What is the whore of Babylon - part 4

Let's be clear: our world appears to be over four billions years old. There were no dinosaurs when man first came on the scene. There was never any "water dome" surrounding the earth and if you saw the individuals that we refer to as "Adam" and "Eve" you might be surprised that they didn't look like the nearly hairless caucasian teenagers that we somehow always depict on felt boards and in movies. Oh, and you probably have a great grandmother somewhere who has outlived Methuselah.

The sad part is that you probably think that I just contradicted the Bible one or more times. Nothing could be further from the truth. What I am disputing is a pattern of interpretation; a pattern that picked a certain outline of what it decided Biblical truth must be and has now spent the last four centuries or so working backwards trying to create some sort of evidence for itself.

Well... at least we got rid of the gnostics.

What am I talking about? Where do I start? There are so many points at which the current -- oh, what do I even call this thing? It doesn't deserve terms like evangelical or even conservative... only about half or so of Bible believing Christians go in for it... let's just call it Young Earth for now -- crumbles into a heap of irrational mishmash:

The age of the planet? The creation story from Genesis was spoken long before it was written down and let me tell you, even if Adam had have been born in October of 4004 there still would not have been a language in existence that could have said the things that we try and make that passage say. By the time it was rendered into Hebrew the Hebrew language had two words to denote the passage of time. Two. No hours, minutes, or seconds, no millenniums, centuries, or years.... and no word that meant, "a period of 24 hours". Time keeping was tricky for primitive man and our earliest two words meant something like, "a period of darkness in between two periods of light", where darkness can either literally mean nightfall or can mean something more vague like, "a period of the unknown". The second word means the reverse, "a period of light in between two periods of darkness and it can express the same sorts of multiple meanings. Context is the key. The same word that Young Earthers take in Genesis as meaning 24 hours is taken by the same folks to mean "7 years" when it is given in the context of, "the great and terrible day of the Lord."

I'm going to get to the point for the sake of time. In debates with atheists I can do something fancy that always leaves them thinking I've just cheated in some way or another -- I can take the current scientific theory of our universe's creation and the evolution of life on this planet, place it next to the Genesis account and make the two match. It's simple. You just have to apply a couple basics rules that any primitive group of humans would have employed when understanding such a story.

The Bible is an amazing thing. It doesn't need our help to defend itself. Trust me. We are not doing God any favors when we create our own little fictions that supposedly will explain everything.

Methuselah? The Genesis genealogies are old enough that there are not a lot of other surviving pieces of literature to compare them to. But there are a few. And from the little we have it seems clear to me that the word we translate "year" in those genealogies did not mean "a period of 365 days" to Methuselah and his contemporaries. If I had to nail down a guess, I would say that the figures added up their ages using a lunar cycle (basically a month) starting from some sort of rite of passage event. If I'm right Methusaleh lived to be about 90. Whatever it was, the ancients did not use their genealogies the way that Archbishop Ussher did.

Dome of water? I feel silly even answering this sort of thing. A dome of water surrounding the earth? Seriously? You don't need God holding a giant bucket over the earth to make it rain for forty days. A nice-sized meteor hitting the ocean will do that for you. And no, sitting under a water screen would not make you live for a thousand years either.

So what does any of this have to do with Gnostics and the end times?

Christianity isn't just a religion, it is also a pattern of thinking -- a way of looking at the world and decided what to think/do about those observations. This is what Paul is alluding to when he says, "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be changed by the renewing of your mind." (Romans 12:2), where renewal leads to a Christian was of thinking and a casting off of the Roman pagan religion/thought patterns. When Christianity was the dominant pattern of thought across the western world it was only natural that Gnostics would use it for their foundation of spiritual increase. When observational-based thinking began to separate from the Christian church, in other words when a person could either be a scientist or a Christian, but it started to be a little tricky to consider themselves as both, the gnostics suddenly had a choice. And science works better as a foundation for gnosticism than Christianity ever did.

Next post: Gnostics, the where are they now episode.