Creation as Science

A lecture by Dr. Hugh Ross. As an Old Earth Creationist, I appreciate and endorse the work of Ross and his organization: Reasons to Believe.
http://www.reasons.org
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Genesis 1 vs. Rashi

Those of you who are interested enough to watch my videos (or read this blog) know that Genesis 1:1 reads: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth." in Hebrew: בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃ What you might not know is that Jewish translations treat this verse differently. Artscroll translates the first three verses as "In the beginning of God's creating the heavens and the earth – when the earth was astonishingly empty, with darkness upon the surface of the deep, and the divine presence hovered upon the surface of the waters – God said, "Let there be light, and there was light."

Artscroll translates this passage so that the first two verses describe the situation and nothing happens until verse three. Artscroll's justification is that "in the beginning God created" would indicate that the Torah is giving the sequence of Creation – that God created the heaven, the earth, darkness, water, light, and so on. However, Rashi and Ibn Ezra maintain that this verse cannot be chronological.

Rashi argues that we cannot translate רֵאשִׁית as a beginning simpliciter, since it always means "beginning of." He cites Genesis 10:10 "beginning of his kingdom" Jeremiah 26:1 "beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim" and Deuteronomy 18:4 "first of your grain." Hence, the Hebrew word בָּרָא which is a verb, has to become a gerund in order for the verse to make sense. He justifies this with Hosea 1:2 "When the LORD first spoke to Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea..." which uses תְּחִלַּ֥ת as a sort of "in the beginning of" and the verb דִּבֶּר as a gerund as well.

Rashi admits that "In the beginning God created" is not a forced interpretation of the Hebrew. He just rejects it because he believes that such an interpretation would suggest that God created the earth before he created the water. And to Rashi, this is unacceptable. Hagigah 12a of the Talmud says that the water preceded the earth because the heavens were created from fire and water.

I think you can see already, Rashi is letting rabbinic tradition mess with his interpretation of this verse. This is one problem with the rabbis. They know the verses in their original Hebrew, and what the Hebrew means, but they sometimes derive their interpretations independently of what the words are actually saying.

Like some of the modern scholars, Rashi denies the prima facie reading and places verse 1 as a subordinate clause modifying verse 2. Claus Westermann, one of the leading Old Testament scholars of the 20th century, who specialized in Genesis, disagreed with Rashi. Westermann notes that there is no evidence that בְּרֵאשִׁית cannot be used in the absolute sense as רֵאשִׁית is used to denote an absolute beginning in Isaiah 46:10. So it can mean "in the beginning" or "in the beginning of" depending on the context. While Hosea 1:2 does use the same structure as a subordinate clause, this verse is atypical. The normal construct for circumstantial ideas is the infinite construct, as is used in Genesis 5:1. Hence, Hosea is the exception, not the rule. Also, our oldest textual witnesses of Genesis 1:1: the Masoretic punctuation, the oldest translations, and the New Testament all took 1:1 as designating an absolute beginning.

As Franz Delitzsch pointed out, not only does "the heavens and the earth" serve as an idiom to mean "the whole universe" as the ancient Hebrew language has no word for universe, but the grammatical relation of verse 1 to verse 2 entails that 1 cannot be a mere heading, because the vav connects the two verses, indicating a relation of connection between God's primary and subsequent acts of creation. Computer analysis has also shown what scholars like Delitzsch noted—that whenever there is a vav plus a non-predicate plus a predicate, then the preceding clause furnishes either background or circumstantial information. Whenever this construction precedes a main verb, as it does in verse 2, then it is always background information that is given.

Finally, the real nail in the coffin the fact that the next verse וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵי תְהֹום וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל־פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם׃ begins with a vav, which always means "and" and is used extensively in Genesis to signal the beginning of a new sentence. As Artscroll notes, Rashi's interpretation forces the interpreter to translate the vav as "when" even though it is not translated as such anywhere else. If translating רֵאשִׁית as "the beginning" simpliciter is problematic, then translating וְהָאָרֶץ as "when the earth" is a thousand times more problematic. When the text is allowed to speak for itself, it testifies strongly against Rashi's rabbinic eisegesis and in favor of the standard translation: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth."

What Christians Can Learn From Judaism: The Sabbath

Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism celebrates the Sabbath in a very different way than the different flavors of Christianity as well as Reform and Conservative Judaism. The Sabbath for most Christians as well as for non-Orthodox Jews usually means attending a religious service for an hour or two, meeting, greeting, and eating with the community afterward, driving home, and then usually proceeding as though it was any other day of the week.

The Orthodox community treats the Sabbath differently, however. Since the Rabbis enforced a highly legalistic system with a gazillion and one laws regarding the Sabbath, any conceivable form of productive work becomes impossible for anyone in the community. Since driving is forbidden on the Sabbath, the entire Orthodox community must live within walking distance of the Synagogue. This has the added benefit of making all the members of a synagogue live within walking distance of each other, making it much easier for them to get to know one another. Imagine if everyone at your church lived within walking distance of each other.

The Sabbath is a 25 or so hour experience, from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. As a single adult, let me tell you about my Sabbath experience with the Orthodox community. It begins with the Friday evening service. Technically, it is supposed to begin with lighting candles, but as a single guy who at this time lived outside the community, it began at the synagogue. Anyway, after a relatively short evening service, I was walking outside the synagogue and one of the Orthodox people, I think his name was Ben, asked me "do you have a place to eat and a place to stay" at this point, not knowing exactly what he meant by it, I shrugged my shoulders and he said to me "Ok, you're coming with me." Already, I knew that this experience was different than the other denominations of Judaism, where you simply leave after the service.

Ben led me to his house, where he was having several other guests for his obligatory Sabbath meal. I got to meet his guests and made several friends even in that evening. After the extended meal was over, he let me spend the night in an extra bedroom, as Jews are not allowed to drive on the Sabbath, and I got to better meet his wife and several children.

The next morning I was awakened fairly early, and walked with his family to the synagogue. After making it through the three hour Shacharit morning service, I visited another man named Ari and his family for the midday Sabbath lunch. He pointed me in the general location of his house beforehand, but because I did not walk with him to his house, I had to sort of guess which one it was. During lunch, I made the joke that I knocked on the door and hoped that it was the right house. He told me that almost anybody on his street would have been happy to have me over for the meal. It was at this point that I realized being part of an Orthodox community is like being part of a large extended family.

He, too was having several guests, including Josh, a young college student who became Orthodox a few years prior. During the afternoon, we walked around the neighborhood and dropped in on many of the other families in the community. Since everyone was under the restrictive Orthodox Sabbath laws, no one had the excuse of being too busy to meet with us. So I got to meet a lot more people in a very short period of time.

In our cold and somewhat paranoid modern society, we have forgotten the art of hospitality toward strangers. Have you ever been to a church where people you don't know invite you over to their house for a meal with their family? No church that I have ever attended has extended that type of hospitality. Can you imagine what would happen if a group of volunteer families at a church actually did that? It would make single men like myself, who are a very non-churchgoing demographic more likely to attend church in the first place, because it would make it so much easier to get to know everyone. Introverts like myself have a much easier time when meeting in these settings rather than in large crowds.

There is also something to be said about being unplugged from our connected world for a full day. It helps to reduce the stress a great deal. Because the Orthodox view of the Sabbath is to cease from any sort of productive activity, including the use of electronics, it helps people take their minds off of their concerns and helps them enjoy the moment. And that is the point of the Sabbath, to be an island in time, where for one day we can take our focus off our constant planning for the future and simply enjoy the moment.

Separate But "Equal" Weights And Measures

The antimissionary Moshe Shulman of Judaism's answer has been kind enough to respond to Michael L Brown's article called "Unequal Weights and Measures." In this article, Dr. Brown explains the gross double standard by which anti-Missionaries operate. Dr. Brown's article is here. My video summary of it is here.

In short, Jewish antimissionaries are willing to grant leniency when evaluating issues in the Tanakh which they are not willing to grant when evaluating the New Testament. They are quick to harmonize Exodus 20:8 which states "Remember the Sabbath" and Deuteronomy 6:4 which states "Guard the Sabbath" and harmonize them by saying "God said both at the same time."

However, these same anti-missionaries complain about the baptism of Jesus. Matthew 3:17 reads "This is my beloved son" while Mark 1:11 reads "You are my beloved son." They will shout: "holy crap. This is a major contradiction. How could you possibly think this is the word of God?" This reeks of a fallacy called special pleading, when you are willing to hold other views in extreme skepticism without applying it to your own.

Shulman has responded here, on his website. It's a short article, one that will only take a few minutes to read through. But let me give you a quick summary of his article in my own fake New York accent (which is apparently a really bad Joe Pesci impersonation):

Dr. Michael Brown has written an article stating that anti-missionaries criticize the New Testament in ways that they would never criticize their own Tanakh or Rabbinic literature. Brown argues that we should hold one standard for criticizing both the Tanakh and the New Testament. But that's no fun! Rabbinic Judaism came first. Therefore, we should begin with the assumption that Rabbinic Judaism is innocent until proven guilty, and that Christianity is guilty until proven innocent. There is nothing unfair about this method.

Secondly, Rabbinic Judaism and Evangelical Christianity interpret the Bible through different means. Because Rabbinic Judaism has a set of authoritative interpreters, they can address Biblical problems, such as harmonization, alledged misquation, and hyper-literality issues, and come up with solutions which can be accepted without question. However, because Christianity holds to a doctrine called "sola scriptura" which means that only the Bible is written by God, we can be as skeptical as we want to be regarding any Christian solution. After all, we, the Rabbis, get to decide how you Christians are allowed to interpret Scripture.

I'm then going to go through several sections of Michael Brown's article with this methodology.

For example, Judaism has an interpretation to reconcile "an eye for an eye" Evangelical Christianity has no authoritative teaching magesterium, and therefore is not allowed to give a non-literal interpretation. Judaism has a harmonization in its teaching magesterium for reconciling Geneis 1 and 2. Christianity does not. So Judaism wins again! Who killed Goliath? Judaism has an answer in Rabbinic Tradition. Christianity has no Rabbinic Tradition, so Christianity has no answer!

That's right, Christianity is bound to a literal interpretation because it doesn't have Rabbinic Tradition. Christianity is not allowed to harmonize. Christianity is not allowed to engage in non-literal interpretation. Christianity is not allowed to engage in textual criticism. Why? BECAUSE I SAID SO!!

I am not kidding when I say that this is basically how the article goes. Shulman is admitting that he is indeed holding a double standard, but then saying that it's okay for him to do that, because Rabbinic Tradition says it is. And since we all know for a fact Rabbinic Tradition is the absolute word of God, it is not even possible to argue that Rabbinic Tradition is incoherent or that any part of it is false. Shulman's case against Dr. Brown is circular. It assumes that the Tanakh and Rabbinic Tradition are from God, while the New Testament is not from God, in order to establish that the Tanakh and Rabbinic Tradition are from God, while the New Testament is not.

In the interest of charity, I am going to assume that Shulman is engaging in a type of presuppositional apologetics, specifically, a system where you hold up your worldview as a whole and then hold up your opponent's worldview as a whole. You then compare the two for internal consistency and correspondence with reality. I think that Shulman is taking the Rabbinic interpretive system as a whole, including its presupposition of an authoritative Rabbinic Tradition, and testing it against Biblical problems. Because this interpretive system begins with the assumption that the Tanakh and Rabbinic tradition are from God and are therefore infallible, it cannot be falsified from within the system. Shulman is then attempting to hold up Evangelical Christianity, testing it as well for internal consistency and correspondence with reality. Problem is, he is engaging in a straw man fallacy by misrepresenting the Evangelical position.

To those who read books on Evangelical Bible interpretation, such as in Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, you'll notice that we bring several presuppositions to the text itself, which are considered authenticated by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit.

1 All 66 books of the Bible are Scripture
2 All Scripture is infallible and inerrant (incapable of being wrong)
3 Textual criticism, harmonization, and non-literal are perfectly valid as long as there is some justification for using them

And when you include these assumptions when evaluating the Christian system, all the Biblical problems posed by the anti-missionaries just disappear in a poof of logic. However, we soon realize that this system, too, is unfalsifiable when evaluated from within the system. So that when we compare the to systems, granting each its own internal assumptions, we quickly realize that there is no way of falsifying either.

But the two systems are irreconcilable. They cannot both be true, yet neither can be falsified from within. So how do we break the deadlock? By abandoning the assumptions of both systems, and holding both to some third standard. Problem is, when we do that, when we stop assuming divine authorship of our own texts, all of Dr. Browns arguments come right back on the table. It really is hypocritical to use liberal criticism of your opponent's worldview without letting your opponent use it of your view. It really is deceptive to say that the Tanakh gets a free pass for all its Bible difficulties, but the New Testament does not. There is no getting around it. If you want to compare the Rabbinic and Christian systems, the only way to do so fairly is to hold both systems to the same standard.

In short, Shulman's case is that Rabbinic tradition has an authoritative answer to every conceivable objection, while the New Testament does not. This response collapses the entire anti-missionary case into a single accusation: "You need a divinely inspired authoritative oral tradition in order to make sense of Scripture."

If this really is the anti-missionary case, is seems strange that they concentrate all their attacks on the New Testament. If the only problem is that Christianity lacks the authoritative Rabbinic tradition, as these Rabbis claim, then why not spread out your accusations over the entire Bible? There is plenty to attack in the Tanakh, and pointing out its difficulties as well will help the audience understand that the Rabbinic objection to the New Testament is not that there is anything inherently wrong in the text itself, but that the book does not have authoritative Rabbinic answers to its difficulties.

We know why the Rabbis do not do this. They avoid mentioning the Tanakh difficulties because they want to make it look like it is the text of the New Testament, not the lack of Rabbinic tradition that is the problem.