does not believe what the author of Genesis was attempting to teach. It seems that this area is a razor’s edge, a great fulcrum, much like (though, immediately, less important than) the path to heaven: step one bit to either side, in to a crass literalism (which I reject any and all association with, as I have made clear, favoring a basic “contextual reading” which can then be expanded by other senses), or in to a non-creationism, and fall off of religion entirely - e.g. Howard Van Till.

 

[Khalid]

Erratum to last clause: “e.g. the “Ultra-Fundamentalists” on one hand (those who schism over such things as whether the Bible gives literal authorization for musical instruments to be used in NT worship, or derive a doctrine of an inspired KJV from the Psalms) and Howard Van Till-style evolutionism on the other.”

 

[PeaceInChrist]

So, wait… I’m confused… Is it heretical now to reconcile scientific discoveries, such as the age of the universe, big bang, and evolution, with Biblical interpretation? If it is, then I guess the majority of the faithful, orthodox Catholics I know are unknowingly heretical. I’m more unorthodox than I thought. And if inerrant refers to historical facts, then what of the much-flaunted date or number contradictions that atheists love to point out? I am not understanding this at all.

 

[grannymh]

So, wait… I’m confused… Is it heretical now to reconcile scientific discoveries, such as the age of the universe, big bang, and evolution, with Biblical interpretation? If it is, then I guess the majority of the faithful, orthodox Catholics I know are unknowingly heretical. I’m more unorthodox than I thought. And if inerrant refers to historical facts, then what of the much-flaunted date or number contradictions that atheists love to point out? I am not understanding this at all.

Suggestion. Learn basic Catholic doctrines.

Scientific theories about the material/physical planet earth and its universe do not become Catholic doctrines. However, some scientific theories about the origin and nature of humans do collide with basic Catholic doctrines regarding the human person. When that happens, Divine Revelation contained in Catholic doctrines wins.

 

[Gorgias]

Scientific theories about the material/physical planet earth and its universe do not become Catholic doctrines. However, some scientific theories about the origin and nature of humans do collide with basic Catholic doctrines regarding the human person. When that happens, Divine Revelation contained in Catholic doctrines wins.

Quite right. Yet, Peace’s question goes right to my assertion: when we wed Catholic doctrine to issues of science, under the mantle of Scriptural literalism, then the necessary result is a certain skepticism - if not outright disbelief - in Catholic teachings. Its predictable outcome, then, is the opposite of evangelization…!

p.s. to Khalid: I, too, am engaged at the moment; I’ll try to respond to your reply in the next few days…

Blessings,
G.

 

[Khalid]

Gorgias: no need to yet, or no rush, I still have to reply fully to all of the points in your reply.

 

[Gorgias]

Oh. I’m a (bit) busy, so it may be a day before I get back to your actual points (I’ve not even finished essay on #8 yet), but I’ve never heard him referred to as Georges - I know who “Lemaitre” is, though. I won’t cast aspersions on his orthodoxy (working within a uniformitarian naturalistic framework, as all modern, post-Newtonian and pre-Bohrian [QM] science has been, if one sees the expansion of the universe [it is expanding], it demands that one extrapolates back to a point where it could contract no more, the point from which it started its expansion - the inaptly-named “big bang”),

Hmm… that would seem to suggest either that you dispute that matter began at the ‘bang’ (does it begin at some later point, with matter dispersed through space but all hurtling away from a single point?), or that all matter ‘hiccuped’ at some point (that is, that there’s a discontinuous rate of expansion of the universe)? In any case, this seems a bit far afield of our discussion, so maybe it’s best to abandon this line of discussion. Nevertheless, my only point in raising it was to refute your assertion that the only point of view of the origin of creation, for an orthodox Catholic, is literalistic creationism. Having accomplished this, I think it’s fair for us to move on…

it is undoubted that (Deistic [commonly and incorrectly called “theistic”] and/or Darwinian) evolutionism is impossible to hold in good faith, and without contradiction with the truths of Christianity (original sin, resurrection, God-in-history, atonement).

Perhaps I need to ask you how you define ‘theistic evolution’, because… (wait for it)…

Now, I do not say that one can not hold it either in bad faith or with contradiction, or both, even while consciously unaware of the massive dissonance.

…because I’m wondering which you’re saying: that John Paul II was acting in ‘bad faith’ or ‘with contradiction’?
John Paul II:

In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII has already affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points.

John Paul II:

Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis.

Moving on, then…

For this, I put forth as a counter-example of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Let me state this very clearly: it is not necessary to assent to de Chardin’s ideas in order to assent to evolution, nor am I referring to his ideas in my response to you. If you’re saying that a refutation of de Chardin is tantamount to a refutation of evolution, then I would assert that you’re not acting in good faith. I don’t think you are, but the fact that you raise Chardin, seemingly as a straw man in response to a discussion of evolution, is somewhat disconcerting.

Not that life-stories of given individuals of greater or lesser orthodoxy has any bearing on the truth of anything whatsoever, except whether those individuals were orthodox to a greater or lesser degree. I believe we both agree on this, that one can’t put forth a pious and observant Muslim to disprove Christianity, or mutatis mutandis, a pious and practicing Christian to disprove Islam, or a first-grade student to disprove predicate algebra.

Yet, that’s not what I’m doing: I’m putting forth an orthodox Catholic priest, not a Muslim, and a scientist highly respected in his field, not a first-grade student. Your attempt to characterize Lemaitre as a ‘fish out of water’, or as a child among scholars, is simply poor form and rather disappointing.

Neither am I putting Lemaitre before you biographically, but as an example of a learned priest and scientist (who would take issue with your ‘strict creationism’).

Edit: insofar as my statement on commentaries, I have read a good deal ranging from the conservative (NAC) to the liberal (ICC, Anchor), and I am unaware of a single commentary beyond those two, or possibly three… that disagree with the general contours* of my thesis… due to the laws of statistics (which would tend to say, at the least, that roughly 7/10 commentaries agreed with the rough contours of my exegesis).

LOL! Of all the Catholics I might have expected would espouse a ‘majority rules’ heuristic in the determination of the interpretation of Scripture, I would’ve never thought it would have been you! Does this mean we can start taking votes on matters of doctrine, based on the opinions of theologians…?

 

[Khalid]

Replying just to the last post (still working on the others):

1. Depending on the day, I lean towards either the sort of white-hole cosmology espoused by John Hartnett, Russell Humphreys, and a few other creationists (Einstein’s field equations + bounded universe, rejecting the Copernican principle, instead of the Big Bang’s unbounded universe: see the books Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe by Russell Humphreys, Dismantling the Big Bang by Hartnett and Williams, and Starlight, Time, and the New Physics by Hartnett), or, secondly, and less desirably, a modified form of the quasi-steady-state “intrinsic redshift” cosmology of Halton Arp (see Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies and Seeing Red, both by Arp), although both seem inadequate in some ways, in that the first seems to predict a blueshift in nearby objects (one that is unobserved), and the latter requires a “breaking”, so to speak, of the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of matter).
2. I apologize for any misconception; I was using my statement that you took as a “fish out of water” to refute my own example of Teilhard de Chardin (that a first grader does not disprove the predicate calculus was meant to be analogous to the heresy of Chardin does not disprove in itself the “general theory of evolution” [that is, life through descent with modification from a universal common ancestor, herein referred to as “evolution”]), to make it clear that I was not arguing from the orthodoxy or lack thereof of specific characters. I was not attempting to any way imply that Georges Lemaitre was such a one. Lemaitre was one of the foremost modern cosmologists, and Big Bang theory in and of itself is in no way incompatible with Christianity or with God’s ex nihilo creative act; it, indeed, is mostly consonant with it. Further accretions to the Big Bang cosmologies in an attempt to dodge anthropic coincidences, etc. (such as chaotic inflationary multiverse cosmology, brane-collision M-theory cosmology, and other, more esoteric solutions) are designed from their very inception to be contrary to Theistic faith (whether they succeed or not is not for me to say), but these have nothing to do with Lemaitre.

I do believe that any attempt to reconcile evolution, (as defined above, as I am not tackling cosmic or chemical or geological evolution) with Christianity, in the end, if believable, destroys one or the other: I was using the philosophy of Chardin as an example of this. There are certain half-way measures, so to speak, that require massive contortions of the Christian religion and Scriptures (day-age pre-Adamite, soul-infused-hominid theistic evolution framework hypothesis-type stuff) and Darwinian evolution (by strapping an unnecessary and extraneous God on to the edifice of materialistic evolution), which strain credibility, as the evolution does not require God, and, indeed, militates against God as anything but a first cause (deist god), and the religion does not require evolution, and, indeed, militates against evolution as undercutting its very foundation of creation-fall-redemption.

1. I’ll catch flak for this, but, in this place, John Paul II was not making a dogmatic statement, and that, if you read, he was carefully hedging what he said (if you read the letter Humani Generis, it’s a bit more obvious the distaste for evolution that pours off of the Holy Father’s pen, believing that it would have to be accepted if it was proven as a scientific fact, which, indeed, it would be, but evolution is as far from scientific fact as perpetual motion is), and, although I believe he was undoubtedly acting and speaking in good faith, that if such a statement is construed to endorse the compatibility of Darwinian evolution with Christian doctrine, the Pope, in this situation, and of this private theologian opinion of his, was mistaken.

If we have come to be by a process of evolution, what need have we for a redeemer? For life, in general, is now more perfect - more complex, more organized, more knowing, etc. - than it ever has been in the past, and will continue to become ever more perfect. In an evolutionary scenario, there could not be any original justice, but only an original sin that was not a sin, because it was natural, an original “red in tooth and nail”, if you like, that, we, by our own power (or, by the natural power of the laws of mutation, genetic drift, and natural selection) have walked away from and towards a state of greater blessedness. This implies a postmillennialism, the perfectability of man, and, as Teilhard de Chardin’s philosophy was all about, the ability to evolve ourselves right in to the New Jerusalem.

(Continued below)

 

[Khalid]

(Continued from above)

In order for us to have fallen, we need to have been better in the past than we are today. In order to need a redeemer, we need to have fallen. I hope you can see, at least, why, even if you conclude differently, I say that insofar as I can see an evolutionary viewpoint is incompatible with the very framework and contours of Christianity, not to mention specific doctrines such as the Incarnation, or inspiration of the Bible, or resurrection, or Original Sin, or atoning crucifixion.

There are also moral objections to an almighty God who creates by evolution, and many scientific objections (namely, that, insofar as all of science tells us, in regards to “vertical evolution” - information-generating mutations culminating in macroevolution - it doesn’t work, and breaks basic laws of physics, and has never been observed, and is not present in the geologic column hardly at all, leading to Stephen J Gould and Niles Eldridge’s “Punctuated Equilibria”, whereby absence of evidence for evolution is turned in to evidence for invisible evolution) but I am not here so much attempting to argue against evolution, or against the standard model Big Bang cosmology, or cosmic inflation, or various interpretations of quantum mechanics, as I am attempting to argue for a specific exegesis of Genesis 1-2 and an exegetical method that can be applied by generalization to the first eleven chapters of Genesis.

Note that these statements only involve directly deistic evolution (commonly called “theistic evolution” or “evolutionary creationism”, as espoused formerly by Howard J Van Till, which, ironically, is identical to the kind of deistic prime-mover Darwin himself had in mind), which is defined as “evolution (life through descent with modification from a universal common ancestor) set in to motion by God at creation and left thereafter to operate according to natural law”. They do not hold nearly as much water against Intelligent Design (true “theistic evolution”, as espoused by such as Michael Behe or William Dembski), progressive creationism (such as espoused by Gleason Archer or Hugh Ross); those are separate topics, or any of various other old-earth or gap creationisms.

1. In no way do I accept such. I was attempting to marshal “independent” evidence for my exegesis that you would respect, to establish the plausibility of my exegesis according to other, more qualified exegetes, other than leaning solely on my authority and argumentation. I am going by the standard “consensus” model of these scholarly pursuits here, such as how is spoken of “scientific consensus”, “medical consensus”, etc., analogously with “exegetical consensus”. If I am correct and none agree with me, I am still correct, even if viewed as a crank. If I am wrong and all agree with me, I am still wrong, even if viewed as completely consonant with current knowledge. If the Church dogmatically rules my exegesis incorrect, it is most certainly incorrect. If certain Popes and prelates hold different, or contradictory, views, that does not invalidate either my view, or the various views of the Popes and prelates.