Watcher's Issue with Genre

Watcher has just trotted out the genre issue again.

Again, Watcher fails to address the fact that his argument is already plainly known to those he is criticizing.

The fact is that, in the minds of those skeptics who oppose the ideas that both Watcher and I espouse, they have other reasons why they keep disagreeing with his claim that Genesis 1 is a Chronicle. He does not address those reasons at all, never mind in a way that would get any traction with those skeptics.

If all Watcher wants to do is remind everyone why he thinks it is a mistake to deny that the account is a chronicle, he actually barely touches on why. This is because he misses how there is so much more to the account than that it is a Chronicle.

And part of Watcher's problem is that, like most of my fellow YEC's, he keeps making certain claims by which many people have a strong cause to doubt the YEC position as inherently superstitious and obsessively zealous:

 NO CONVENIENT DEBATE

 

There is a river we all are called to cross. It has two places. One place is cut through a deep chasm. The other is on a plain, the water only feet below. Few manage the river. Enter the state of the debate:

Dr. John Walton¹ explains Genesis 1 as that of

1. God having borrowed
2. the popular physical cosmological beliefs of the Ancient Near East
3. in order to provide to His own ancient people a culturally appropriate conceptual substrate upon which
4. to communicate to His people His abstract, and everyday functional, Truths;
5. and through that people, communicate these Truths to the remaining bulk of humanity.

This thesis is deeply flawed. The single most basic flaw is its failure to make any ultimate sense of the manner in which the Gospel of Jesus Christ finally was given to the world. Specifically, it is fairly pre-committed to the ideas that:

(1) 'the remaining bulk of humanity' was just so many hapless innocents, and that so was God's own people;

(2) after an unspecified duration and process of prior human history, God had finally seen fit to communicate said Truths to anyone at all to begin with;

(3) God had wanted to communicate said Truths to 'the remaining bulk of humanity' by way of some mysterious manner, and or eventuality, that is neither (a) particularly clearly spelled out in the Torah, nor (b) noticeable therein by a naively ignorant visual scan of each line of the Torah text.

Per (3)(b), the Torah's particular organization is one that commands the tradition that the book of Genesis be the first of its text to be considered. This is because the subjects and the chronology naturally compel the human person to so consider Genesis. And the natural focal text of that natural human compulsion is Genesis 1, both in the content-and-structure of chapter 1 and in the physical location of that chapter within the book.

So Walton's thesis is shallow on all measures.

Nevertheless, that shallowness is not a complete absence of depth. In fact, Walton's position in defense of his thesis has a number of prime theological qualities on which every Christian agrees.

Yet most of my fellow 'YEC''s are happy to undercut every one of those values---and more---in a rush to carefully defend the measure of the account in every way conceivable, and which already is traditionally established in the 'YEC' camp. The fact that Walton does essentially the same kind of thing is beside this particular point. This point is about the sheer foolishness that my fellows, in fact, commit in defense of the basic 'YEC' position. Their thought is that any effort at defense of that position is justified by default. This is the sentiment, on the part of 'YEC''s, that a given defense of the 'YEC' position is ever only grossly unrighteous when, and if, the 'dead crow meat' finally begins really flying at them.

here are just a couple YEC-centric errors that have not (yet) seen any broadly-made 'crow':

1. 

In centuries past, the admittedly odd part of the ignorantly perceived sequence in Genesis 1:1-18 had been deemed to involve God's own 'glory light'. This is what the Eastern Orthodox Church has believed, and it is believed by so many leading Christians in the West. In recent years, that ignorant conception of that light has been naturalized within a physics-only model of the entire first eight verses. (DeRemer, F., M. Amunrud, and D. Dobberpuhl. 2007. Days 1-4. Journal of Creation 21, no.3:69-76, https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j21_3/j21_3_69-76.pdf. pg. 69 top.) This purportedly allows the best of God's 'grandeur and majesty' in the account: to a life-indifferent, trivially universal kind of physics. But this comes at the expense of rendering the account to say nothing more about Earth except that to which seems akin to a woman-shaped mannequin (vs. 9-10) that God then arbitrarily impregnates (vs. 20-30). Worse, this physics-first model is therein pushed in exclusion to the God-given normal perception that the account begins and proceeds with our home world, Earth. As if that is not too obsessed, those who espouse this model take for granted that the 'Earth-first' reading it itself likewise necessarily exclusive of a physics-focused considering of the language of the text! The truth is that an 'Earth-first' account in no way precludes to its own language, subjects, and sequences a suggestive match to physics. On the contrary, an 'Earth-first' account inherently provides for a physics-focused consideration of its terms and sequence. But, unless the account is immediately about all of the most life-central concerns in the physical world, then its first eight-plus verses may as well be just some poor version of Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV show. For, God created massive parallel processing: He does not restrict Himself---or us--to 'brute force' computing. This can be further understood by the fact that, even according to Genesis 1, we humans we not created inside a nearly-windowless space ship, in deep space, and sitting reading a pile of textbooks about trivially universal physics! The first human social unit, one man and one woman, was created in the blue-sky daylight. It was not the middle of a clear night with only all the stars in view.

 2.

 

the same life-indifferent, universally trivial, purported best of God's grandeur and majesty is implicit in the modern impression that Psalm 19:1 has only that one ostensibly best subject. In fact, it is for that impression alone that, given the Hebrew of Genesis 1, we have so much as miscounted of that Hebrew by a failure of the final two: that the word 'šāmayim' 'appears only seven times in Genesis 1. (Faulkner, D. R.: Thoughts on the rāqîa‘ and a Possible Explanation for the Cosmic Microwave Background, Answers Research Journal 9 (2016):57-65, https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/cosmology/thoughts-raqia-and-possible-explanation-cosmic-microwave-background/.) This claim is false in two ways. One, it overlooks the two instances of that word in which their contexts give no glancing indication of the luminary realm (vv. 26, 28). Two, there is actually only one instance of that exact word; all the others are 'haššāmayim', and in each case it most assuredly means the general 'sky', as in, the birds/stars are in the the 'sky'. But, we have, here, already deemed the sensible substance of breath and breeze in oxymoronic, astronomy-centric, modern-centric terms, and therefore the Bible silent on its cosmically thin reality: The blue daylit sky is, even in dusk-to-night transition, at once (a) invisible in terms of its substance and upper extent and (b) purely an obstacle to observation (the stars cannot be seen through it, nor very well at night under powerful 'light pollution'). Thus, we take for granted the modern-centric impression that the cosmic preciousness of that blue-lit substance is a 'concept' that the ancient Hebrews---and even Adam himself---naturally lacked. As if this is not enough insult to the ready phenomenal data and the God-given human capacity readily to understand it, the astronomy bias here has hypocritically been happy to espouse astronomical concepts and, or, objects that far more admittedly of which no pre-'modern' human can have had any natural knowledge:

Th[e] understanding [that](...) rāqîaʿ [is outer space] nicely incorporates the Old Testament verses that speak of the heavens being stretched or spread out—as in Job 9:8; Psalm 104:2; Isaiah 40:22, 42:5, 44:24, 45:12, 48:13, 51:13; Jeremiah 10:12, 51:15; and Zechariah 12:1. ( . . .) Certainly, those who wrote about the stretching of the heavens or those who first read or heard it must have had some understanding of what this meant. ( . . .) Since Genesis 1:8 equates šāmayim with rāqîaʿ, and we know from the verb from which rāqîaʿ comes means to beat or spread out, the best fit for understanding the stretching of the heavens is with what God did on Day Two. ( . . .) [T]he Bible implies that the boundary of the universe is accompanied by water. ( . . .) This is borne out by Psalm 148:4, which speaks of waters above the heavens still being there. We do not know who wrote Psalm 148 or when they wrote it, but it almost certainly was long after the Flood. That is to say, in the post-Flood world, the universe is surrounded by water.

So, in general, it would seem that nearly all 'YEC''s for the past two thousand years have been convinced that the obviously short-and-sweet prime account of the Creation Week should be its best self mainly for being nothing so much as exactly straight-forward to our merely modern, merely Western, minds.

John Walton finds this particular conviction profoundly erroneous. Indeed, we ought not find it too burdensome to passionately---and humbly---seek the account as that which is fully central to its own main subject: 1) life, and, therefore, 2) Earth as life-support system. It is a gross disservice to the Creator of that life to reason as if Genesis 1 is more truly a chronicle per se than a chronicle of the creation of that life-support system.


But a Japhethite way of thinking makes great messengers, and poor disciples, of the Truth of Genesis 1 and 2.
Hence, both Walton and the active bulk of his 'YEC' critics are already too preoccupied with defending merely their respective positions to notice the deep errors that themselves allow to that end: 'Defend this particular foundational truth at all costs.'

For Walton's part, he simply applies his own inner Japhethite by presuming, 'modern'-centrically, that the prime central account 'material origins' necessarily begins with the explicit description of the creation of mere matter. At the same time, Walton admits that the Hebrew is rightly concern centrally with life, never centrally with such life-indifferent facts as that both a bride's wedding dress and a pile of refuse is made of matter! Walton admits that it is only natural to know that God created matter. But Walton just wants for Genesis 1 not to be a chronicle of the 'material creation' of the functional cosmos. So Walton slams that idea by correctly insisting that the ancient Hebrews are 'not physicists.'

In other words, according to Walton's logic, the only way for Genesis 1 to be an account of the 'material origins' of the 'functional' cosmos is for both (1) God to have mistook the ancient Hebrews for modern physicists, and (2) for the account itself to explicitly say that matter is the first thing created.

So, the one truth, defended by Walton, is tough, bendy, steel reinforcement bar. The other truth, the 'YEC' position, is rigid concrete. And each side knows that the river is wide. So each of them builds their own bridge. And, so, one bridge increasingly sags, until no car can drive up the opposite end even if it manages to remain more or less intact from the 'drive' down the near end; And the other bridge just shatters into the river mere feet below.

1.  Understanding Genesis 1-3 - John Walton and Joe Fleener https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kOflP3eLSI