BobRyan said:
[quote:4e9a8]1. Moses already knew "what a day" was by the time he wrote Genesis. So also did his readers.
L.K
Big assumption No.1 being that Moses wrote Genesis, of course,
-- I am not questioning your need for a deny-all solution.
-- I DO question your "Moses knew what a day was but maybe some other writer of Gen did not" argument... that is just silly.[/quote:4e9a8]
And your unwillingness to follow my argument is....? Questioning the authorship of The Penatateuch is not a 'deny-all' solution for anything. It is applying literary analysis to derive understanding, as you claim you derive from exegesis. That biblical scholars have developed the Documentary Hypothesis based on careful examination of OT text, for example, clearly illustrates that your arguments are less incontrovertible than you assert. Perhaps you would like to make a 'deny-all' assertion here?
And again you accuse me of saying something I did not say. Please do not use quotation marks to imply that I have written something that I did not write; this is dishonest. I am also still awaiting references and links for various other things you have charged me with saying and that I do not believe I ever said. You seem more than willing to make claims and accusations that you are unable or unwilling to support. What is anyone supposed to take from this?
[quote:4e9a8].... but let's accept this for the sake of argument. This implies what? That neither Moses nor his audience could conceive the use of figurative language?
Nope - it SHOWS that the obvious meaning IN the text can not be ruled out AS IF "Moses did not know what a day was".
He did.[/quote:4e9a8]
A number of points.
There is no absolute certainty that Moses wrote these words himself.
No one, least of all me, is saying that 'Moses did not know what a day was.' I am fairly sure that he would have been able to measure its exact duration in any meaningful way, so in that sense his understanding would have only been approximate. I am also fairly sure that he would have been as capable of using language poetically as any other scribe. I am also fairly sure that, as an astute politician, he would have been capable of bending text to whatever the needs required.
You do not know with absolute certainty what Moses may or may not have known; you can use certain assumptions, prejudices, pre-existing beliefs, biases, doctrinal understanding, or whatever to determine what you think he knew, but none of these delives absolute certainty.
You cannot know with absolute certainty what Moses may or may not have intended by what he wrote.
Consequently, you cannot with absolute certainty rule out all interpretations of the text other than the one you prefer.
And we have NO EXAMPLE IN ALL of scripture of any OTHER rendering for "evening and morning where the xth-day" NO NOT EVEN ONE other example ...
No, what we have as far as I can see is that no such example can be believed by you to mean anything other than what you believe it to mean. I have given you ample evidence that other biblical scholars disagree with your conclusions that the writer(s) of Genesis meant the creation days to be understood as actual, literal 24-hour days. On one level, it interests me very little what they meant and what you understand them to have meant. All I am interested in showing is that disagreement with your obdurate assertions exists.
So again your argument runs aground in the shore of this "inconvenient detail" getting in the way of your "good story".
I have no story. You, on the other hand, have a story that you are determined to insist on, come what may.
My argument is that the context of "evening and morning" in the text -- USED in the text... and SEEN by those paying actual attention to what the text says -- is of the form "evening and morning where the xth-DAY" a FORM for which we have NO excuse in all of scripture to BEND to some other meaning of DAY.
No not even one in all of the Bible!
And your reason for claiming that no such excuse exists? Is allegory and metaphor confined to only one word? Does it extend to phrases and sentences? Again please pay attention to the fact that I am not saying you are wrong; I am only arguing that you may not be as right as you assert you are.
2. Moses already knew what "evening and morning" were by the time he wrote Genesis. So did his readers. Moses used the term "evening and morning were the FIRST DAY" -- we have NO instance of that phrase EVER being used in all of scripture to mean anything but a real day.
Again, how do you find absolute certainty in your understanding of how the phrase in question was intended to be understood?
And supposing that his readers would launch into wild imaginative speculation about it NOT being a day is gratuitous fiction on behalf of darwinism -- but not good logic.
Again, arguing doubt about the absolute certainty of your conclusions does not consitute 'gratuitous fiction on behalf of [D]arwinism'. There is nothing 'wildly imaginative' about suggesting that the audience for whom the writer intended his words would be capable of understanding the poetic uses of metaphor and allegory.
Obviously.
[quote:4e9a8]I would add that other biblical scholars disagree with you,
Do you have EVEN ONE Bible scholar exegeting Ex 20:8-11 to mean anything OTHER than a real day? You said you do not have it -- I believe you.
Do you have EVEN ONE Bible scholar showing ANY CASE in all of scripture where the phrase "evening and morning where the xth-day" -- AS A PHRASE is EVER used in scripture to mean something OTHER than REAL day -- where all can at least agree to the EXISTENCE of such a thing. OR are your so-called "bible scholars" merely REACHING in Gen 1 by AVOIDING the entire phrase and comparing the WORD "yom" to other uses while extracting it FROM the phrase as "contexct".[/quote:4e9a8]
Your argument being that biblical scholars who disagree with you are just plain wrong, is that it? And why do you put the words
biblical scholars into quotation marks and disdain them with the words 'so-called'? Are you trying to suggest that I made them up out of thin air? Are you trying to imply that they can't possibly be scholars of the same intellectual worth as yourself because they choose to reach different conclusions from yours? Why should I prefer your conclusions to theirs? As far as I know, you are no sort of biblical scholar at all, so-called or otherwise. Why should I value your opinion?
Recall that a snippet word WITHOUT a context is merely a PRETEXT.
If you don't like their arguments, reasoning and conclusions, take it up with them, not me. I have only referenced and quoted these scholars to show that there are different meanings that can be taken from biblical text and that exegesis does not provide the absolute certainty of deriving the one true understanding of biblical text that you claim it does.
[quote:4e9a8]L.K
but we already know that many biblical scholars disagree with several of your conclusions. Gleason L Archer in The Encycopedia of Bible Difficulties, pp.60-1 has this to say about the use of the word 'day/yom':
[quote:4e9a8]There were six major stages in this work of formation, and these stages are represented by successive days of a week. In this connection it is important to observe that none of the six creative days bears a definite article in the Hebrew text; the translations “the first day,†“ the second day,†etc., are in error. The Hebrew says, “And the evening took place, and the morning took place, day one†(1:5). Hebrew expresses “the first day†by hayyom harison, but this text says simply yom ehad (day one). Again, in v.8 we read not hayyom hasseni (“the second dayâ€Â) but yom seni (“a second dayâ€Â).
In Hebrew prose of this genre, the definite article was generally used where the noun was intended to be definite; only in poetic style could it be omitted. The same is true with the rest of the six days; they all lack the definite article. Thus they are well adapted to a sequential pattern, rather than to strictly delimited units of time.
Notice that by IGNORING the context of DAY in the phrase "EVENING and MORNING were the xth-day" they get -- nothing but sequence -- and pretend not to "notice" that the "Evening and morning" phrase is dissected OUT of the text to make their eisegesis work
In fact from the argument they make above the BEST they get is "Evening and morning where a Third Day" following "A second day" --- then "A fourth Day" following a third day" where EACH day is only composed of "Evening and morning".
There is no "a zillion evenings and morning were considered a day" EVEN in THEIR attempt to bend-and-wrench.
So there you go "again".[/quote:4e9a8]
See above. Take it up with them, not me. I have no grounds for placing any more (or less) confidence in your assertions than I have in theirs. I only intend to show that opinions other than yours exist on the understanding of what is signified by the days referred to in the creation myth of Genesis.
Bob said -
We pretty much all agree to these obvious points -- and that is why I call them "glaringly obvious".
'We' being you and who else?
Well as I said - my points so far are just the glaringly obvious ones.[/quote:4e9a8]
So that's just you, then? The royal 'we'?
[quote:4e9a8]Bob said -
Though I am certain that the endless story telling of Darwinism does not resort to the Bible to prop up it's stories the way it resorted to the confirmed and debunked hoaxes of Piltdown Man.. Nebraska man... Neanderthal-dating to 20,000 years ago... Horse fossil sequence presented in Simpson's horse 1951 horse series (Simpson reproducing Marsh's fraudulent work) ... etc.
Wishful thinking on your part. The inconvenient detail being highlighted above is the fact that Darwinists are NOT reaching for either Ex 20:8-11 or Gen 1-2:3 to "state darwinism" -- they do not consider this "darwinist text".
Your efforts to spin it into something akin to darwinism fail even by darwinist standards. They use no such language as is seen IN that text to frame the concepts of darwinism![/quote:4e9a8]
The OT has nothing to say about Darwinism, because the ideas of Darwin were beyond the understanding of those who wrote it. OT text is wholly irrelevant to Darwinism and the theory of evolution seeks no doctrinal validation in a text at least 2.5k years old, so why you think it should mystifies me. You seem obsessed with trying to bend the OT into use as a counterblast against the theory of evolution, I presume because you believe the Universe to be less than 10k years old, that the theory of evolution must therefore be wrong (apart from microevolution, which I understand you to accept) and the OT must thus be searched for any piece of text that can be contrived into an argument against Darwinism.
