Noah and the Ark

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by Aquila

I read Ross's book, Creation and Time. I found it to be very good and I like a lot of what he has to say. I just think that the narrative is pretty clear about describing actual days not long periods of time. Besides, science would have microscopic and simple plant life come way before the age of the "third day".

Alan Haywood's theory (Divine Fiat Theory) is that we see God, in the dateless past, speaking for six literal days. Then everything spoken begins to manifest and develop over a period of billions of years. No specific order is required, no specific time frame or outline needed. That would mean that the world around us that has been developing for billions of years is the result of six creative days of divine utterance. All things can then be said to be the result of an utterance made during a single day.

What if...

What if we were a band a struggling former slaves and captives? We have the already ancient scrolls of a ceremonial law that governed the worship in some old ruin of a temple that our grandfathers claimed was a glorious "in their day." We have a history as a people, an identity and legends of greatness creep around the campfires at night; but today we're just a mess.

Now, you have to pull everyone together and recreate that greatness. How do you begin?

Your people never were all that united behind their temple state and state religion. The old kingdom was continually wracked by civil wars and the nastiest of rebellions and intrigue. The actual worship and "religion" of the people was this polyglot of pseudo-Egyptian and Phoenician practices with the occasional outright abomination and murder thrown into the mix. It didn't square up at all with what is described in the scrolls you read; and now they've acquired a a taste of Persian and actual Babylonian ideas. Before Babylon was almost a legend itself - but now everyone's actually been there!

So what do you do? How do you bring order to this chaos? How do you give these people a hope that some ancient God their ancestors only "sort of" worshipped is really going to be among them after so humiliating a defeat? Where was God when their grandfathers were enslaved? Why were their grandfathers enslaved in the first place?