A basic problem with dating the origin of the universe is that we use natural processes to clock natural processes. If certain cyclical or periodic processes are already in place, then (assuming a uniform rate) we can use these to clock other processes. But when dealing with the absolute origin of the universe, those processes are not a given, for those processes are the result of God’s creative fiats. You can use a watch to clock the passage of time if you have a watch, but if the watch is under construction, you can’t use the watch to clock itself.

One thing I’d note at the outset is that Mohler is just a popularizer. If Evans is attempting to mount a takedown of young-earth creationism, he will have to train his guns against its most sophisticated exponents.

It is not only possible but desirable that advocates of LSDYEC, Day-Agers, Framework proponents, and Analogical Day advocates join together in their common affirmation of the full authority of Scripture and discuss the merits and problems of the various positions—without anathemas and ad hominem arguments…

A problem with that recommendation Evans is oblivious to his own anathemas and ad hominem arguments. His article betrays a bristling animosity towards Mohler and other “fundamentalists.” He needs to back up a few paces and cultivate the critical detachment to recognize in himself what he is so quick to fault in his opponents.

Although many young-earth creationists are “fundamentalists,” Evans uses the term very loosely. For instance, it’s my impression that many confessional Lutherans are young-earth creationists. Does that make Lutherans “fundamentalists”? Likewise, were the Westminster Divines “fundamentalists”?

In his detailed study of Christian interpretation of the days of creation, Robert W. A. Letham concludes,

Before the Westminster Assembly there were a variety of interpretations of Genesis 1 and its days.  If the text of Genesis is so clear-cut, why did the church down through the centuries not see it that way?

Well, that’s a very broad question. For example, some church fathers espoused instantaneous creation. But isn’t that a preconception they were bringing to the text of Genesis rather than a conclusion they were deriving from the text of Genesis?

As I have argued elsewhere, a consistently intra-biblical hermeneutic is impossible—the biblical writers wrote to people who were expected to bring their knowledge of nature, history, geography, language, and the human condition to bear on the interpretive process.  Or, to phrase it more concretely, they wrote to people who knew what the city of Damascus, acacia trees, the Euphrates River, and human sexuality were, and they assumed that such knowledge would be utilized in interpretation.  At issue here is the crucial question of whether extrabiblical knowledge is relevant to the interpretation of Scripture, and the historic Christian tradition has answered this question with a resounding “Yes.”

There’s some truth to that principle. However, there are two basic problems with Evans’ appeal to that principle:

i) As we shall see, Evans (as well as Walton) merely pays lip-service to what ancient Near Easterners could know about their world. Evans doesn’t make a good faith effort to project himself into the situation of an ancient Near Easterner.

ii) There is also a bait-and-switch, as Evans substitutes the historical horizon of a modern reader for the historical horizon of the original audience. Take his appeal to “astrophysics, astronomy, geology, paleontology, biology.” But it would be grossly anachronistic to bring those considerations to bear on the interpretation of Gen 1, for that’s far removed from what the original audience had in mind. Those were not the operating assumptions of the narrator’s target audience.

Second, Mohler vastly underestimates the problems that ANE comparative studies pose for his LSDYEC position.  The problem is not simply that there are some superficial similarities between the creation narratives in the Babylonian Enuma Elish text and Genesis 1.  Rather, both these texts (and many others) assume a cosmology which was quite coherent to the ancients but which we do not (indeed cannot) share.  Wheaton College Old Testament scholar John Walton phrases the matter well:

So what were the cultural ideas behind Genesis 1?  Our first proposition is that Genesis 1 is ancient cosmology.  That is, it does not attempt to describe cosmology in modern terms or address modern questions.  The Israelites received no revelation to update or modify their “scientific” understanding of the cosmos.  They did not know that the stars were suns; they did not know that the earth was spherical and moving through space; they did not know that the sun was much further away than the moon, or even further than the birds flying in the air.  The believe that the sky was material (not vaporous), solid enough to support the residence of deity as well as to hold back waters.  In these ways, and many others, they thought about the cosmos in much the same way that anyone in the ancient world thought, and not at all like anyone thinks today.  And God did not think it important to revise their thinking (John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate [IVP, 2009], p. 14).

In other words, Dr. Mohler doesn’t interpret Genesis 1 in a consistently literal way, and neither does anybody else today as far as I can tell.

i) It’s revealing to see Evans quote this passage with evident approval. For Walton’s position surrenders the inerrancy of Gen 1. On Walton’s view, Gen 1 asserts a false conception of the world. That’s because the narrator was scientifically ignorant. He didn’t know any better. Likewise, that’s the position of Paul Seely and Peter Enns–among others. So Evans is tacitly admitting that he must sacrifice the inspiration of Scripture to defend his alternative.

ii) Walton is trying to ride two horses. On the one hand, he attributes the depiction of Gen 1 to antiquated cosmological conceptions. On the other hand, he promotes a cosmic temple interpretation. But if the narrator is depicting the world in terms which foreshadow the tabernacle, then isn’t that the controlling paradigm rather than ancient cosmology?

iii) Did ancient Israelites not know that the sun and moon were farther away than flying birds? What that claim reveals is not how unobservant ancient Near Easterners were, but how unobservant Walton and Evans are. If you spend much time watching birds in flight, or gazing at the sky,  you’ll notice birds flying across the face of the sun. Likewise, at night, you can see bats or nocturnal birds fly across the face of a full moon. Therefore, ancient Near Easterners were certainly in a position to gauge relative distances in that regard. Walton and Evans aren’t making a serious effort to see the world through the eyes of an ancient Near Eastern observer. Rather, they make unexamined and untested assumptions about the original audience. Walton and Evans are clearly out of touch with the natural world.

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