This from a CRC-Voices discussion about Genesis Cosmology responding to the attempt to re-read the Genesis cosmology in terms of our modern conception of planets and solar systems.

The irony of this approach is that in an attempt to preserve biblical literalism the items of the story that the author intended to be literal must be reinterpreted as figurative or metaphorical.

for example. Let’s imagine Moses wrote this in Genesis. Moses with his Egyptian educated cosmology inspired by God, reworking it as a polemic. For Moses the floodgates of heaven and the fountains of the deep were quite literal in letting in the cosmic deep which God parted in Genesis 1.

What your approach does is on the basis of modern scientific descriptions alter the text to make the firmament, the floodgates and the fountains of the deep all metaphorical for clouds.

But wait, it gets worse.

At least Moses’ flood is consistent because there is more than enough water in “the deep” to swallow up the earth, because the stuff of earth was ordered out of “the deep”. Moses’ story is actually very consistent with itself and “works” in a way that this non-literal metaphorical mash-up does not.

When we apply our metric to the flood story hosts of problems emerge. Where does all the water come from to flood the globe to a depth of 29,000 feet above current sea level? Clouds? Did God create extra water and then uncreate it?

The irony of this position, of trying to re-interpret Moses into a modern framework is that you are actually forced to read the text LESS literally because you’re constantly reinterpreting the furnishings of his coherent worldview to correlate to elements of our own. I first figured this out when I saw that my fundamentalist baptist mother-in-law was penciling in “corrections” in Genesis to harmonize Genesis 1 and 2. It was clear that she had a mental framework built from the text that she was reading back onto the text. That’s what we all do. The goal of exegesis is to examine our assumptions so that we can hear the text more clearly, not make the text conform to the world we have created for it. That is living under the authority of the text.

Now, do I know whether the flood was local or universal? No. I have no idea. Could be universal. Could have been more localized. Given the dearth of other flood stories something must have happened and Moses is reshaping the story to get the Egypt out of Israel. What all of this tells us about the world, about God, about living as the people of God is frankly more applicable to me as a pastor than what geologists tell me about the planet. At the same time I want them studying their geology and doing their work. Christian geologists will fiddle with this in ways I can’t.

What is clearer to me is the coherence of the text of Genesis and what it has to say based on the grammatical/historical context which IS our traditional approach to interpretation.

What organic inspiration affirms is God’s sovereignty over both creation and history. Who better than a man raised with the best education available in the ANE to write a polemic against the competing creation stories?

A lesser God looks down and says “boy that Moses just isn’t up to the task. I’ll put him in a trance and do some automatic writing through him and when he wakes up he’ll say ‘wow, that was cool, I didn’t even know I was doing it, it must be from God!”

A greater God sees far ahead to a wandering Aramean, his promised son who is a weak father, a rebel thief of a twin, his boastful gifted son of a favorite wife whose betrayal by his brothers saves the world from hunger, a genocidal god-imposter, a frightened mother and the soft spot in a daughter’s heart for a baby in a basket. To me THAT God is awesome.

Mechanical inspiration is for those who lack imagination in a truly sovereign God. pvk