From a conversation on another blog about Genesis, Intelligent Design (ID), and theistic supporters of evolution (TE).

If the TEs really want a miracle-less Christianity, there is a whole body of modern theological literature they can quote to sustain them. And if they really are not embarrassed by miracles in the slightest, there is another whole body of literature to sustain them: the Patristics, the Scholastics, the Reformers, etc. I don't understand why they have such a hard time stating their position....

Some of you know some of these ASA-list guys, from Christian conferences and ASA [American Scientific Affiliation] meetings and so on. Any idea why they are so elusive? Are they hiding some big-time skepticism about miracles behind this vague language? Or is it that they simply don't know what they believe?

In my time at Wheaton College, I did work with a number of TE's on the ASA list. And while I too am puzzled by their thought processes, my general impression is that they have made an uneasy alliance between the anti-Christian world of science and their devout faith. There is no question that they despise liberals for their lack of faith, but there is also no question that they admire their atheist colleagues as doing commendable science. So I use a psychologist's explanation that their vagueness is a case of "cognitive dissonance", which they solve by avoiding clarity. Not because they are dissimulating, but because they really don't want to know themselves. I think it was Greg Bahnsen's PhD thesis that discussed how a man can deceive himself, believing A & !A by adding more layers. A & B, where B--> !A. Or if that is too obvious, then A, B, and C, where A-->B, B-->C and C-->!A. With enough buffer layers, one can be a very content contradiction. Hence the vague buffer layers of TE's.

One of the many subgoals of ID, then, is to clarify these implications.

Yet another reason to be hated.

I'd be interested in a critique of the views of a related Wheaton character, John Walton, whose new book "The Lost World of Genesis" is creating a stir.

This Wheaton Bible-dept tripe is one of a piece with TE-ASA muddle-headedness. In 2002 Wheaton had a course called "Origins" which brought together 3 depts--physics/astronomy, biology/evolution, and bible/walton--to talk about the origin of the universe. The concept was clever, but the implementation was stultifying. Walton wanted to say thatGenesis had nothing to say about the Big Bang, which the physicist said had nothing to do with evolution, which the biologist said had nothing to do with Genesis. So the point of the course was....there is no point.

Now believe me, if the TE-ASAs could find evolution in Genesis, they would be all over it like jam on bread, but the fact that everyone is so anxious to declare Kantian walls of separation should tip you off that there's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on.

I found Walton's material only slightly less annoying than the animated Powerpoint slides he insisted on using. One would think that Meredith Kline's work in the 70's had demonstrated how the Genesis account uses cultural understandings of Hittite covenants to frame its message of creation, rather than the other way around. It reminds me of the 30 year effort to claim that Noah's flood was derivative on Babylonian flood epics, when in fact all the data showed it was the other way around. So after many evangelical papers demonstrated the derivative nature of Babylonian accounts which finally silenced the critics, we have Walton claiming that the Genesis creation account is derivative on Babylonian (or as he would say, Mesopatamian) temple dedication rites.

And I would make the same sort of comment for Peter Enn's fixation that 2nd Temple eschatology was supposedly determinative of NT theology. Whenever we get an extra-biblical source that looks vaguely like the Bible, why then it is the Bible that must be the derivative!

Of course, when we get a scientific account of creation that looks vaguely like the Bible then it is the Bible that is....totally unrelated. It's all very tiresome. I look forward to the definitive review by the the tireless Jack Collins.

I am likely not the only one who would like to learn more about the papers that show that the Babylonian flood account is derivative of Noah's. Can you tell me where such arguments are made?

Good question, but I don't have my textbooks here, so I'll have to do some web searching. As I recall, the cogent arguments were made some 20 years ago, and most of the defenders of the "Noah is derivative of Babylon" have stopped making the claim, retired or died. One would think that if it were still a believable theory, it would be actively defended, so the silence is telling.

OK. I went over to OT Abstracts and put in "Noah flood" + "Gilgamesh", or "Babylonian" or "Mesopatamian". I found 5 hits on the first two, and 600 on the last. I didn't peruse all 600, so this is a rough cut from the first 100. I found 2 articles supporting Gilgamesh as original in 2004 and 1986. I found 6 articles supporting Bible as original, 1983, 1994, 1978, 1976, 2002, 2000.

So my impression of the fading of the Gilgamesh explanation is roughly correct, and corresponds to my Wheaton college Bible-class curricula impression circa 1980.

This survey does not include (simply because the abstract made no mention of a Gilgamesh), the many articles on the JEDP analysis of Noah, that makes its composition much later than Moses, and would potentially allow it to be influenced by it. After all, it is logically possible for Genesis to be a late redaction, yet reflect an oral tradition that predated Gilgamesh, so support for JEDP isn't necessarily support for a Gilgamesh influence.

Nonsense...

Well I am, as usual, ashamed to have written so hastily in such learned company. ... What I should have said, is that it is not that Genesis, as a document, preceded the cuneiform Gilgamesh, as a document, but that both are drawn from the living oral memory of a real actual flood that occurred in the Mesopatamian basin about 5000BC as determined from geology and paleontology. As a Christian, I believe that the Genesis document reflects more accurately, if not infinitely accurately, the actual events of Noah that later made it into the oral tradition of many of the world's "religions". (Just because a history is about origins doesn't automatically make it religious.)

I know that in many if not all Western institutions, a document and its contents are separately evaluated, with a reconstructed history to explain the divorce. But it is the subject of my attempted ThM thesis, that at least for some types of documents (say, titles and deeds), there can be no separation of document and content, if one is true, so is the other. And what distinguishes Genesis (as well as the other canonical books of the Bible) from, say, the Gilgamesh epic, is that it has the properties of a deed rather than a narrative because it is self-referential. (There's going to be a long chapter on speech-act theory etc, to put this claim in the appropriate jargon.) This then, is the critique of JEDP and similar documentary hypotheses: they can't be true, anymore than the title of your car can have a documentary origin and still be valid.

So given the existence of a real event, and a real oral history, the composition of Genesis as a polemic against the mythologizing of Gilgamesh is the point of the evangelical critique. That is to say, Genesis is not adapting Babylonian motifs, but defending the truth against Babylonian motifs. This is what I meant by saying cryptically that Gilgamesh is derivative of Genesis, inasmuch as Genesis is the infinitely true, and Gilgamesh the poor copy. It is this polemical aspect of Genesis that the evangelical literature supports.

[In a very similar relationship, science also reports the flood, but through a poor copy. What validates science, as ID [intelligent design] would claim, is design (and not MN [methodological naturalism]). And design is self-referential too. So the same criterion that ID develops for valid science has a direct analogy to Biblical/textual scholarship, which is why I find ID a far more productive hypothesis than simply biology. And BTW, just as many of the possible relationships between data/theory are highly improbable (random chance w/o design-->OOL [origin of life]), so also some of the possibilities for textual transmission are demonstrably improbable for all the same reasons.]

So thanks for clarifying my sloppy writing. Here is the link to the bibliographic list (which was constructed extremely crudely by flagging the words for Gilgamesh and Noah in the abstracts of a simple search, so please don't flog me for my slack criteria and obvious bias!)