Tim Keller on Evolution and Creationism

Jonathan Bartlett - Bartlett Publishing

|207.155.33.xxx |01-05-2010 23:18

As someone who transitioned from an old-earth perspective to a young-earth perspective, I did not find his arguments even remotely addressing what I found was important. The biggest part of young-earth creationism is not Genesis 1 - As an OEC I read it figuratively, as a YEC I am open to either reading. The crux of YEC comes from Genesis 6-9 and 2 Peter 3. In fact, 2 Peter 3 actually spells out the epistemology used for developing an evolutionary worldview:

"Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, 'Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.' " (2 Peter 3:3-4).

The author then points out how the flood contradicts this epistemology:

"For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished" (2 Peter 3:5-6)

There are no global sediments in the Cenozoic strata of the earth, but the paleozoic and mesozoic strata tend to be continental and worldwide. So, if they represented the flood, rather than hundreds of millions of years of evolution, then there would be no reason to think that the time existed.

In addition, quite apart from any biblical notion, many serious thinkers have rejected the naturalistic view of origins that evolutionists tell (and, if it isn't naturalistic - it isn't evolutionary theory).

You might be interested in a book review I did of Harrell's "Nature's Witness". You can read it here.

As for the reading of Genesis 1/2, I think the bigger issue is one of literary context. There are several places in scripture where that verb combination is rendered the same was as Genesis 1/2. The reason isn't because that's where the grammar points, the reason is that we use the context of scripture to infer time-relations. English is much more exact about time relations than Hebrew. I would think that forcing a time ordering might not be doing justice to the nature of Hebrew, and that the context of the previous passage (which is much more specific about time-ordering), should be used to interpret the passage in Genesis 2.

I know that you use the notion of raqia as a reason to not believe in the historicity/validity of the passage, but think about it for a moment. If the Rabbis of the first century were taking the passage as literal history, who had a much deeper access to their own literary tradition than we do, then isn't that a reason to think that the answer to the question "how did the author want this text to be understood" be that it is to be understood more literally? Obviously, the text itself is vague, and leaves a lot to interpretation and questioning. Nonetheless, I think that the fact that they were looking at the raqia as a real thing indicates that their expectations for the passage was that it was rooted in reality.

The point of all of this is not to make the BIble a science textbook - I know of very few Creationists who would do that (although one, Russ Humphreys, has actually made some fairly impressive results from it). The point is that it _does_ appear to be a history book of God's interaction with His creation. If science is the study of the real world, and God has interacted with the real world, any view of science which leaves out God's action will simply be wrong.

You also might enjoy reading a friend of mine's story about his transformation from evolutionary to YEC.

I know many doubt the globality of the flood and say that it was just "universal" for the people living in that reason, but if you look at the text, you realize that God wasn't just killing humans. Genesis 6:7 indicates that God was also after the animals and the birds, too. There are many other reasons as well.

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