“Simply because the Bible has a different view of origins to those put forth in human philosophy, there is a period of conflict whenever the church comes under the influence of a human philosophical system. Thus, any defender of neo Platonism in Augustine’s day or of Aristotelianism in the late Middle Ages found himself in trouble with Genesis.” Noel K. Weeks, The Hermeneutical Problem of Genesis 1-11, originally published Themelios 4, no. 1 (September 1978): 12–19
There’s a lot of historical information in Genesis that one would not have imagined could have happened especially in the first eleven chapters, such as, the Lord’s creation in six days of everything from nothing, mankind made male and female in His image, the fall of mankind and its consequences for the world, the global flood that reworked everything, and the creation of language families as a response to disobedience.
Much of this is offensive to non-Christian philosophers whether they are promoting evolution, neo Platonism, Aristotelianism or whatever other rationalized treasure they have gilded with fool’s gold for our consumption. In Genesis the Lord gets so messy through His personal interactions with the material world and mankind that He becomes intolerable to philosophers hoping to be guided solely by the authority of logical deduction from a minimal set of axioms of their own choosing.
Admittedly, in perhaps the only defense of these philosophers, without being told any of these events most people would likely start just as they have done with simple axioms. If we didn’t know better, we would likely also have imagined a clean, transcendent deity removed from material interactions with the world except for occasional mental connections through psychic fields or forest faeries. Our philosophies would rely on uniformitarian processes based on patterns of material change we observed in the world without getting a deity involved rather than messy events we had no control over or, worse, were our own fault.
That’s what we would have done. The problem is, we’ve been told what happened. We don’t have to make those mistakes.
Genesis As a Test
Because of this potential conflict, a Christian could use Genesis as a quick test for philosophical error. Genesis could also be used to test whether a professed Christian has capitulated to some erroneous philosophy. If the Christian reinterprets or rejects what is in Genesis to make it conform with what is in some philosophy, then capitulation has occurred.
Here are some tests.
1. Has “day” been reinterpreted to mean “billions of years”? (Genesis 1)
2. Can the philosophy correctly count how many genders there are? (Genesis 1-2)
3. Has mankind, a special kind of creature made in the image of God, been replaced with talk about a human animal species evolving with other animals from primordial pond scum? (Genesis 1-2)
4. Does evil originate with a fall of mankind or does the finger get pointed elsewhere? (Genesis 3)
5. Was there a global flood that completely churned the face of the earth, set tectonic plates in motion, destroyed radioactivity as a clock, flipped the geomagnetic poles multiple times, raised mountains, allowed glaciers to form, filled the oceans, buried fossils, dug canyons, and left, since then, only about 5,000 years of non-biblical history or are there allegedly archeological sites still around dating from before the time of this catastrophic event? (Genesis 6-9)
6. Does the diversity of languages have a miraculous origin with the intent to disperse a rebellious population or did languages evolve over tens of thousands of years coming from pond scum which came from some explosion which ultimately came from what precisely? (Genesis 11)
Why Is the Test Important?
The historical events in Genesis are the context in which the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah and the prophecies of His return make sense. They are part of the revealed plan of salvation. The messy, but wondrously miraculous, events throughout this plan of salvation (past, present and prophesied future) characterize the Lord of the Bible as personal and powerful unlike any other deity ever offered by philosophy including New Age pantheistic projections of the human mind.
Without Genesis Christian salvation history would have no justification since there would be no need (no fall) nor way (no promised miraculous intervention) to redeem mankind. If Genesis were false as history, then Christian history and its prophetic future would be false as well. If one removed Genesis as history, the plan of salvation would unravel into a New Age philosophy of sentimentality and self-help where death, not life, dominated all available future outcomes.
The Guidance from the Authority of Scripture
From a philosophical perspective one might as well accept the history in Genesis as true no matter how messy it is. It does account for the world we see around us. Since the alternatives to it lead to death there is no point in wasting one’s brief lifetime in philosophical investigations at all if any of those alternatives were true.
However, once we accept Genesis as the history of what actually happened it becomes authoritative for our philosophy. If there is any conflict between our philosophy and Genesis, it is our philosophy that must change, not Genesis. The authority of Genesis guides the construction of our philosophy.
One way to make sure Genesis is that authoritative guide is to explicitly insert the authority of the entire Bible (which includes Genesis) as the First Axiom of any philosophical system or scientific theory we attempt to construct. Then as an axiom it would guide our intellectual system building by steering us away from error through the threat of derivable contradiction with that first axiom which is all that would survive such a logical collapse.
Circumventing the Authority of Scripture
One would think this would be an obvious thing for Christians to do. However, as Noel K. Weeks notes conflict can arise if the church comes under the influence of a human philosophical system. When under the influence of a human philosophical system such as atheistic evolution, neo Platonism or Aristotelianism a Christian philosopher would try to tweak Genesis to suit his needs rather than modify or reject his own philosophy.
For example, if the authority of Scripture were really guiding Alvin Plantinga, who was busy assigning God the task of guiding alleged evolutionary processes that don’t exist, he would never have written, Christian belief just as such doesn’t include the thought that the universe is young. As another example, if the authority of Scripture were really guiding William Lane Craig he would never have jumped into the pit of big bang mythology turning the personal Lord of Genesis into an impersonal first cause.
In both of these examples, Christian philosophers circumvented the authority of Scripture as a first axiom. They rejected the guidance that Scripture could have provided them in their philosophies to help them avoid error.
However, I doubt that either of them think they committed any error. In their minds they likely imagine themselves innocently coming under the influence of a human philosophical system that just happened to be offended by Genesis. They would likely see themselves as having nothing to repent of even if that philosophical system were later acknowledged as wrong since philosophy is little more than a hypothetical mind-game where no one gets hurt by false teaching. All such a defense would show is that capitulation to human philosophical systems results in delusion.
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