Before I relinquished it, my version of the "gap theory" was like the Stephen Wright joke: "One day I came home and realized that someone had stolen everything, and replaced it with an exact duplicate."

what forced me to drop even that, almost unfalsifiable theory, was Russell and his tree-rings. I was prepared to ignore completely the global flood implied by "the face of the waters," but the least I would expect is a discontinuity at about the time of the six-day recreation. Evidence of trees happily living before and after the creation week was more than I could accept.

The argument about verb tenses is a bit of a sideshow--too easily dismissed. So the earth "was" formless and void... at the time. It's easy enough to conclude that scripture is silent about how it might have been in prior ages.

The biggest takeaway I see in this report is that even 2,000 years ago, people had an irresistible compulsion to throw coins in pools.

Most adults in our Christian churches are not Christian in a biblical sense. A majority of the people who attend Christian churches are not Christian and have been attending the same church for nearly a decade.

I'd like to know more about this. We would say that none of 'em are Christian, of course, but that's obviously not what the author meant by that statement. What defines a "biblical" Christian in their eyes, and why are most adults not ones?

Depending on the answer, I might end up agreeing that half of Christadelphians are not "Christian in the biblical sense," which would be a powerful takeaway.

See, I wondered whether he was complaining that too many parishioners are modalists and tritheists. He's not getting any sympathy from me on that front.

What Fort said. Some evidence suggests that Goliath's kit was much more deluxe than the average Philistine's, and Samuel supports this: if he were dressed like any other Philistine, they wouldn't describe his armor in such detail. (A later writer would probably not have described the Greek kit in detail, BTW, since he would assume all Philistines dressed like that.)

But my remarks about the "Judean Lourdes" aren't about historical debates like that. My point is that those bits read like superstition in an otherwise not superstitious book. They don't fit. Even references like demons are not done superstitiously. No girls levitating over their beds and rotating their heads 360 degrees like the Exorcist. No description of horned beasties running away from the scene after being expelled. The parable of "seven other demons" hints at a popular superstition, but in a restrained way. And this idea of an angel offering periodic healings as a lark would, apart from that one verse, read like another popular superstition. It's plausible that a marginal note explaining the superstition crept into the text, where it suddenly reads like an endorsement and not just an explanation.

It's my general feeling that we Christadelphians avoid talking about that particular passage. I'm not sure exactly what would happen if brethren argued a similar position about it within the ecclesia.

A much milder passage is John 5:4. It reads differently than the rest of the Bible generally. Do angels really amuse themselves by splashing in a pool, healing the first sick person to struggle into the water, and presumably having a bit of a laugh at the poor disappointed losers who didn't make it? We Christadelphians believe that Lourdes is a fraud--it's one of our distinctives. In this case I've casually accepted the theory that verse 4 is a scribal gloss that leaked from the margin into the text, and not felt motivated to argue about it. I think most brethren read it without anything like the dissonance that Matthew's passage causes--and so without avoiding it, but without particularly questioning it either.

(On a hermeneutical note, I can point to other places where the writers of scripture report others' beliefs without comment. Did the scribe believe that the witch at Endor really did raise Samuel? I don't think it's clear-cut; the scribe reports the scene as Saul perceived it, without affirming or denying its veracity. It's a prime example why we should really hesitate to make an inferential case for a doctrine. That incident supplies plenty of ammunition to argue by inference that ghosts and mediums are real.)

Via Diglotting:

While I claim ignorance regarding what happens when we die, I must say that I definitely don’t ascribe to the idea of hell. Even though I did believe in it during my teenage years, I now find the idea of eternal conscious retributive punishment to be an abhorrent thing to believe in. I do believe in some sort of existence after death, but I am somewhat skeptical of the idea of an incorporeal soul part of us that survives death and flies through a tunnel of light to heaven. I find the idea of a future resurrection of the body to be a much more holistic and meaningful concept in this modern scientific age regarding the question of life-after-death.

I do. I ascribe several things to the idea of hell. Barbarity, injustice, sadism, sociopathy, and unspeakable horror, to name a few. I do not, however, subscribe to the idea of hell.









Sorry, couldn't resist. My hobby is spotting when smart people use the wrong fancy word. My Dad got me started, with his awful habit of saying "prodigious" when he meant "propitious."

Palis are holding their breath, waiting to find out if these laws are still on the books.

I think the missing ingredient is that the ANE reader would have a function-oriented cosmology that played a similar role for him as our scientific cosmologies do us. In other words, they thought it was factual just as we do ours.

There's a danger in creating a false dichotomy between "functional" and "factual" cosmologies. Among other things, that leads to the erroneous notion that they were self-aware about the fact that their model was ahistorical. They weren't; that's what made it a "cosmology" as opposed to a "mythos." I think the key is the fact that they had no means of verifying their hypotheses anyway, so verification simply wasn't important. A sufficient test of a good theory was that it was consistent and useful. A recent miraculous creation was perfectly self-consistent, so no problems on that score. And a functional creation was quite useful to a pastoral civilization: it laid the groundwork for a discussion of seasons, the planting cycle, weeding, husbandry, etc. It was the shortest possible path from A to B, where A is "where did everything come from?" and B is "how do we go about surviving in this world?"

To them a bad cosmology would be bad because it was not self-consistent, or because it was inconsistent with the realities of their lives. One which taught them to plant in winter, for example, or condemned farming, or encouraged them to eat toxic plants, or undermined civic virtues like cooperation at harvest time.

It may be more accurate to say that they saw their myths as pre-history. They certainly believed the persons in these myths did exist and the events recorded did occur but this doesn't prove their conception of history was significantly different to our own.

I suspect something similar applies to Gen 1-11. It's likely that the ancient Hebrews saw the events and people as real, but the stylised nature of the accounts suggests we're dealing with "mythologised" history, where actual events involving historical people were related using the tropes and motifs of the ANE with which they were familiar, but which are alien to us...

That's also a good way to put it. Americans are again a poor example, because we have no pre-history to speak of. Our conception of the Wild West is probably the closest thing we have to a mythical past--we do pretty generally believe our own cowboy stories. I know that Davy Crockett was a real historical figure, and I'm pretty sure he did not in fact "kilt a bar when he was only three," but I accept the unverified claim that he was indeed "king of the wild frontier." The shootout at the OK corral really happened, but I'm sure is mythologized in ways I couldn't even tell you. Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, etc., are the sort of tropes that Americans believe.

(Which is unfortunate, in some ways. We believe that the West was uncivilized, when in fact Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell, for the years from 1870 to 1885, had only 45 homicides--a rate of approximately 1 murder per 100,000 residents per year, and much lower than the homicide rate of any major US city today except Lincoln, Nebraska, and El Paso, Texas, both of which had 0.8 homicides per 100,000 in 2010. The belief that "gun-slinging" was accompanied by high murder rates, shootouts at high noon, and all the rest, has a significant impact on public policy today. Politicians surprisingly often say, "This isn't the Wild West anymore!" with no conception that the Wild West wasn't wild in the first place--they're appealing to American myths, perpetuated by movies.)

In any case, I don't think any of the three of us disagree materially here. History and myth are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps Romulus and Remus even existed, for that matter. So none of this discussion should be taken as dismissing anything in scripture as pure fiction. Instead, the much more modest heresy is being considered, that elements of exaggeration, or tropes that were the ancient equivalent of "gun-slinging cowboys," might have been employed in relating some of these stories, and that interpreting them as strictly journalistic accounts would have similar results to watching a John Wayne movie as if it were a documentary.

I don't know to what extent it's really so, but it appears that Greeks regarded their myths as history.

It may be more accurate to say that they saw their myths as pre-history. They certainly believed the persons in these myths did exist and the events recorded did occur but this doesn't prove their conception of history was significantly different to our own.

Fair enough. "Pre-history" is a nice way to put it. The fantastical elements were relegated to an unverifiable past. They weren't disbelieved per se, but they were compartmentalized differently than recent history, which relatively lacked fantastical elements and could be verified.

I'd say, though, that I have a certain amount of doubt whether "our own" conception of history is so different from theirs. We believe (in this country) that Washington "could not tell a lie," as shown by the mythical incident of the cherry tree; we believe that Lincoln "freed the slaves," which only happened after his death; we believe that Puritans came to this country seeking religious freedom, when in fact they came seeking a place where they could impose their (purer) vision for the Church of England; we believe that the colonists (apart from a handful of loyalists) unitedly sought independence, when historians agree that only 10-15% were in favor of secession in 1776; we believe that Roosevelt ended the depression by joining WWII, when in fact our prosperity in no way increased until some time after the war (we just failed to notice, because our rationing books were part of the "war effort," and our young men were dying in Europe, rather than idling on street corners). Our "knowledge" of US history is a complete hodgepodge of myth, propaganda, and selective ignorance. Less outlandish than Greek myths, perhaps, but different only in degree, not in kind.

Far more people believe the folk version of US history than the historians' version, and they persist in believing it even after they've been told the truth. My sixth-grade teacher told us as eleven-year-olds that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to confederate territories, where of course it had no force; that slaves in Union territories like West Virginia were not freed; and that the intent of the Proclamation was to prevent England aiding the South, with which it appeared likely to do, having strong sympathies in every area except the issue of slavery. Of those forty kids, how many still believe that "Lincoln freed the slaves"? Most of them.

The line between myth, folk tale, and propaganda seems blurry to me. All are types of falsehood that are sort of believed, but somehow compartmentalized in a way that avoids empirical verification. It is of course true that we have changed our attitude to "history" somewhat, and we now insist that our "myths" be packaged in a much more believable form. And Americans, perforce, have no interesting "pre-history," because in prehistorical times we lived in England and Holland, and that was only about 300 years ago.

Yes it's what we would now call history with literature. But to Herodotus and Josephus, it was just history.

^^ This.

We can call history a modern concept if we like. But there's no getting out of the fact that the ancients had their own version of history, and just like ours it was seen as a record of literal facts about literal persons and events. I honestly don't see a huge difference between the two.

I don't know to what extent it's really so, but it appears that Greeks regarded their myths as history. My limited experience with modern-day polytheists suggests that they would have had varying degrees of awareness that as their history passed back into mythic time, it ceased to be strictly literal. Even the ones who considered it mythic, however, would treat it as history.

In a recent exhortation I got this right: I said that Mark, specifically, borrowed elements of a "heroic" narrative style for his gospel, but then (purposely) "betrayed" the readers by having the hero die a criminal's death, and then denying the readers any triumphal climax by ending on an ambiguous note with confused women at an empty tomb.

(I suggested that verses 9-20 of Mark 16 should be treated as an "afterward," and that the reader should pause after verse 8 for a bit before reading on.)

It's previously been raised. The Horde didn't lose faith. Myers is competent developmental biologist who has carved out a niche at his current home...

What's the niche? Teaching?

Ah, how I miss academia--and the war between the researchers and the teachers! One crusty old curmudgeon (who was a favorite teacher of mine) asked my thesis advisor, "Do you realize that students are paying for your research?" My advisor replied, "Do you realize that students are paying for your no research?"

Good times.

Great piece. It dovetails with some other recent posts on BTDF. The nutshell summary is that "fellowship" is about having a relationship with each other, carried out as a partnership.

By itself, that wouldn't seem very impressive; we talk about that all the time. We routinely exhort about how we're "family." The key bit is to truly appreciate the implications of a "relationship." We have a distorted view of them, because we're born with all these family relationships, and often treat them as fetters to be strained against. They just are; they don't take work; and the best we can hope for is for them not to inconvenience us too greatly.

If we think in terms of a friendship, or a marital relationship, we get a different picture entirely. If we don't nurture those relationships, then our friends turn into strangers and our spouses turn into enemies. They require regular care and feeding. And there is a burdensome aspect, since that means putting up with their quirks or accommodating their bizarre sensitivities--but unlike our family, our friends and spouses are not stuck with us. If we neglect them, they are free to go elsewhere for what they're needing. (If we regard our spouse as "stuck with us," and treat her accordingly, we'll either discover her gone some day, or discover that our lives have become hell on earth.)

Ecclesial relationships are like friendships or marriages. If we do the Sunday-morning-handshake routine, they're not brothers and sisters; they're strangers. If we ignore them, except when we feel motivated to rebuke them, they will feel free to ignore us, or hate us, or go elsewhere--they certainly won't be influenced in any useful way, unless they happen to be masochists. And so on.

So when it says they "devoted themselves to fellowship," it's saying that in the context of preaching the word, exhorting, reading, praying, and all that, they consciously and effortfully nurtured their relationships with each other and with God.

I'd like to be encouraging about your project, and I hope it's very successful. As far as looking up, and commenting on, every use of the word "one" in scripture, I think it's good to remember that the Hebrews were ordinary humans, and "one" was an ordinary word to them. If you imagine what it would be like to look up every occurrence of "one" in Moby Dick, say, or War and Peace, I think you would conclude that it was a huge effort likely to bear only a very little fruit.

On your question, I know that Malachi never heard of the "Holy Trinity," had no conception of the Holy Spirit as a person, and had never in his life heard of "God the Son." So he couldn't possibly be arguing for or against any of those ideas. Just like the verse says, Malachi was saying, "We all have the same God, so we should all be true to each other and our religion."

I noticed in the original writeup that they contradict their claim to have found no images.

Given my want--to listen to what people mean, rather than what they say, as far as possible--I quickly deduced that they are expressing the claim that these "guardian lions," etc., were not objects of veneration, and that no objects of veneration were found. In other words, no idols. Solomon's temple was decorated with pomegranates and cherubim, the latter of which I casually equate with similar images of winged, human-headed lions in Babylon, but contained no idols. It would be distinctive (I confidently assume) from foreign temples which had (I confidently assume) decorative images along the lines of the cherubim, but also (we know for certain) idols to be worshiped.

I'm unqualified to pronounce judgment. Tentatively, however, I come away with the sense that they found cultic storage boxes with more-or-less bog standard decorations, but no idols inside, and no idols on the site that might have originally been placed inside.

If that's true, and you can easily see the largish number of assumptions I'm using to fill in the gaps in my actual knowledge, then I'd say this is a pretty exciting find: that while the other Canaanites were opening the doors on their shrine boxes and offering incense and prayer to the figurine within, the Israelites were opening the doors of their shrine boxes (or leaving them closed) and directing their prayers and incense at the empty space (or space occupied by flowers or some such "offering"). That would be highly distinctive, and while not at all proof of "monotheism," as Ritmeyer seems confusedly to imagine is claimed, but rather proof of a ban on veneration of images, which suggests familiarity with Moses' law, or some earlier prototype thereof.

It would also seem suggestive that the concept of an invisible, or at least unrepresentable, God, is a very early element of Israelite religion--even if they were merely monolatrous at the time. It does strongly suggest monolatry, since there are (assumedly) no images of lesser deities. If a polytheistic people believed that the chiefest god was invisible, it would seem unlikely to me that they also believed that lesser gods, demigods, etc., were all invisible, so I would expect to see an empty shrine-box for the chief god, but statues of lesser gods around it as well, if they were polytheistic.

ETA: Indeed, to add folly to folly, or rather speculation to speculation... regardless of the significance of this find, I'm about half convinced that non-polytheists (including monotheists and monolaters) would structure their devotional life exactly as described above: by setting up the same type of shrine as they knew from the larger cultural environment, but removing the idol from the place setting.

Edit: If everyone had a personal relationship with their ministering angel/God then their would be no more need to preserve free will and hide from us. Although this is characterised as Adam hiding from God. You would have personal proof like me. You have to voluntarily surrender your free will in this life or you were never sincere. How can you be sincere if you only surrender your free will when you have no other choice, at physical death?

This is the way it will be in the future and that is EXACTLY why it says their will be no more death, no more suffering, because their will be no more free will. You cannot have both.

duh.

You just replied to yourself and said, "Duh."

I wish someone would convince my son Dawkins is a......errrr.....dawk! He thinks he's the best thing since sliced bread right now lol.

His writing on evolution and related subjects is top notch. It's just that he seems to suffer from the delusion that brilliance in one area makes one competent, or at least not utterly incompetent, in others. The same reason doctors are notorious for losing their shirts investing--they think being smart makes them competent investors.

His science is incredibly garbled, but I give him full marks for not trying to blame tornadoes on teh gayz.

The book is extremely light on knowledge of Christianity (Carrier only evinces a very rudimentary knowledge of C.S. Lewis’ brand of “mere Christianity”), and doesn’t even really attempt to touch the surface of theology and philosophy...

Slightly tangential, but Dawkins and Myers have taken to directly mocking the notion that a knowledge of these subjects is necessary to debunk theism. Their meta-argument is roughly that arguing the details of textile technology is nothing but a distraction from noticing that the emperor is stark naked. It dovetails nicely with their generally angry outlook, since it allows them to make various cracks about "discussing the merits of imported versus domestic newt tongues for making love potions," and such like.

I'd like to see a cogent meta-counter-argument explaining where "sophisticated theology" comes into play. As a non-theologian, I'm ill equipped to make it myself: I can see Myers and Dawkins et al veering off the beam, but can't necessarily articulate where they went wrong exactly. Unfortunately I can see that their mockery is partly on target: a sizable chunk of apology appears in my view also to rely fatally on the assumption of what they're trying to prove; they really do take the form of "discussing textiles" instead of confronting the question whether the emperor's posterior is or is not showing.

In "The God Delusion," which in all honesty I haven't read, I understand it to focus mainly on origins. God's reason for being is to explain the unexplainable concerning origins; we now have explanations for those previously unexplainable mysteries; therefore, there's no need for God. And since beings only exist if they're needed, God doesn't exist. QED. On that score my first reply is, "Jessica Simpson!" Clearly useless beings have an annoying habit of existing. So putting God out of a job does nothing to attack the question whether He exists or not.

Dawkins of course thinks he's addressing a deeper epistemological problem; he believes that the only reason people believe in God today is their need to fill the gaps. His error is clear: practically nobody believes in God for that reason. It's as good a theory as any other, I suppose, for how primeval people went about inventing their myths and superstitions, but subsequent generations don't repeat that process anew. They believe in God (or their parents' gods) for the simple reason that their parents did. It's now communicated to them, along with other cultural elements, as part of their upbringing. If asked why they believe, most will say they "Just do." So attacking "God of the gaps" doesn't lay a glove on them.

American fundamentalists (and their overseas brethren) make Dawkins overconfident, because they do retroactively pin their belief on such things. I.e., they didn't start believing in God to fill gaps, but after the fact they did start hanging their faith on the idea that these gaps are proofs of God. It makes their faith easy to destroy, because the foundations are so shaky: instead of attacking what might even be an impregnable structure, you undermine the foundations and watch it fall like Jericho. It has the opposite effect on those of us who aren't fundamentalists, because he's not touching our building nor its foundations, but he is strutting around proclaiming himself conqueror of all he surveys. It makes one want to snicker and call, "Jettez la vache!"

But to my regret, it's not a complete response to Dawkins. If I personally pointed this out to him, he would turn the tables and reply, "So tell me, Mr. Jeenyus, why do you believe in God?" Any reply I make will get me skewered, since my main reason is... I just do. I have only indirect evidence to point to, such as the power and meaning of scripture in my life, and mumble mumble prophecy. I'm not the David to send out to slay him with a well-chosen apologetic sling stone. So while I see that his theological unsophistication causes him to miss the mark, I'd be interested myself in a more complete, cogent explanation of what this mark is that he's missing.

I've casually assumed that misogyny is at work, based on generally-remembered material I've read in the 1980's remarking that the Qumran community (1) were Essenes, (2) were a male-only ascetic community, and (3) did have writings that, e.g., made heavy use of the "sinful woman" imagery from Proverbs.

And combination of those might have been debunked by now, but assuming that all three are true, I'd still vote for misogyny. It's hard to imagine folks joining an ascetic all-male community while having good healthy attitudes toward women.

In that case I'd revise my estimate of the likelihood of misogyny downward, more or less in proportion as the gender mix approaches 50:50.

In the US, for example, the Shakers were a celibate community with a fairly equal gender mix, in which men and women shared leadership roles, and regarded "Mother Ann" as a prophetess, was as you'd expect full of bias against sex but relatively free of bias against women.

Since I can't find any source willing to commit to a guess about the gender mix, I'm stuck assuming they were about even. The graveyard studies, which aren't necessarily statistically significant, suggest 46% women, after excluding the graves that are thought to have been later burials by bedouins (i.e., shallow, east-west facing graves). So now I'd rate Ken's #! and #2 about equally likely.

How could that be when Israel didn't come along until a long time after and from Adam came all sorts of other nations?

You need to read the book to get the background, but the basic idea is that Genesis was finalized after the exile--perhaps by Ezra, say. The post-exilic writings such as Chronicles recast Israelite history in order to address the burning question of the day: what does it mean to be a Jew in light of the diaspora? How are they God's people, if they've lost their land and temple? What of God's promises of an eternal kingdom, since their kingdom was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, and the throne has never been reestablished since? How can they worship God while living in Babylon without any access to the temple, nor any temple to access? Etc., etc.

The critical development in Jewish theology after the exile was the concept that God scatters but also regathers; punishes but also relents. Genesis 1-3, in its final form, tells the same story that plays out over and over in the OT, and it's precisely the story of Israel: God picks out His people, puts them in a good land of His choosing, gives them commandments and access to His presence, and then they disobey and are punished but also redeemed. Adam's biography is a reenactment of Israel's history. Apart from serving as an allegory of Israel, Adam is also specifically identified as Israel's ancestor via the genealogies in Genesis, so his special creation by God and his covenant relationship to God is another thing that makes Israel special. Genesis is ambiguous about the existence of other people at the same time, such as Cain's wife, or the people Cain was afraid of, etc., but that wasn't the primary concern of the Jews; although they seem to have believed that he was the ancestor of everyone in the world, Adam's relationship with other nations was of no interest to them. Adam was the special son of God, Seth was the special son of Adam, Shem was the special son of Noah, and so on, making the Jews the "firstborn" among the nations--so they specifically were the heirs of Adam's specialness in a way that no other nation was. Thus Adam both literally and figuratively marks the Jews as special to God despite Adam's exile from the garden and Israel's exile from the promised land.