Posted on 10/08/2009 11:36:56 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Augustine: young earth creationist--theistic evolutionists take Church Father out of context
--snip--
Augustine was not vague about the age of the earth, the historicity of Adam and Eve as our first ancestors, or the events in the Garden of Eden and the worldwide flood later in Genesis. However, his doctrine of creation was complex...
(Excerpt) Read more at creation.com ...
Ping!
St. Augustine of Hippo
We’ve learned a bit about God’s creation since then.
This doesn't help the literalist case any. Because whether the "day" is longer than 6 24-hour periods *or shorter*, it's still clear that Augustine was not hung up on defining the Genesis day as strictly as some today. Frankly, his interpretation of progressive revelations to the angels is even MORE an allegorical and symbolic reading than the day-age hypothesis, which at least makes the "days" lengths of time.
One of the chapters in his City of God bears the title “On the mistaken view of history that ascribes many thousands of years to the age of the earth.”
You know what made him argue that? There were rather ridiculous "sources" people were citing from the ancient Egyptians, etc. with totally fabulous chronologies of hundreds of thousands of years. He was taking issue with those. And yes, he was pretty firm in saying not more than 10,000 years. But he said it because there was frankly no evidence to the contrary in his day.
However, his doctrine of creation was complex. All matter, according to him, was created on the first day. Subsequently God created pregnant ideas that Augustine called rationes seminales, which were imbedded in creation. Some only came to fruition afterwards, even, it might be argued, after the Fall. Augustine thought that God could even have catered for the eventuality of the Fall of man into sin and the subsequent curse. But, all speculations set aside, Augustine did not teach a process of one kind changing into another.
This is largely true. He did not envision a process of one kind changing into another. I'd even argue that might even be confirmed in palaeontology--when we talk about evolution we talk about changes *from a primordial organism* that was largely undifferentiated into a more specific, differentiated organism. There is no question of an insect turning into a vertebrate. Latin changed into French, Italian, and Spanish, but you will never see *Italian* change into French or Spanish.
Anyway, Augustine's discussion of the phase of the moon at its creation and the spontaneous generation of flies from non-living matter show pretty clearly that he was not averse to some sort of development of creation according to already established laws and principles. I'll post when I get a chance.
His views on creation really are complex, and not easily translated to today's arguments.
Out of context, or in the context - who cares? The “orthodox creationism” cannot be reconciled with material evidence which we now know.
This “orthodox creationism”, which is mainly a Baptist enterprise, resembles the big mistake made by the Catholic Church 500 years ago. Back then, the Church used certain passages in the Bible to support the view that Sun orbits the Earth. The Bible, however, wasn’t intended as a textbook of astronomy, physics or biology. These subjects are tangential to the God’s word, and are presented in a purposefully symbolic or simplistic way, matching the cognitive abilities of people living 4,000 years ago.
"God, after all is the author and founder of things in their actual natures. Now whatever any single thing may in some way or other produce and unfold by its natural development through periods of time that are suited to it, it contained it beforehand as something hidden, if not in specific forms and bodily mass, at least by the force and reckoning of nature, unless of course a tree, void of fruit and stripped of its leaves throughout the winter, is then to be called imperfect, or unless again at its origins, when it had still not yet borne any fruit, its nature was also imperfect. It is not only about the tree, but about its seed also that this could not rightly be said; there everything that with the passage of time is somehow or other going to appear is already latent in invisible ways. Although, if God were to make anything imperfect, which he then would himself bring to perfection, what would be reprehensible about such an idea? But you would be quite within your rights to disapprove if what had been begun by him were said to be completed and perfected by another."The philosophical underpinnings of evolution are there, as long as we remember that we are not talking about changes from one kind to another but merely a perfection of an existing, undifferentiated type to a more differentiated one.
People say things like that to marginalize a plain reading of, and trust in, the Bible. But you are ignoring the evidence - such as that contained in this very article!
Here's a regular challenge I offer. I realize that Christians have varied in various ways in how they interpret Genesis over the ages. But the modern compromises with atheism are novelties that cannot be justified. If there were any validity to them from a biblical standpoint, we should expect _someone_ in the pre-modern era, within Christendom, to have espoused something consistent with old-earth beliefs. This we cannot do.
I challenge you or anyone else to find a Christian writer prior to the 17th century offering an unambiguous opinion that the world is older than, say, 10,000 years old. If young-earth creation is really such a marginal belief as you seem to think, then that ought to be an easy challenge to meet.
PS: I'm not a Baptist. Never have been, and expect I never will be.
Yet, when it deals with those subjects, it is true and reliable. This, for instance......
Job 26: 7 & 8 He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing. He wraps up the waters in his clouds, yet the clouds do not burst under their weight.
There's still the issue of where the ancients got that kind of knowledge from.
The explanations may be concise, but these verses, for example, do not deal with symbolic representations. Scripture is accurate scientifically even though brief in its explanations.
The question is much more complex than that, Liberty. You’re not going to find many early Christian writers who disagreed with the Genesis chronology *from the creation of Adam*, which came in under 10000 years.
But it’s the 6 “days” before that may well be the sticking point. The question is not easy to answer, but it is odd that the Fathers took a rather allegorical view of those days and even cited them in contexts of “thousands of years”. Is this a clear statement of an old earth? Of course not. But it isn’t a clear-cut case given their allegorizing.
http://www.catholic.com/library/Creation_and_Genesis.asp
Personally, I believe in God. Professionally, I am a PhD scientist (physical chemistry/biophysics) and I have to reconcile the objective facts with religion. It is possible, and actually the Catholic Church has learned from the Copernicus/Galileo/Giordano Bruno folly how to do this.
I challenge you or anyone else to find a Christian writer prior to the 17th century offering an unambiguous opinion
With all due respect, I do not care about such opinions. Now we have the material evidence, consisting of isotope compositions of minerals and live (or formerly live) matter. We have collections of fossils. We have the knowledge of protein sequences and genomes. And we need to either reconcile these hard data with the Faith (it is possible), or stick to literally interpreting the Bible, which wasn't meant to be a textbook of cosmology or biology (again, the example of the geocentric theory is relevant), and make fools of ourselves, just as the Catholic clergy 500 years ago did.
Not only that. If a biologist reads the Genesis, the order of appearance of living creatures is completely consistent with the theory of evolution! :) The Bible touches these subjects. It is, however, necessarily as accurate as accurate would be the attempts to explain procreation to a 4 year old.
Largely, yes. There are some issues, as in the appearance of the angiosperms (seeded plants) earlier than the vertebrates, but overall the pattern is there.
The Bible touches these subjects. It is, however, necessarily as accurate as accurate would be the attempts to explain procreation to a 4 year old.
Let's assume the Mosaic authorship of Genesis. Take Moses from 1500 B.C. into today and play for him a movie of how scientists believe the universe and the earth were formed and populated. He has no words for many of the things he sees, so he needs to describe them *in the language that he knows*--a language which was built around goats and huts and stars and sky and fire and water and wind.
That, I believe, is Genesis right there.
To be fair and give credit where credit is due - the Genesis creation matches what the Sumerians came up with earlier (mostly).
Genesis has two contradictory order of appearances of life.
First Account (Genesis 1:1-2:3) ,p> Genesis 1:25-27
(Humans were created after the other animals.)
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image.... So God created man in his own image.
Genesis 1:27
(The first man and woman were created simultaneously.)
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Genesis 2:18-19
(Humans were created before the other animals.)
And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
Genesis 2:18-22
(The man was created first, then the animals, then the woman from the man's rib.)
And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.... And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
He did conflate the days of creation down to an instant,
_______
So he did not believe in the literal truth of Genesis, then? You tell us time and time again that it was 6 literal 24 hour days for creation. Augustine said something different, as your exegesis explicitly states, in fact you correct him.
Augustine is a saint and you are an anonymous internet poster. And we should believe an anonymous internet poster’s reading of the Bible more than a saint’s, because??????
Will my children’s children be studying St. GGG’s contribution to Christianity?
We now know that dead people don't come back to life, that bread and wine don't turn into flesh and blood, that virgin human females cannot gestate and give birth to children (short of some sort of artificial insemination) . . . there's just all sorts of stuff we know now that folks didn't know thousands of years ago! But you'd be surprised how many hypocrites there are who will let science tell them how the world originated who won't listen to it on the other subjects.
This “orthodox creationism”, which is mainly a Baptist enterprise, resembles the big mistake made by the Catholic Church 500 years ago.
Impossible! The Catholic Church doesn't make mistakes! Besides, it is well known that the Catholic Church has never interpreted the Bible literally a single time in two thousand solid years! Catholics have always believed the Bible is full of holes! Those people who persecuted Galileo were obviously Southern Baptists traveling in a time machine, because everyone knows that everyone has always believed in evolution until those evil, stupid rednecks got polluted by nineteenth century positivism which led them to invent a theretofore unknown and unheard of Biblical literalism. And naturally this caused them to found the Ku-Klux Klan and start lynching Black people (whom, everyone knows, are completely and totally free of the purely redneck abomination of Biblical literalism). Oh, and by the way, Charles Darwin freed the slaves, right?
Back then, the Church used certain passages in the Bible to support the view that Sun orbits the Earth. The Bible, however, wasn’t intended as a textbook of astronomy, physics or biology. These subjects are tangential to the God’s word, and are presented in a purposefully symbolic or simplistic way, matching the cognitive abilities of people living 4,000 years ago.
Of course, the Bible is about "salvation" because it's a "chr*stian" book, and chr*stians get to reduce everything to "salvation," don't they? It's not as if the Torah were the verbatim Word of G-d dictated to Moses letter for letter. No sir, those wonderful chr*stians proved the documentary hypothesis a hundred years ago by simply assuming its truth (which is how they "prove" everything they believe).
That, I believe, is Genesis right there.
The Torah was not written by Moses. It was written in its entirety by G-d, 974 generations before the Creation of the World, and then dictated to Moses as a sequence of unpunctuated, unvocalized letters.
Of course you don't believe that, but foolish me, I try to help you.
From my readings of Augustine it is clear he sees Genesis as a spiritual description only.
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