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I thought I would cross post this - it's the best response I've read from anyone who has watched this thing. It's from a poster on another board I read, who studies ancient texts and manuscripts for a living.
I really wanted to respond to this thread yesterday, but was so damn tired. FYI, I'm in Jerusalem at present, working at the Israel Museum for ten days on a fascinating ancient scroll that I believe preserves source material for the famous so-called "War Scroll" from Qumran Cave 1.
It constantly bugs me, but this point requires significant and regular correction. While official Christian doctrine almost universally endorses a position of creation ex nihilo—which means basically a creation from out of nothing—this idea was not arrived at by way of a straightforward reading of the biblical creation texts. The idea of creation ex nihilo receives support from most English translations of Genesis 1:1 by translating the first word as an adjective, and not an adverb: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." In actual fact, this is a very strange translation of this word, ברשאית, which where elsewhere used almost universally functions as a temporal qualifier of the verbal clause. My (much better) translation is "When God began creating the sky and the ground, the ground was a chaotic soup and darkness encroached upon the surface of that chaos." You can see that in this alternative rendering, there is no suggestion that there was nothing prior to God's first creative act. Rather to the contrary, the Genesis 1 creation story makes much better sense in its depiction of God fashioning the cosmos from functionless raw materials.
The story is not about origins, it is about order and harmony. In the ancient mind, the ultimate reality was believed to be synonymous with stability, function, and uniformity. The Hebrew word ברא, which is used exclusively throughout this story to describe God's activity is believed to have emerged from an Ugaritic root meaning "to cut", and was essentially understood to convey a sense of organisation. This is completely in tune with the action taking place in Genesis 1, in which we see God assigning function, and compartmentalising the universe. The "moral" of this story—if one were to call it such—is that EVERY element of reality has a God-given function. Every part of the cosmos conforms to its divinely mandated designation.
All creationist doctrine and propaganda springs from a preposterous commitment
to the infallibility of Christian scripture. Modern evangelicalism's roots are
in fundamentalist Christianity, which began as a reaction to the emergence of
critical scholarship and science, which both began to seriously undermine the
received meaning of the biblical texts. This was tantamount to a disaster, since
protestant Christendom depended exclusively upon the authority of Scripture as
the founding component of their religious beliefs. It was thought that if the
Bible was somehow not a flawless record that conformed to conventional teachings
of history, science, ethics, politics, etc., then it would eventually prove to
be useless, and the church irrelevant.
You will hear Ken Ham frequently
refer not to his belief in God or to the atonement of Christ in his appeals to
faith. Rather, he is wholly, and irrationally committed to this absurd idea
about the flawless revelation of "Scripture". One could say that Ken Ham's god
is actually not the Christian god. Ken Ham's god is the Bible, especially as it
is understood by way of his horribly naïve and unsophisticated "natural"
hermeneutic of simple reading for comprehension. He has no sense of language,
literature, history, culture, anthropology, social theory, or any of the other
rather massive factors that will absolutely affect the meaning of ancient
biblical texts. / message sig
