Comment on SDA Darwinians compromise key church doctrines by Sean Pitman.

@krissmith777:

You wrote:

Daniel profecied an amount of 7 years in Daniel 4:25, the word עִדָּן (or iddan) is used which actually literally means “years.”(Strong’s H5732) –It actually turned out to be literal years, but using your position that Daniel is prophetic, and therefore not to be taken literally since a “day is equal to a year,” then we should wonder why this prophetic “7 years” did not turn out to be 2,520 years.

The answer is quite obvious to the candid mind. The prophecy of Daniel 4:25 was specificially in regard to Nebuchadnezzar himself… what would happen to him in particular if he did not follow the Divine warning to him personally? Obviously God was not telling Nebuchadnezzar that he would be driven from men for thousands of years since he was to be restored to his throne after his period of insanity – according to the prophecy. Obviously, this doesn’t make sense if you interpret the 7-years as being thousands of years. And, the fulfillment of the prophecy, as described by Daniel himself, after 7 literal years is an internal explanation of the prophecy.

You have to use common sense here my man.

I notice you insist on making no qualifications. — If you mean to say that it [Genesis] talks about Abraham, Noah, Jacob, and Joseph in historical terms, then I agree with you. But I do make the qualification for Genesis chapter one, as I have already pointed out that that particular chapter is written in poetic form called “parallelism” as well as “block logic.”
Link: http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/23_genesis_1.html

The parallelism of days 1-3 to 4-6 is often cited. Parallelism, however, is not all that makes up Hebrew poetry. Hebrew poetry consists of a series of couplets or triplets exhibiting complementary, climatic or antithetic parallelism e.g. in Psalm 5:1, “Give ear to my words, O Lord;”: is complemented and paralleled by “Consider my meditation.” This is clearly different from the fact that on days 1-3 God creates the environment and on days 4-6 the creatures who are to live and rule in the respective environments. One is a parallel of ideas in successive stichoi, the other a parallel of ideas which may be several verses apart.

Short of some sort of metaphysical presupposition that regards history as totally random and all order in historiography as being a result of arbitrary human imposition, I cannot see how one would ever reasonably support a proposition that an ordered description of historical events lends itself to the intretation that such a description was indended, by the author, to be taken as allegory or in any other way but a literal description of real historical events?

Again, the rest of the Genesis narrative continually supports the literal reading of the first chapter of Genesis (to include the second chapter) and the rest of the Bible also supports a literal reading of this text.

Yet, especially among evangelicals anyway, there is a willingness to accept the historicity of the patriarchal narratives even though these narratives also use parallelism. The patriarchal narratives are structured history in the same way as the earlier chapters of Genesis. They fit within a framework created by the heading “These are the generations of . . .” (Genesis 2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10; 11:27; 25:12, 19 etc.). There are clear instances of parallel structure. Thus the experiences of Isaac parallel those of Abraham:

Both Abraham and Isaac have barren wives (Genesis 15:2; 16:1; 25:21). Both lie concerning their wives (Genesis 20:2; 26:7). Both face famine in the promised land (Genesis 12:10; 26:1). Both make a covenant with the Philistines (Genesis 21:22-34; 26:26-33).

If parallelism of structure proves that a passage is not historical then the patriarchal narratives are not historical. This of course is the conclusion of many liberal exegetes, but evangelicals once more maintain an inconsistency, being willing to apply a higher-critical principle in one area of Scripture but not in another. (for further information along these lines see: Link).

This is why the vast majority of secular scholars of Hebrew, like James Barr, argue that the author of Gensis clearly intended to convey, to his readers, a literal account of true historical events. Now, these same scholars argue that the author was simply mistaken, but that’s a completely different argument from the one you’re making…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

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