Genesis and Cosmology, lecture at a conference on Scientific Cosmology and Christianity at Wheaton College, Illinois, 26-27 March 2003 Now some full-length talks, in chronological order: Instead, the questions in their minds would have been about the function of the creation and about who is in charge of running it. Whereas we tend to think about Genesis 1 in terms of material origins, this is not what the ancient Israelites would have been interested in.
Reading science into the Bible or reading science out of the Bible inevitably ends up making the text mean things that it would never have meant to its original audience. Science, Scripture and the Creation Narrative. Ancient people genuinely believed their myths and used them to answer the big questions: who are we and how does the world work? (For us, science can function as a kind of "mythology", answering those same big questions.) This way of communicating was part of the "cognitive environment" of the ancient Israelites, so it is no surprise that God's revelation in the book of Genesis sometimes reflects this and has a similar function. So the cosmos is pictured as a temple, with everything in its rightful place, in which God takes his seat in order to govern the world. When they heard about God "resting", they would have immediately thought of a temple, as temples are places where gods rest. We need to think carefully about how an ancient audience would have heard Genesis 1. (* = my recommended listening, to avoid too much repetition of material.)įirst, a few video clips by John Walton over at BioLogos: Here's what I found (with thanks to the ASA).
However, since the average gestation time for a book to sit dormant on my bookshelf is around a decade (neglecting brief excursions into removal boxes), I thought I'd try to find some online audio material by John Walton to whet my appetite. In order to investigate this further, I've obtained a copy of John Walton's 2009 book, The Lost World of Genesis One. Recently I've been aware of a strong positive correlation between the phrases " John Walton" and " Genesis One".
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