Josh << Number one says who? Number two why? Number three, if the bible is the inspired word of God then how can genesis be taken as anything other than literal? >>
Say who?
Pope John Paul II and
Pope Benedict XVI, that’s who!
I know we keep forgetting about those Popes.
See also John Paul II’s commentary on Genesis in his
"Theology of the Body" (from EWTN articles). The Catechism as well notes there is symbolical, figurative, allegorical language being used in Genesis 1-3 (especially paragraphs 337, 362, 375, 390, 396).
Number Two: Why? Because God chose not to write a science textbook. God communicated to the primitive Israelite culture of the
Mediterranean region in the ancient language and primitive science they could understand at the time. That’s what JPII and B16 tell us, and that’s what most modern theologians and biblical scholars believe also. The Bible is STILL the inspired Word of God (2 Tim 3:15-17; 2 Peter 1:19-21).
To take Genesis and the Bible literally on science means we must believe the earth is flat since that was the
view of the earth the Israelites, Egyptians, and Babylonians had (they were neighbors and all wrote similarly of a flat earth). Fr. Stanley Jaki, O.S.B., a distinguished Hungarian physicist and Benedictine theologian, on the flat and fixed earth of the Bible:
“If asked about his physical surroundings or about the physical world at large, the typical Israelite would have given a reply very irritating to the modern mind. It is irritating to say the least to hear that the earth is a flat disk, the sky an inverted hard bowl, and that the two form a vast tent-like structure. Of course, other inhabitants of the ancient Near-East would have given similar answers…To be sure, much the same would have been done by a typical ancient Egyptian and Babylonian…The hardness of the sky, but especially the immobility of the earth, had to appear all the more a divinely ordained physical fact as, according to the Bible, a mere man, Joshua, could be authorized by God to stop the sun and the moon in their tracks and, apparently, for a whole day…Obviously, to modern eyes dazzled by space rockets cruising along ‘world lines’ set by Einstein’s four-dimensional cosmology nothing could seem more jarring than the Bible’s physical world, which is little more than a glorified tent. To that tent the Bible assigns the sky as its cover and the earth as its floor, though hardly in a consistent way. In Genesis 1 the sky is a firmament, that is, a hard metal bowl, whereas in Psalm 104 and Isaiah 45:24 it is more like a canvas that can be stretched out…Herein lies one of the non-trivially unscientific aspects of the world as described in the Bible…Well before the advent of modern science, and indeed of heliocentrism, the contrast between that biblical world-tent and the world of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic geocentrism had to appear enormous.” (Stanley Jaki,
Bible and Science, pages 19-25)
PhilVaz view: was there a literal talking snake? Probably not. Was everything (all plants and animals) created literally from a puff of smoke (or man literally from dirt) in six days? Definitely not, since science gives us the time span in billions of years (the universe is about 13+ billion, the earth 4.5 billion). We know when things “appeared” on earth through evolution generally: first life about 3.5 billion years ago, then single-cell creatures before multi-cell, fish before amphibians and tetrapods, primitive tetrapods before reptiles, reptiles before mammals and birds, primates and homo sapiens show up only in the past few million years. God is responsible for all of this.
What does the “six days” mean then? It symbolizes the work week, and we “rest” as God did – see the Catechism 337-338, and
Ludwig Ott on creation and evolution:
“As the Sacred Writer had not the intention of representing with scientific accuracy the intrinsic constitution of things, and the sequence of the works of creation but of communicating knowledge in a popular way suitable to the idiom and to the pre-scientific development of his time, the account is not to be regarded or measured as if it were couched in language which is strictly scientific…The Biblical account of the duration and order of Creation is merely a literary clothing of the religious truth that the whole world was called into existence by the creative word of God. The Sacred Writer utilized for this purpose the pre-scientific picture of the world existing at the time. The numeral six of the days of Creation is to be understood as an anthropomorphism. God’s work of creation represented in schematic form (opus distinctionis – opus ornatus) by the picture of a human working week, the termination of the work by the picture of the Sabbath rest. The purpose of this literary device is to manifest Divine approval of the working week and the Sabbath rest.” (Ott,
Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, page 93, cf. Exod 20:8)
See also the
Cardinal Schonborn catechetical lecture for 11/13/2005 reprinted/retranslated in his book
Chance or Purpose
Phil P
