William Lane Craig – Poetry, Short Prose and Walking

Scripture as First Axiom and Its Circumvention

“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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The Fairy Tale Bible Vs the Real Bible

The Fairy Tale Bible has the same words in it as the Real Bible. What makes it different from the Real Bible is that the words in the Fairy Tale Bible mean something different from what they mean in the Real Bible.

It is easy to get started with a Fairy Tale Bible. Go online and find any popular bible offered. To transform it into a Fairy Tale Bible rather than a Real Bible, don’t read any more of the book than you have to. This is the first rule regarding the Fairy Tale Bible. The second rule is to fake-read this bible by listening to New Age or atheist leaning commentators who will tell us what the text says since we aren’t going to be reading it ourselves anyway.

We can then babble about “evolution” or write poetic nonsense about “the universe” and pretend that we are just as “biblical” as the next guy.

Examples of Fake-Reading

Genesis 1

For example, if we were reading about the six days of creation in the Real Bible, we would understandably think of six 24-hour days because they have an evening and a morning and we know how to read.

To fake-read this in the Authorized Atheist Version of the Fairy Tale Bible we would let some commentator tell us that the word “day” means a gazillion number of years over which an unscientific process called “evolution” turned a random explosion called the “big bang” into stars, galaxies and people through chance events. The commentator may, or may not depending on how supposedly Christian he is, graciously give God permission to “guide” that unscientific process (which doesn’t actually exist) so God has something useless to do.

Admittedly fake-reading is a pathetic alternative to actually reading the Real Bible, but I suspect, indeed from my own personal experience I am convinced, that is how some people read the bible.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts – the whole NT

As another example, if we read about the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus in the Real Bible we would see these as real historical events with significance for ourselves and our families regarding repentance and salvation.

However, if we were fake-reading the Lalaland Edition of the Fairy Tale Bible we would read a commentator who’d compare what happened to Jesus to what happens in near-death experiences. Then we would listen to a commentator claim someone found the very box in which the very bones of Jesus were stored. And then we’d watch a movie based on a novel that showed us how Jesus and Mary Magdalen had children who became royalty in Lalaland.

Genesis 6-9

It doesn’t get any better when reading about Noah’s flood. In the Real Bible we would think of a global catastrophe which ultimately formed the mountains, glaciers, canyons and oceans that we see around us. Our praise and gratitude to God would be immense for His mercy in protecting those eight people along with two of each kind of breathing creature so they could have survived that event and we could be here.

Should we want to switch over to the Fairy Tale Bible all we’d have to do is pretend that flood catastrophe never happened or at least wasn’t global. We would see it as one of those goofy things primitive people without any brains make up. We’d blindly believe that “scientists” one day would be able to explain, or at least convince each other, how those mountains, glaciers, canyons and oceans got there.

Real Life Example of a Fairy Tale Bible Commentator

Consider what the philosopher and supposed Christian apologist William Lane Craig said about Genesis: There are hints in the text itself that a seven day twenty-four hour day Creation week is not contemplated by the author. (1:44)

In case you didn’t notice, Craig is reading “hints” which aren’t actually there, in spite of him saying “in the text itself”, rather than the actual words which are, indeed, in the text itself. Although I’ve been plenty gullible in the past, today, as soon as I hear words like “hint” about a bible verse I anticipate that I will be led down a rabbit hole the commentator himself can’t find his way out of.

It is also worth noting for those not familiar with fairy tale thought patterns that Craig said contemplated by the author, but not contemplated by Moses whom most people would recognize as the author of Genesis. This omission of the name “Moses” was likely deliberate. The point of the Fairy Tale Bible is to discredit the Real Bible as an historical document. One way to do that is to fictionalize the people mentioned in it. Here Craig is subliminally suggesting that someone other than Moses might have written Genesis to raise our suspicion about the truth of anything else in that book or in any other book in the bible.

If the Real Bible is history we would have to take it seriously. That is why historicity is attacked by those promoting the Fairy Tale Bible. Fairy tale commentators do not want us to take the Real Bible seriously.

Craig excuses his position in advance by saying, I think that the book of Genesis is open to a wide range of legitimate interpretations. (1:19)

That he has to make this excuse at all is a sign that he’s aware that his position is not what his audience is ready to accept. He wants to disarm any hostile reaction from them. Some of them may even see him as a heretic. To avoid such a charge up front he asserts on his own authority that the book of Genesis is “open” to “wide” interpretation.

Since Craig is a philosopher, it’s a fair question to ask him what it means philosophically for him to call his interpretation “legitimate”? Unless he’s an atheistic humanist believing that man is the standard of all things, it doesn’t really matter what he thinks. What matters is: Does God think his interpretation is legitimate? What evidence does he have that God agrees with him?

If Craig is honest, he would not be able to answer that question and so he would likely throw it back at me. He would demand to know: What evidence do I have that God agrees with me? My response would be that I am a reader of the Real Bible. My “interpretation” is neither more nor less than accepting God’s Word as it was written. Given his searching for hints that contradict the actual words in the text that would be a response Craig could no longer honestly give.

Craig also said, There is a very tiny minority of Christians today who believe that the world was created some ten to twenty thousand years ago. (0:45)

And he proudly proclaimed that he’s not one of them. Oddly, this analytic philosopher doesn’t seem to know that truth does not depend on a majority vote. His reference to “a very tiny minority” does sound like an underestimation to make his own position look better than it is.

However, even if his poll numbers were correct (which I doubt), being part of a remnant is not necessarily a bad thing especially if one considers the remnant entering by the narrow way in Matthew 7:13-14. You would have to be reading the Real Bible to even know those verses. So, just in case you aren’t, let me quote them. (The red emphasis, however, is mine.)

Matthew 7:13-14 (KJV)
¹³Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
¹⁴Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Admittedly, anyone who persists in fake-reading the Fairy Tale Bible will start thinking in fairy tale English, but the quantity of people suffering from a delusion does not make that delusion true.

Confession

The reason all of this bothers me is because I used to read, talk and think fairy tale English just as fluently as the next deluded babbler. I even tried to make sense out of atheistic big bang mythology using Craig’s Kalam cosmological argument.

But then I broke the first fake-reading rule. I actually read the Real Bible. Although I still listened to commentators, I didn’t just listen to questionable ones talk about it. I noticed that there was a history in the Real Bible that I do remember people, long ago, having mentioned but which I had forgotten. Then I became very suspicious of those commentators leading me into either an atheistic or New Age direction.

However, I can’t take full credit for this change of heart. If it were up to me alone it would not have happened, because I would not have had an experiential base for trusting what I read in the Real Bible. The Holy Spirit had to smack me around a bit.

It is helpful to realize that fairy tale English has two overlapping dialects: atheist and New Age. These dialects seem contradictory, but they actually complement each other. Each dialect contains its own blend of pseudoscientific speculation and magical witchcraft. That is, each dialect contains a different blend of Star Wars and Harry Potter, but otherwise they are pretty much the same delusion. What I have come to realize is that the Holy Spirit has nothing to do with either of them.

With results coming from the James Webb Space Telescope even atheists today are smartening up. Some of them now think that the big bang either didn’t happen (which leaves them with what?) or the mythical bang has to be pushed back another gazillion years to place it outside the falsifying reach of modern technology. Although they don’t appreciate it, they are at a fortunate crossroads where they have to start thinking and make better choices.

Craig thought he saw a crack in atheism because they hypothesized a beginning to the universe. He bought into their fairy tale of deep time and imaginary chance processes just to keep this hypothetical beginning afloat. Unfortunately he had to throw Genesis under the bus to do that.

When the big bang reaches the status of a falsified hypothesis (because it really makes no sense in any self-respecting atheistic, closed universe constrained by increasing entropy) I wonder how these compromising Christians will respond? May they repent as well as I did and may they start using their academic training to do real apologetics work in support of the Real Bible.

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Old Testament Chronology and the Age of Mankind

Douglas Petrovich presented a framework for building a sound chronology of the Old Testament at the 2023 Chafers Theological Seminary Pastors’ Conference. If one chooses appropriate assumptions one can come up with a chronology that is faithful to the Bible and also synchronizes with Egyptian and Assyrian chronologies. This confirms the reliability of the biblical record as history.

To build this chronology one needs certain dates that one has confidence in to serve as “tent pegs” as Petrovich calls them. Reaching consensus on what those tent pegs are is not easy but it is achievable. Having that chronology allows one to date and make sense out of the archeological data. That we need to go through so much trouble to construct such a chronology is reason to believe that mankind is very young.

Construction Begins on the First Temple—967 BC

I Kings 6:1
And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the Lord.

Can we find what year Solomon began to build the first temple in our calendar? James Ussher in his Annals of the World gave the date as 1012 BC. Edwin Thiele was able to establish an absolute date based on Assyrian records linked to a solar eclipse which occurred in June 15, 763, in The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings. This allows one to come up with 967 BC as the year Solomon initiated the building of the first temple. There is a discrepancy of 45 years between these dates. Rodger Young clarified the issues around this discrepancy in Ussher Explained and Corrected arguing in favor of the 967 BC date which Petrovich accepts.

Israelite Exodus from Egypt—1446 BC

Accepting 967 BC and the information in 1 Kings 6:1 about the Exodus occurring in the 480th year one can date the Exodus back to 1446 BC (967+479=1446). From this date and knowing the Israelites wandered for 40 years in the desert (Numbers 32:13) we get the year they crossed the Jordan into Canaan as 1406 BC (1406+40=1446).

Jacob Moves His Family to Egypt—1876 BC

If one concludes as Petrovich does (see his Origins of the Hebrews, 2021) that the Israelites spent 430 years in Egypt, the “long sojourn”, rather than 215 years, the “short sojourn”, then the date the long sojourn began would be 1876 BC. It becomes another tent peg (1446+430=1876). The date the short sojourn began would be 1661 BC (1446+215=1661).

The reason for the 215 year discrepancy is due to textual variants of Exodus 12:40. The Masoretic Hebrew text gives 430 years in Egypt. The Septuagint Greek text said this period of time included time in Canaan.

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This lecture highlights the resolution of difficulties permitting one to construct a sound Old Testament chronology. At 19:25 in the video Petrovich lists the major dates going back to Abraham. At 55:15 he presents the Egyptian chronological scheme.

He recommended the following sources for those interested in pursuing biblical chronology further:
Andrew Steinmann, From Abraham to Paul, Concordia Publishing House 2011
Edwin R. Thiele, The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1994)
Rodger C. Young, Ussher Explained and Corrected, Bible and Spade 31/2 (2018), 47-58

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Why Mankind Is Very Young

William Lane Craig, the professor of philosophy at Houston Baptist University and research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, asserts, “Adam plausibly lived sometime between around 1 million years ago to 750,000 years ago, a conclusion consistent with the evidence of population genetics.” (The Historical Adam, First Things, October 2021).

Much of the Old Testament chronology presented above goes back less than 4000 years. However, it involves controversy as to when something actually happened. This should make anyone pause who claims that humanity has been on this earth for much longer than 8000 years. Why? Because there is no historical evidence to justify that claim. Furthermore Biblical textual variants do not even justify ages as old as 8000 years.

From available historical evidence we know we can go from stone age to space age in about 5000 years. That means if humanity were around for 100,000 years (let alone the million that Craig finds plausible) we would have historical records going back 90,000 years assuming a generous 10,000 years to go from stone age to space age.

If we had such historical records then there would be no doubt about what happened a mere 4000 years ago. We would have archived video recordings of Solomon holding a press conference broadcasted live to the entire world via satellite in 967 BC about the construction of the temple. We would know precisely when that press conference started. Constructing a sound biblical chronology would not be the problem that it is today.

Since we don’t have that kind of historical record it is reasonable to doubt the non-historical dating methods and speculations that extend mankind back hundreds of thousands of years. Mankind is nowhere near that old.

Sunday Walk 71 – Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth

The Institute for Creation Research finished an eight year project some years ago countering claims that the Earth is billions of years old based on radioisotope dating. Articles by John Baumgardner on carbon-14 dating and Andrew Snelling on radioisotope dating of the Grand Canyon and radiohalos provide an introduction to what they discovered.

Ian Juby’s recent video linked below also summarizes some of this.

https://youtu.be/UNlq9xE4-3k

For over a hundred years naturalists have attempted to undermine Genesis as history. Christians who accept the naturalist’s worldview think they can add God to deep time, abiogenesis or evolution leaving their Christianity unharmed. What they do, however, is undermine Christianity from within making a similar mistake the Trojans did when they accepted that horse given to them by the Greeks.

Weekly Bible Reading: Zechariah and Malachi
Commentaries:
David Pawson, Zechariah, Part 58 and Malachi, Part 59, Unlocking the Bible
Bible Project, Zechariah and Malachi
Weekly Torah Readings
14 Tevet, 5782, Vayechi: Parashat Exodus 47:28-50:26; Haftarat I Kings 2:1-12

Sunday Walk 66 – The Mythology of Deep Time

A few years ago I would likely be labeled a theistic evolutionist without realizing what that meant. I was reading Alvin Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies and studying his evolutionary argument against naturalism. I was also studying how William Lang Craig accepted the deep time of the Big Bang to try to make the kalam cosmological argument work for him.

To caricature my position I tolerated ideas of evolutionary and cosmological deep time as long as I could sugar-coat them with some kind of spirit “guiding” evolution or somehow squeeze in the kalam argument to assert the existence of that spirit. By accepting deep time I was, unwittingly, throwing original sin under the bus along with the rest of the Bible. And all for what? My goal was to assert the existence of some spirit without checking first just what that spirit was.

I now realize that whatever that spirit might be it could not be Yahweh as revealed in the Bible because I had replaced the historical chronology of Genesis with the pseudo-scientific mythology of deep time. Rejection of Genesis is a rejection of the entire Bible. Atheists understand this which is why they ridicule Creation, Noah and Babel. Compromising Christians do not. What I needed was an apologetics directed back at myself that would lead me to take the Bible seriously.

All of that changed when a fellow member of our Men’s Group briefly mentioned the rapid geological change that happened as a result of the eruption of Mount St Helens. Looking into this, I was shocked to realize that places like the Grand Canyon did not need millions of years of deep time to form. The catastrophic global flood and its aftermath could explain the present state of continents, oceans, mountains, coal deposits, canyons, fossil-filled sedimentation layers and glaciers.

Furthermore, if I started with God creating the universe in a functionally mature state, that is, if I took Genesis as seriously as I should have, I could get to the present state of the universe with only a few thousand years of change using processes identified and measured by modern operational science.

By contrast, if I started with the Big Bang and over 13 billion years of deep time, I could not get to the universe I see today. Too much entropy would have occurred over that span of time. Indeed, the evidence is so overwhelming against deep time that Don Batten could provide 101 separate lines of evidence suggesting that the earth and the universe could not be anywhere near as old as deep time mythologies claim it to be. I began to see that the hypothesis of deep time had been falsified over and over again.

The reason I mention all this is because experimental, operational science (not naturalistic speculations presented as “science”) has matured to a point that no one needs to shy away from the historical creation and fall accounts in Genesis.

Cal Smith, The Trojan Horse of Long Ages, Answers in Genesis Canada

Weekly Bible Reading: Obadiah (Audio), Joel (Audio)
2 Kislev, 5782, Toldot: Parashat Genesis 25:19-28:9; Haftarat Malachi 1:1-2:7
Commentaries:
David Pawson, Obadiah and Joel, Part 48, Part 49, Unlocking the Bible
Bible Project, Obadiah and Joel