Yet Another Creationist Candidate. "Creationism" might soon follow "dodo" into the realm of extinct derogatory words but there seems precious few willing to shoulder its responsible load. This post will volunteer a candidate, which may slightly prolong the death throes. But excepting the last 100 years and then only in the West, there just isn't a better word to describe the view of all mankind for the last 6 millenia. Before we begin, however, we will survey the vast field of creationist and anti-creationist theories to get at least a bestiary of this medieval topic.

Data

UC
1) Let us begin with what it means to be anti-creationist. As any materialist can tell you, material causes for creation are either law (determined) or chance (undetermined). As Dembski would say, if an event (e.g. death) is not natural (old age, cancer) or an accident (fall, lightning) then it must be designed (murder). The one thing a materialist rejects is design, for if there be a designed creation, then we must have a designer, a creator. There are three main ways to get rid of the creator, to have an uncreated creation.

a) We have the Epicurean / Democritus / Materialist view that the universe has always existed and therefore no creation is required. In the 20th century this was called the "steady-state" universe, as proposed by Fred Hoyle, Tommy Gold and Herman Bondi. The discovery of quasars, 3-degree blackbody radiation, the 80:20 primeval hydrogen:helium ratio, and the failure to see proton decay has effectively eliminated almost all adherents to this hoary theory, being replaced with a version of the "Big Bang" theory that has a definite start time to creation.

b) There are some variations on Big Bang, that suggest the universe is cyclic, that it continually explodes, expands, contracts, and re-explodes. Thus the Big Bang is really eternal in a Hindu sort of way. This view has found difficulty both with the mathematics of black holes, which are singularities that remove all information that we might have of a re-explosion, and with the observation that the universe lacks 90% of the matter needed to stop the expansion and begin the contraction. It looks instead as if it will expand forever.

c) The fact remains that all we know is about our singular universe is that it is uniquely contingent, it could not have been very much different from what we see or we wouldn't be here to see it. How much different? One grain of salt more or one less, and the Big Bang wouldn't allow us the privilege of debating it. This is just one among a dozen or more "coincidences" that suggest neither law nor chance controlled the creation.

So failing with either DC or AC eternity, another approach has been to rely on infinity to overwhelm chance. You can win the lottery by buying all the tickets, so by multiplying the number of Big Bangs to infinity, the importance of our particular one can be reduced to zero, despite living in a universe with a low probability of existence. Unfortunately, this infinity of supposed Big Bangs is completely unobservable in principle and in practice, since they lie outside our "light cone" of observability. Therefore this attempt at purposelessness is pure metaphysics, as inconsistent as it is meaningless.

d) Somewhere on the science versus metaphysics continuum between (b) and (c), lies Stephen Hawking's attempt to eliminate a beginning to creation by blurring the time and space dimensions at the Planck scale of 1 trillion trillion trillionth of a second. For some reason, which still eludes me, Hawking thinks that blurriness at this time scale will eliminate the need for a Creator, who is implausibly allergic to this imperfection that Hawking hypothesizes. Of course Hawking recognizes that there is no way to actually prove his conjecture, but the mere possibility is enough to innoculate himself from his ex-wife's Christianity.

If you think I am downplaying the seriousness of the anti-Christian views, I urge you to read the literature for yourself, for it seems that none of these scientists are philosophically rigorous in their objections, but rather have already made up their minds and are looking for sheer plausibility. This leaves creationist accounts for the origin of the universe.

Now just about every religion on the planet has a creation story, and plotting their similarities and differences would take more than one book, so I will restrict myself to Judeo-Christian positions on the definitive treatment: Genesis 1 & 2. There have been perhaps a dozen or so ways to interpret these first chapters of the Bible, with perhaps the best summary in Vern Poythress' "Redeeming Science", 2007. So working from his list we have the following

YEC
2) The standard "literal" or naive view of Genesis is that it took 6 "days" in a specified chronology to create the universe (equated with the "heavens and the earth"). There is some debate on the temporality of "days", so we have several sub-categories, but they are all agreed that Adam and Eve lived not more than 10,000 years ago, e.g. "young-earth creationism".
  a) The days are 24 hour days based on a quartz crystal watch, since the sun isn't created until the 4th day, e.g., "24 hour day YEC".
  b) The days are much longer than 24 quartz watch hours, perhaps as long as millenia, e.g. "day-age YEC".
  c) The days may be 12 or 24 hour quartz, but the nights or the time between days was indeterminate millenia, e.g. "Intermittent day YEC".
  d) The days may (or may not) be 24 quartz hours, but day one of Gen 1:2 didn't start at the Big Bang, but at some arbitrary geologic time much later than Gen 1:1, say 13,699,993,333 ABB, when some catastrophe necessitated a new creation, e.g., " gap YEC"
 
OEC
3) Alternatively, there are several "nearly literal" ways to interpret these two chapters. We might call these "old earth creationism" (OEC), and are generally compatible with a 13.7 billion year universe (or whatever number you want to use).
  a) the story is analogical, not scientific. No importance can be assigned to either the duration or rate of time, since these are "modern" concepts. e.g., "analogical view" of Poythress and Collins.
  b) the order is not chronological, but didactic. No importance can be assigned to chronology, hours, or days. e.g. "framework view" of the late Meredith Kline.
  c) with one small correction to the order, and an elastic view of day, the "testable creation" model of Ross is supposedly compatible with BB.

ACK
4) The entire story is "myth" with no material consequences, only spiritual consequences. God created the universe, but we know nothing more than that from Genesis, e.g. "religious only view".

Analysis

Having categorized these views, let me offer some general criticism. Most YEC positions (2 a-d), have trouble with geochronology, with the various methods devised to date rocks and artifacts such as Carbon-14,  and other radiometric methods (Potassium-Argon, Uranium-Lead), thermoluminescence, sedimentary layering etc. While in the past it may have been possible to point out the large error bars on the methods, modern instrumentation has so greatly shrunk the uncertainties that some other criticism must be raised to reject their unified witness. Although individuals at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) may have toyed with changing physical constants--the speed of light, the fine structure constant, Einstein's cosmological constant--YEC proponents usually fall back on philosophical nominalism, that God can do anything He likes, including making things recently that "look" old.

While such a position is philosophically defensible, it has many disadvantages. I have posted how such a view is Gnostic, since it requires "secret knowledge" of Biblical hermeneutics lacking in even the most careful observer of nature to properly interpret the truth. Much like Berkeley's solipsism it undermines both theology and science by making God capricious, irrational and unknowable. For example, after Jesus' resurrection he met two men on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus who did not recognize him, and while walking incognito he explained to them why the Messiah had to die. One would think that a nominalist couldn't assert "must die", must less a propitionary atonement.

And by making God capricious, such nominalism maligns not only the character of God, but the whole basis for a lawful, consistent, knowable science founded on a Christian God. In other words, all the advances of the West in the last 500 years must be discarded if we are to adopt a YEC interpretation of Genesis 1.  Poythress makes these and many other points connecting theology and science in his disarming book, Redeeming Science, which I highly recommend.

That leaves me with OEC views 3 and 4. However for all the same reasons that YEC destroys the foundations of knowledge, so the Kantian dualism of view 4 destroys science, refusing to let religion influence observations. If the Bible be but a myth whose stories must perforce give way to `science' then it cannot be a foundation, much less a guide or a limit to science. And since Science manifestly needs Christianity, position 4 brings down the ediface as surely as 2.

So we putter about with OEC view 3, wondering if we need a PhD in Hebrew to distinguish the slight nuances of "framework" versus "analogical". But it may not be all that ambiguous, if we just extend our "window" of analysis to Genesis 3 and perhaps Genesis 1:1.

Yom and language

We have alluded to the infamous quartz watch problem, that days are mentioned before the sun was created, making the term somewhat ambiguous, a point that propaganda film "Inherit the Wind" used to great advantage. Was the "day" a 24 hour period or not?  The issue here is multi-level and recursive, making it worthy of all the various interpretations hung on the humble word "yom".

To begin with, how do we define words? Nouns might be easy, just point to the object and repeat the word, but verbs? Abstract nouns? It gets harder and harder. If we insist that "yom" was 24 hours before the sun was created, then the concept if not the word itself existed in the mind of God long before it was written by the hand of men. Then language must be something divine, a gift, in dictionary form, transmitted in whole cloth. in toto, to the grassy Garden. And we are back to the imago Dei.

But if language is so constructed, and transmitted, what are we to make of ambiguities, of puns, of similes and metaphors? Must they not also have existed in the mind of God? (And no, puns are not a result of the Fall if God made them.) Thus the very thing we attempted to establish, the 24 hour "yom", becomes license for all manner of ambiguity and uncertainty in language, including "yom" itself.

Then let us take the opposite view, that a word is an Aristotelean category, a generalization without some Platonic one-to-one correspondence with ideas in the mind of God. Then it would be the height of error, a complete anachronism to attribute "yom" to a time period before such a time period could be measured. It would be like Adam naming a tomato "beefsteak" before he had ever seen a steak. It would be evidence that the story was false, and not to be trusted. Again, the very thing we were trying to avoid, the unbelievable 24 hour requirement, would by an anachronism make the entire story unbelievable. Despite an unbelievable story being compatible with mythical view 4, it is not compatible with analogical view 3.

Well, suppose for a moment that God ushered Moses into a movie theater and showed him the exclusive videotape, and Moses wrote down what he saw with words that were anachronistic because they were his own words some millenia later. Isn't this possible without destroying the basic truthfulness of the story? No, because the videotape is the "mind of God", and therefore the videotape plays the role of language. If God speaks, and it is so, then language precedes existence, we are back to the previous claim that language comes directly from the mind of God with all its ambiguities, and we have forsaken Aristotle once again. We cannot admit a word used before its definition, to have any meaning unless we admit that words are more than generalizations, but the divine mind itself.

So all attempts to monkey with a word end up messing with the story. There is an irreducible character to this story, much like Behe's irreducible complexity of bacterial flagella, that does not permit the alteration of a single part. But that should encourage not discourage us because then we can be confident that the story is not malleable, not given to error, it is even self-authenticating. We must acknowledge that the words are God's words (the videotape images are God's thoughts) and therefore they carry all the ambiguities of language itself. We may never be more certain of the duration of "yom" than we are of God's thoughts. And the best way to remind us of the limitations of our understanding is to call it "analogical".

As Poythress points out, OEC view 3 (a-c) are all analogical views, though with varying limitations. The framework view (b) requires a non-chronological presentation, and so is a subset of the broader view (a), while (c) is nearly chronological, but with specific connections to "quartz-time" moments favored by Hugh Ross; the differences are theologically insignificant, though perhaps scientifically distinct.

Heavens and Earth

Now I am going to apply that same analysis of "yom" to the Hebrew word for earth, "eretz", and heaven "shamayim".  In 1:1 we have "God created the eretz and the shamayim", while in 1:2 we have "the eretz was formless and void", whereas the shamayim disappears to be replaced by "darkness" or "deep" or "waters".  So we have two words that seem like they have no particular meaning, for how can something as substantial as earth be "formless" or worse "void"? Likewise, how could you confuse the ethereal heavens with either darkness, deep or waters? 

To drive home this point, we are given a definition of "shamayim" in verse 1:8, "God called the expanse heaven". But then how could it be used in verse 1 and 2 for something else? Likewise we have a definition of "eretz" in verse 1:10, which doesn't agree with its useage in 1:1. This is a clear an anachronism as one could wish, yet a deliberate, recursive anachronism.

In my previous post, I discussed PoMo language, and suggested that the dictionary attempts to define words in terms of other words, and therefore must be circular, recursive. This dictionary problem reveals that language is both holy and divine. If then an Aristotelean category cannot explain "shemayim" and "eretz", what exactly did God have in mind?

Let us suppose, unlike Meredith Kline and Hugh Ross, that order is important in our analogical view of creation. Then how can God describe what existed before the creation of the 3rd rock from the sun, our Earth? In science, we just invent words when we need them, and so to describe the stuff in our solar system before the Earth coalesced we say "protosolar nebulae". But it takes an entire theory of many pages, or perhaps many books of theories, before we are ready to define this protosolar nebulae. If you were asked to explain this to a 1st grader   you might be tempted to say "a dusty gas cloud". And if he asked what that was, you might say, "well a gas is like blowing air in a balloon, or the mist that rises off the lake in the morning". And if he asked how you can get a gas without the balloon, or a mist without the lake, you might be tempted to just say, "its blobby and tenuous", or perhaps even "formless and void".

Now once you had explained the protosolar nebulae, how would you describe the rest of the universe before the formation of the Earth? Um, a galaxy of stars, coalescing and igniting from primeval molecular hydrogen clouds. And what did a primeval molecular hydrogen cloud look like? Dark and vast and vaguely clumpy. What is vast?  Far away, deep space. And what is hydrogen? The first element. What's an element? Uh, let's backtrack, hydrogen is what the space shuttle uses for fuel, when it burns in air it makes water, hey, it's name in greek means "water maker"!

You takin' notes Moses?

So in my reading of Genesis 1:1-8, there's no indication that we are talking about the 3rd rock from the Sun yet. For all I can tell we have moved rapidly through the Big Bang, galaxy formation, solar nebula and are only just getting to coalescence of the Earth (the Hadean), by verse 8. And along the way, God has some special points to make about comets. Maybe there's a lot more of them than we think, preceding the formation of our solar system by some 6 billion years. And what exactly does he mean by the "ruach" hovered over the face of the waters? "Ruach" is associated with life, with spirit, with the soul. Could it mean that life was begun on comets that crowd the dark lanes of space? God is not just telling us about the beginning our world, but about the vast reaches of space He is preparing for the final act. We addressed this in an earlier post, where we discuss the first evidence for ancient life on comets, and how it is the final nail in the faulty paradigm of evolution, but first a word from our sponsor.

If the word preceded existence, then we should be looking at Genesis not to see how it can be made compatible with science, nor even how it tells us some secret Gnosis that makes all our present science deceptive. Rather, it tells us the definition of the words. This may be the "analogical" view of Genesis, but it is analogy on steroids, analogies that predict, it is closer to what scientists (and Hugh Ross) call a model. For the comet story began only a little over a decade ago, and until then, Genesis 1:2 was never imagined as referring to comets, but to our amazement, we discover that the words were truer than we thought. It is science that rediscovers the meaning of the text, 3200 years after it was written.

So Genesis may not revolutionize our science, but it should revolutionize our language, our thoughts, our existence.  Just as we discover that Gen 1:1-7 has more astrophysics terms than we knew existed, so we discover that Genesis 3 has more anthropology, more archaeology than science appreciated. For even more important than the definitions of yom, eretz and shamayim, are the definitions of man, woman, and sin. It all happened in a garden. That is the next post.