The Creation Myth

The Creation of the Sun and Moon, Sistine Chapel, by Michelangelo.
But who's that guy who lost his pants?  Seems kinda strange, don't it.  Click to enlarge.

Once upon a time when your Head Trucker was still too wet behind the ears to know any better, I got into a big, hairy religious argument discussion with a Bible-believing lady. I might a-knowed the conversation weren't goin' nowhere when she began by claiming the King James Bible was the only one to use because that's exactly how God wrote it - ever word, from front to back. In English, o'course.

I ain't makin' this up, fellers.  The Bible said it, and she believed it.  So that little talk we had was a waste of breath, for shore.  Now you have to understand, her motive was good; it was just her thinking that was all kinda sideways.  Poor woman just had no idee there was anything in the world to know about, besides her little church in her little town in her little world.

Well, we live and learn. Your Head Trucker, of course, has long since moved on from thinking that God created the universe, and Texas to boot, in just six 24-hour days. But a lot o'folks hasn't. In Texas and elsewheres. Which is why I'm putting a little chunk of this article by a fella named Carl Pinnock out here, so's maybe somebody somewhere, sometime, can read it and get a little clearer understanding of things. It's right int'restin'.  He called his piece "Climbing Out of a Swamp: The Evangelical Struggle to Understand the Creation Texts":

For even though the purpose of Genesis 1—11 is other than scientific, these texts are still talking about the real world and its history in their own way. After all, the creation of the world is the beginning of God's purposeful temporal activity in relation to history and the event of the world's coming into being. My point is more modest, that we should be guided in a general way by the macro-purpose of the Bible and the Book of Genesis and not unduly influenced by debates which have their meaning largely in the context of modern society.

This impression about the function of the Bible is reinforced by specific signals in the text itself which should alert us to it in other ways as well. The fact that God made the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day, not on the first, ought to tell us that this is not a scientific statement (Gen. 1:14—19). This one detail in the narrative suggests that concordism is not going to work well and that the agenda of the writer must have been something other than one of describing actual physical processes.

Continued after the jump . . .