Lately, I have been quite intrigued by the work of Walt Disney. As a visionary entrepreneur, I’m interested in how folks like him pushed the boundaries of what was thought possible. What may surprise you, though, is how he was unknowingly an important theological voice in the 20th century.
------------The rationalistic version of Biblical exegesis------------
Baptist Professor Ostrander (2002) remarks that Adam and Eve, when they respectively 'opened their eyes' 'for the first time', surely had 'thoughts and feelings' 'rushing through them' of the Natural world around them. This implies far more about the self evidence Divine Design than what our dull, and culturally warped, biologically Fallen brains readily can suspect as being self evident.
Indeed, as part of his own remark, Ostrander asserts that it is 'impossible' for us to know 'what kinds of thoughts and feelings would have been rushing through' Adam and Eve in their first moments of life.
But it is universally self evident that much of their thoughts and feelings must have been similar to many that we already have, or can have, of the natural world around us and above us (which is what that Psalm 19 is about).
So the first thing we must do is be sure we are not harboring a too-sharp dichotomy between ourselves and Adam and Eve. They were, like we are, in essentially the same self evidently designed Natural Creation.
The epistemologically passive 'affirmation' of the Bible that Ostrander seems to make is rationalistically justified. Nevertheless, it is metaphysically and epistemologically vacuous: it is dissociative---like a disembodied Blank Slate mind that lives in an empty space. So such 'affirmation' is just like thinking to properly understand God and Genesis 1 by approaching the account firstly and mainly according to mere logical possibility cum God's omnipotence.
So we cannot afford to ignore or degrade Psalm 19 in this. For, to ignore or disregard this psalm regarding Genesis 1 is to doom all our 'thumping' on Genesis 1 to nothing truly foundational for anything, much less for the debate on origins.
Then the other sides in that debate shall simply continue as they have done all along: to feel, and rightly so, that our own position on Genesis 1 includes SOME deep flaws. Those sides shall then continue simply to conflate their feeling on this with their own sense that their logic on the debate is sound.
This is like two very different dogs, both rabid, each attacking the other in a small cage, and one of the dogs is mostly right. Any wrongness on the part of that mostly-right dog shall not be seen by the other as a minor issue. This is especially if some of that wrongness is, in fact, VERY DEEP.
As Apostle Paul makes clear (Romans 1:20-23, 10:18), the prime difference between atheistic and Christian notions of origins is not that of the presence or absence of a Creator, nor of the presence or absence of Deep-Time-and-Death notions of origins. Rather, the prime difference is the presence or absence of a less or more rounded doctrine on the universal self-evidence of Divine Design of Nature Present. And it seems, at least to me, that Paul is saying that it is the rejection of that evidence that LEADS to such Deep Time notions of origins.
6. Worst of all, we would be inclined to the 'logic' of the science-fictional Vulcans regarding marriage: that marriage is some kind of collectivist loyalty to 'the survival of the species.' Thus, human social virtue would, for us, be mere fantasy. This is because our main set of concerns would be that of the values of (1) toil, and (2) the human power to make and contrive things to help us maintain the ship. We might have an open ended supply of raw matter that drifts through extragalactic space, as random clouds of it may continually be propelled out of host galaxies. But we would have no natural knowledge of any of the main things of which Genesis 1 is about.
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So this Stranded Space Ship hypothesis seems to show that our physical and metaphysical cosmological virtue depends on our native relation to the Ecological Earth. It seems this space ship scenario, if it were reality, would be cosmologically misleading to us, both directly and in regard to Genesis 1. In short, it seems it would cause us to have a bankrupt philosophy of cosmology, anthropology, and theology. It therefore might be described as the ultimate 'Space Ship Cosmology'.
And item 4. shows what the Sabbath rest is about: rest. The command to keep the Sabbath rest was not intended to make it mechanically impossible for humans to work on the Sabbath. It was intended to help preserve the practice of resting on the Sabbath. Just because there was no Sabbath command in Genesis 1 or 2 does not mean God did not, at that time, intend for humans to cease producing physical wealth every seventh day. If anything, an original lack of any such command was itself the best expression of the nature and relevance of the Sabbath rest. We are God's children, not God's robots. We naturally follow His example, no command required.
And the Sabbath REST is about general personal individuality, or autonomy, WITHIN the universal self evidence of Divine Design. It is NOT about 'obeying' 'commands'. We are individual and differentiated living creatures, not robot clones needing to be programmed. Not even the holy angels are clones. And the one entity which is the most differentiated from the creature, yet the most broadly affirming of the creature, is God.
I suggest that the following six items would be some of the basic results of this scenario.
1. We would be so vastly far from any star that we would think stars are just points of light. Thus, unlike what it is that, in reality, we see of the Sun and Moon from Earth, our lives inside this ship would show us no apparently large celestial bodies. At best, we could see only the kinds of things that terrestrial humans see of the Milky Way galaxy without telescopes. Therefore, viewing the cosmos from that ship, far from any galaxy, there would be no near bright body to uniquely serve our needs either for visible light or for energy. And we could never achieve an everyday perception of a deep connection between light and heat. This is because the lighting fixtures in this ship would give off little or no warmth; And, because any actual local points within the ship that produce all our ambient heat would give off none of the kind of light by which we humans see.
2. Worse, our best everyday sense regarding water would be that it is a liquid nutrient; that it has great potential for thermal storage; and thus, great potential for some kinds of thermal exchange. It would never suggest to us a way of life that is unbound by this ship.
3. Still worse, the ship's food synthesizers would rob us of any sense of just about everything worth knowing about God and Creation. Likewise, the ship's air filtration and air pressure systems would, by effect, rob us of any knowledge of God. And our lack of a blue sky in 'daylight', on a planet that has trees, would make us foolish idiots as to the Divine origins of anything worth knowing. 'What is a “tree”, momma?', our children would have to ask, assuming we even know such a word ourselves, or its referent. 'What is “day” and “night”, momma?' 'What is the “sea”, momma?' These words, and their referents, would be esoteric, at best.
4. Even worse, our metaphysics would obtain due to our sheer cost in time, labor, expertise, and technology in maintaining this ship, and would be warped in favor of a truly deep servitude to the concerns of mere survival. For, without our toil in maintaining its functions that keep us alive, we all surely would die when the ship fails. Thus our conceptions of the Creatorhood of God, and of His Ordinary Providence, would be obscenely lacking. Our very conception of human dignity would be bound horribly to that of the individuals' earning a place on the ship. If a given individual, in his own liberty or need, simply lived a day without working, that individual easily could be committing injustice against both himself and all his shipmates. Only by special prior permission from them all could he ever cease toiling for even one day. Therefore, the very idea of a regular day of rest would be obscure to us; and that of a yearly multiple day holiday would be completely invisible to us. For we have no natural day, and no natural year, living in that ship.
5. Imagine, in living all our lives inside this space ship, we somehow came to be well informed, merely by theory and record, that a planet based, water based means of life would leave us free from the costs of maintaining this ship. Imagine we even came into possession of Genesis 1. Would we think that such a hope was realistic? Or, instead, would we condemn even Genesis 1 as some kind of wicked lie? How could we even understand most of what Genesis 1 says? We, in fact, would see Genesis 1 as the most abominable thing possible. We would say, 'If God wanted us to live on a planet, He would have created us on a planet. But this “Genesis 1” thing makes almost no natural sense, so it cannot be from God. It seems to say that God created the physics, here in vs. 1-3. So this we find self evident in it. Nevertheless, is an “animal”? So this, clearly, is a pagan account of origins, like an absurd kind of Fairy Tale! At best it is an involved code that no one can be sure to correctly interpret. So we must get rid of any copy of this “Genesis 1”! It is an absurd and false hope! It has been contrived by charlatans, or by those of unsound mind!'
Two, this ship would have artificial systems for all factors humans require to survive, and to live 'normally'. And, just like the Enterprise, all those systems would require maintenance.
Three, the main difference to Star Trek in this scenario is that, as just implied, the version of humanity that lives in this ship has no natural knowledge of anything but what this ship, and its strandedness, allows. Another difference to typical Star Trek stories also is key here: Beside its own recycling systems, the only raw materials available for this stranded ship's maintenance and expansion is content-variable clouds of microscopic matter that randomly and constantly are ejected from nearby galaxies. The ship has all the technology required to 'farm' these clouds, but even that technology must not be allowed to degrade too far.
Four, the ship has artificial systems for (1) expanding the size and mass of the ship to accommodate any increases in human population; (2) synthesizing food; (3) generating gravity; (4) producing air pressure and air content; (5) producing thermal and lighting conditions; (6) maintaining hull integrity; (7) etc.. (The main issue here is that the health, and the very life, of humans in this scenario respectively would suffer or cease if any one or more of these artificial systems were not maintained).
Five, the ship's data banks do not contain any information on the fact that there are planets, much that there is at least one planet has free gravity, free air and air pressure, free thermal regulation, a biologically based system of many factors of life support, and all that other things we actual, terrestrial natives take for granted about our Earth, our Sun, and wider cosmos. The only possibility for such information is a single, paper-like copy of Genesis 1:1-3.
Six, this copy of the account is made of a very durable paper-like material, such that it has held up well enough for the thousands of years in which this account has been handled by the humans who live in this ship. Electronic copies have been made and distributed from the start. But the only natural evidence that the paper copy is worth the story its presents is that no one has ever been able to determine just what it is of which its paper like material is comprised. Various occasional attempts have been made, with all manner of technology afforded by this ship. But to no avail.
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Question: Would the humans in this scenario have all the conceptions necessary to understanding the most metaphysically basic things which we ACTUAL humans have in our real, Earth-based lives? I don't think so. I think it would preclude a number of FOUNDATIONALLY right senses of ANYTHING, either of (I) the Completed Creation, or of (II) Genesis 1 as an account of origins and of Divine Design.
Why is Genesis 1 amenable to the kinds of interpretations that are incorrect? Why is the account not far more clear, so as to outright preclude these erroneous interpretations?
Some of the incorrect and erroneous interpretations of Genesis 1 are overly simplistic, and thereby subtractive. Others are importive, or eisegetical, of ideas which are not plainly apparent in the text, not even to the ancient native speaker of ancient Hebrew.
On the most ignorant kind of initial level, we can think: 'Surely, God could have had the text include, at the very least, an addendum of statements that outright preclude the many erroneous interpretations of every part of the text that have ever been made.'
In fact, none of the Bible includes an inspired commentary on Genesis 1. This means Genesis 1 pretty much 'all on its own' in a kind of world that produces mistaken ideas about everything, including about Genesis 1.
Not even Calendar Day creationists are unanimous on just what a given verse or word of the account really means.
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------------Language and Divine Design------------
But I explain here that, in order to answer this issue, we must understand basically what natural language is, and is not.
One thing natural language is NOT is a function of communicating merely the logically possible. God is all powerful, so God can do anything imaginable, even the utterly arbitrary. But it is overwhelmingly clear that God did not create according to any random selections from 'All that which is merely logically possible'.
Specifically, we live in a highly life-affirming Creation, and we ourselves are part of that as living creatures. So we find it all self evidently coherent, since we living creatures depend on its life affirming designs. The merely logically possible allows God to have designed it any which way---even many which ways that, together, make up just a random jumble of ways. That would preclude any deepest predictability to anything.
So consider the nature of our everyday simple sets of statements on a single, naturally valuable topic. In these sets of statements, there is lot of ambiguity. But that ambiguity is not there to allow our meaning to be obscure. Much less is it there as an intention, on our parts, to be sure that many in our audience twists our meaning due to many of our terms' equivocal nature.
The ambiguity in our language is simply a kind of 'side effect' of our addressing our audience 1) on a universally known topic 2) in a powerfully brief way.
Firstly, our topic is so naturally evident that we let that be the main guide to our audience in interpreting our natural statements on that topic. Secondly, we know that our audience is not a logically extreme version of Complete Idiots, much less 'dutifully' passive-receptive ones. Our audience, we know, are humans, who have a lot of implicit natural knowledge on that topic.
So our sets of everyday simple statements on a valuable natural topic self evidently shows a simple flow of information that is powerfully brief. And these sets of statements are touched only with whatever emphases that we think serve that topic.
So imagine someone who is so 'in tune' with the Completed Creation that his first set of statements on its origins are...simply,...and humbly,...perfect.
This is what Genesis 1 self evidently seems to be.
In fact, to think otherwise of Genesis 1 seems to be to admit that the account either (a) is a flawed effort at plain communication or (b) is a less or more esoteric body of...whatever.
But if humans had no natural knowledge of an ecological planet, Genesis 1 would be impossible for humans to begin to properly understand in the first place. And that is not even the beginning the problem:
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------------The space ship negation of Divine Design------------
Consider a hypothetical scenario defined by the following six conditions.
One, every human, ever since humans began, have lived their lives bound inside a Star Trek like space ship, and this ship stranded drifting indefinitely far out from any galaxy.
But, as I hinted in the start of this post, I think there is a third extreme. In fact, it is little more that a modified version of the first extreme. And it is the merely status quo among the particular set of perceptually and intuitionally Fallen humans who abide the idea that Genesis 1 is plain and infallible history.
Specifically, this third extreme is the BSCI: 'The Biblical account of origins has little more valuable to the issue of origins than what it spells out for the BSCI. According to this extreme, the account teaches on origins NEARLY ONLY that which it spells out for the benefit of the BSCI.
So this third extreme implies the 'Easy Dogma' that, since no human was there to witness 'what God choose to do, when, or in what total time span', the account must be, either mainly or purely, a matter of what God Himself 'witnessed' of His own creating work.
In this third extreme, the account is to be seen in light mainly or strictly of the supposed fact that Moses 'is the author cum inspired author' of all details that make up the 'book' of Genesis. That is, despite all normal-sense kind of evidences to the contrary, it was Moses who was the first human in history to have produced Genesis 1 and passed it on.
So this third extreme tends to the additional intuition that the account is best understood in light of the work of Moses in delivering the Children of Israel from an oppressive Egyptian regime: that either God either inspired Moses to contrive the account from little or nothing, or God dictated it to him.
Notice the presupposition here: One, that the whole book of Genesis is a single original document no details of which existed by inheritance prior to Moses; Two, this is because none of Scripture spells out, for the benefit of our Complete Idiot, as to how Moses came by any of those details in the sense of such inheritance from any Patriarchs. Thus, despite any normal sense that any of those details normally suggest such inheritance, the idea of such inheritance must be held to be, at best, merely speculative. In short, regarding any and all of the book of Genesis, what God wants us to understand from it consists in little or nothing but what it spells out, and, ONLY WITHIN THIS hermeneutic, what it thereby seems surely to imply.
But this is EXACTLY HOW THE PHARISEES claimed to be the true teachers of the Law: The Law is little or nothing but what it spells out, for the Complete Idiot cum rabidly 'loyal' 'obeyer'. This is how the Pharisees added to the Law: by contriving rules that, so long as a person simply obeyed those rules, that person could not possibly violate the Law, even unintentionally. So close to the Truth, yet so far away from it as to miss, and to even oppose, many of the most valuable things about it.
So, according the most 'conscientious' of those who hold to this third extreme, the litmus test of abiding the authoritative plainness of Genesis 1 is similarly contrived accordingly to the logical extreme of plainness: the mere logical possibilities of God's power.
Accordingly, the particular, and minority, parts of the account that, by a Complete Idiot kind of reading, 'exegetically' 'compels' the idea that God created certain things according to His pure 'logically possible' power and freedom. In other words, in Creation Week, God abrogated some of the value to humans of His own Designs of the Completed Creation!
And the claimed 'Divine' motives for this abrogation are that God is 'thumbing' His omnipotent 'nose' at all three of (A) any who would doubt that He did so; (B) any who, in taking for granted the account's supposed Complete Idiot's plainness, oppose the account itself; and (C) any who, in being pagan or atheistic without having ever heard of the account, abide and enforce the Divine-Design-denying, pagan and atheistic notions of origins.
So this third extreme does not, in any most principle ways, oppose the first extreme. On the contrary, it makes exceptions in favor of the first extreme Moreover, and therefore, this third extreme's opposition to the second extreme is an opposition that fails to account for the fact that the second extreme is a PRODUCT of a DENIAL of the evident Divine Design of Nature Present.
In short, the most trustingly loyal advocates of this third extreme tend to somewhat conflate General Revelation with the second extreme; that is, since General Revelation is not Idiot proof, the mere idea that Genesis 1 is plain HAS TO BE Idiot proof...as long as one approaches the account as that some Idiot: whatever it spells out, or thereby seems to imply, we must assent to that---just as a little child might naively assent to an absurd and arbitrary story if the adult tries to get the child to actually assent to it.
Yet so many of the most well known spokespersons for the third extreme teach that, contrary to those who would deny that Genesis 1 is a plain account of actual material origins, science IS NOT, in fact, that which favors, much less that which is rabidly loyal to, the second extreme.
Many of my fellow Recent Creationists see Genesis 1 as little more valuable to the issue of origins than what it spells out for what I'm calling a nearly Blank Slate, rabidly 'loyal' 'Complete Idiot' way of interpreting it (BSCI).
According to this BSCI, Genesis 1 teaches on origins NEARLY ONLY that which it spells out for the benefit of the BSCI itself. This implies the 'Easy Dogma' that, since no human was there to witness 'what God choose to do, when, or in what total time span', the account must be, either mainly or purely, a matter of what God Himself 'witnessed' of His own creating work.
'And, since God is all powerful', the BSCI says that 'Genesis 1 must be interpreted principally in light of God's power to do logically ANYTHING.
So the BSCI holds that the universal self evidence of Divine Design is of subordinate value for interpreting any of Genesis 1 Anything needing explaining in the account is therefore to be explained mainly through the logical possibilities of God's power, and only secondarily, if at all, through the ways in which we can identify in it any suggestion of things that we find most naturally good.
So it is predictable that, in face of a culture that abides the Divine-Design-denying atheist notions of origins, the BSCI holds that Genesis 1 most likely is more opposed to notions themselves than to affirm the universal self evidence of Divine Design!
This is why it is respectable among so many modern Recent Creationists to claim that Genesis 1:1 means, not the general cosmos and the special Earth, but 'the absolute chronologically first things God created was empty space and physical matter'. Accordingly no life-affirming fine tuning of this cosmic physics pair need be presented in the account, so long as the account can be construed as competing directly against the modern secular skepticism, as such, of this ancient account.
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But the BSCI fails to see that notions of origins may better be called notions of Nature Past, as opposed to notions of Nature Present. And, it fails Nature Present in the fact that it fails to account for Psalm 19 in terms of Paul's usage of this psalm in linking receptivity to the Gospel to receptivity to many of the prime factors of Divine Design.
In general, Psalm 19 is a praise for the fact that Nature Present constitutes universal self evidence of Divine Design. But, one must not miss the special, central concern of this psalm. It is the psalmist's own realization that, especially in his fallen state, he needs to know of that evidence in its most important factors and, from there, any details of that evidence that bear on his sinful nature in an anxiety-filled life.
So it ought to come as surprise, nor as oddity, that Apostle Paul, in the first portion of his foundational letter to the Roman Believers, links pagan and atheistic notions of Nature Past to a denial of the universal self evidence of Divine Design of Nature Present (Romans 1:20-23).
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The Two Basic Erroneous Extremes
To begin to understand why Paul, in all this, does not once emphasize the Creation Account, but does have in mind Psalm 19 (Romans 10:18), we might have to consider a generic theism-deism of a type which is deeply ignorant of the Bible-based debate on origins. If we were to begin with this type of generic theism-deism, what would be our most naturally expected time frame for origins?
But, despite this beginning, we all can already see at least two two mutually opposite extreme logical possibilities for that time frame: One, far, far too short for the epistemological and theological value of the universal self evidence of Divine Design; Two, far, far too long for that same value.
The first extreme here is that which focuses on nothing but God's omnipotence and freedom. The intuition here is that from the fact that (1) our own creaturely power is limited, and (2) this limitedness commonly is beset with frustrations, unwanted delays, a sense of hardship, etc.. 'Therefore', say advocates of this supposedly most rawly 'God-honoring' extreme, 'it is only natural to think God brought into being all things together in a single timeless, durationless, instant'.
Accordingly, God's work of causing all things to come into being is that of essentially how the title character Genie, in the 1950's TV show, I Dream of Genie, simply wished something, and that something just 'poofed' into existence. But, in this, God is seen principally as wishing to avoid any process of building things. He also thereby is seen as avoid having to have any deep knowledge of those things, or any initiative of deep design of those things.
So this first extreme fails to account for the origin of the particular designs or functions of anything; of what, exactly, is or shall be, and what is not. And this includes all the astonishing details and relations in which the things that exist obtain as they are. This extreme is nothing but a happy selfish worship of power, not of God. It does not honor God, and the reason why is simple: It reifies God as a Tired Genie Ignoramus who therefore is too happy to simply will something into being that this Genie might herself actually need or be pleased to have.
An obvious second extreme as to a time frame for origins is that which denies most any Divine Design at all. This allows the various kinds of ambiguously 'mysterious' ideas according to which God simply allowed all things as products of mere happenstance from some somehow Divinely designed initial conditions. Thus, at best, say, God simply foreknew how things would play out. For this second extreme, the time frame for origins is naturally expected to be whatever long time that 'evolutionary' notions of origins ever allows.
This is not to deny that God 'logically' can have created the cosmos either over billions of years or in a single durationless instant. But if He had one either of these, that would have been a pointlessly selfish, merely 'impressive' stunt. We humans are not being treated to a 'wow'ing show of God's mere power. For, we are His children, made in His likeness. We are not paying customers at a cruel-to-animals circus, of a past era, by which God gets rich. God needs nothing from us. And Genesis 1 demonstrates just how good, and wise, and powerful He is for us. The account not once outright states, 'God is good', much less, 'God will judge those who reject His Word.' No. Genesis 1 is record purely of Who He is as Creator and Father.
Again, on the Earth, there is only one natural way to assemble a wood house: in a fairly short span of time, least weather, bugs, plants, microbes, and wild animals begin to incur. Similarly, there is only one naturally expected process of creating and assembly of a dynamic complex system. This is unlike for the most parts of an automobile, which may be made and assembled in any imaginable sequence, and beginning with most any imaginable part. One could begin the car by making the windshield or the gas cap, and proceeding from there to the assembly that holds the rod for the left turn signal. But this is only because an auto, by virtue of its mere existence, is not being driven. In fact, its engine need not even be made until after the whole rest of the car is put together.
But the Completed Creation has no 'off' mode. It is interdynamic throughout, and all for the support of life, and to support Earth's cosmically unique role in that. As Psalm 19 implies, our everyday most natural and broad sense of things is what makes possible the universal self evidence of Divine Design. In fact, that sense is alone so foundational that it is confirmed by the most advanced modern instrumental modes of empirical inquiry. Those modes, in their own ways, show that the entire cosmos, from humans and the Earth to the 'basic' physics of it all, appears to be very finely design and 'tuned' for sake specifically of
(i) water based life,
(ii) Earth's cosmically unique role in the support of that life, and
(iii) a Biblically compatible kind of human physical and metaphysical cosmological virtue (ex: Sarfati, 1997, 2015; Neller, 2014; Harwood, 2017; Price, 2017; Gonzales and Richards, 2020).
In other words, this fine design is intuited by humans' 'primitive' mystical senses regarding Nature. Of course, Fallen human ways tend to a distorted and superstitious conception as to what that intuition implies. Nevertheless, the general intuition is exactly true: the cosmos, in its binary, marriage-like intrarelation (Genesis 1:1, 14-18), constitutes an affirmation of life, the Earth, and humans. In other words, the Divine Design reality of cosmic physics can be said to constitute, or at least to have, a functional 'friendship' toward life, the Earth, the human individual, and, by extension, marriage.
Finally, though it is logically and grammatically possible to begin and proceed an account of making and assembling a house with its generically identified physical 'foundation', the same is not the most valuable way of beginning and proceeding an account of creating, making, and assembling the Completed Creation. As already pointed out, the only way Genesis 1 would need to spell out that 'God created matter, blah blah blah', on order for it to properly address that fact, is if the Completed Creation were the very thing that hardened atheists think it is: a mutually dissociative bunch of...whatevers. These are 'whatevers' that, as such atheists would have us believe, include 'raw' dynamic 'facts' that only happen to cause any of them to congeal, and in the various ways in which they empirically are observed do so.
So ought we presume that Genesis 1 is an 'origins-centric' suspension of our everyday most natural broad sense of things? The account does not even spell out about gravity or inertia, perhaps the one most general, familiar, merely physically and biologically external-internal thing we all begin experiencing, in the womb, aside from relatively unchanging tastes, and the sounds, vibrations, and occasional impacts of living in there.
For, imagine we were blind and deaf, our nostrils held closed, ourselves fed air through a tube, and ourselves submerged in mile-diameter, thousand-foot deep body of body-temperature water. Almost the only thing we could sense of our environment is that by way of inertia. We might wriggle and roll, and strain against the cords holding us in place. But our resulting pronounced perceptions of such an environment would not indicate 'squat' as to what the Completed Creation actually is.
Adam and Eve were not created as infants, much less under such limiting conditions.
So we ought not think it best simply to presume upon our ignorance by insisting that the time frame of which Genesis 1 is plain record is irrelevant to WHAT IT IS that God created: The very Creation we know everyday. We must allow for the possibility that that time frame is in service to, and thus a function of, what the Design in Nature actually is (Leviticus 26:34-35). And we must begin with our own internal biological sense of that time frame:
We implicitly know that a human workweek of four hundred days is too long. We likewise know that a human workweek of four minutes is too short. So, clearly, there is an ideal length of workweek somewhere between these extremes. If we fail to immediately see, 'intellectually', what that ideal is, that in no way means it is arbitrary to our biology. And if it is not arbitrary to our biology, then there is no sound basis for presuming that it is arbitrary to the ecological Earth.
The original Completed Creation (Genesis 1:31). A genuine Utopia. How does it figure into the issue of how to correctly interpret Genesis 1? Is Genesis 1 originally for the Children of Israel? Or did Abraham know of it? If we say he did not, then what does that imply for how we thereby must think to correctly interpret ANY of the Hebrew Scriptures. But if we think Abe did know of the Creation account, then does not that mean that Adam and Eve knew of it as well?
But if we say that Adam and Eve did not know of the account, then what ideas, if any, did Adam and Eve ever have about origins? Were the two originally so perfect in cognitive and perceptual coherence and yet have little or no thought to origins? Did they have no understanding of origins?
We might want to say that origins, by God's miraculous power, is strictly outside human understanding of how the Completed Creation ongoingly functions. That is, we might have been taught, at least implictly, that Genesis 1 is far more an account of a 'Divine Arbitrary Fairy Tale on Origins Made Reality' than it is anything we can identify as affirming the universal self evidence of Divine Design (Psalm 19).
I posed this issue to an internationally known Recent Creationist. He gave me no answer but that which implied he saw Genesis 1 by way of this God-is-all-powerful,-end-of-story, Fairy Tale Made Reality hermeneutic Axiom.
I pressed the question by asking if he knew what was the "Design*, or the principle of coherence, of the whole Completed Creation. One of his followers replied that such an overall Design is something only God can know. I replied to this by pointing out that that overall Design cannot be a randomly filled bowl of individual instances of Divine Design.
No one in that small collection of my fellow Recent Creationists seemed to know, or care, for the issue. I stated that the overall Design surely has to do with life and humans, as opposed to to do with some obscure, even arbitrary, 'mystery'.
God 'logically' can have created Adam and Eve inside a miraculous, temporary, observation bubble just prior to the first moment of Creation Week. Accordingly, God can 'just as well' even have had this Bubble be able to slow down the time difference between inside it and outside it, and this to any difference as Adam and Eve wished. Further, the Bubble could record and replay the events as many times as they wished. Thus Adam and Eve could have watched, smelled, felt, and in all other ways experienced any and every chronological and locational part of Creation Week for as many times as they pleased, at any rates they pleased, for as long as they pleased. This would include even the creation and making of cosmic physics, during whatever parts of Creation Week that such physics was being created or made.
But, then too, God 'could just as well' also have provided the Bubbled Adam and Eve with all the technological instrumentation to aid them in their study of how God created and made the cosmic physics. By the same token, God also 'could just as well' have' made endless sandwiches, for as long as Adam and Eve were pleased to remain in the Bubble prior to taking on their own proper lives as images of God.
But is there not a marriage-like relationship in Divine Design? See Psalm 19:5.
Consider the central portion to the account (vs. 14-18). This is the only part of the account to specify the luminaries (vs. 14-18). Yet this portion specifies the luminaries primarily in terms of their relation to the ecological Earth. In other words, it presents them in relationship to life. So it would be patently false to insist that the account presents the luminaries mainly or purely in their own terms: as merely one set of the various sets of parts that make up the Completed Creation.
Genesis 1, sight unseen, can be described as an account of origins. But the account is nothing like that of the process of assembling a diorama. One cannot even best describe the assembling of a house as that of a list of its various basic parts. This is because a house is not a pile of parts laying randomly about. Nor is it just one thing merely added to another. For example, the foundation is not affixed to the rest by the way in which the whole would obtain in zero gravity.
How much less, therefore, can Genesis 1 be said to present a reductive, and 'bottom', up' process of bringing about the Completed Creation that we know everyday. The Sun is not an unmoving and non-lighting painting on a blue canvas in utter darkness. Too, the Earth is not some random planet seen from a frame of reference in outer space, say, near the orbit of the Moon.
Indeed, Genesis 1 uses ecologically descriptive terms, such as 'the Earth brought forth' (ex: v. 12). If the account had meant to say that God essentially 'zapped' the completed system of flora into existence in a durationless kind of instant, it could better have said so without bothering to use such para-ecological terms. For, those terms would be misleading if, in fact, God created the system of flora in a single, durationless, I Dream of Genie-like 'Poof!'.
So the very fact that the account uses clearly ecological terms means it is concerned for how God cared, in a practical and most intimate sense, for dynamically integrating the dynamic system of flora with the by-then initially functioning water cycle (v. 3-10). Only a dissociatively 'loyal', cum 'theological', reading could find in the account only what it spells out additively. This is no more perceptive than if, when we read a list of the most naturally obvious basic parts of a woman, as such, we fail to see that it amounts to the description of a woman.
Some Christians are inclined to think that Genesis 1 is not describing any process of actual creation, and instead is describing how the completed Earth functions normally. But, the fact is that the ecological Earth is an irreducibly complex natural system of life support. Irreducibly complex artificial systems, such as a house, naturally require assembly in a short span of time, and this in relation to the dynamics involved in them. In zero gravity and in hard vacuum, a house made of normal wood may be assembled in any imaginable length of time. But the same in not the case for a house on the ecological Earth, with that ecology's own ongoing dynamics. On the Earth, there is no natural option to assemble that same house over hundreds, thousands, or millions of years. And the Earth itself is like that same house in relation to the wider 'cosmos'. So the total cosmos has no natural option to that of being created in a short time.
DEC 31st 2020_PART 5 of 5 on Genesis 1
------------The rationalistic version of Biblical exegesis------------
Baptist Professor Ostrander (2002) remarks that Adam and Eve, when they respectively 'opened their eyes' 'for the first time', surely had 'thoughts and feelings' 'rushing through them' of the Natural world around them. This implies far more about the self evidence Divine Design than what our dull, and culturally warped, biologically Fallen brains readily can suspect as being self evident.
Indeed, as part of his own remark, Ostrander asserts that it is 'impossible' for us to know 'what kinds of thoughts and feelings would have been rushing through' Adam and Eve in their first moments of life.
But it is universally self evident that much of their thoughts and feelings must have been similar to many that we already have, or can have, of the natural world around us and above us (which is what that Psalm 19 is about).
So the first thing we must do is be sure we are not harboring a too-sharp dichotomy between ourselves and Adam and Eve. They were, like we are, in essentially the same self evidently designed Natural Creation.
The epistemologically passive 'affirmation' of the Bible that Ostrander seems to make is rationalistically justified. Nevertheless, it is metaphysically and epistemologically vacuous: it is dissociative---like a disembodied Blank Slate mind that lives in an empty space. So such 'affirmation' is just like thinking to properly understand God and Genesis 1 by approaching the account firstly and mainly according to mere logical possibility cum God's omnipotence.
So we cannot afford to ignore or degrade Psalm 19 in this. For, to ignore or disregard this psalm regarding Genesis 1 is to doom all our 'thumping' on Genesis 1 to nothing truly foundational for anything, much less for the debate on origins.
Then the other sides in that debate shall simply continue as they have done all along: to feel, and rightly so, that our own position on Genesis 1 includes SOME deep flaws. Those sides shall then continue simply to conflate their feeling on this with their own sense that their logic on the debate is sound.
This is like two very different dogs, both rabid, each attacking the other in a small cage, and one of the dogs is mostly right. Any wrongness on the part of that mostly-right dog shall not be seen by the other as a minor issue. This is especially if some of that wrongness is, in fact, VERY DEEP.
As Apostle Paul makes clear (Romans 1:20-23, 10:18), the prime difference between atheistic and Christian notions of origins is not that of the presence or absence of a Creator, nor of the presence or absence of Deep-Time-and-Death notions of origins. Rather, the prime difference is the presence or absence of a less or more rounded doctrine on the universal self-evidence of Divine Design of Nature Present. And it seems, at least to me, that Paul is saying that it is the rejection of that evidence that LEADS to such Deep Time notions of origins.
DEC 31st 2020_PART 4 of 5 on Genesis 1
6. Worst of all, we would be inclined to the 'logic' of the science-fictional Vulcans regarding marriage: that marriage is some kind of collectivist loyalty to 'the survival of the species.' Thus, human social virtue would, for us, be mere fantasy. This is because our main set of concerns would be that of the values of (1) toil, and (2) the human power to make and contrive things to help us maintain the ship. We might have an open ended supply of raw matter that drifts through extragalactic space, as random clouds of it may continually be propelled out of host galaxies. But we would have no natural knowledge of any of the main things of which Genesis 1 is about.
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So this Stranded Space Ship hypothesis seems to show that our physical and metaphysical cosmological virtue depends on our native relation to the Ecological Earth. It seems this space ship scenario, if it were reality, would be cosmologically misleading to us, both directly and in regard to Genesis 1. In short, it seems it would cause us to have a bankrupt philosophy of cosmology, anthropology, and theology. It therefore might be described as the ultimate 'Space Ship Cosmology'.
And item 4. shows what the Sabbath rest is about: rest. The command to keep the Sabbath rest was not intended to make it mechanically impossible for humans to work on the Sabbath. It was intended to help preserve the practice of resting on the Sabbath. Just because there was no Sabbath command in Genesis 1 or 2 does not mean God did not, at that time, intend for humans to cease producing physical wealth every seventh day. If anything, an original lack of any such command was itself the best expression of the nature and relevance of the Sabbath rest. We are God's children, not God's robots. We naturally follow His example, no command required.
And the Sabbath REST is about general personal individuality, or autonomy, WITHIN the universal self evidence of Divine Design. It is NOT about 'obeying' 'commands'. We are individual and differentiated living creatures, not robot clones needing to be programmed. Not even the holy angels are clones. And the one entity which is the most differentiated from the creature, yet the most broadly affirming of the creature, is God.
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DEC 31st 2020_PART 3 of 5 on Genesis 1
I suggest that the following six items would be some of the basic results of this scenario.
1. We would be so vastly far from any star that we would think stars are just points of light. Thus, unlike what it is that, in reality, we see of the Sun and Moon from Earth, our lives inside this ship would show us no apparently large celestial bodies. At best, we could see only the kinds of things that terrestrial humans see of the Milky Way galaxy without telescopes. Therefore, viewing the cosmos from that ship, far from any galaxy, there would be no near bright body to uniquely serve our needs either for visible light or for energy. And we could never achieve an everyday perception of a deep connection between light and heat. This is because the lighting fixtures in this ship would give off little or no warmth; And, because any actual local points within the ship that produce all our ambient heat would give off none of the kind of light by which we humans see.
2. Worse, our best everyday sense regarding water would be that it is a liquid nutrient; that it has great potential for thermal storage; and thus, great potential for some kinds of thermal exchange. It would never suggest to us a way of life that is unbound by this ship.
3. Still worse, the ship's food synthesizers would rob us of any sense of just about everything worth knowing about God and Creation. Likewise, the ship's air filtration and air pressure systems would, by effect, rob us of any knowledge of God. And our lack of a blue sky in 'daylight', on a planet that has trees, would make us foolish idiots as to the Divine origins of anything worth knowing. 'What is a “tree”, momma?', our children would have to ask, assuming we even know such a word ourselves, or its referent. 'What is “day” and “night”, momma?' 'What is the “sea”, momma?' These words, and their referents, would be esoteric, at best.
4. Even worse, our metaphysics would obtain due to our sheer cost in time, labor, expertise, and technology in maintaining this ship, and would be warped in favor of a truly deep servitude to the concerns of mere survival. For, without our toil in maintaining its functions that keep us alive, we all surely would die when the ship fails. Thus our conceptions of the Creatorhood of God, and of His Ordinary Providence, would be obscenely lacking. Our very conception of human dignity would be bound horribly to that of the individuals' earning a place on the ship. If a given individual, in his own liberty or need, simply lived a day without working, that individual easily could be committing injustice against both himself and all his shipmates. Only by special prior permission from them all could he ever cease toiling for even one day. Therefore, the very idea of a regular day of rest would be obscure to us; and that of a yearly multiple day holiday would be completely invisible to us. For we have no natural day, and no natural year, living in that ship.
5. Imagine, in living all our lives inside this space ship, we somehow came to be well informed, merely by theory and record, that a planet based, water based means of life would leave us free from the costs of maintaining this ship. Imagine we even came into possession of Genesis 1. Would we think that such a hope was realistic? Or, instead, would we condemn even Genesis 1 as some kind of wicked lie? How could we even understand most of what Genesis 1 says? We, in fact, would see Genesis 1 as the most abominable thing possible. We would say, 'If God wanted us to live on a planet, He would have created us on a planet. But this “Genesis 1” thing makes almost no natural sense, so it cannot be from God. It seems to say that God created the physics, here in vs. 1-3. So this we find self evident in it. Nevertheless, is an “animal”? So this, clearly, is a pagan account of origins, like an absurd kind of Fairy Tale! At best it is an involved code that no one can be sure to correctly interpret. So we must get rid of any copy of this “Genesis 1”! It is an absurd and false hope! It has been contrived by charlatans, or by those of unsound mind!'
DEC 31st 2020_PART 2 of 5 on Genesis 1
Two, this ship would have artificial systems for all factors humans require to survive, and to live 'normally'. And, just like the Enterprise, all those systems would require maintenance.
Three, the main difference to Star Trek in this scenario is that, as just implied, the version of humanity that lives in this ship has no natural knowledge of anything but what this ship, and its strandedness, allows. Another difference to typical Star Trek stories also is key here: Beside its own recycling systems, the only raw materials available for this stranded ship's maintenance and expansion is content-variable clouds of microscopic matter that randomly and constantly are ejected from nearby galaxies. The ship has all the technology required to 'farm' these clouds, but even that technology must not be allowed to degrade too far.
Four, the ship has artificial systems for (1) expanding the size and mass of the ship to accommodate any increases in human population; (2) synthesizing food; (3) generating gravity; (4) producing air pressure and air content; (5) producing thermal and lighting conditions; (6) maintaining hull integrity; (7) etc.. (The main issue here is that the health, and the very life, of humans in this scenario respectively would suffer or cease if any one or more of these artificial systems were not maintained).
Five, the ship's data banks do not contain any information on the fact that there are planets, much that there is at least one planet has free gravity, free air and air pressure, free thermal regulation, a biologically based system of many factors of life support, and all that other things we actual, terrestrial natives take for granted about our Earth, our Sun, and wider cosmos. The only possibility for such information is a single, paper-like copy of Genesis 1:1-3.
Six, this copy of the account is made of a very durable paper-like material, such that it has held up well enough for the thousands of years in which this account has been handled by the humans who live in this ship. Electronic copies have been made and distributed from the start. But the only natural evidence that the paper copy is worth the story its presents is that no one has ever been able to determine just what it is of which its paper like material is comprised. Various occasional attempts have been made, with all manner of technology afforded by this ship. But to no avail.
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Question: Would the humans in this scenario have all the conceptions necessary to understanding the most metaphysically basic things which we ACTUAL humans have in our real, Earth-based lives? I don't think so. I think it would preclude a number of FOUNDATIONALLY right senses of ANYTHING, either of (I) the Completed Creation, or of (II) Genesis 1 as an account of origins and of Divine Design.
DEC 31st 2020_PART 1 of 5 on Genesis 1
Why is Genesis 1 amenable to the kinds of interpretations that are incorrect? Why is the account not far more clear, so as to outright preclude these erroneous interpretations?
Some of the incorrect and erroneous interpretations of Genesis 1 are overly simplistic, and thereby subtractive. Others are importive, or eisegetical, of ideas which are not plainly apparent in the text, not even to the ancient native speaker of ancient Hebrew.
On the most ignorant kind of initial level, we can think: 'Surely, God could have had the text include, at the very least, an addendum of statements that outright preclude the many erroneous interpretations of every part of the text that have ever been made.'
In fact, none of the Bible includes an inspired commentary on Genesis 1. This means Genesis 1 pretty much 'all on its own' in a kind of world that produces mistaken ideas about everything, including about Genesis 1.
Not even Calendar Day creationists are unanimous on just what a given verse or word of the account really means.
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------------Language and Divine Design------------
But I explain here that, in order to answer this issue, we must understand basically what natural language is, and is not.
One thing natural language is NOT is a function of communicating merely the logically possible. God is all powerful, so God can do anything imaginable, even the utterly arbitrary. But it is overwhelmingly clear that God did not create according to any random selections from 'All that which is merely logically possible'.
Specifically, we live in a highly life-affirming Creation, and we ourselves are part of that as living creatures. So we find it all self evidently coherent, since we living creatures depend on its life affirming designs. The merely logically possible allows God to have designed it any which way---even many which ways that, together, make up just a random jumble of ways. That would preclude any deepest predictability to anything.
So consider the nature of our everyday simple sets of statements on a single, naturally valuable topic. In these sets of statements, there is lot of ambiguity. But that ambiguity is not there to allow our meaning to be obscure. Much less is it there as an intention, on our parts, to be sure that many in our audience twists our meaning due to many of our terms' equivocal nature.
The ambiguity in our language is simply a kind of 'side effect' of our addressing our audience 1) on a universally known topic 2) in a powerfully brief way.
Firstly, our topic is so naturally evident that we let that be the main guide to our audience in interpreting our natural statements on that topic. Secondly, we know that our audience is not a logically extreme version of Complete Idiots, much less 'dutifully' passive-receptive ones. Our audience, we know, are humans, who have a lot of implicit natural knowledge on that topic.
So our sets of everyday simple statements on a valuable natural topic self evidently shows a simple flow of information that is powerfully brief. And these sets of statements are touched only with whatever emphases that we think serve that topic.
So imagine someone who is so 'in tune' with the Completed Creation that his first set of statements on its origins are...simply,...and humbly,...perfect.
This is what Genesis 1 self evidently seems to be.
In fact, to think otherwise of Genesis 1 seems to be to admit that the account either (a) is a flawed effort at plain communication or (b) is a less or more esoteric body of...whatever.
But if humans had no natural knowledge of an ecological planet, Genesis 1 would be impossible for humans to begin to properly understand in the first place. And that is not even the beginning the problem:
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------------The space ship negation of Divine Design------------
Consider a hypothetical scenario defined by the following six conditions.
One, every human, ever since humans began, have lived their lives bound inside a Star Trek like space ship, and this ship stranded drifting indefinitely far out from any galaxy.
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The Third, specially erroneous Extreme
But, as I hinted in the start of this post, I think there is a third extreme. In fact, it is little more that a modified version of the first extreme. And it is the merely status quo among the particular set of perceptually and intuitionally Fallen humans who abide the idea that Genesis 1 is plain and infallible history.
Specifically, this third extreme is the BSCI: 'The Biblical account of origins has little more valuable to the issue of origins than what it spells out for the BSCI. According to this extreme, the account teaches on origins NEARLY ONLY that which it spells out for the benefit of the BSCI.
So this third extreme implies the 'Easy Dogma' that, since no human was there to witness 'what God choose to do, when, or in what total time span', the account must be, either mainly or purely, a matter of what God Himself 'witnessed' of His own creating work.
In this third extreme, the account is to be seen in light mainly or strictly of the supposed fact that Moses 'is the author cum inspired author' of all details that make up the 'book' of Genesis. That is, despite all normal-sense kind of evidences to the contrary, it was Moses who was the first human in history to have produced Genesis 1 and passed it on.
So this third extreme tends to the additional intuition that the account is best understood in light of the work of Moses in delivering the Children of Israel from an oppressive Egyptian regime: that either God either inspired Moses to contrive the account from little or nothing, or God dictated it to him.
Notice the presupposition here: One, that the whole book of Genesis is a single original document no details of which existed by inheritance prior to Moses; Two, this is because none of Scripture spells out, for the benefit of our Complete Idiot, as to how Moses came by any of those details in the sense of such inheritance from any Patriarchs. Thus, despite any normal sense that any of those details normally suggest such inheritance, the idea of such inheritance must be held to be, at best, merely speculative. In short, regarding any and all of the book of Genesis, what God wants us to understand from it consists in little or nothing but what it spells out, and, ONLY WITHIN THIS hermeneutic, what it thereby seems surely to imply.
But this is EXACTLY HOW THE PHARISEES claimed to be the true teachers of the Law: The Law is little or nothing but what it spells out, for the Complete Idiot cum rabidly 'loyal' 'obeyer'. This is how the Pharisees added to the Law: by contriving rules that, so long as a person simply obeyed those rules, that person could not possibly violate the Law, even unintentionally. So close to the Truth, yet so far away from it as to miss, and to even oppose, many of the most valuable things about it.
So, according the most 'conscientious' of those who hold to this third extreme, the litmus test of abiding the authoritative plainness of Genesis 1 is similarly contrived accordingly to the logical extreme of plainness: the mere logical possibilities of God's power.
Accordingly, the particular, and minority, parts of the account that, by a Complete Idiot kind of reading, 'exegetically' 'compels' the idea that God created certain things according to His pure 'logically possible' power and freedom. In other words, in Creation Week, God abrogated some of the value to humans of His own Designs of the Completed Creation!
And the claimed 'Divine' motives for this abrogation are that God is 'thumbing' His omnipotent 'nose' at all three of (A) any who would doubt that He did so; (B) any who, in taking for granted the account's supposed Complete Idiot's plainness, oppose the account itself; and (C) any who, in being pagan or atheistic without having ever heard of the account, abide and enforce the Divine-Design-denying, pagan and atheistic notions of origins.
So this third extreme does not, in any most principle ways, oppose the first extreme. On the contrary, it makes exceptions in favor of the first extreme Moreover, and therefore, this third extreme's opposition to the second extreme is an opposition that fails to account for the fact that the second extreme is a PRODUCT of a DENIAL of the evident Divine Design of Nature Present.
In short, the most trustingly loyal advocates of this third extreme tend to somewhat conflate General Revelation with the second extreme; that is, since General Revelation is not Idiot proof, the mere idea that Genesis 1 is plain HAS TO BE Idiot proof...as long as one approaches the account as that some Idiot: whatever it spells out, or thereby seems to imply, we must assent to that---just as a little child might naively assent to an absurd and arbitrary story if the adult tries to get the child to actually assent to it.
Yet so many of the most well known spokespersons for the third extreme teach that, contrary to those who would deny that Genesis 1 is a plain account of actual material origins, science IS NOT, in fact, that which favors, much less that which is rabidly loyal to, the second extreme.
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Many of my fellow Recent Creationists see Genesis 1 as little more valuable to the issue of origins than what it spells out for what I'm calling a nearly Blank Slate, rabidly 'loyal' 'Complete Idiot' way of interpreting it (BSCI).
According to this BSCI, Genesis 1 teaches on origins NEARLY ONLY that which it spells out for the benefit of the BSCI itself. This implies the 'Easy Dogma' that, since no human was there to witness 'what God choose to do, when, or in what total time span', the account must be, either mainly or purely, a matter of what God Himself 'witnessed' of His own creating work.
'And, since God is all powerful', the BSCI says that 'Genesis 1 must be interpreted principally in light of God's power to do logically ANYTHING.
So the BSCI holds that the universal self evidence of Divine Design is of subordinate value for interpreting any of Genesis 1 Anything needing explaining in the account is therefore to be explained mainly through the logical possibilities of God's power, and only secondarily, if at all, through the ways in which we can identify in it any suggestion of things that we find most naturally good.
So it is predictable that, in face of a culture that abides the Divine-Design-denying atheist notions of origins, the BSCI holds that Genesis 1 most likely is more opposed to notions themselves than to affirm the universal self evidence of Divine Design!
This is why it is respectable among so many modern Recent Creationists to claim that Genesis 1:1 means, not the general cosmos and the special Earth, but 'the absolute chronologically first things God created was empty space and physical matter'. Accordingly no life-affirming fine tuning of this cosmic physics pair need be presented in the account, so long as the account can be construed as competing directly against the modern secular skepticism, as such, of this ancient account.
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But the BSCI fails to see that notions of origins may better be called notions of Nature Past, as opposed to notions of Nature Present. And, it fails Nature Present in the fact that it fails to account for Psalm 19 in terms of Paul's usage of this psalm in linking receptivity to the Gospel to receptivity to many of the prime factors of Divine Design.
In general, Psalm 19 is a praise for the fact that Nature Present constitutes universal self evidence of Divine Design. But, one must not miss the special, central concern of this psalm. It is the psalmist's own realization that, especially in his fallen state, he needs to know of that evidence in its most important factors and, from there, any details of that evidence that bear on his sinful nature in an anxiety-filled life.
So it ought to come as surprise, nor as oddity, that Apostle Paul, in the first portion of his foundational letter to the Roman Believers, links pagan and atheistic notions of Nature Past to a denial of the universal self evidence of Divine Design of Nature Present (Romans 1:20-23).
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The Two Basic Erroneous Extremes
To begin to understand why Paul, in all this, does not once emphasize the Creation Account, but does have in mind Psalm 19 (Romans 10:18), we might have to consider a generic theism-deism of a type which is deeply ignorant of the Bible-based debate on origins. If we were to begin with this type of generic theism-deism, what would be our most naturally expected time frame for origins?
But, despite this beginning, we all can already see at least two two mutually opposite extreme logical possibilities for that time frame: One, far, far too short for the epistemological and theological value of the universal self evidence of Divine Design; Two, far, far too long for that same value.
The first extreme here is that which focuses on nothing but God's omnipotence and freedom. The intuition here is that from the fact that (1) our own creaturely power is limited, and (2) this limitedness commonly is beset with frustrations, unwanted delays, a sense of hardship, etc.. 'Therefore', say advocates of this supposedly most rawly 'God-honoring' extreme, 'it is only natural to think God brought into being all things together in a single timeless, durationless, instant'.
Accordingly, God's work of causing all things to come into being is that of essentially how the title character Genie, in the 1950's TV show, I Dream of Genie, simply wished something, and that something just 'poofed' into existence. But, in this, God is seen principally as wishing to avoid any process of building things. He also thereby is seen as avoid having to have any deep knowledge of those things, or any initiative of deep design of those things.
So this first extreme fails to account for the origin of the particular designs or functions of anything; of what, exactly, is or shall be, and what is not. And this includes all the astonishing details and relations in which the things that exist obtain as they are. This extreme is nothing but a happy selfish worship of power, not of God. It does not honor God, and the reason why is simple: It reifies God as a Tired Genie Ignoramus who therefore is too happy to simply will something into being that this Genie might herself actually need or be pleased to have.
An obvious second extreme as to a time frame for origins is that which denies most any Divine Design at all. This allows the various kinds of ambiguously 'mysterious' ideas according to which God simply allowed all things as products of mere happenstance from some somehow Divinely designed initial conditions. Thus, at best, say, God simply foreknew how things would play out. For this second extreme, the time frame for origins is naturally expected to be whatever long time that 'evolutionary' notions of origins ever allows.
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This is not to deny that God 'logically' can have created the cosmos either over billions of years or in a single durationless instant. But if He had one either of these, that would have been a pointlessly selfish, merely 'impressive' stunt. We humans are not being treated to a 'wow'ing show of God's mere power. For, we are His children, made in His likeness. We are not paying customers at a cruel-to-animals circus, of a past era, by which God gets rich. God needs nothing from us. And Genesis 1 demonstrates just how good, and wise, and powerful He is for us. The account not once outright states, 'God is good', much less, 'God will judge those who reject His Word.' No. Genesis 1 is record purely of Who He is as Creator and Father.
Again, on the Earth, there is only one natural way to assemble a wood house: in a fairly short span of time, least weather, bugs, plants, microbes, and wild animals begin to incur. Similarly, there is only one naturally expected process of creating and assembly of a dynamic complex system. This is unlike for the most parts of an automobile, which may be made and assembled in any imaginable sequence, and beginning with most any imaginable part. One could begin the car by making the windshield or the gas cap, and proceeding from there to the assembly that holds the rod for the left turn signal. But this is only because an auto, by virtue of its mere existence, is not being driven. In fact, its engine need not even be made until after the whole rest of the car is put together.
But the Completed Creation has no 'off' mode. It is interdynamic throughout, and all for the support of life, and to support Earth's cosmically unique role in that. As Psalm 19 implies, our everyday most natural and broad sense of things is what makes possible the universal self evidence of Divine Design. In fact, that sense is alone so foundational that it is confirmed by the most advanced modern instrumental modes of empirical inquiry. Those modes, in their own ways, show that the entire cosmos, from humans and the Earth to the 'basic' physics of it all, appears to be very finely design and 'tuned' for sake specifically of
(i) water based life,
(ii) Earth's cosmically unique role in the support of that life, and
(iii) a Biblically compatible kind of human physical and metaphysical cosmological virtue (ex: Sarfati, 1997, 2015; Neller, 2014; Harwood, 2017; Price, 2017; Gonzales and Richards, 2020).
In other words, this fine design is intuited by humans' 'primitive' mystical senses regarding Nature. Of course, Fallen human ways tend to a distorted and superstitious conception as to what that intuition implies. Nevertheless, the general intuition is exactly true: the cosmos, in its binary, marriage-like intrarelation (Genesis 1:1, 14-18), constitutes an affirmation of life, the Earth, and humans. In other words, the Divine Design reality of cosmic physics can be said to constitute, or at least to have, a functional 'friendship' toward life, the Earth, the human individual, and, by extension, marriage.
Finally, though it is logically and grammatically possible to begin and proceed an account of making and assembling a house with its generically identified physical 'foundation', the same is not the most valuable way of beginning and proceeding an account of creating, making, and assembling the Completed Creation. As already pointed out, the only way Genesis 1 would need to spell out that 'God created matter, blah blah blah', on order for it to properly address that fact, is if the Completed Creation were the very thing that hardened atheists think it is: a mutually dissociative bunch of...whatevers. These are 'whatevers' that, as such atheists would have us believe, include 'raw' dynamic 'facts' that only happen to cause any of them to congeal, and in the various ways in which they empirically are observed do so.
So ought we presume that Genesis 1 is an 'origins-centric' suspension of our everyday most natural broad sense of things? The account does not even spell out about gravity or inertia, perhaps the one most general, familiar, merely physically and biologically external-internal thing we all begin experiencing, in the womb, aside from relatively unchanging tastes, and the sounds, vibrations, and occasional impacts of living in there.
For, imagine we were blind and deaf, our nostrils held closed, ourselves fed air through a tube, and ourselves submerged in mile-diameter, thousand-foot deep body of body-temperature water. Almost the only thing we could sense of our environment is that by way of inertia. We might wriggle and roll, and strain against the cords holding us in place. But our resulting pronounced perceptions of such an environment would not indicate 'squat' as to what the Completed Creation actually is.
Adam and Eve were not created as infants, much less under such limiting conditions.
So we ought not think it best simply to presume upon our ignorance by insisting that the time frame of which Genesis 1 is plain record is irrelevant to WHAT IT IS that God created: The very Creation we know everyday. We must allow for the possibility that that time frame is in service to, and thus a function of, what the Design in Nature actually is (Leviticus 26:34-35). And we must begin with our own internal biological sense of that time frame:
We implicitly know that a human workweek of four hundred days is too long. We likewise know that a human workweek of four minutes is too short. So, clearly, there is an ideal length of workweek somewhere between these extremes. If we fail to immediately see, 'intellectually', what that ideal is, that in no way means it is arbitrary to our biology. And if it is not arbitrary to our biology, then there is no sound basis for presuming that it is arbitrary to the ecological Earth.
The original Completed Creation (Genesis 1:31). A genuine Utopia. How does it figure into the issue of how to correctly interpret Genesis 1? Is Genesis 1 originally for the Children of Israel? Or did Abraham know of it? If we say he did not, then what does that imply for how we thereby must think to correctly interpret ANY of the Hebrew Scriptures. But if we think Abe did know of the Creation account, then does not that mean that Adam and Eve knew of it as well?
But if we say that Adam and Eve did not know of the account, then what ideas, if any, did Adam and Eve ever have about origins? Were the two originally so perfect in cognitive and perceptual coherence and yet have little or no thought to origins? Did they have no understanding of origins?
We might want to say that origins, by God's miraculous power, is strictly outside human understanding of how the Completed Creation ongoingly functions. That is, we might have been taught, at least implictly, that Genesis 1 is far more an account of a 'Divine Arbitrary Fairy Tale on Origins Made Reality' than it is anything we can identify as affirming the universal self evidence of Divine Design (Psalm 19).
I posed this issue to an internationally known Recent Creationist. He gave me no answer but that which implied he saw Genesis 1 by way of this God-is-all-powerful,-end-of-story, Fairy Tale Made Reality hermeneutic Axiom.
I pressed the question by asking if he knew what was the "Design*, or the principle of coherence, of the whole Completed Creation. One of his followers replied that such an overall Design is something only God can know. I replied to this by pointing out that that overall Design cannot be a randomly filled bowl of individual instances of Divine Design.
No one in that small collection of my fellow Recent Creationists seemed to know, or care, for the issue. I stated that the overall Design surely has to do with life and humans, as opposed to to do with some obscure, even arbitrary, 'mystery'.
God 'logically' can have created Adam and Eve inside a miraculous, temporary, observation bubble just prior to the first moment of Creation Week. Accordingly, God can 'just as well' even have had this Bubble be able to slow down the time difference between inside it and outside it, and this to any difference as Adam and Eve wished. Further, the Bubble could record and replay the events as many times as they wished. Thus Adam and Eve could have watched, smelled, felt, and in all other ways experienced any and every chronological and locational part of Creation Week for as many times as they pleased, at any rates they pleased, for as long as they pleased. This would include even the creation and making of cosmic physics, during whatever parts of Creation Week that such physics was being created or made.
But, then too, God 'could just as well' also have provided the Bubbled Adam and Eve with all the technological instrumentation to aid them in their study of how God created and made the cosmic physics. By the same token, God also 'could just as well' have' made endless sandwiches, for as long as Adam and Eve were pleased to remain in the Bubble prior to taking on their own proper lives as images of God.
But is there not a marriage-like relationship in Divine Design? See Psalm 19:5.
Consider the central portion to the account (vs. 14-18). This is the only part of the account to specify the luminaries (vs. 14-18). Yet this portion specifies the luminaries primarily in terms of their relation to the ecological Earth. In other words, it presents them in relationship to life. So it would be patently false to insist that the account presents the luminaries mainly or purely in their own terms: as merely one set of the various sets of parts that make up the Completed Creation.
Genesis 1, sight unseen, can be described as an account of origins. But the account is nothing like that of the process of assembling a diorama. One cannot even best describe the assembling of a house as that of a list of its various basic parts. This is because a house is not a pile of parts laying randomly about. Nor is it just one thing merely added to another. For example, the foundation is not affixed to the rest by the way in which the whole would obtain in zero gravity.
How much less, therefore, can Genesis 1 be said to present a reductive, and 'bottom', up' process of bringing about the Completed Creation that we know everyday. The Sun is not an unmoving and non-lighting painting on a blue canvas in utter darkness. Too, the Earth is not some random planet seen from a frame of reference in outer space, say, near the orbit of the Moon.
Indeed, Genesis 1 uses ecologically descriptive terms, such as 'the Earth brought forth' (ex: v. 12). If the account had meant to say that God essentially 'zapped' the completed system of flora into existence in a durationless kind of instant, it could better have said so without bothering to use such para-ecological terms. For, those terms would be misleading if, in fact, God created the system of flora in a single, durationless, I Dream of Genie-like 'Poof!'.
So the very fact that the account uses clearly ecological terms means it is concerned for how God cared, in a practical and most intimate sense, for dynamically integrating the dynamic system of flora with the by-then initially functioning water cycle (v. 3-10). Only a dissociatively 'loyal', cum 'theological', reading could find in the account only what it spells out additively. This is no more perceptive than if, when we read a list of the most naturally obvious basic parts of a woman, as such, we fail to see that it amounts to the description of a woman.
Some Christians are inclined to think that Genesis 1 is not describing any process of actual creation, and instead is describing how the completed Earth functions normally. But, the fact is that the ecological Earth is an irreducibly complex natural system of life support. Irreducibly complex artificial systems, such as a house, naturally require assembly in a short span of time, and this in relation to the dynamics involved in them. In zero gravity and in hard vacuum, a house made of normal wood may be assembled in any imaginable length of time. But the same in not the case for a house on the ecological Earth, with that ecology's own ongoing dynamics. On the Earth, there is no natural option to assemble that same house over hundreds, thousands, or millions of years. And the Earth itself is like that same house in relation to the wider 'cosmos'. So the total cosmos has no natural option to that of being created in a short time.