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Flood geology - Reliability of Genesis

Flood geology - Reliability of Genesis: Encyclopedia II - Flood geology - Reliability of Genesis

Flood geology starts from the viewpoint that the Biblical Book of Genesis is an accurate and impartial description of actual historical events. They point to its high level of detail (including precise dates for all the important events of the flood, and the exact dimensions and the type of wood used in the ark), its descriptive style (which they regard as "objective and historical"), and the Genealogies of Genesis, which extend from Adam to Abraham and provide a method for calculating the age of the Earth. Furthermore, the language i ...

Flood geology: Encyclopedia II - Flood geology - Reliability of Genesis

Flood geology - Reliability of Genesis

Flood geology starts from the viewpoint that the Biblical Book of Genesis is an accurate and impartial description of actual historical events. They point to its high level of detail (including precise dates for all the important events of the flood, and the exact dimensions and the type of wood used in the ark), its descriptive style (which they regard as "objective and historical"), and the Genealogies of Genesis, which extend from Adam to Abraham and provide a method for calculating the age of the Earth. Furthermore, the language is universal — while a single kôl (Hebrew for "all") might not always be universal, the Flood account has a double kôl which is unambiguous (all the high mountains under all the heavens).

The idea that Genesis is literally accurate is not universally held within Christianity, being associated principally with fundamentalist Protestant sects in the United States. The Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, for instance, both regard Genesis as being merely a figurative description of the Earth's creation. Indeed, the literalness of Genesis had been rejected as early as the 5th century by Saint Augustine of Hippo. However, Augustine was in a minority, because most Church Fathers did accept a literal Genesis.[9] Augustine wanted to collapse the six days into an instant. He affirmed a young earth:

Let us, then, omit the conjectures of men who know not what they say, when they speak of the nature and origin of the human race. … They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed. (Of the Falseness of the History Which Allots Many Thousand Years to the World’s Past, De Civitate Dei (The City of God) 12(10).)

Opponents of flood geology within the church such as Langdon Gilkey argue that it and creation science, as well as philosophical naturalism err in reducing all truth to scientific truth. Gilkey’s key claim is that these endeavors confuse religion’s language of ultimate origins with scientific theories about proximate origins and as a result give the impression that independent domains of knowledge are competing exhaustive explanations of reality (Gilkey; 1986; 2001, pp. 27-28; Pleins, 2003, pp. 59-60). Others regard flood geology as both unscientific and an impediment to evangelism (Goff & Harvey, p. 320).

Mainstream science and creation science thus have fundamentally different philosophical starting points. Mainstream scientists proceed from the basis of considering only the physical evidence, discounting religious works such as the Bible. Physical evidence is held to be of superior scientific (though not moral) value to Biblical accounts. Creationists, by contrast, consider the Bible to be the literal Word of God and therefore irrefutable; if physical evidence appears to contradict the Biblical account, the physical evidence must either be wrong or misinterpreted. In addition, the Bible itself is considered to be a legitimate source of factual evidence, a view which mainstream science does not concede.