I’m still refusing to answer tomndebb directly any more in this thread as a protest to his (IMO) lack of intellectual integrity, but I want to point out to other readers the implication of his question above.
To review, his insoluble contradiction is that Genesis 1:26 says that man was created last (i.e. after the other animals), but Genesis 2:19 says that God formed animals out of the ground and brought them to the already created Adam, so he could name them.
Some of the implications of his one-note harping on this are:
He cannot think of a resolution himself.
He finds in inconceivable that anyone else can think of a resolution.
It’s bad enough that he doesn’t think I can resolve it myself. He’s aware that there are millions of Fundamentalists, and thousands of books written by Fundamentalists, and probably thousands of websites created by Fundamentalists, that address alleged Biblical contradictions to the satisfaction of their audience, but he thinks that in the last month, I haven’t been able to find one that addresses his question, even though googling “genesis 2:19 contradiction” returns over 100,000 results, and the very first one (from Answers in Genesis) directly answers his question.
It points out that the Hebrew for “formed” can also be translated as “had formed,” so there’s no contradiction – God had formed the animals sometime previously to 2:19. It mentions that Tyndale’s Pentateuch (published in 1530, 200 years before the Enlightenment) used “had formed.” And a quick look at Bible Hub shows that the NIV, the ESV, the Douay-Rheims (1609), and the Darby, at least, also use “had formed,” so it’s not just one wacky website saying it.
I’m not a Hebrew scholar, so I don’t know how legitimate this argument is, but as the website notes, and as Leo also noted, inerrancy is claimed only for the original manuscripts, which are long gone. So a believer (which I am not) might also claim that a trivial copyist’s error could have changed the sense of the verb to past tense from the pluperfect tense. In any case, I’ve seen this resolution many times from many sources, so it is evidently satisfactory to believers.
I like my solution (the one that took me five seconds) better. In Genesis 1, God populates the world with animals, including polar bears in Greenland, and kangaroos in Australia. In Genesis 2, he creates Adam (“What?!? Wait, that’s a contradiction!” No, it’s just going into more detail about how man was created), plants a new Garden in Eden for him, and then gives him dominion over the animals by having him name them. In order to do that, he had to show all the animals to Adam. He could have transported the polar bears and kangaroos to Eden, or he could have transported Adam to Greenland and Australia, but he decided it would be more elegant to simply create new polar bears and kangaroos on the spot (and probably vanish them later). Contradiction solved, in such a way that even a moron like me can understand it, without spending years studying ancient Hebrew (but possibly their knowledge of ancient Hebrew, or even the Vulgate, is why medieval scholars saw no contradiction).
And I guess it’s worth repeating — I don’t believe a word of Genesis. But unlike tomndebb, I can conceive of Middle Age peasants, and even devout Middle Age scholars, believing it.
I can think of numerous ways to resolve the conflict. Every one of them, including, (especially), the nonsense from Answers in Genesis, do violence to the actual text of the writings. Somehow, by resorting to the pluperfect, we are supposed to ignore the clear statement that God created all the plants on the Earth (Gn 1:11), yet when He created Adam, (Gn 2:7) there was no plant living on the Earth (Gn 2:5). And, yes, there are word games employed by current literalists to try to trick the passage into saying what they need it to say, but the clear text declares that when Adam was created, there was no plant growing before God, having created Adam, then created the garden. The two creation accounts differ. They differ in language and style. They differ in message and intent. As such, they were accepted for a couple of millennia as separate stories, explaining different aspects of God’s actions, that did not need to be shoehorned into a singe narrative.
Sure, lots of (literalist) people play word games with the texts to come up with ways around the literal presentation of the text. However, there is a clear absence of such word games prior to the Enlightenment. That is the point of my argument. They were quite willing to embrace the contradictory passages without resorting to such word games because that is how myth and Story were used throughout human history prior to the European Enlightenment.
Since I have never claimed that Middle Age peasants and scholars did not believe the scriptures–just the opposite, in fact–your straw man fails again.
I see that in my ineptness (and my hurry to get to dinner), I botched that up. I shouldn’t have said “believing it,” I should have said, “believing it to be literally true.”
For those who came in late, I posted all kinds of citations from Popes and scholars saying that Church tradition has always (i.e. up to the time of that particular document — 1893 in Pope Leo’s case) been to take the Bible literally, but tomndebb accused me of dodging his question about a specific contradiction (emphasis mine):
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
You continually dodge the question regarding the way that your definition avoids all the actual literal contradictions in scripture. The creation of humans after all other creatures or Adam before any other creature cannot be wished away as “allegory.” Whether the father of Joseph was Jacob or Heli is not a metaphor. They are flat out contradictions that were accepted by the people who followed Jewish and Christian scripture for several milennia as they regarded each variant as Story that did not have to be in strict accordance with other elements of Story.
[/QUOTE]
So I quoted Eusebius examining the question of strict accordance between the genealogies, and concluding, “So that both these accounts are strictly true and come down to Joseph with considerable intricacy indeed, yet quite accurately.”
Does tomndebb say “Gee, I guess I was wrong?” Heh. Does he say, “I apologize for accusing you of dodging the question?” Does he even say, “Although I still disagree, thank you for going to the time and trouble of finding that very obscure but interesting cite from 1800 years ago?”
He does not. He first tries to say that since Eusebius didn’t mention Heli by name, he didn’t address the question at all, and when even he finds that position too embarrassing, he drops the genealogies, and jumps to another alleged contradiction, and says I’m still dodging his questions, because I can’t explain the apparent discrepancy in whether God created the animals before or after Man.
So I finally explained that, and after half a dozen posts saying it’s a clear contradiction, he blows it off by saying he can think of lots of ways to resolve it, but since they aren’t satisfactory to HIM, they obviously couldn’t have been satisfactory to illiterate Middle Age peasants, let alone scholars.
So now we’re back to the illiterate medieval pig farmer scrupulously comparing the texts of sermons six months apart, and concluding that at least one of the chapters must be allegorical.
And guess what, if I don’t give an answer about the plants, he’ll accuse me of “continually dodging the question.” Evidently, he’s prepared to go through each of the hundreds of alleged Bible contradictions, until I die of old age.
But he’s flat wrong. Several posts ago, I gave a cite to Aquinas expounding on Genesis, including the URL, but said it was too long to post.
Evidently, it was also too long to read, because it contains exactly what tomndebb says doesn’t exist — a synthesis of Genesis 1 and 2 that uses word games to make them both be true:
[QUOTE=St. Thomas Aquinas, ca 1270]
Thus, therefore, in either respect this formless state ends on the third day: first, when “the waters were gathered together into one place and the dry land appeared”; secondly, when “the earth brought forth the green herb.” But concerning the production of plants, Augustine’s opinion differs from that of others. For other commentators, in accordance with the surface meaning of the text, consider that the plants were produced in act in their various species on this third day; whereas Augustine (Gen. ad lit. v, 5; viii, 3) says that the earth is said to have then produced plants and trees in their causes, that is, it received then the power to produce them. He supports this view by the authority of Scripture, for it is said (Gen. 2:4, 5): “These are the generations of the heaven and the earth, when they were created, in the day that . . . God made the heaven and the earth, and every plant of the field before it sprung up in the earth, and every herb of the ground before it grew.” Therefore, the production of plants in their causes, within the earth, took place before they sprang up from the earth’s surface. And this is confirmed by reason, as follows. In these first days God created all things in their origin or causes, and from this work He subsequently rested. Yet afterwards, by governing His creatures, in the work of propagation, "He worketh until now."Now the production of plants from out the earth is a work of propagation, and therefore they were not produced in act on the third day, but in their causes only. However, in accordance with other writers, it may be said that the first constitution of species belongs to the work of the six days, but the reproduction among them of like from like, to the government of the universe. And Scripture indicates this in the words, “before it sprung up in the earth,” and “before it grew,” that is, before like was produced from like; just as now happens in the natural course by the production of seed. Wherefore Scripture says pointedly (Gn. 1:11): “Let the earth bring forth the green herb, and such as may seed,” as indicating the production of perfection of perfect species, from which the seed of others should arise. Nor does the question where the seminal power may reside, whether in root, stem, or fruit, affect the argument.
[/QUOTE]
That’s what I call word games: God created the plants on the third day as potentialities, and later as actualities. Both chapters have been, as tomndebb would say, shoehorned into a single narrative. And every word, of both of them, is true.
If someone cares more about the tone of my posts than their substance, he’s pretty much by definition not very susceptible to reason and logic.
And for the record, I have consistently referred to tomndebb as intelligent and educated (but indoctrinated), and he has consistently referred to me as someone lacking in intellect (or was that the other mod?), historical knowledge, understanding, and even the correct definitions of words.
Ah, ha! The version of the Summa to which I have been referring uses a differing notation for scripture, so I did miss the passage addressing the creation of the plants. Congratulations, you have, indeed, demonstrated that a bit over a thousand years after the texts were compiled, Augustine made an effort to reconcile them and that after another 700 years, or so, Thomas Aquinas supported that effort.
I concede that with the texts on which I base my primary argument buried with the rest of my college notes, lo these forty years and more, I am not currently going to be able to offer further documentation to persuade you of my position.
Your “indoctrinated” reference, however, is silly, since my argument rests completely on anthropological works that have nothing to do with the teachings of the church–a point I have noted on several occasions and which you insist on ignoring.
I have made no claim that you are lacking in intellect.
My observations that you have applied the words allegory and metaphor incorrectly in your discussion are accurate.
I’ll echo this (as he was trying to put it in front of others to try to, I dunno, make determinations?).
Augustine, for one, believed that God made all things at once. If anything, he believed the ‘days’ indicated when they were recognized or something - Aquinas disagrees with Augustine. However, it seems to indicate that Augustine did believe in some sort of poeticism for the Creation narrative.
Anyways, that isn’t the point. Just about every early scholar of Christianity - Origin, Augustine, Anselm, etc. thought that the important points were not the literal words themselves, but what they indicated. The allegorical reading of Scripture was the part that really mattered and the part that indicated what God really wanted people to understand (and thus live by). Hence, while they may have believe in literal text, it was not the totality of faith, and could survive a showing that the literalness was more poetic than actual - after all, the allegorical reading from the text was more important. This is a very different POV than current fundamentalists, for whom the literal text is the primary importance and allegory is not really important, or in many cases, desirable (for example, the phrase “The Bible said it, I believe it” indicates the thinking among the modern fundamentalist).
Splendid! We’re halfway there — you’ve stopped ignoring indisputable facts, so I’ve lifted my embargo on addressing you directly. Now allow me to press my luck, and see if I can also get you to stop ignoring sound logic.
Would you further concede that since Augustine and Aquinas are arguably the most influential theologians in Church history, that maybe, just maybe, Pope Leo and the Vatican may not have been off their rockers when they said that the Church had always believed in Biblical inerrancy? And that if that’s true, and snce it’s a tenet of Roman Catholicism that the Church is the final authority on Biblical interpretation, that a non-heretical Christian in Western Europe, for most of the last 2000 years, must also have accepted Biblical inerrancy?
That would be a good trick if you could do it, since it would require falsifying my citations from Augustine, Aquinas, the Catholic Encyclopedia, and various Popes and Vatican Councils.
Your “indoctrinated” reference, however, is silly, since my argument rests completely on anthropological works that have nothing to do with the teachings of the church–a point I have noted on several occasions and which you insist on ignoring.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, I did ignore it, because like many of your “unanswerable” arguments, it was too trivial to bother with.
I chose indoctrination as the most charitable explanation for your seeming immunity to facts and logic, over alternative explanations like the Dunning–Kruger effect. If you want to reject it, I won’t stop you. But the fact that you went outside the church for your argument does nothing to refute my hypothesis of indoctrination – there are enough secular authors with every conceivable viewpoint to allow confirmation bias to work its magic, and allow you to reach any desired conclusion.
Correct. On further review, I see that it was the OTHER mod who made a gratuitous personal insult in GD, when I objected to him disparaging a line in one of my posts after completely removing its context. Thanks for having my back on that one.
It’s possible, since I write most of these posts while watching TV, and I’m writing for a message board, not an academic journal. More likely, I just neglected to add “extended” to “metaphor” on occasion, since my meaning was clear without it, and it’s still correct, albeit not optimal.
But so what? What if I consistently wrote “there” for “their,” or “your” for “you’re,” or made some other trivial errors? Why should you bring up a trivial error from weeks ago time after time, post after post, as if that justified your not reading my citations (as in the case of Aquinas), or dismissing them as biased and uninformed (as in the case of Pope Leo’s encyclical)? I won’t say it’s proof of very shallow thinking, but it certainly does you no credit.
Based on the above, you’re the one who doesn’t get what tomndebb was trying to say, because he didn’t say anything resembling what you just wrote. He didn’t say that early scholars may have taken the text literally, but thought that the allegorical reading was more important. He said, repeatedly and emphatically, that they absolutely did not take the text literally, even in the face of my citations from Popes and Vatican councils and Catholic Encyclopedia articles that said they did. He challenged me to name a single scholar who took it literally, and felt that since he was unaware of early scholars addressing his alleged contradictions, ipso facto and e pluribus unum, none of them did.
I’m kind of surprised that you don’t know that, since his position was identical to yours just last week. In post 267, you quoted tomndebb saying that Leo and his council was too befuddled by 19th-century thinking to be correct in their assessment of traditional Catholic doctrine, and beyond that, were “just wrong.” Your assessment of all that was, “You said it better than I.” In view of your more recent post, I guess I’ve changed TWO minds about Church history, which must be some kind of record for GD.
And I’m still boggled by the fact that you guys considered Pope Leo (and the Vatican) too biased and uninformed to know as much as you allegedly do about Church history. At the time that encyclical was issued, the Catholic Church had little incentive to maintain the doctrine of inerrancy. As even you have posted, the Bible is the highest and final authority for Protestants (sola scriptura), so they had a lot more to lose if passages previously thought literally true were admitted to be non-historical.
But it is Catholic doctrine that official Church teaching is just as authoritative as scripture, so it has nothing to lose by saying, e.g., Genesis is allegorical. Indeed, it has a strong incentive to say that the entire Bible is allegorical, and can only be properly understood under the auspices of Church teaching.
The only compelling reason for Pope Leo to have maintained the inerrancy of the Bible, in the face of what was rapidly becoming overwhelming scientific evidence to dispute it, was that it was well known that the Church had always espoused a literal interpretation, and he didn’t want to admit that the Church had been wrong to insist on that throughout its history.
Unfortunately for this debate, it is not simply a matter of one one and done. (Few things in religion, particularly the Catholic Church, are.) If I ever feel the urge to dig out my texts, I may provide them. For this discussion, I concede that you have won the “debate.” I am not, however, going to concede an actual error in fact, just because you claim it.
First, I never said anyone was “off their rocker.” Your persistent efforts to mischaracterize my statements are silly.
What I noted was that Leo, writing in the context of the 19th century, did not, himself, realize the ways in which people used the mythology of scripture, accepting contradictions. That whole understanding developed only through the 20th century with new insights from anthropology.
Now, you have demonstrated that there have been scholars in the church, (notably those whose background was centered in philosophy), who have, indeed, worked to compel the scriptures to accept literal understandings. Clearly, Pope Leo relied on them for his declaration. (I wish that he had paid more attention to John Chrysostom, of course, or that John had had more influence on the church than Augustine, but I will survive that.)
No. it would require only that I provide the various other authorities in the church who have clearly accepted conflicting aspects of scripture as both true. I am not denying the evidence that you have found that various statements from the church have insisted on rigorous (if tortured) explanations to insist on literalness.
In other words, you choose to falsely repeat an accusation for which you have no evidence, just to disparage me.
Understood.
This is just gobbledegook. Accusing me of “ignoring facts and reason” for having relied on science and history for my position is, again, silly.
I have never made an issue of spelling mistakes or unintentional typing of homophones, so that is irrelevant nonsense.
Your claim that the error was “weeks ago” simply does not conform to the fact that you were still using it, within the last couple of days.
I did read your citation from Aquinas. I have responded appropriately to every citation you have provided. I have acknowledged citations that actually contradicted my statements.
Your persistent mischaracterization of my statements, like your inaccurate use of the word “indoctrinated,” indicate the lack of integrity on your part of which you have accused me.
That’s actually exactly what he’s saying. He has pointed out that the literal understanding of the stories in Scripture by pre-moderns (such as accepting the Noah story as actually happened) are not the same as the literal understanding of Scripture by fundamentalists. It’s like you ignored the whole part where he indicated that pre-moderns most likely did believe that things like the Flood actually occurred. Contradictions in Scripture did not generally bother the pre-moderns as they were concerned by the allegorical reading beyond - they held both (or more) readings to be true. They had no issues with putting in different versions of similar events - 4 Gospels, the stories of 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings overlapping with the stories of 1 & 2 Chronicles. They didn’t try to hammer them into the same - they just put them together as sacred Scripture.
Nice reversal. I’m the one who has provided all the cites from the highest authorities in the Church, and you’re the one who is “just claiming” that he knows better, and could prove it if he ever felt like it.
Well, I can lead a horse to water, but I can’t make him drink. Thanks for letting me know that further efforts will be wasted.
That itself is a mischaracterization of my posts. I used that phrase exactly once, was clearly joking (it was very late), and did not attribute it to you. How I “persistently” characterized your position was exactly what you yourself repeat below, stripped to its essentials: that Leo (and his Vatican staff) was too indoctrinated by 19th-century attitudes to think clearly about (arguably) the most important single aspect of Church history.
Yes, that’s what you wrote, to which you added, “And, to a certain extent, Leo was just wrong.” In other words, he had been indoctrinated by 19th-century culture, to the point that he couldn’t see the truth. And you say that to show that you were not disparaging him. However, you evidently consider yourself immune to 20th-century indoctrination, and you also consider it disparaging when I opine that you are not.
Chrysostom would not help you. To use one of your own examples, he took every word of Genesis 2 literally. Since you’ve already said you’re not going to budge, I won’t waste my time finding it again, but a week or two ago I found a beautiful homily from Chrysostom on Original Sin, in which he refuted the argument that since Adam had not yet eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, he had a childlike mind, andcould not be responsible for disobeying God.
He cited Genesis 2, where Adam named all the animals, and said that the fact that Adam could name thousands of animals so well that we still use his names to this day (heh), and keep all of that straight without repeating a name or making a mistake, shows that he was unbelievably intelligent, and clearly knew right from wrong. Thus, he was fully responsible for disobeying God in Genesis 3.
In short, he used the literal truth, of a passage you have claimed could not possibly be taken literally by a scholar, to prove his point about a fundamental tenet of the Church.
Wrong, for two reasons. First, as has been shown, what you consider to be “conflicting” can be easily resolved by believers.
You have never addressed my question about current fundamentalists. How is it that they can study the Bible assiduously, and still take every word literally, even in the face of 21st-century attitudes and scientific knowledge? Unless you think they’re all idiots, the only answer is indoctrination. And if that’s true in a time when every third-grader knows enough science to make the Bible seem absurd, how much more easily would the same mechanism have worked a thousand years ago, when there was absolutely no reason to doubt anything in the Bible?
Second, even if you found someone who flatly declared that the literal meaning of a purportedly historical part of the Bible was nonsense, all that would prove is that he was heretical, at least in that instance. I have never claimed that everyone has always agreed with official Church doctrine. Far from it. But in this case, there is a True Scotsman, and he is defined by the Vatican.
Not so. Just as you do with Leo, I choose to bestow the most charitable possible motive to you for your failure to see plain facts.
In political arguments, it’s not uncommon to hear someone say that if you disagree with me, you must be either lying, stupid, or crazy. I don’t say that. I have acknowledged that you are intelligent and educated. I know beyond doubt that there are devout Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Republicans who are much more intelligent, informed, and educated than I am. And yet, I know that their intelligence and education doesn’t keep most of them (and slightly less certainly, all of them) from being completely wrong, because it’s impossible for their various beliefs to be simultaneously true. The only explanation I can think of is that indoctrination somehow short-circuits their reasoning. I’m open to your alternative explanations.
I don’t see how it’s disparaging to you for me to think you are not immune to indoctrination. If the word itself is the problem, I don’t mean that you were locked in a closet and starved until you accepted Jesus. Many people are indoctrinated into their faith in a very loving way, with the best of motives. Many others are indoctrinated unconsciously by their culture, or even their own inclinations, as they search for the meaning of life. But whatever the source, IMO it still prevents them from being completely rational about their beliefs.
I will agree to disagree with you on that point.
You evidently did not read my link to Aquinas, until after I actually included an excerpt in one of my posts. And the “appropriate” response to my other citations from Popes, scholars, Vatican councils, and the Catholic Encyclopedia (all of which contradicted your statements) would have been to accept them as authoritative, at least until you could find something equally authoritative to refute them, rather than simply yawning and saying they were contaminated by [del]19th-century[/del] [del]Enlightenment[/del] 16th-century attitudes, moving the goalposts each time I posted a new citation, until you were demanding a citation from a thousand years or more ago. Which I supplied.
That said, I appreciate that you have finally budged as far as you did.
The fact that I think you are no less susceptible to cultural attitudes than you think Popes and Vatican councils are, does not constitute bad faith on my part. As for mischaracterization, I have done nothing equivalent to (just off the top of my head) your claim that I thought it was impossible for a reactionary movement to arise in the 19th century, when I had said the opposite, or your taking something I had said about pig farmers, and ridiculing me for saying it about scholars.
You should read his posts again. He said that early scholars could accept miracles, but not contradictions. They could believe Genesis 1, but not Genesis 2, since in his opinion they were in conflict.
Read his last couple of posts, and thrash it out with him, not me.
Andros’ very helpful contribution to this thread was in response to a gross error I made, which I corrected about an hour after I made it. I am disappointed, but not shocked, that neither of you acknowledged the correction.
But you might ponder the fact that tomndebb himself, while showing no reluctance to point out my various shortcomings, has not said that I fail to comprehend the main points of his thesis.
Where did andros say anything about the tone of your post? He said you’re not very convincing, which is true. You’ve failed very badly to make a good case for your position in this thread - not because of your tone, but because you continue to drastically misconstrue almost every post tom makes in this thread, consistently twisting his arguments to fit your own deformed understanding of Christianity. I know you think you’re winning this debate, but in this atheist’s scorebook, all the points are in tom’s column.
