Monday, July 17, 2006

Of Clarification of My Previous Post, and Responses To Criticism

I think some clarification of my thought is in order, as a number of the objections to my post on Genesis 1 seem to be directed at a position I do not in fact hold. Addressing them rather haphazardly, I would point out the following:

In response to Katy's last comment, a careful re-reading of my original post should make it clear that I am not proposing some variant of Day-age Theory (which seems to have been her impression, judging from the reference to an "epochal" Monday--though the thing about a momentary Friday just confuses me). What I am suggesting is of a different order entirely. To explain it, I need to make a scientific statement, followed by a more liberal-artsy illustration:

• Relativity tells us that there is no privileged (read "ultimate") description of duration or sequence of events in spacetime.

• All observer-participants in the physical world experience their own unique timeframe. This works rather like Narnian time--each observer's timeframe runs faster or slower relative to everybody else's depending on what that observer happens to be doing (and what everybody else happens to be doing). Now most everyone here on earth operates under pretty much the same relativistic conditions, so the differences between all our gazillions of different timeframes are so close to nil that we can disregard them under all but the most extraordinary circumstances, and speak generally of what we might call "Earth Time." But somebody in a different part of the universe (or in a different universe, if such things exist--many physicists are open to the idea, though I must say I am not fond of it) might be operating under conditions different enough from our own to make his experience of time significantly out-of-synch with ours. If there were a lot of folks there with him, operating under largely the same conditions, we might generalize their collective experience under another appellation--say, "Narnia Time." These two general timeframes, "Earth Time" and "Narnia Time," would be overwhelmingly stable and consistent internally--two humans on Earth would agree that, say, a glass fell from the table before it shattered on the floor, and that the whole thing took 1.063 seconds. But say that there was a magical door in Narnia through which a dwarf and a centaur could observe this same terrestrial event, but from their own Narnian timeframe. Our dwarf and centaur would agree with each other on their version of what happened, but they might describe the glass shattering gradually over a hundred years, after which it rose, miraculously restored, from floor to table. Furthermore, they might describe this second action as occurring almost instantaneously, though it was hard to tell, as the pageant of glass and table was obscured by the simultaneous intrusion of the Second Punic War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both the Earthly and Narnian descriptions of what happened to the glass would be fully correct and literal, from their own perspective. Neither description would be the "real" description--what happened to the glass does in fact depend to a certain degree on whom you ask. What General Relativity does is provide the scientific framework for reconciling these two descriptions.

What I am suggesting about the Genesis 1 creation account is akin to the phenomenon described above, though not entirely. I am saying that Genesis 1 recounts the story of the creation from a third, similar, but essentially different, viewpoint--let us call it "Aslan Time." Alsan perceives the falling glass from his kingdom in the Utter East, a world beyond all worlds, whose timeframe is the archetype from which both the Earthly and Narnian timeframes are derived. Likewise, it is increasingly common for theologians to reject the formerly common view of God as wholly atemporal (for reasons I cannot elaborate here), but rather to see our experience of time as a reflection or shadow of a divine temporality arising as an aspect of the interaction of the Persons of the Godhead. Time in the created order derives its characteristics from both the interrelations of material things and the whole creation's relation to its Creator. Divine temporality arises solely from the Trinity, and is different than, if analogous to, our experience of time.

I think the creation days of Genesis 1 are shaped by this divine temporality, for several reasons--the fact that the account begins before there are structures in the universe from which what we know as time can arise, the fact that the days are framed by unique creation-acts of God (i.e. Each creation-act is not portrayed as occurring "on" or "in" a certain day--rather, each act is a day, framed by a covering/covenanting/evening and a harvest/appraisal/morning), and the fact that God appears to create time on day four. Genesis 1 is a very literal, historical acount of how God created the world. However, so is the Big Bang Theory, with its approximately fifteen-billion-year-old cosmos. The two descriptions simply assume different reference points (and, of course, they tell their stories to different ends).

In response to Katy's other question, I would say that of course our week is patterned after God's creation week. I don't see a problem.

Josh, hopefully this clarification clears up that I am in fact taking Genesis 1 literally (depending on what you mean by "literally"--the term itself is pretty vague). Darwinian Evolution doesn't enter the picture here, so I'm not sure why you bring it up. The current proposal of an approximately fifteen-billion-year-old universe is based on things like redshift measurements and proportions of various elements in the observable universe, not estimations of how long it would take for life to evolve (assumed to be only a tiny sliver of the total age of the cosmos). As for the creation of light and its division from darkness, and their constitution as Day and Night, I think the emphasis is on something more cosmic--Day as "heat" and "life," and Night as a "bending" or "turning back" from Day (check your Strong's). I think the original readers would have interpreted the passage this way. Of course, they would have seen it as meaning what we ordinarily mean by "day" and "night" too--again, I don't see a problem with that. Perhaps a problem arises if you equate the "Day" and "Night" with the "evening" and "morning," which does seem to do violence to the text, given the inappropriate order ("Night" follows "Day," while "evening" precedes "morning") and vastly divergent symbolism. Notice that there are creation "days," but not creation "nights." This is because "Night," as Genesis 1 uses it, is a constituted form of the pre-creation darkness and chaos--it is anti-creational, an "aversion" to the "Creation-Day."

I hope I have shown that I am not "just" trying to accommodate science with this interpretation. To misappropriate a recent Leithartean distinction, I am not trying to let my scientific "tail" wag my theological "dog." Rather, I want to incorporate the whole experience of God given to man, through natural and special revelation, into my hermeneutics. Obviously natural revelation must not trump special revelation, but neither should the two disagree (else God would be a liar). The New Physics, comprising Special and General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, has turned out to reveal a universe that is overwhelmingly more Trinitarian in character than was imagined by Newtonian physics, and vastly more suggestive of a divinely-instituted order (an order than runs much deeper than we could have envisioned under older models). Thus I hardly see reason to shrink from its claims without careful consideration.

posted by Jeremy at 7:28 PM

5 Marginalia:

Thanks for the clarification. That explanation is much closer to what I thought you were saying the first time around. I'm sure my misunderstanding derives wholly from my RELATIVE unfamiliarity with all the quantum stuff.

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