Scope of the Flood (Part 2)

(This is about the 6th post in a series on modern misunderstandings--especially among evangelical Christians--about the flood of Noah's day. The series was motivated by a recent claim of the discovery of Noah's ark. The new reader would do well to scroll down and read the series in order to better understand this post.)

Unlike the subjective hermeneutic principle of John MacArthur ("If the plain sense makes sense, seek no other"), the two interpretive principles I want to discuss today are well-accepted by Bible scholars and fundamental to understanding any passage of Scripture. We will apply them to the flood account of Genesis 6-8, specifically with regard to the scope of the flood. These principles apply not only to understanding the Bible, but should be used with any written document (the Constitution of the United States, Moby Dick, or whatever). These two principles are closely related, so closely, in fact, that I will state them as one:

At the outset, establish the intent and the context of the passage in question.

So, arguably the first thing one should ask about Genesis 6-8 is a series of questions like, "What's it there for? Why did the ancient author include this account? (How does it fit with the author's larger project and purpose?) What is it about?" These are questions of intent, and if we ignore or miss the author's intent, we are much more likely to miss his meaning, which is what we ought to be after.

The intent of the flood account is to describe God's judgment on sinful humanity. I won't spend time supporting this claim, since it is so well-recognized by such a broad spectrum of serious Bible scholars. That is, if there is a more central purpose (intent) to this passage, the burden of proof would seem to lie with the proponent of that other purpose. What I will take the time to point out is what the intent of this passage is not.

It is not a hydrological treatise. Though it mentions water a great deal, and says some things about where the flood waters came from and departed to, its intent is to describe God's judgment on sinful humanity.

It is not a geological or paleontological explanation. Finding in Genesis 6-8 (as Ellen G. White, Henry Morris, John Whitcomb, and others have found) a way of explaining away the record from creation itself (the fossil and geological records) is completely ad hoc and foreign to the purposes of the ancient author.

It is not a biological treatise. It was not meant to explain the diversity of life on Earth as seen at present. Nor was its intent to offer instructions on captive breeding, animal husbandry, or other aspects of conservation biology. Its purpose was to describe God's judgment on sinful humanity.

The second thing that needs to be established is the context. The context, in a very real sense, flows out of the intent, and in this case (as in many others) the context and scope will be seen to be very similar.

The flood account claims to deal with God's judgment of sinful humanity, and the scope and context of that judgment is made very clear. The context is all humanity. All humans living at the time of Noah (with the exception of the 8 members of his immediate family) were judged by God to be exceedingly wicked, and were destroyed in the flood described here.

Given the context of all humanity, the question of scope then becomes,

Does the passage necessarily describe a global flood--one that somehow covered the entire planet--as modern readers are tempted to assume, or does it describe a more localized flood, but one which encompassed all humanity of that time?

There is a good deal to be said on behalf a local flood. Considering the larger context (including the passages of the Bible that precede and follow the flood account) reveals the following:

1) The exceeding wickedness of the humanity of that day included murder and the failure to obey the dominion mandate (to multiply and fill the earth).

2) Humanity had not spread far from its place of origin. (There are no place names given in the run-up to the flood account that refer to locations outside of Mesopotamia.) Indeed, humanity's spread to other parts of the planet is described by Scripture as taking place only after the Tower of Babel incident, which follows the flood. (The latest archeological and genetic evidence fit very nicely with the Bible's, so long as one does not impose an unsupportable, recent date on them. According to those evidences, the spread of humans to Europe and Asia did not occur until a mere 30-40 thousand years ago, with the spread of people into the Americas happening about 11-13 thousand years ago.)

In addition, a local flood (but one that was nonetheless universal to all humanity) fits all of the available evidence (both from Scripture and from the creation itself) very well. A global flood, on the other hand, runs into all sorts of evidential problems, so much so that proponents of a global flood (young-earth creationists) end up promalgating a host of bizarre doctrines, each of which is ad hoc and not found in Scripture. These include the idea that the Earth was almost entirely flat prior to the flood and that all of the plate tectonics evident to geologists and paleogeologists occurred during the flood.

They include the doctrine that there were far fewer species at that time and that what we see today is the result of extremely rapid adaptation that occurred after the ark came to rest. Meant to account for the obvious lack of space on the ark for the millions of terrestrial species that have inhabited the Earth, this young-earth doctrine involves a rate of evolution that exceeds by orders of magnitude that in which the staunchest evolutionist would believe.

Similarly, the young-earth and global flood view seems to depend upon the ideas that there were only representative "kinds" of dinosaurs on the ark, that these were probably "teenage" or young dinosaurs (not fully grown Brachiosaurus), which subsequently evolved at extremely rapid rates to account for the much greater number of dinosaur species found in the fossil record.

Another, related bizarre doctrine used to defend the global flood position is the idea that all animals were created as vegetarians. I'm not making this stuff up. Ken Ham and other "creation scientists" insist that lions and eagles were originally plant-eaters, though everything about the physiology and anatomy of these creatures is perfectly designed for capturing, consuming, and digesting other animals.

Now, as a Christian you may choose to believe such nonsense, but it is not "plainly taught" by Scripture, even though the most important reason offered for holding this view is that it is the plain sense of the flood account. In the next post, we'll look at the parts of the passage that make modern readers overlook the context and jump to the conclusion that the entire planet was involved. We'll look at other Bible passages that have similar all-inclusive language but for which we all recognize the context as limiting or narrowing the scope.

In the meantime, I urge you not to promote a global flood as a part of Christian belief. It is not, and never has been. Indeed, it is belief that the Bible teaches such silliness that keeps many unbelievers from considering Christianity's true claims and leads many young people raised in the church to abandon Christian belief when they finally come to reason through this issue and to become aware of the overwhelming contrary evidence.

Scope of the Flood

Well, I got pretty busy for a few days, but I think I promised in the last post to address another huge misunderstanding about the flood of Noah's day, the one recorded in Genesis 6-8. This misunderstanding exists especially among conservative (Bible-believing) English-speaking Christians, but its popularity among such Christians has led many unbelievers to assume that it is what the Bible teaches. That is, this misunderstanding presents a significant barrier among educated people to considering the central claims of Christianity, like the deity, substitutionary atonement, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. I'm talking, of course, about the idea that the flood encompassed the entire planet.

Where did this idea come from? Well, it came (and comes) from a particular interpretation of Genesis 6-8, but one that didn't gain any traction until the late 1800's. Throughout church history up until that time, no one seriously claimed for this passage a global scope. But by the late 19th century, a couple of things began to change. For one thing, people came increasingly to see the world in global terms, as crossing from one side of the planet to the other became realistic. It was perhaps inevitable that modern readers would begin to interpret this passage from a global perspective that would have been completely foreign to previous generations. In addition, a host of evidence from the sciences--particularly from geology and paleontology--began to call in to question another interpretation held dear by many Christians of that time, that the earth and universe were created in six 24-hour days only some 6,000 years ago.

The first person recorded as claiming that the flood of Noah's day covered the entire planet and could be used to explain (away) the geologic and fossil records was Ellen G. White, the prophetess and founder of Seventh Day Adventism. She claimed to receive revelations directly from God in her frequent trance-like visions, and her followers considered the resulting pronouncements to be on an authoritative par with the Bible itself. According to historian Ronald L. Numbers (The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism)

Because of their distinctive Sabbath doctrine, Adventists adamantly opposed any scientific theory that proposed interpreting the days of creation symbolically. To follow "infidel geologists" in supposing that the events described in Genesis 1 "required seven vast, indefinite periods for their accomplishment, strikes directly at the foundation of the Sabbath of the fourth commandment," argued White. "It makes indefinite and obscure that which God has made very plain."

One of White's disciples was an amateur geologist named George McCready Price, and in 1923 he authored a geology textbook, The New Geology, whose main thesis was that the flood was the central geological event of Earth's history. In part because of his Adventist roots and his lack of credentials, Price's book received little attention. But in 1961, theologian John Whitcomb and hydrology engineer Henry Morris resurrected Price's ideas in The Genesis Flood, a heavy tome with all the trappings of a scientific publication. This book garnered a much wider readership, at least among conservative Christians desperate for an argument against evolution and scientific naturalism but unable to reason through the arguments and evidence for themselves. Indeed, for a particular group of people--conservative American evangelicals--this book was so influential that it led to the proliferation of so-called creation science organizations, groups dedicated not to doing good science but to filtering all scientific evidence through the very fine filter of their modern interpretation of Genesis. Their starting point was and remains that the Earth and universe are only thousands of years old and that the flood of Noah's day was global (and thus explains away all of the scientific evidence that seems to show a much older Earth).

Interestingly, the hermeneutic grounding of this position remains very similar to Ellen G. White's personal, subjective approach. John MacArthur, for example, who without any scientific understanding maintains a young-earth and global flood view, grounds those in the hermeneutic dictum

If the plain sense makes sense, seek no other.

The first significant problem with this principle is that it is subjective. To whom must the plain sense make sense? Let's acknowledge (for the sake of argument) that a plain sense reading of Genesis 6-8 might include a global scope for the flood. That sense didn't make sense to any readers of this passage until very recently, when we began to see the world in global terms. More importantly, it doesn't make sense to me, or to anyone else with a modicum of understanding about the planet on which we actually live. It doesn't make sense to geologists or hydrologists or anyone who takes seriously the idea that God has faithfully revealed Himself both through Scripture and through the creation. In short. MacArthur's principle is too subjective to be valid.

In addition, this principle is not a well-recognized one among Bible scholars, but seems to be an ad hoc principle, one established in order to support dubious interpretations like that of a global flood. There are other hermeneutic principles that are both more important and more universally accepted that would seem to make MacArthur's unnecessary and ineffectual.

In the next post, I'll discuss two such principles as they relate to the flood, considering the intent of the passage and considering the context of the passage. I hope to show that ignoring both of these very basic interpretive principles is fundamental to arriving at the conclusion that Noah's flood encompassed the entire planet.

I hope you'll hang with me, even though these posts are lengthy.

Hebrew Genealogies

One of the most important rules of Biblical hermeneutics is that the modern reader must not place on the ancient text modern or cultural standards that didn't apply in the time of the writing. The writers of the gospels, when retelling an account of a dialogue or teaching of Jesus, frequently disagree in the exact wording attributed to Him. In our day and culture, this would be considered misquoting, and could even be grounds for a lawsuit. But the standards of Jesus' day were different, and in 'quoting' someone else the goal was to be faithful to their meaning, not to their exact wording.

Those today who use the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 to attempt to date the people and events of pre-Abrahamic history (including Noah's flood) are guilty of the same sort of thing--placing an inappropriate modern expectation on an ancient account.

Today, when we compile a genealogy, the goal is completeness; we attempt to fill in a name to account for every generation from whenever that list begins right down to our generation. And so the temptation, when reading the genealogies presented in Scripture, is to expect that their goal was the same. But it was not. Moreover, because we tend to get glassy-eyed when we come to those portions of Scripture devoted to genealogies, we don't bother to study them, to compare them, or to try to understand them.

If we did take the time to study them, we would find that the genealogies presented in the Bible are not and were never intended to be complete, exhaustive lists of ancestry. Instead, they were meant to establish lineage by highlighting key figures linking one individual with another. The genealogies found in Scripture are commonly--if not invariably--telescoped, a process in which some names are included and others are omitted for brevity's sake or as unnecessary for establishing the particular claim being made (whether that claim has primarily familial, religious, or political purpose).

Key to understanding this telescoping of the genealogies is the recognition that the Hebrew words generally translated 'father,' 'son,' and 'begat' (or 'became the father of') and their Greek New Testament counterparts have much broader meaning than the precise ones the English words have. The Hebrew ab covers not only father but also grandfather or ancestor; ben means not only son but grandson or descendent; yalad does not mean precisely 'gave birth to,' but rather 'became the ancestor of' or 'gave rise to the line of.'

Interestingly, we accept (at least subconsciously) the concept of telescoping even in English, as when we read the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1:1,

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

This is a typical Hebrew genealogy. It takes the identical form as that of genealogies throughout Scripture. It is not meant to convey the number of generations between Abraham and Jesus, but merely to establish ancestry. In this case, it is so obvious even to the modern reader that we are not even tempted to apply to it our own expectations of genealogies. But when we turn to a longer Hebrew genealogy, we may be tempted to treat it as an exhaustive list.

We must avoid this temptation. In almost every case (or perhaps all cases) where there is enough other biblical evidence to assess the completeness of a genealogy recorded in Scripture, we discover that telescoping has occurred. In addition, no clues are ever given as to whether or not a particular genealogy is complete (in modern terms) or telescoped. And the amount of telescoping can be quite significant in terms of generations omitted. Nonetheless, comparison among genealogies and assessing other historical evidence from Scripture leads to the conclusion (by conservative Bible scholars) that biblical genealogies are generally not less than 10% complete.*

There really is no longer any debate among serious Bible scholars about the fact that most Biblical genealogies are telescoped. Nonetheless, proponents of a young Earth (and of a global flood 4,800 years ago) insist that the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 are special, that they really are intended to be exhaustive. In part, this is naivete or ignorance about what I have discussed above. Henry Morris, for example, writes

The record [of Genesis 5] is perfectly natural and straightforward and is obviously intended to give both the necessary genealogical data to denote the promised lineage and also the only reliable chronological framework we have for the antediluvian period of history.

Morris here presumes that these genealogies are complete; he does not provide any reason for believing it. As we have seen, understanding Biblical genealogies makes it anything but "natural," "straightforward," or "obvious" that Morris' interpretation is correct. Indeed, comparison of the Genesis 11 genealogy with the one in Luke 3 demonstrates that the former is telescoped, since it omits (at least) the name Cainan (between Shelad and Arphaxad).

One thing sets the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 apart from most, the addition (to the normal formula) of information about the age at fatherhood and the age at death of the people listed. Neither this nor anything else in the text necessitates understanding these genealogies as complete. As in other places in Scripture, the inclusion of these ages is done only because they are exceptional, and because the Hebrew culture recognized both old age and old fatherhood as signs of blessedness. The four different genealogies of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam (Ex. 6:16-20, Num. 26:57-59, I Chron. 6:1-3, and 23:6, 12-13) likewise include personal details like age at death, yet these genealogies can be shown to be only 20 to 40 percent complete (highly telescoped).

The claims of Morris and others notwithstanding, Scripture does not enable us to date the creation, the flood of Noah's day, or any other pre-Abrahamic events. Evidence from the creation itself (God's other revelation to us) does allow us to set some limits on these events. And a date of 4,800 years ago for the flood (that claimed by those who alledgedly discovered the ark) is way outside those limits.

In the next post in this fun series, I'll revisit the misconception that the flood of Noah's day should be understood as global in its scope.


* Bible scholars that recognize that Hebrew genealogies are telescoped place the date for the creation of Adam at between 30,000 and 60,000 years ago, a date that matches well with the relevant evidence from archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and other fields.

Wrong Date, Too

Okay, I'll cut straight to the chase today. The next main reason for doubting the recent claims of having found Noah's ark is that

Just as the location of the alledged ark discovery, so, too, the dating of the ark is wrong--fitting perfectly with expectations that arise from a (popular, widespread) misinterpretation of Scripture rather than what would be expected by archaeologists and serious students of the Bible.

While the Bible lends itself to verification and falsification by specifying historical people and places, it never gives dates. The calendar dates by which we order our lives (B.C. and A.D.) are very recently derived, and would, of course, have been unavailable to the human authors of the various books that make up the Bible. The closest Scripture comes to specifying dates is to fix an event in a particular year of the reign of some well-known ruler. And this sort of date fixing didn't become feasible until the point at which humanity had begun to order itself into kingdoms, which was a rather later development. The point is that the Genesis accounts--including the account of the flood--do not attempt to fix dates for the events they describe.

This is not to say that we cannot arrive at dates for some of the events recorded in Genesis. Historical, archaeological, and anthropological evidence can, in some cases, be aligned with the Bible's accounts to estimate the timing of certain events and people. There remains, to be sure, some controversy about the exact date of the exodus (of Moses and the Israelites from Egyptian captivity), but the two dates at issue are not all that far apart. And most Bible scholars and archaeologists accept that the "Ur of the Chaldeans" from which Abraham was called by God to move is the important city in southern Mesopotamia that flourished from about 3000 to 1900 B.C. But dating any events or people described in Scripture prior to Abraham can only be done in very general terms, that is, within very broad limits.

And even though the chronological limits placed on the flood are necessarily broad, they do not include a date as recent as only 4,800 years ago. A host of evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and even (now) genetics, places the spread of humanity that occurred not only post-flood but post-Babel at between 9,000 and 40,000 years ago. So, if neither Scripture itself nor the available corroborating evidence provides a date for Noah of 4,800 years ago, where does that date come from? Well, if you're tracking with this series of posts, you'll have by now guessed that it comes from a rather modern (but popular) misinterpretation or superficial reading of Scripture.

Ask many conservative evangelical Christians how they come to the conclusion that the Earth and universe are only thousands of years old--and that, therefore, the flood of Noah's day dates to about 4,800 years ago--and an important part of their answer will be the idea that the names and ages in the Hebrew genealogies (of Scripture generally and of Gen. 5 and Gen. 11 in particular) can be set end-to-end and summed to arrive at such dates. As I will flesh out in the next post, this idea involves a misassumption about Hebrew genealogies and is demonstrably false. It persists in modern circles, however, because studying and testing it involves greater effort than does reading the text superficially.

But by now you can understand why I immediately dismiss the recent reports of an ark that dates to 4,800 years ago on Mt. Ararat. Both the date and the place match perfectly with popular expectations but miss by miles and thousands of years the place and date that a careful study of Scripture and the relevant evidence predict.

Ark in the Wrong Place

In the last post, I claimed that it was highly improbable that remains of Noah's ark had been found. The only reason I gave was that such a find would be unexpected based simply on the fact that it would be from a much earlier period than any other of the many biblical artifacts so far discovered. I suggested that it was the sensation that such a find would represent--not its likelihood--that causes people to search for it and make claims of having discovered it.

I should perhaps have added that I find it highly unlikely that the sturdy wood used to build it would have been left unused throughout the intervening millenia. If we take the Bible's account as true (which I do), we will know that God promised Noah that He would never again use a flood to wipe out humanity. There was, therefore, no need to keep a large boat lying around, and I expect that the timbers were reused for more practical purposes almost immediately by the survivors of the flood. Moreover, since the ark came to rest in the mountains, it is also unlikely that sands would have buried it, which is the case for most buildlings, stellae, and other artifacts from Bible times that are being discovered by modern archaeologists. But this is a relatively minor point, and not one of my main reasons for discounting the recent claims of a discovery of the ark.

So here's my next main reason...

The place of the alleged discovery of the ark--Mt. Ararat--is not where the Bible claims that Noah's ark came to rest.

I realize that many people have come somehow to believe that Noah's ark ran aground on Mt. Ararat. It did not, at least according to Scripture. What the Bible actually says (in Gen. 8:4) is that

the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. (italics mine)

The mountains of Ararat are a rather vast range that occupies a large portion of present-day Turkey and Armenia. This large range includes Mt. Ararat itself, but the biblical account--rather than specifying "on Mt. Ararat," which the Hebrew of the time was certainly capable of doing--only asserts that the boat came to rest somewhere in a much larger geographical area.

Now, I don't know how so many people who would claim to be serious students of the Bible can be so superficial in their reading of it as to miss this plain fact. Perhaps part of it is that well-meaning Sunday school teachers "dumb down" such Bible stories for easy consumption by the children they are charged with teaching. Then, perhaps, we tend to remember the stories as taught us rather than ever reading them aright for ourselves. At any rate, I strongly believe that we--like the apostle Paul--should at some point "give up childish ways" and take Scripture seriously enough to read it truly.

Here's the point for this post, though. For whatever reason or reasons, a misconception about where Noah's ark landed has become very popular. When, then, I hear that the ark has been found not where it should be but rather where popular misconception would place it, I have every reason to suspect that something fishy is going on.

But the problem is worse than this, as I'll hope to share in the next post or two. Thanks for reading!

Thoughts on Noah's Ark

In case you hadn't heard, news reports in the last week have covered the claim that a team of Chinese and Turkish archaeologists have discovered the remains of Noah's ark on Mt. Ararat and that carbon-dating of the wood yields a result of 4,800 years old.

A friend of mine who keeps a close watch on the latest discoveries in archaeology in the Middle East emailed several Christian friends (including me) to warn them to be very cautious about believing these reports. My response to him was that it never once crossed my mind that the reports of finding the ark on Mt. Ararat could be legitimate. So, perhaps it would be worthwhile for me to explain why. But first, a word about biblical archeology (from a non-expert)...

The Bible--unique among the world's "Holy Books"--presents itself as historically true. It is filled with specific names of people and places, and opens itself to verification or falsification. Many of the Bible's historical claims ought to be accessible to the archeologist, including the places, people, and events of Jesus' day and those of the thousand years or more preceeding the time of Jesus.

How has the Bible fared with regard to archaeological evidence? There have, of course, been periods of time in which verification of the events, people, and places recorded in the Bible has been lacking, or slow in coming. And during such periods, bold claims have been made by skeptics, that the Old Testament is mainly myth, that people like Moses, David, and Solomon never existed, that Israel didn't achieve the level of culture ('kingdom' level, as it were) claimed for it, and on and on.

Such claims have always been unwise, for the very simple reason that "absence of evidence does not prove evidence of absence." And, in the case of biblical archaeology, the makers of such claims have had to eat crow time and time again. The history of archaeology in the lands mentioned in the Bible is a continual record of verification, and this has been especially true of the past 100 years of digging.

It used to be believed that David and Solomon never existed. But that skeptical view was disproved by the discovery in 1993 of a stela on Tel Dan that refers to King David.

So, okay, it seems pretty clear now that David (and probably, therefore, Solomon) existed. The skeptical response (of not all that long ago) was that while these men existed, claims of their having established kingdoms are greatly exaggerated. Several independent recent discoveries are proving the skeptics wrong and verifying the Bible's portrayal of Israel's existence as a thriving, far-reaching kingdom in David's day.

In short, archaeology has provided no falsification of any biblical account and has incrementally, progressively provided verification of more and more of the people, places, and events recorded in the Christian and Jewish Scriptures. To be sure, there still has been no archeological evidence uncovered to verify the existence of Moses or the Exodus (though many will be aware of one archaeologist's claims--never independently confirmed--of discovering chariot wheels at the bottom of the Red Sea). The history of research in this field would suggest that thereby claiming that Moses didn't exist would be folly. But this leads into my first reason for dismissing the recent claims about the discovery of Noah's ark...

In terms of historical time, the discovery of Noah's ark would be a complete outlier (a much earlier event than any other verified biblical events) and therefore not anticipated by any serious archaeologists (Jewish, Christian, or otherwise).

This is not my most important reason for rejecting these claims, but it is significant. For one thing, it suggests that the claim may have less to do with likelihood and more to do with perceived apologetic value. That is, while finding Noah's ark would be highly improbable, it would nonetheless be sensational and striking in its implications for verifying the historicity of the Old Testament. This is a first clue that one ought to be suspicious of this claim.

But we can't confuse improbability with impossibility. It's possible that some remains of the ark could one day be found. So in the next post, I'll offer more compelling reasons why 'this ain't it.'

A Voice at the Table

So, I owe you one last statement about the global warming issue (and then it looks like I'll have to post a bit about Noah's ark). Here it is, and it flows out of the statements that have gone before...

Christians ought to be speaking into the discourse.

Here's my reasoning. I have shared that the entire discussion is taking place within an inaccurate metaphysic, that the universe is all there is, that there is no God. Those of us who know better ought to bring our perspective to bear on the issues. In particular, that the atmosphere and Earth are well-designed to maintain life-support temperatures has special importance to the problem, and research and solutions that take this into account are essential.

But also, I have shared that this is a justice issue, that billions of people stand to be affected by the decisions made and the solutions chosen. The potential for injustice is great, and those whose welfare is most likely to be overlooked are the world's poor and voiceless. As such, Christians need to be the ones to stand up for them, ensuring that they have a voice and that their vulnerability is not ignored in favor of the comfort of those in wealthy nations.

In turn, the reason Christians need to care that justice is done in this issue is quite simply because God cares and has always cared about justice. His heart is ever for the most vulnerable, and He has always demanded that His people care about justice. Through the prophet Micah, He proclaimed,

He has told you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8).

Likewise, Jesus cared about our response to the plight of the poor. In His 'Great Commission,' He tells His closest friends to make disciples in all the nations and to teach them to observe "all that I have commanded you." Interestingly, as recorded in Matthew's gospel, the last teaching that Jesus had given them was that the sheep would be separated from the goats (the ones to eternal life and the others to banishment) on the basis of whether they had fed the poor, clothed the needy, welcomed the stranger, cared for the sick, and visited the prisoner (Matthew 25:21-46).

As in Old Testament times, and as in Jesus' day, it is God's people who are expected to have a heart for the voiceless and to see justice done. For this reason, Christians of all professions--scientists, economists, politicians, statesmen--need to do their best to understand the complex issues surrounding anthropogenic global warming and speak into the weighty decisions that are being made.

It's a Justice Issue

The fifth statement that I can make with confidence about the controversial issue of global warming is this...

There is a justice component to the anthropogenic global warming issue.

By this I mean that there is the potential for human suffering, either if global warming is real and continues at dangerous rates, as a result of the implementation of some of the proposed solutions, or both. And if widespread human suffering is a possible consequence of whatever decisions are made, then there is the potential that widespread injustices will take place, that the health and welfare of some will be overlooked in favor of that of others, that some will have no voice.

A Particular Metaphysic

So far, I've posted three statements about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) about which I have a good deal of certainty. They were 1) Despite what much of the media say, there is a good deal of disagreement among scientists about the validity of claims about AGW, 2) The issue is primarily a political--not a scientific--debate, and 3) the Earth is remarkable in its ability to maintain life-friendly surface temperatures throughout life's history and despite huge changes in the amount of solar energy reaching it.

The next (and, I think, last) three statements I'll make on the subject are quite interrelated, so much so that it is difficult to decide which should come first. Here's what I came up with...

The anthropogenic global warming debate is being carried out almost entirely within a particular metaphysical perspective, that of naturalism.

Now, regular readers will realize that I frequently blog about the issue of scientific naturalism. I have argued that there is neither historical, philosophical, or practical justification for adopting a naturalistic approach to doing science, and I have shown that all of the latest important scientific discoveries have undermined a naturalistic understanding of the world in which we live and supported a theistic one. I have even argued that naturalism cannot logically ground either the scientific enterprise or the reliability of human reasoning.

My goal here is not to advance or defend those arguments again. Rather, it is simply to point out that in this important debate about anthropogenic global warming, its possible consequences and those of proposed solutions, we continue to act as though nature is the whole show despite overwhelming evidence and reason to the contrary.

Is this important? I suggest it is. If either AGW or its proposed solutions are as significant as people and the media seem to think, then it only makes sense that we begin our search for truth from within a metaphysically accurate worldview rather than from within a worldview that excludes the accurate answers. Let me illustrate this with just one practical example by referring back to yesterday's post.

The default position throughout the history of Western thought has been to acknowledge that things that appear to be designed--like the universe itself and living things and their components--are designed. It has only been very recently that scientists and others have kidded themselves into thinking that the design apparent in everything we see in the world around us is, in fact, only apparent. Let's see where these two very different approaches lead with regard to the thermal regulatory efficiency of the Earth and its atmosphere (discussed yesterday).

If the Earth's remarkable efficiency at maintaining life-friendly surface temperatures is designed (as the evidence would suggest), then we would do well to understand it better in order to work with that design to prevent future failure. If, on the other hand, we rule out design with regard to the atmosphere (and crust and plate tectonics and life and all the other interrelated factors mentioned yesterday), we are likely to miss important cues that would help to solve whatever real problems arise.

But what is actually going on is a worse option. And that is that the idea that the universe and life are designed has become so unpalatable to so many moderns--for reasons having to do with the theological and moral implications--that the features and efficiency of the Earth's thermoregulating mechanisms are not merely dismissed as only apparent but are in fact ignored altogether. I trust that you can understand that this is not the way to go about arriving at an accurate understanding of these important issues. Just as the relatively recent discoveries of the roles and purposes of the human tonsils and appendix required that researchers be open to their being designed (and eschewing the naturalistic conclusion that they were the useless byproducts of an evolutionary process), so, too, breakthrough discoveries about the threat of AGW likely require an openness to the design of the entire system, design attested to by all of the evidence available from life's long history on Earth.

Efficiently Regulated

Here's my third statement about global warming...

The Earth is truly remarkable in its ability to maintain life-friendly surface temperatures for billions of years despite drastic changes in the amount of solar energy reaching it. The mechanisms in place for this thermal regulation have always been (apparently) extremely efficient.

The complexity of the thermal regulation about which I'm talking is mind-boggling, so I'll try to keep it simple. During the tenure of life on Earth (some 3.86 billion years), the solar energy reaching Earth has increased by 30 percent. And yet, the Earth's surface temperatures have stayed within a very narrow life-friendly range.*

If you've read much about the global warming issue, you're undoubtedly familiar with some of the factors that go into determining the Earth's surface temperature. A short list includes the atmosphere and its make-up (amounts and proportions of greenhouse gasses and such), the amount of energy coming from the sun (natch), and the Earth's albedo (read 'reflectivity'). But besides the obvious factors that play into these things, a host of other factors have played a role in maintaining this delicate balance throughout life's history. These include the amounts and forms of life on Earth, the timing and extent of extinction events, the varying rate at which once-living material has been stored in the Earth's crust and mantle, the timing of the re-release of such carbon deposits to the atmosphere,** and more.

As scientists continue to research these things, more factors are added to this list. The point is that all of these very different things act--and always have acted--in concert to keep Earth at a life-supporting temperature even though the energy input has varied drastically through time.

Now it is possible that the humans alive today have the capacity to throw this efficient, time-tested thermal regulatory mechanism out of whack. It should be noted, however, that some historical occurrences would seem to have involved perturbations to this system that would have dwarfed--in terms of abruptness and magnitude--even the sum of current human perturbations. (As just one example, think of Chicxulub, the meteorite that wiped out the last of the dinosaurs when it struck the coast of the Yucatan, sending debris 3000 miles in every direction and blotting out the sun for two years or more.) It is also noteworthy that every once in awhile (though with seemingly less fanfare than the dire predictions receive), a scientist will go on record as being amazed by the unexpected resiliency of the atmosphere (explaining, in part, why the predictions made by the models have failed to actualize).

Again, what I have shared in this latest certain and confident statement does not prove that anthropogenic global warming is false, nor does it mean that it's true. It seems, however, that it should play a part in the search for the truth on this issue, but it just doesn't seem to come up much; perhaps it's another of those 'inconvenient truths.'



* There have been periods--though not while humans were alive--when the Earth was quite a bit warmer than today, but no so warm as to preclude the flourishing of living things.

** You'll notice that these last two factors have to do with plate tectonics and the resulting earthquakes and volcanoes. This is yet another aspect of the Earth that is necessary for life's existence, and one that is believed to be unique to Earth (among other identified planets both in our solar system and outside it).

Political, Not Scientific

I'm up and running on a promised series of posts each of which is a confident and certain statement about the threat of anthropogenic global warming. This confidence and certainty are all the more startling because of my first claim (in yesterday's post), which had to do with the fact that this issue involves a great deal of debate and controversy. It is precisely because there is such a diversity of opinion--even among the appropriate scientists--about human-caused global warming that my claim to be able to make several statements with certainty should be at least provocative.

I'll trust that my first statement passed muster, that no one is really willing to argue logically and evidentially (as by a willingness to hear from every scientist) that no scientist doubts or harbors skepticism about the idea that human-caused warming is occurring at an unprecedented and dangerous rate. My second certain statement is a corollary of the first...

The global warming alarm as cast in the various media is not primarily scientific but political.

This statement likewise seems so obvious as to require little support. The issue became part of our collective awareness through a politician, not through a scientist. The issue is kept before us by politicians and by political journalists. Indeed, the only confusion on this point likely stems from the frequency with which those politicians appeal to science--"all scientists agree that anthropogenic global warming is occurring at a dangerous rate." This claim we know is untrue, and so can see it as a mere ploy, an attempt to disguise a primarily political discussion as a scientific one.

I hope that even those of you who are not scientists can as readily (as those of us who are) see that though scientific evidences ought to ground our conclusions about the validity of anthropogenic global warming, such evidences have become a minimal part of the rhetoric associated with this issue.

No Debate?

I promised to offer half a dozen statements about global warming that I can assert with confidence and certainty. Here’s the first one…

Despite vehement claims to the contrary, there is a good deal of disagreement among scientists in the relevant disciplines as to whether the central claims about anthropogenic global warming are true.

Let’s unpack this a bit. The central claims of the global warming alarmists I take to be… 1) The Earth is warming at an unprecedented and dangerous rate, and 2) the primary cause of this warming is human development and resource use. My purpose in this post is not to address (at least directly) whether these two statements are true or not. I’m not an expert in meteorology, climatology, paleo-climatology, or the like. Both statements may be true, or both may be basically false. The first might be true and the second one false. Each may be partly true and partly false. But while I won’t tell you what to conclude about the veracity of these twin statements, I can tell you a good deal about how such claims should be supported.

These statements are truth claims, statements purported to describe the way things are. Moreover, because they deal with atmospheric, planetary, and solar physics and chemistry, they would rightly be considered scientific truth claims. Now, the credibility of such claims should rest upon evidence and reason. That is, if they are to be believed by reasonable people, the preponderance of the relevant evidence should be such that these conclusions are strongly warranted. If contrary evidence exists, it should be acknowledged appropriately, and good reasons should be given why such evidence does not undercut the conclusion. All of this evidence should be dealt with within a logically sound format. Premises (that deal accurately with the evidence) should be strung together in a sound deductive argument that leads to a sure conclusion or in a strong inductive argument that yields a very high degree of probability.

Is this what we see regarding global warming? No indeed. Instead, very early in the argument, what we are told is,

There is no debate among scientists with regard to anthropogenic global warming.

Really? No, seriously? Is that all you can say?

This happens to be a claim about which I am sufficiently expert to draw a conclusion. It is thoroughly false. There is a heated and vigorous debate among scientists about the truth value of statements 1 and 2. And not only is there wide disagreement about these general claims, there is also deep disagreement about more particular claims. For example, a third claim is that carbon dioxide is a significant and controllable component of this (alleged) human-induced warming. This, too, is very much contested. And this is important because much of the proposed solution (to the problem which may or may not be actual) involves curbing our collective ‘carbon footprint.’ This, in turn, brings us to a fourth claim, that the solution to the problem is ___________ (The Kyoto Protocol or other political legislation).

If you’re tracking with me at all, you probably realize right away that, even among those scientists who generally agree with the other three claims, there is no consensus—but rather wide disagreement—about the correct solution.

We have come to give scientists a much greater level of authority and credence than they (we) deserve. At the same time, we have chosen to abdicate our right to assess a set of scientific evidence and argumentation, choosing instead to allow others to tell us what to think. And far too often, these twin failings have been exploited by those who would sell us a bad bill of goods.

Again, it may very well be that anthropogenic global warming is a real threat. If so, it’s quite problematic that in lieu of a careful treatment of all of the relevant evidence in a sound, reasonable argument, we are—early and vehemently—assured that “all scientists agree…”, an assurance that is easily demonstrated to be false.

Earth Warming

Later this week is the day designated Earth Day. Each year I like to take the opportunity that Earth Day affords to blog a bit about environmentalism. There's at least a couple of reasons for this. For one, Christians have the most reason to care about the Earth, since we recognize it as the Lord's and because God has commanded us to be good stewards of it. Nonetheless, stewardship of the environment is one of those areas in which some of those Christians who take the Bible most seriously are guilty of some of the shoddiest thinking or are guilty of ignoring the issue completely. On the other side, those most concerned about the environment are frequently those who--because of an innacurate worldview (one other than the Judeo-Christian understanding)--are incapable of arriving at right conclusions about either the problems or the solutions on environmental issues.

But this week I thought I'd address the issue that most people get emotional about when the environment is mentioned--global warming. And so my goal will be to offer about a half dozen statements about which I can be very certain with regard to the complex and controversial issue of global warming. I hope you'll read along this week.

My Friend Shelby

I hope you're all reading along with the month-long series "Why Is Christianity True?" at Apologetics315. Today's post is by my good friend Shelby Cade, and deals with the evidence from Jesus' fulfillment of prophecy and the Resurrection. Check it out and then link from there to his apologetics blog.

Advice from a NT Textual Expert

My last post was about the fixation on end times prophecy and current events in which many American evangelicals get caught up. It brings to mind something that stuck with me that was said by Daniel Wallace, the New Testament textual critic that gave a keynote address at our recent Central Oregon apologetics conference.

He said that we have the most textual evidence for (copies of) the gospels, followed by the epistles, and that Revelation comes in a distant last. He took this to reflect the amount of study spent on the different New Testament books by the early church, and believes that theirs would be a good practice to follow.

Yet many evangelicals spend far too much time speculating--nay, asserting--that their understanding of Revelation gives them warrant to declare its fulfillment in modern world events. (If only they knew their history as well, they might approach the topic of prophecy more humbly.)

Prophecy Event

[Be sure to check out--each weekday this month--the essay posted at apologetics315 in the series, Why is Christianity True? (My contribution will be published there at noon on Wednesday, April 7)]

I was somewhat disappointed to read in The Bend Bulletin this morning that Tim LaHaye and like-minded evangelicals will be bringing their "message of biblical prophecy" to Central Oregon this month. LaHaye is the author of the "Left Behind" series of fictional end-times novels so popular among evangelical Christians today.

My take on this issue is similar to that expressed by Mark Noll in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which calls out the modern American church for its anti-intellectualism.

Paul Boyer's When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Harvard University Press, 1992) documents the remarkable popularity among American Bible-believing Christians--again mostly evangelicals and fundamentalists--of radical apocalyptic speculation. Boyer concludes that Christian fascination with the end of the world has existed for a very long time, but also that recent evangelical fixation on such matters--where contemporary events are labeled with great self-confidence as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies heralding the End of Time--has been particularly intense.

Referring to the deluge of books like this that came out in the weeks following the start of the Gulf War, Noll writes,

The books came to various conclusions, but they all shared the disconcerting conviction that the best way of providing moral judgment about what was happening in the Middle East was not to study carefully what was going on in the Middle East. Rather, they featured a kind of Bible study that drew attention away from careful analysis of the complexities of Middle Eastern culture or the tangled twentieth-century history of the region toward speculation about some of the most esoteric and widely debated passages of the Bible. Moreover, that speculation was carried on with only slight attention to the central themes of the Bible (like the divine standard of justice applied in all human situations), which are crystal clear and about which there is wide agreement among evangelicals and other theologically conservative Christians. How did the evangelical public respond to these books? It responded by immediately vaulting several of these titles to the top of religious best-seller lists.

I lament with Noll how an

unsound hermeneutic has been used with wanton abandon to dominate twentieth-century evangelical thinking about world affairs.

An so, Tim LaHaye is coming to Bend, where, according to The Bulletin,

The prophecy conference... is being sponsored by more than 50 churches in the greater Central Oregon area.

That means nearly every nearby Bible-believing church (excluding at least my own, Antioch) is perpetuating this problem, and thereby helping to make the true message of Christianity even more inaccessible to the reasonable people in need of it.

An Empty Tomb

The 5th historical fact that needs explaining is that

The tomb was empty.

Unlike the other facts we have discussed, this one is not accepted by virtually all scholars. Nonetheless, there is powerful evidence for it, and about 75% of the scholars who study the subject accept it. Habermas and Licona lay out three sets of evidence. The first is what they call the Jerusalem factor. By this is meant that the preaching of the resurrection of Jesus took place immediately after the events in the same area where the events occurred. Those who desired to deny the claim of Jesus' resurrection--and there were many, both among the Jews and the Romans--needed only to provide a corpse, the verifiable proof that Jesus was still dead. There is no evidence that this was ever done. Habermas and Licona...

We certainly would expect to have heard from Celsus, the second-century critic of Christianity, if Jesus' corpse had been produced. When he wrote against Jesus' resurrection, it would have been to his advantage to include this damaging information, had it been available. In short, if a body of any sort was discovered in the tomb, the Christian message of an empty sepulcher would have been falsified. Anything but an empty tomb would have been devastating to the Resurrection account.

A second set of evidence for the empty tomb is enemy attestation. Several independent sources attest to the fact that early critics of the Resurrection accused the disciples of stealing Jesus' body. If the body were still in the tomb, there would have been no need to account for its absence.

When the boy tells his teacher that the dog ate his homework, this is an indirect admission that his homework is unavailable for assessment. Likewise, the earliest Jewish claim reported regarding Jesus' resurrection was to accuse the disciples of stealing the body, an indirect admission that the body was unavailable for public display. This is the only early opposing theory we know of that was offered by Jesus' enemies.

A third set of evidence for the empty tomb is the testimony of women. In those days, women were seen as untrustworthy witnesses, and their testimony was not even admissible in legal cases. If the empty tomb story were fabricated by the early Christians, it would not serve their case--in such a culture--to have women as the first and most frequent witnesses to the fact. Yet all four gospel accounts have it that way, and two gospels never have men at the empty tomb. The best explanation for this quirk in the accounts is that this is what actually occurred, that the gospels record no more nor less than what truly happened.

For all these reasons,

The empty tomb is, therefore, well evidenced for historical certainty. Former Oxford University church historian William Wand writes, "All the strictly historical evidence we have is in favor of [the empty tomb], and those scholars who reject it ought to recognize that they do so on some other ground than that of scientific history." (Wand, 1972, Christianity: A Historical Religion?)

So we have five historical facts, each supported by multiple independent attestations and each accepted by most scholars who study the issue (and the first four facts by virtually all such scholars). Together, these facts provide powerful support for the bodily resurrection of Jesus. And--here's the main point of the 'minimal facts' argument--any alternate theory must adequately account for each and all of these. And, as the remaining chapters of Habermas and Licona's book demonstrates, they do not. No explanation yet produced accounts for these five historical facts as does the Christian one--that Jesus really did rise from the dead. And the implications are rather obvious:

If the tomb was empty because Jesus rose from the dead, then God exists and eternal life is both possible and available.

Good news indeed, even 2,000 years later.

(All quotes from Habermas and Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus)

Skeptic, Enemy Attest Resurrection

I'm sharing the 'minimal facts' argument for the actual bodily resurrection of Jesus as found in Habermas and Licona's book. We've already discussed two historical facts, each with multiple lines of evidence supporting them and each enjoying the agreement of virtually all scholars that study the issue. These were:

1) Jesus of Nazareth was executed by Roman cucifixion

and

2) His disciples claimed--and believed--that he had appeared to them bodily risen from the dead.

Today, I'll share two more historical facts. These are:

3) Saul of Tarsus (better known as the apostle Paul), a persecutor of early Chistians, became a follower of Jesus after he experienced what he thought was a resurrection appearance,

and

4) James, Jesus' brother and a skeptic throughout Jesus' life, believed that he, too, saw the risen Jesus and subsequently became a leader of the church at Jerusalem.

Again, these two facts enjoy a multiplicity of independent attestations and are accepted by virtually all scholars.

Regarding Paul's conversion from enemy to follower, the evidence includes Paul's own testimony, that of Luke, and that of the church in Galatia. Regarding his believing in the resurrection to the point of being willing to suffer and experience martyrdom, these same three witnesses are augmented by the testimony of Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Tertullian, Dionysius of Corinth and Origen (the latter two preserved in Eusebius).

There is less information available to us regarding James' life before the death of Jesus. Nonetheless, the gospels report that Jesus' brothers didn't believe his message, the early creed imbedded in I Corinthians 15:3-8 reports the appearance of the risen Jesus to James, and Paul and Luke identify this same James as a leader in the early church. There is independent evidence as well for James' martyrdom, these including Josephus, Hegesippus, and Clement of Alexandria. It is true that the appearance of the risen Jesus to James is only recorded once (in the I Cor. passage of the New Testament), but Habermas and Licona argue that it enjoys early church tradition and acceptance of the vast majority of modern scholars...

Further, critical scholar Reginald Fuller explains that [the evidence] is sufficient. Even without it, "we should have to invent" such an appearance in order to account for two things: James' conversion from skepticism and his elevation to the pastorate of the church in Jerusalem, the center of ancient Christianity.

Here are 4 historical facts, then, that need explaining. Belief that Jesus appeared alive after being horribly crucified was taught by his disciples and held to even in the face of the threat of persecution and death. And while some skeptics argue that it was their collective desire that led them to hallucinate a risen friend, that theory cannot account for the conversion and belief of Paul, an enemy, or James, a skeptic.

But there's one more such historical fact to be addressed... in the next post.

Why is Christianity True?

Beginning today, my fellow apologist Brian Auten is doing a series in which apologists from across the web weigh in on the question "Why is Christianity True?" It includes audio presentations of each of our essays and links to the authors' blog sites. A new essay will be published each week day throughout April, and my contribution is due to be posted on Wednesday, April 7.

Go to apologetics315 to check out today's installment, which includes both a foreword and an introduction. Then be sure to check out Brian's site each weekday for another reason for concluding that Christianity is true.


(Back to the "minimal facts" argument in the next post)

The Disciples Believed

So, I'm sharing the 'minimal facts' argument taken from Habermas and Licona's The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. The first historical fact, discussed in the last post, is that Jesus was executed by Roman crucifixion. Here's the second fact:

Jesus' close followers--his disciples--claimed and believed that he rose bodily from the dead and appeared to them.

Again, this is a fact of history, one that enjoys multiple independent sources of attestation and that, as a result, is accepted by virtually all scholars who study the issue. Habermas and Licona identify nine independent sources attesting to the statement that the disciples claimed from the very beginning that Jesus rose from the dead. These sources fall into three categories--the testimony of Paul, the testimony of oral tradition, and the testimony of written documents.

But not only is it historical fact that the disciples claimed resurrection--it is also historical fact that they believed it, that they truly thought that Jesus had appeared to them following his crucifixion. Habermas and Licona identify seven independent sources that attest to the willingness of the disciples to suffer persecution and even martyrdom rather than deny the resurrection. Habermas conducted a study of more than 1,400 sources published since 1975 about the resurrection, and concluded

perhaps no fact is more widely recognized than that early Christian believers had real experiences that they thought were appearances of the risen Jesus. A critic may claim that what they saw were hallucinations or visions, but he does not deny that they actually experienced something.

As just one example, the atheist New Testament scholar Gerd Ludemann writes,

It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.

So we now have two historical facts upon which our argument builds: 1) Jesus died by Roman crucifixion, and 2) His disciples believed that he rose from the dead and appeared to them.