The Bible and age of the earth? | John Lennox at SMU
The Veritas Forum, 22 July 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S26Dq3Uu6nM
1:44 Do I count as part of the extended audience by watching the video?
I believe Earth is fixed in relation to what's above and outside the sphere of the fix stars, and doesn't move.
I believe the denial of this has caused a lot of not just open apostasy but also wanton reinterpretations of other aspects of Biblical truth, like Jesus ruling in Heavenly Jerusalem and that being an actual, threedimensional place, see Apocalypse, or like God being knowable since creation by the visible working of the universe.
2:05 Have you ever met fixed-earthers?
Myself. Dr. Robert Sungenis. His friend Rick DeLano. The late Pope Michael I. Presumably Pope Michael II. He at least hasn't repudiated it.
A Belgian I forgot the name of who has died. Also Catholic, as above. A Protestant that Pope Michael used. Same or other Protestant that I interacted with.
Johnny Proctor. Levi J. Pingleton. Catholics again.
Yes, I have met fixed-earthers and I am one of them.
2:29 "you didn"t have to"
Are the moving earth exegeses legitimate exegesis, or unbearable and strategically chosen eisegesis.
Here is a fairly Biblically minded man, Fr. Robinson SSPX, who does his reading of Joshua 10:12, voilà:
In Josue 10:12-13, it relates that Josue commands the sun and the moon to stand still and that they obey. We could take the direct literal sense as indicating that both the sun and the moon move around the earth. But, when this meaning has been excluded by science, we take the direct literal sense as meaning that Josue commanded the sun and the moon to stop their movement as it appears to us in the sky and that they obeyed.
If the movement of the sun and the moon as it appears to us is really the movement of earth as it doesn't appear to us, why was Joshua adressing sun and moon rather than earth? How were sun and moon the ones obeying?
3:52 Dr. Lennox isn't really THAT old that the Deep Time scenario to him is compatible with a history of mankind well below 8000 years, as the maximum Biblical age of it.
Both gap theory, here exposed by Dr. Lennox, and day-age, elsewhere exposed by Fr. Robinson, are taken at the face value of the claim simply about adding lots of time before Adam. Now I don't think even that is a theological option, but by now, taking the Deep Time scenario seriously would involve taking the Bible as involving serious errors in Genesis 5 and 11, specifically of omission, and in Genesis 14, perhaps an anachronism, but above all, an error in stating all of earth was flooded within the history of mankind, within the last 8000 years.
So, taking the Young Earth as wrong because of science will involve taking Deep Time by ramifications doing lots more to the Bible than "slight" modifications to Genesis 1.
I mean, Dr. Lennox was just 17, when Willard Libby won the Nobel prize for carbon dating. He speaks as if, like Cardinal Wiseman (died 15 February 1865) and Fr. Fulcran Vigouroux (died 21 February 1915) he had died before Carbon dating entered the Deep Time mix! In their time it was just geology which they could relegate to prehuman only, and distant starlight, which conceivably could be even pre-earth, and therefore pre-human. This is no longer the case, the Deep Time scenario by now has more ramifications which are at deeper opposition to the faith than back in their days! And for some reason, Dr. Lennox didn't watch the Nobel prize of 1960. And he missed the excavation of Shanidar Cave, with the certainly human Neanderthals. Or at least, he missed their carbon datings.
No comments:
Post a Comment