St. Augustine never heard of "higher criticism."
EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Tue Mar 01, 2022 2:17 pm
Never thought he did. I asked if you believed in higher criticism.
In the Church today, it's called "textual criticism." And I'm with St. Augustine on this.
He merely noted that where scripture was not clearly supporting any particular thing, we should be very careful not to add our own ideas to it, and we should be willing to revise our ideas if new information became available.
You're probably thinking of what is now called "textual criticism." You see it in creationist organizations like "Answers in Genesis" for example when they point out that the development of new species from older species is not anywhere denied in Scripture
You are making an assumption that Augustine was not addressing a specific issue.
His opening line says he wasn't. Did you read it?
Answers in Genesis teach that God created kinds
Which traditional Christians do also. The issue is that creationists don't approve of the way He did it.
If you think so, you don't know much about philosophy. Most of the Ionian philosophers thought the world was eternal. And many, like Democritus, thought that there was nothing but atoms, with nothing else at all.
In Augustine's day, there was no such thing as a naturalistic theory of the creation of the universe, there were no intellectuals that believed that there was deep time or that God did not create the Universe.
If you think so, you don't know much about philosophy. Most of the Ionian philosophers thought the world was eternal. And many, like Democritus, thought that there was nothing but atoms, with nothing else at all.
WOW! You are speaking about a time 500-1000 years before Augustine. In Augustine's day, there was no debate because Christian theology had won that debate.[/quote]
No, that's wrong. For example, St. Augustine felt compelled to write a rebuttal of the pagan claim that Christianity had been responsible for the disasters in Rome in his time.
Augustine believed that the universe was created in an instant way quicker than 6 days.
An instantaneous creation of the universe, from which all other things came forth as God created them to do. Which is consistent with the Bible and what we know of the world through science.
With the rise and dominance of Christianity in the West and the later spread of Islam, metaphysical naturalism was generally abandoned by intellectuals.
But the scientists of the Renaissance, borrowing from the Greeks and Arabs, focused on methodological naturalism. Galileo and Bacon, for example, explicitly ruled out supernatural or magical issues in understanding nature.
I thought we were talking about Augustine. The Renaissance is 4 to 5 hundred years after Augustine.
Probably a bad idea for you to bring it up, then.
He pointed out that the text itself made that clear. He saw the "days" of creation as categories, not literal periods of time.
When the evidence for long ages became obvious, most Christians realized that their earlier assumptions about scripture were incorrect.
Higher criticism did make it easier for people to believe in deep time.
As Augustine put it, a willingness to revise one's opinions on things not clear in scripture, when new evidence is found.
But it took most of the 1800s to argue through what the Bible actually said about creation. Now there is little confusion on what the terms mean and what the Greek construction means.
For most Christians, yes. But there remain a significant number of creationists who do not accept Genesis as it is. Fortunately, it is not a salvation issue.
Each direction of thought has been laid out. It has been well documented that for a person to believe in deep time they must treat Genesis as an allegory and the literal interpretation of Genesis describes a universe that was created in 6 days.
Augustine's work was "The Literal Meaning of Genesis." And he pointed out that a literal reading of Genesis ruled out literal days. The text itself says this.
I am good with a literal interpretation of Genesis. There is now more evidence than ever before about 6-day creation.
No, that's wrong. This is why the number of creationists is declining over time.
You seem to be treating the 20th century exigesis of creationists as if they were Scripture, they are not.
A literal interpretation of the Bible does not give a 6,000 year old Earth. It takes a good amount of exegesis and assumptions about what it means to arrive at that new doctrine.
You would need to explain how this is the case because James Ussher's methodology of how he came up with 6000 years is well documented and understood.
Most Christians do not accept it, since it requires the assumption that the Creation "week" is an actual history, which the text itself makes clear that it is not.
"Literal" would be "what it actually said." Christians generally do not accept the addition of a young Earth to scripture. They object to such unwarranted additions. So did St. Augustine:
Often, a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances, … and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, which people see as ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.
The shame is not so much that an ignorant person is laughed at, but rather that people outside the faith believe that we hold such opinions, and thus our teachings are rejected as ignorant and unlearned. If they find a Christian mistaken in a subject that they know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions as based on our teachings, how are they going to believe these teachings in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think these teachings are filled with fallacies about facts which they have learnt from experience and reason.
Reckless and presumptuous expounders of Scripture bring about much harm when they are caught in their mischievous false opinions by those not bound by our sacred texts. And even more so when they then try to defend their rash and obviously untrue statements by quoting a shower of words from Scripture and even recite from memory passages which they think will support their case ‘without understanding either what they are saying or what they assert with such assurance.’ (1 Timothy 1:7)
Yes, whether or not stars were the abode of the angels.
As you see, he didn't mention that. He made a more general argument that one should avoid putting one's own wishes into scripture and then announce them to be God's word.
But after reading through the theological exegesis of creation. I am quite sure he would align himself with 6-day creation.
He clearly did not. He wrote of an instantaneous creation, from which everything else unfolded as God intended. He thought the potential for all things was in that creation so (for example) the Earth would bring forth life, rather than God poofing it into being.
And he definitely did not believe in long ages.
The evidence for a very old Earth was not available to him. By the late 18th century, most Christians had accepted the evidence, which is of course consistent with Genesis.
So Augustine did believe that God created this universe in a short amount of time.
In an instant, actually. But as he says, he was willing to consider new evidence, since the text is not perfectly clear on this issue.
