Three portions of scripture and the age of the world.
I want to return in this post to the subject of my previous post in this series “Time and Eternity – #7 The Comprehensive Biblical Timescape” and previous post #14 in the “Age of the World” series. Some parts of those two posts are reproduced here.
My thesis is that all chapters of the Bible, except the first two and the last two, are an account of God restoring his covenant with humankind. The “in time” (or “historical time”) portion of Holy Scripture comprises the bulk of the Biblical text, and is composed of historical narrative, prophecy and poetry. The first two chapters (and part of the third chapter[1]) of Genesis and the last two chapters of Revelation are brief portions of Scripture describing what only God can know and reveal from his eternal perspective. God must reveal these eternal realities—creation and consummation—to his people within the context of time, so that they may understand their mutual origin, destination, and God’s eternal plans for them.
These two brief divisions of two chapters each are not set in the temporal realm, but in the eternal. The Bible affirms the validity of this approach in describing the very different human and divine perceptions of time.
(Psalm 90:3-4) You turn man back into dust And say, “Return, O children of men.” {4} For a thousand years in Your sight Are like yesterday when it passes by, Or as a watch in the night.
(2 Peter 3:8-9) But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. {9} The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.
Allowing for the eternal perspective to be used in this fashion impacts the current debate over the age of the earth in significant ways by moving us out of our temporal confines. And this approach from the eternal perspective is consistent with Biblical theology.
When we recognize that Genesis 1–2 are not a record of events within our present space-time continuum (or timescape) we can believe the biblical account of creation quite simply and literally. There can be no conflict between the Genesis 1–2 account of God’s creation in eternity, and the findings of science in our time delimited, death-filled, cosmic real estate. They are two different things, two different creations in two different real estates.
That said, recognition that the events of Genesis 1–2 are not in time also allows scientists and Christians to rationally and logically explore our present time-cursed cosmic real estate in historic earth-time. This can be done without contradicting or conflicting with the Bible. But scientifically minded persons will not “find God” or “discover the mind of God” (as Stephen Hawking proposed) in this manner. God has revealed his mind in the Holy Bible, and though exploration of nature scientists may find his fingerprints (Romans 1:18-20), but the human scientific enterprise will never discover the mind of God. God is not a unified physical theory of our time-cursed, death filled cosmos, because He is extrinsic and transcendent to our earth bound temporal realm, and His perspective is very different from ours. God is a Person Who Is Love, and Who reveals himself in His recorded word, the Holy Bible.
As scientific discoveries come along, we may accept them as valid for the present moment, until such time as further investigation modifies or replaces old concepts with new ones. In this manner scientific “truth” continually “evolves,” as human minds and their investigations within time change. If there is an absolute verity in science, it is simply that what is accepted as true today may need to be modified or rejected tomorrow. The scientific method is based on this fundamental notion of evolving knowledge, which is constantly being refined and modified through ongoing testing in the light of newly acquired observation and experimentation.
Recognizing that Genesis 1–2 are in the eternal realm defuses apparent conflict between God’s eternal Unchangeable Truth and human kind’s temporary evolving truth. Such recognition, in my opinion, provides a more complete view of reality.
Of course, this will only be the case if one chooses to consider the eternal perspective rather than presuming that only the temporal perspective is valid. This consideration of faith is a facsimile of the choice that the first man and woman had in the Garden of Eden from the upside of the Fall, but that the rest of mankind now experiences from the downside of the Fall. It is the choice to trust God or to trust oneself, to acknowledge God’s revealed perspective or to keep one’s temporal blinders securely fastened in place, and thereby screen out the eternal perspective.
In other words, this choice is the original conflict presented by Satan to Adam and Eve—they may choose to see and act like animals (Their physical bodies were mammalian, as ours are.), or to see and act according to the words of God. Of all former and currently existing animals, only human beings have been created with the ability to act in accordance with the words of God, rather than merely reacting according to the physical impulses their animal nature.
The secularist or atheist who chooses to reject all notion of the eternal real estate of God does so solely on an a priori presumption for which he can offer no supporting evidence. That is, except for the negative evidence of his own imperfect physical senses within his own limited time-bound perspective. The atheist defaults to his own emotional inclination. This a priori presumption is exemplified by the famous atheistic scientific author Isaac Asimov in the following statement:
“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I’m a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.” (Underlined emphasis added.)[2]
But the modern scientific understanding of time as an elastic and variable dimension offers indirect support for the biblical concept of eternity. Eternity, the absence of time as we know it (entropic time or historic time) is the perspective on our origination and destination that is declared in the Holy Bible. If it were not for God’s gracious presentation of this perspective in the first two and last two chapters of the Bible, humankind would know nothing other than historic earth-time and death. But God has set eternity in our hearts, even though we do not perfectly understand all that He has done or the size and extent of the timescape in which we live and history progresses. Notice the contrasting words of time and eternity the following well-known Bible verse:
Ecc 3:11 He (God) has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.
It is my personal hope that future theological and philosophical considerations and exploration will use the temporal and eternal perspectives as a new and productive paradigm for exploring the interaction of God’s general revelation in the natural world with His special revelation in the Holy Bible. In successive posts in this series I will seek to apply this paradigm of complementary temporal and eternal perspectives to some theological conundrums.
I freely confess that my brief explanations are, and probably always will be, very much a work in progress, primarily because of incomplete data in my own historic earth-time experience. I believe that the potential applications are greater and more involved than presented here in primitive and abbreviated form as they have occurred to me. Helpful comments and contributions, with insightful and constructive criticisms, which can be demonstrated from the very words of God in the Bible or from empirically confirmed and validated mainstream science, are welcome.
Thus far the temporal and eternal perspectives have been introduced and reviewed in regards to the argument over the age of the world. I should now like to take up this dual perspectives paradigm to resolve other specific conflicts, I believe are simply paradoxes, in Biblical theology,.
[1] Genesis 3 is a transitional chapter describing the first couple’s rebellious choice and God’s banishment of them from eternity into time.
[2] Asimov, Isaac. Free Inquiry magazine, Spring 1982.
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