Posted on 07/16/2002 9:33:12 PM PDT by Alamo-Girl
Well said! I enjoyed your essay tremendously. Following is the theory that I believe best expains how dinosaurs, fossils and fossil fuels do not really conflict with a literal "7-day" creation account.
It is called the "Gap Theory". The first verse of Genesis begins: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." He created, but when he did the creating, it does not say. Perhaps eons ago. Prehistoric creatures were put here to walk the earth. They left a lot of fossil remains as they died out from natural causes, perhaps a meteor. The Bible goes on in verse 2 to say: "The earth was formless and void and darkness was over the surface of the waters."
I have read that the Hebrew word for "void" suggested something that once was and then was really messed up. Perhaps the war that the Bible later mentions between the angels of heaven where one-third of the angels follows Satan and gets kicked out of heaven, really messed up the earth, made it "void" and dark.
Now God looks upon the earth again and says in verse three: "Let there be light".... there already was a sun and moon, created eons before, He just lifted the darkness surrounding the messed up earth and let the sun once more shine upon the earth, and began the literal seven days of the new creation of earth in which he would this time instead of dinosaures put other creatures and man upon the earth.
It is a plausable explianation that allows responsible science to coincide with the Bible. I do not believe Darwin's theory to be "responsible" science as there are too many descrepancies (the main one being the odds on amino acids just by chance forming into complex "life" are just too great to believe that happened by chance. The Bible has no contradictions.... only misunderstandings of men reading into it more than is there. The Bible has mysteries that are not readily clear because this helps to separate the believers from the non-believers. The believers take the Bible first on FAITH..... then one by one the mysteries begin to become clear as the Holy Spirit reveals them to us. My interpretation is only a theory and like yousaid... we will one day find out the real truth. Until then I can only say, I firmly believe that we must take the Bible as the Word of God and literally true and know that there is an answer that fits with what we know to be true in science with no condidictions eventhough we maybe cannot yet see it.
There is no need to go that far. Most people who care about this probably know that the bible as we see it now is a collection of this and that selected for support of the church. In addition, a lot of the NT, while written clearly enough makes no sense when taken logically and literally. But it's in parables! Yeah, no kidding. And for a finale, consider that English was not the language in which the Bible was written; which means that translators wrote the versions commonly available in the US and that since translators as a rule are well-acquainted with the rules of grammar, the result would be grammatical.
As for my views on origins, I fall back to a very simply philosophy: Everything begins with God, and as such, anything is possible.
Agreed. Which is why Hugh Ross's views must be flawed. And bump for a later read.
The problem with this is that the universe looked the same 6000 years ago as it does now. The planets were there, the stars were there just like now. There are old records. China has records going back 5000 years. The Pharoahs based a lot of their cosmology 4000 and 5000 years ago on the appearance of the heavens, and their constellations still look the same as our constellations.
FWIW, I agree in my "take" that the solar system and stars look the same today as they did 6000 years ago. The sentence after the one you quoted says I see both statements are true and compatible due to the effect the expansion of the universe has on the perception of time depending on the observer’s point of view.
The next three paragraphs and links explain why I came to that conclusion - and the remaining narrative goes into more detail.
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