Warning…This is talking to people who have a biblical worldview. So before you get your panties in a wad just know that this isn’t a creation evolution subject, it’s a literal or allegorical debate.
I had some good conversation with my coworker @jbenjamin85 (twitter) on creation in the bible. How growing up he was taught a gap theory that some how involved dinosaurs being created before mankind and other animals, Lucifer wanting to be God resulting in Lucifer being cast out of heaven, and then God recreating heaven and earth creating our current fossil structure and interpretation of physical evidence we see today.
What we settled on is that taking one verse of scripture, that Lucifer was cast out of heaven is something that you cannot base an entire theory on that doesn’t even relate.
So the debate still goes on, was creation 6 literal days, was there a gap, or was each day millions of years. We actually can’t know the definite answer to that question because nothing totally spells it out. That’s why they’re theories, you weren’t there. Based on evidence found in scripture I can piece together a logical assumption (again this is MY logic). Scripture can be taken one of two ways, literal in which every word read means what it says, or allegorical meaning you can interpret whatever you want to out of the scripture.
What a lot of people fail to realize is that scripture lets you know when it’s an allegory or when its a literal historical account. Genesis is not an allegory, it was written by Moses as a historical account given by God as to what He did. So if Genesis is to be taken literally then what about the fossil records? Dinosaurs and mankind? Shouldn’t there be a gap somewhere? Did Genesis say in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and then he rested for an indefinite period of time to pick back up on the second day? God created the heavens and the earth, putting into motion time and in doing so giving us a reference for a week we still use today. God could have created everything in a micro-second. God could have taken 5 years to create everything you see before you. The thing is, he tells us specifically it was 6 days and on the 7th he rested. To me that doesn’t say – insert your time frame here -. To me that says I’m being specific so listen up.
That also means dino’s and man shared the land. Herbivores until the fall of man which instituted flesh eating and fleeing from the T-Rex. Genetic variance was robust, thousands of species of one animal came from one. Thousands of human variances came from one. It was so robust in fact that when God destroyed the earth with the flood, that re population could happen again with just a small collection of people and animals from each species that God saved.
I could go on and on. You get the picture. Brings a new light to the word, awesome.
The second you start being open for interpretation the second the literal meaning of the Bible flies out the window. The literal savior and literal miracles become nothing short of stories and your faith and salvation become an allegory themselves, an allegory of a people looking for redemption in a made up God.
So is your faith based on stories or facts?
There is a lot to think about.
“Scripture can be taken one of two ways, literal in which every word read means what it says, or allegorical meaning you can interpret whatever you want to out of the scripture.”
I fall into the allegorical camp, but I wouldn’t say that means I interpret whatever I want. I would say that means I interpret nothing. I don’t take it as God making a scientific statement on the scientific origin of the world; rather, it’s God making a statement that (1) he created the world intentionally, and it was good.
You could say that I’m making an interpretation right there, but I’m really not. I said nothing about the age of the earth. For that, I would look to someone who is actually trying to tell me the age of the earth (like scientists). God wasn’t really doing that in Genesis, in my opinion.
Disclaimer: I’m not saying man knows more than God. I’m saying God KNOWS the age of the earth (of course), but he just hasn’t told us. In the absence of information, then, it’s not a big deal to me what Christians believe about this subject.
Also, if history directly contradicted the existence of Jesus, I would question my Christianity, yeah. But it doesn’t. So I do believe in a literal savior and literal miracles, because that stuff is recorded in a second source.