DEBATE: Is Evolution Compatible with Genesis? Michael Jones vs. Dr. Marcus Ross

All right, so guys, welcome to Capturing Christianity. The reason why I'm starting this way is because we're also filming this live on YouTube. So, welcome, YouTube audience. Welcome, live audience. To, uh, I was about to say our first debate, but this is not anywhere close to our first debate. It is a debate, though, on: Is evolution compatible with Genesis?

And so tonight, we've got Dr. Marcus Ross behind me on my left. He is our young earth creationist. And Michael Jones is our old earth creationist. Let me just, uh, briefly introduce my guests. We'll get started with the debate. What happened? Did you do something funny? Oh, theistic evolutionist. Excuse me, excuse me. I know that was the atheist. Might as well be.

All right, so, Dr. [Applause] So, uh, let me, let me introduce again. Let's go. So, Dr. Marcus Ross, he's a vertebrate paleontologist, educator, and founder of Cornerstone Educational Supply. He has loved paleontology, and especially dinosaurs, since he was a kid growing up in Rhode Island. And he pursued this passion through his PhD work on a group of giant extinct marine reptiles called mosasaurs. Mosasaurs. There we go. Dr. Ross. Dr. Ross is the lead author of the college textbook, *The Heavens and the Earth: Excursions in Earth and Space Science*, and is currently completing a position essay on Adam's historicity for a forthcoming book alongside William Lane Craig, Andrew Locke, and Kenton Sparks.

Michael Jones, behind me on my right, he's the founder of Inspiring Philosophy Ministries, a Christian apologetic organization with a YouTube channel of over 250,000 followers. He has a Master's in Philosophy from the University of Arizona. Let's give it up for our two debaters. [Applause]

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So, let's get started with the debate. Let me let you know about the format for tonight, and then we'll get started with Michael giving his opening statement. So, 40 minutes of opening statements, 20 minutes each, followed by 20-minute cross-examination, 20 minutes on each side. So, total 40 minutes. 20-minute moderated dialogue. That'll be me moderating. Then 30 minutes of curated audience Q&A. We've got two microphones for Michael. Line up on this side. I'll say this again a little bit later on. Michael on this side. For Dr. Marcus Ross, you'll line up over here, so that way they're not turning their neck too hard. All right, that's it. Michael, all right, it's all you. Let me get my timer set up here. Okay. All right.

Well, thanks for coming, everyone. I'd like to thank Dr. Ross for having the debate tonight, now Capturing Christianity and this church here for hosting the debate. I appreciate it. I think it should be clear from the onset, this is not a debate that affects anyone's salvation. Both Dr. Ross and I accept all essential Christian doctrines, like an historical Adam and Eve, and we take a high view of scripture. This is a debate about how to properly interpret the first few chapters of Genesis. And just like we can disagree on how to interpret the last book, Revelation, we can walk away, have our disagreements, and not consider this an issue that affects anyone's salvation.

What I want to do is argue the position that Genesis and the theory of evolution are 100% compatible. You can affirm all essential Christian doctrines and accept the full theory of evolution. My goal is merely to show that if we interpret Genesis in its ancient Near Eastern context, we can have a consistent interpretation of Genesis that does not contradict evolution or essential Christian doctrines. So, I'll focus on what Genesis says in its context and let scripture interpret scripture.

So, let's start with the first verse of the Bible: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The young earth creationists have used this verse to say this is an absolute beginning point of our universe. But the problem is, is when Genesis is translated, our English words do not always align with what the Hebrew words meant. The English makes it sound like the original authors are advocating an absolute beginning point. But many, many Hebrew scholars as of late have put forward sound arguments. This is not actually the case. For example, Michael Heiser draws attention to Hebrew Masoretic vowel points and the wording of the Greek Septuagint. He says they do not imply Genesis 1 should contain the phrase "in the beginning" because there's a clear lack of a definite article. So, the opening line of Genesis should actually be translated as "When," not "In the beginning."

Now, this transforms the verse into a dependent clause instead of it reading as an independent clause. Now, a dependent clause would be if I said, "When I woke up," so you're expecting me to finish that sentence. An independent clause would be, "I, when I, if I said, 'In the morning, I woke up,' that's a complete sentence." So, this means verse one is really dependent on verse two: "When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void." So, in other words, the earth is already there, formless and void, when God begins his creative work.

Now, you might be thinking, "Yeah, but the Hebrew vowel points were added later." True. But Robert Holmstead from the University of Toronto says, "An absolute beginning cannot be derived from the grammar of the verse. Instead, the syntax of the verse, based on well-attested features within biblical Hebrew grammar, dictates that there were potentially multiple periods or stages to God's creative work." So, Holmstead identifies that Genesis 1:1 has a similar grammatical structure to other verses that are restrictive relative clauses. And restrictive relative clauses are dependent in nature. Without getting too complicated, what this means is they are not a complete thought. And this means Genesis 1:1 is most likely dependent on verse two and is referring to a chaotic period prior to the creation week. So, Holmstead says, "The idea Genesis 1:1 should be translated as 'in the beginning' is grammatically indefensible, period, end of story." So, grammatically speaking, Genesis 1:1 cannot mean an absolute beginning of time. Furthermore, this is the same structure we see in Genesis 2. So, it's dependent, circumstantial, main clause. We also see this in other ancient Near Eastern creation epochs like the Atrahasis, the Enuma Elish, a Syrian cuneiform tablet. J.A.S.S.A.N. even goes so far to say that this is really beyond dispute.

So, what this means is that Genesis is not giving us the absolute beginning point. And this supports an extended period of chaos prior to Genesis 1:1, after which God shows up and transforms the earth from a chaotic state to an ordered state. But what about the word "create"? Doesn't it say God "created" the heavens and the earth? Well, in English, yes. But in Hebrew, it's a little bit more vague. Dr. John Walton has written extensively on the Hebrew word *bara* and notes there are no times it necessarily means material creation out of nothing. It more likely means assigning a function, ordering, organizing. Kenneth Matthews, in his commentary, notes *bara* refers to God bringing about a new activity, not necessarily a new thing. Examples which show this are places like Psalm 51: "Create in me a clean heart." It's not about asking for a new material heart. Isaiah 65 speaks of God assigning Jerusalem to be a place of joy, not creating it out of nothing. Isaiah 43, we all know Jacob was not created out of nothing. He had parents that conceived him. Now, I'm not saying *bara* could never refer to material creation, but in no place in scripture does it necessarily mean this. Plus, there are times it cannot refer to material creation. And also, our own word for "create" doesn't necessarily mean material creation. If I said, "I create a safe home for my family," you know, I probably don't mean I've built my house from scratch, but merely that I have made my home to function safely. So, this would mean that Genesis 1 is saying that when God assigned functions or gave new activity to the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void.

However, surprisingly, the words *tohu* and *bohu* probably don't refer to that either. So, David Sumrall has had a full semantic analysis on the word *tohu*, and this conclusion is: it most likely means unproductive. Though it's used to refer to a wilderness or idols that accomplish nothing, a wasteland, people wandering aimlessly, or a desolate settlement. The context of how the word *tohu* is used seems to suggest it refers to an unproductive state or a wilderness where there is no human or ordered civilization. So, Genesis 1 only seems to be saying that when God began to create, or we're being to cause the earth to function properly, it previously was not in something like an unproductive wilderness.

So, my argument is simply that Genesis 1 is not an account of the material origins of the universe. It is an account of God assigning functions or giving new activity to the cosmos for how they're going to operate in this cosmic temple. Now, I could go through Genesis 1 and show how this is the case with each day, the issue with light, or the issue on day four. But a simpler way is to show how it correlates to Jeremiah 4. So, in this passage, Jeremiah is explaining what happened to the northern kingdom of Israel and it's a warning to Judah. The same thing is going to happen to them if they don't shape up. But look at what he does. He says the northern kingdom is *tohu* and *bohu*, where it's formless and void. There's no light, there's no man, no birds of the air, no vegetation. Do any of you actually think there was no light in the northern kingdom of Israel, or that it had become formless and void in a material sense? Even the very conservative scholar John MacArthur acknowledges the language is very similar to what we see in Genesis 1. This is not about the material annihilation of the land of northern Israel. Jeremiah is using this language to say the kingdom was once productive and is now chaotic. So, if the same language is in Genesis 1, but in the reverse, this would imply God is simply taking a chaotic planet, ordering it properly. In other words, if the language of Genesis 1 is used in Jeremiah 4 metaphorically to describe the collapse of a kingdom, not material annihilation, it can also be used in the same way in Genesis 1, but in reverse, implying there was no material creation, but a time when God brought new activity to the cosmos or made it function properly. As John Walton says, "Days one through three, which concerned the three core functions of the cosmos—time, weather, or fecundity—would consequently be viewed as not just activity, but establishing the control attributes of the cosmos, which states four through six could be seen as determining the destinies of the functionaries within the cosmos."

So, the basic argument is that Genesis 1 is a cosmic temple inauguration. God is simply establishing the cosmos as now as temple and ordering things to properly function. This is why things are divided into seven days. The use of seven was a typical cultural symbol for the inauguration of something like a temple. The construction of the Tabernacle was completed in seven stages. The ordination of a priest, seven days. Solomon's temple was constructed in seven years and dedicated to God during a seven-day festival in the seventh month. And even his speech was divided into seven petitions. We also, uh, find this motif outside of the Bible. So, the point is, the seven days in Genesis seem to favor a more functional understanding of the whole passage. The most likely explanation is the text is simply establishing a God entered the chaotic universe, gave it new activity, gave new activity to various creations as part of setting up the whole cosmos as his temple.

Now, I hope to get more into that in the cross-examination area. We'll come back to that later. But what about death before the fall? Young earth advocates always bring this up to attack theistic evolutionists. But the problem is, there is no place in the Bible that says physical death necessarily did not exist before the fall. Talk about Romans 5:12 is brought up. But if we read right after this, Paul says the death he is talking about reigned from Adam to Moses. It's unlikely this is physical death, since people still died after Moses. What this is about is when we spiritually died. Humanity was exiled from Eden. It was like a promised land kind of. Moses brought the children of Israel back into the promised land before the presence of God. Later in the chapter, Paul contrasts life with the grace found in Christ and death with condemnation. Are we supposed to believe life in verse 18 is about Jesus giving us physical life? Well, no, it's when he makes us spiritually alive. So, this is about when humanity spiritually fell, not when physical death entered the world.

What about 1 Corinthians 15:22? "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive." Well, this isn't an issue for theistic evolution, since Paul is using the same context we have Genesis 3 for what it means when we all die in Adam, which is nothing more than being cut off from the Tree of Life. Let's remember what Genesis 3 says. It never says Adam's body was changed from immortal to mortal. God curses the ground, not them, and then just exiles them so they cannot have access to the Tree of Life. So, this would mean that to die in Adam, that what it means is that our first priest failed and broke the covenant. We lost access to the tree that granted us immortality, compared to how we are all made alive in Christ. He is the priest who succeeded and has given us all access to immortality in the resurrection to come. The evidence just indicates Adam was always mortal and was always, and he was only allowed to be immortal by eating from the Tree of Life. Notice what Paul does in 1 Corinthians 15. In explaining Christ's resurrected body, he compares it to Adam's body, which is the type of body we all have now: corruptible, mortal, must be changed to the new body we're going to receive, which Christ has: immortal and imperishable. So, Paul seems to teach that Adam did not have an immortal body like Christ. Thus, as Joshua John Van, he says, "Adam was created mortal and needed the change to inherit the kingdom of God like we will."

Now, as I said, I believe in a historical Adam and Eve. Essentially, I would argue Genesis is more about when Adam and Eve were elected to be the first priest of creation, just like God elected Abraham or Israel. The same would apply to them. In fact, Michael Heiser has pointed out the language of Genesis 1 regarding the *imago Dei* is more verb-dominated. It's calling man to image God or to be his imagers. Heiser also notes the language there, it's very general in speaking of mankind. He says, "The human beings of Genesis 1 are not in a garden in Eden. There is no Garden of Eden in Genesis 1. The command to subdue the earth would speak of the whole earth wherever humans are, not Eden, which is nowhere in view. Genesis 2 describes a distinct, separate creation of two humans. Again, the process is put in pre-scientific or supernatural terms, so it does not give us a scientific perspective on how this happened." So, in reality, Adam and Eve are not even on the scene when God gives the *imago Dei* to humanity. They don't show up until Genesis 2, which I would argue is a sequel to Genesis 1. Remember, the Genesis 2:4, we see the *toledoth* formula. These are the generations of. This phrase occurs several times in Genesis, and it's typically given with the name of a person and that person's son or descending genealogies. The phrase introduces what comes next. It's like a chapter marker. This is the next thing that happens. So, using the same logic in Genesis 2, this introductory phrase refers to what came after God brought the heavens and the earth in Genesis 1. It's not a recap or a second contradictory account. In other words, the story is picking up where Genesis 1 left off. God made the whole cosmos his temple, man his image, and now he hones in on a specific area, Eden, and transforms the place, uh, to be his, to be a temple for him, where the first priest of creation would meet with him. Based on the ordering of Genesis 1 and 2, humanity already existed before Adam and Eve were brought onto the scene and were either created or elected at this point. But I would say we'd have descended from these two people. How does that work? Well, Joshua Swamidass, who's here with us today, put out a book which, in my view, has put the final linchpin in making the case Christianity and evolution are compatible. He's demonstrated through computer models and genetic studies that, uh, everyone by 180 would have a common ancestor that only lived a few thousand years before. This can be shown. All people alive today would be genealogically connected to one couple in the Middle East just a few thousand years ago. So, everyone alive today, due to cross-cultural interbreeding, are all related and share a common ancestor. So, because of this, we can hold to an evolutionary account and believe we all descended from Adam and Eve genealogically speaking. Now, this obviously does not mean that every human that existed descended from Adam and Eve. But I don't think scripture claims this. And the Bible does leave open the possibility there could have been other humans outside of the garden that Adam and Eve's children were allowed to interact and marry with.

Now, the Bible also indicates creation was not in a state of perfection before sin. Notice in Genesis 1:28, humanity is called to subdue creation. Joshua John Vaney, in his dissertation, notes that these terms in Hebrew are very harsh. They're used to refer to war, conquest, enslavement, trampling underfoot. If this is about when Adam and Eve were made kings over creation, it's very weird for them to call to make a war conquest on the earth if it's already perfect. No. So, ask yourself, if God made everything perfect in Genesis 1, why is he telling humanity to go out and subdue creation? It was in a state of perfection, should not need to be subdued. This implies it was not, and humanity was elected by God to subdue creation in his name, bring the idea of Eden to the whole planet. Young earth advocates often bring up the fact that God says his creation is "very good" at the end of Genesis 1. It was good, but it can be good without being perfect. This same phrase shows up in places like Jeremiah 24:2-3 to refer to figs. I'm sure they were very tasty, but I don't think they were in a state of perfection. Jews in Judges 18:11 refer to the land of Canaan, which was rampant, it was sent, and it was not perfect. If it was just referring to the land itself, we would be hard-pressed to say that at this point, the land of Canaan was in a state of perfection. Likewise, God can say about Noah in Genesis 6, he was "blameless and upright," without it actually meaning he was literally perfect and lacked sin. It refers to his moral character in contrast to the wicked generation of that time. We don't have to take it hyper-literally. So, essentially, God calling his creation "very good" in Genesis 1 does not mean it was perfect. It means it was good, but still needed to be subdued in many ways, given the context is likely referring to everything is now functioning properly in the cosmos.

Now, notice I primarily can rely on what scripture says. I can let scripture speak for itself. We don't have to abandon any core doctrines on this view. We can accept an historical Adam and Eve. God made the first covenant with them, and at some point in the past, they broke the covenant, and sin entered the world. Remember, as Paul says in Romans 5:13, "sin is not counted where there is no law." But sin about it anyway. So, there really could not have been sin counted until the covenant was given to Adam and Eve. So, sin entered the world on my view. We spiritually died. Christ came to redeem us from our sin and offer us real physical immortality, immortality in the resurrection to come. But nothing here in Genesis would be concerned with the age of the earth or how humans physically got here. We can let what some early church fathers refer to as the 67th book of the Bible, which is nature, inform us on that. In my view, scripture and science are not in contradiction because they are speaking of entirely different subjects and concerns. There is no reason to abandon what mainstream science says about our physical origins.

Okay, now perhaps after all this, you're not convinced. You may want to hold to a young earth or a different interpretation. Fair enough. But remember, my aim tonight is to not to show you this is the way you have to interpret Genesis. I'm only showing there's a way you can interpret Genesis to where it's compatible with the theory of evolution by simply showing they're talking about two entirely different areas that don't really overlap that much. There's a lot more I could say on this, and I'm sure there's a lot of questions, objections. I hope we get into there's more I could say on Genesis 1. I'd like to get into, but this will give you a general idea of what I'm advocating for. I don't want to overload you too much in this first opening statement. So, if you want more, on my YouTube channel, I have a Genesis 1 to 11 series where I go into this in more detail. Thank you very much. [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

All right, so now we're going to have Dr. Marcus Ross go up and give his opening statement. And just give him a little bit of time to get set up as well. Start the timer now. Huh, tough crowd. Seriously. Uh, why are we getting set up? I will make one corrective. So, I said earlier that we were going to do 40 total minutes of cross-examination. That was false. We're going to be doing 20 minutes total, so 10 minutes each. I thought that was going to be longer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I mean, I can make it work if you want. We can argue as long as we want, but, yeah, still. I'd rather agree. It'd be nice. So, Dr. Ross, whenever you begin, I will start my timer.

All right, one moment. You're right. Ready to go here. All right, let's make sure we got that working. Good. All right. To go. Yep. Well, thank you very much. Thanks to all of you for coming. Thank you, Cameron, for inviting me, uh, to this delightful event. And thank you, Michael, very much for your willingness to participate in a debate with me and make my case tonight. I want to make it very, very clear that our question is not, "Can a Christian hold to evolution?" That answer is an unequivocal yes. And Michael, I'll say, I had to work hard to find a picture of you smiling. I mean, so rather, the question that we are to address today is, "Is evolution compatible with scripture?" That's a different sort of question. And to properly answer that question, we need to know a few things. First, we need a working definition of what evolution actually is. And we also need to assess what the scriptures say about creation's history. Once we have those, we can address the question itself.

So, what is evolution? Well, evolution itself is really, simply put, the common ancestry of all life over geologic time. Now, note that my definition here is a historical definition of evolution. It's not a mechanistic one. There are many ideas about how evolution may or may not be working, but all the proposed mechanisms are seeking to explain the same historical claim, and that is the universal ancestry of life over time. Let's put this into context. This is what's called a geologic column. It's a representation of the earth's geologic history based on observations from around the world. I'm a paleontologist, and I am a young earth creationist. That puts me as an odd duck in many categories. But what I can say is that I can attest that the disagreements that I might have with my colleagues about earth's history do not stem from the observable facts that form the basis of the construction of this particular column. The rocks are found in certain layers, fossils are found in them, and from those observational recognitions, this column has been built. Rather, my differences are about the interpretation of those facts, not the facts themselves.

Now, ancient earth perspectives on the left side of this hold that the fossil record is a product of the dead remains of life's development over billions of years of time. Well, young earth perspectives on the right are ones that assign these perspectives primarily to the fossil record of Noah's flood. So, a key question then relates to why is it, oops, sorry, we went a little quick there. Why is it that there are so many dead organisms, right, including many fossil and modern humans, in the record long before Adam? Are these deaths a consequence of Adam's sin, or are they simply part of God's very good creation long before he made our forbearers? With our understanding that evolution is about the common ancestry of life and over geologic time, and that this view requires that animal and human death occur before Adam and Eve for hundreds of millions of years, we can then turn our attention to scripture.

Now, we know this is the basic layout. Now, to understand scripture well, the faithful who went before us have developed reasonable and reliable principles for how to handle God, God's word. Good interpretation requires that we understand the context of a passage before mouthing off about what it just might mean. It requires that we recognize that clear passages of scripture help us to interpret those places that are difficult. And we apply a good Reformation technique called the *sensus literalis*, which means that we understand the styles of the literature we're looking at, the genre, the figures of speech, and idioms, so that we can understand the text on its own terms. We don't read it wouldn't we in English, the text is trying to tell us something on its own.

Now, when we apply these principles, we find that Genesis 1-11 is primarily composed of historical narratives and genealogies. Okay, but how are we sure that those are the right assignments to these types of literature? Well, our first clue involves the verb tenses that are used. Genesis 1 through 11 is characterized by heavy use of what are called *wayyiqtol* verbs. These are the verbs that move us through time and are often translated as "and so," "and then." So, a couple of examples here from Genesis, and we get the feeling, "Oh yeah, this is what happens when we're in a narrative passage." Now, narratives come in a variety of forms. These are historical narratives, in part, because we know that they lack markers for things such as allegory or parable. Right, Jesus spoke a parable to him, and he gives a narrative, but we're told this isn't really something that literally happened. It's different in Genesis. Moreover, we see that the Genesis narratives are anchored to genealogies, which in the Bible never include fictitious individuals. Moreover, the genealogies lead us into patriarchal history in a seamless form, as William Lane Craig has mentioned in his book. And lastly, the people and the events of Genesis 1 through 11 are firmly attested elsewhere in the Old and New Testaments as being historical. So, the picture is pretty clear. This is history that's being presented.

Now, from this set of historical narratives, we can then build out a timeline as Genesis 1 through 11, at least, is presenting it. Now, the reason that this all seems pretty familiar and pretty easy to remember and clear to us is that this is the clear teaching of the text, both at its surface and, as we'll see, when we plumb its depths. Now, with this brief overview of the text and guided by interpretive methods that are solid and reliable, we can address our question: Is evolution compatible with scripture, particularly with Genesis?

Now, this question is somewhat complicated because there are many different perspectives within theistic evolution, both historically and among contemporary advocates. Right, my friend Josh Swamidass is here. We just heard from Bill Craig, and they differ with each other on some of these perspectives, and they also differ with other theistic evolutionists about perspectives. And so, there's a big diversity over here. It's a large conversation. Now, nonetheless, there are certain commonalities, and theistic evolution, broadly defined, faces a wide array of biblical challenges. I'll only touch on a few of them here, and no doubt others will be coming up in our Q&A, because Michael is very busy typing behind me. No, that's got me nervous. Hear that tap, tap, tap. Now, these are only the biblical challenges. There are scientific issues as well. And in my breakout session, I advocated a position where the fossil record was produced both rapidly and recently, rather than gradually over eons of time.

Now, our biblical challenges, I'm going to select a few. And the first of these is going to concern Adam and Eve as the first and only humans of creation, not just our parents with people outside the garden, for example, as Michael had mentioned. So, we're going to see that in Genesis and the New Testament are in full agreement on the point of Adam and Eve as the first and only humans, and that the case for Genesis 2 taking place after Genesis 1, quite frankly, is quite weak. Now, there are numerous indicators from Genesis that Adam and Eve are the same as the people who are created in Genesis chapter 1. I've listed several of them here, and we're going to look at a couple. In Genesis 2:5, we're told that "there was no man to till the ground." This phrase "no man" is a statement of universal negation, much like Bill Craig had just talked about. That is, there is no one at all. Importantly, the narrative here is not yet set in Eden, nor in the garden, but instead, this is a general statement of the world's condition. There are no people. A few verses later, the "no man" phrase is mirrored by the statement that "there was no helper to be found for him among the animals." Adam needed something different. Jack Collins here has noted sagely that God's statement, "It is not good that the man should be alone," should jar the reader, because after reading the days of creation where everything was "very good," yet here God declares that something is "not good." Clearly, Collins notes, we are still within the sixth day, and the situation is remedied by the creation of the helper that completes the man, "so that male and female he created them." Collins also notes, I might add, that the *toledoth* of Genesis 2:4 is structured to actually combine Genesis 1 and 2, and not to introduce 2 as a subsequent story. And I do hope that we'll be able to explore that later on, which leads us to the fact that Adam is the person who names his helper, and he names her *isha*, Hebrew for woman. He identifies her as a new class of human, distinct from himself as *ish*, which is man. Eve is not simply a woman; Eve is a woman. Now, a few chapters later, we find that Adam's genealogy blends elements of Genesis 1 and 2 together to present him and Eve as the same as the humans that are created in Genesis chapter 1. So, here is the passage, and here it is again with the terms of Genesis chapter 1 in blue and those from Genesis chapter 2 in green. It is clear from the weaving together of these two sets of passages that Moses constructed this *toledoth* of Adam's *toledoth* in order to communicate that Adam and Eve are the people created on the sixth day of creation week, and they are the first humans of all time.

Now, turning briefly to the New Testament, we see universal agreement with Moses on these points across both the Gospels and the Epistles. A few of those are shown up here, and we're going to look specifically at Matthew 19:4. And as we do, Jesus is responding to the Pharisees concerning their challenge over whether it's right for a man to be able to divorce his wife for any reason. Note that Jesus does the same thing that Moses does. He blends elements of Genesis chapter 1 with Genesis chapter 2 to bring the unity of these chapters. Notice also that Jesus's response is, "Haven't you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?" So, he quotes Genesis 1:1, and this lets us know that Jesus is placing the creation of Adam and Eve in the beginning, that is, from the beginning of creation, placing us in the creation week on the sixth day, with additional details given from Genesis chapter 2.

Now, another, uh, we have a few other things that we can do, but I'll have to move on. A second biblical challenge to theistic evolution stems from the fact that, from what we just saw, that is, Adam and Eve are the first of all humans. The second challenge, relating off of that, jumping from it, is that their sin brought both physical and spiritual death to all people, and that this sin produced massive reverberations across the creation. Again, we will see unity in the Old and New Testament with regard to these points. So, in Genesis 2:17, Adam is warned that when he eats the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, "he will surely die." Now, because Adam does not immediately die upon eating the fruit, many have posited that the death that is foretold in 2:17 is spiritual death only. This conclusion stems from misunderstanding of the Hebrew phrase "you shall surely die," which is "die, you die." The misunderstanding comes from an understanding or the thought that this is a statement of immediacy rather than one of certainty. Because it is a certainty phrase, when it is used in the 12 other instances where it is found in the Old Testament, including a couple of passages in Genesis. When Adam and Eve partake of the fruit, they will certainly die. And they will die physically. They are ejected from the garden precisely to bar them from the Tree of Life, so that they are certainly going to die. God stays that execution for a time, why? So that he can begin the process of redemption. But in Genesis 2:5, 5, Adam returns to the dust with the despondent refrain, "and he died." Paul's understanding of the fall, then, is unsurprising in the light of Genesis 2 and 3. As the New Testament scholar Thomas Schreiner puts it very well, that "it would be a mistake to drive a wedge between these two conceptions of physical and spiritual death." Note, he says here, "physical death is the consequence of spiritual death, so that the former stands as the concrete emblem, the emblem and concrete instantiation of the latter." The reason that we die spiritually is because of the physical death as well. They're inextricably tied together.

Now, God's judgment is not limited to Adam and Eve. He curses the serpent above all animals, indicating that the damage from this fall extends further out into all the creatures. And the realm of dominion itself is corrupted. The curse on the ground brings toil, hardship, and pain to the entirety of the realm of work. And what are the two areas of human existence? Dominion and working the ground. This is a cosmic fall, affecting everything related to us, not just ourselves, but the world around us. This argument is also seen in Romans chapter 8. The created order is fundamentally broken, and it groans with us in visible and tangible ways. We all know this at our core. Far from limiting the effects of sin and death to humans, Paul, writing in Romans 8, indicates that the cosmos itself is suffering because God subjected it to frustration and futility when he responded to Adam and Eve's trespass. This stands fully against theistic evolution's view of a groaning and death-filled world being "very good." It's not good. God knows it, and his redemption of humanity will bring about the restoration of our broken world. Likewise, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15 that death, and that is physical death, is the last enemy to be destroyed. Why? Because Jesus's physical and bodily resurrection overcomes our own sentence of physical and bodily death. Resurrection theology is tied to the fall, and this was introduced at Adam's trespass. But Hans Madueme reminds us that there is good news: "The fall is midwife to the gospel."

Now, the history presented in Genesis 1 through 11 holds as we move forward through the Bible. The authors of our scriptures all have a consistent view because the Lord our God is one. But theistic evolution's history differs sharply from the biblical narrative. Theistic evolution places humans of our own species and others prior to Adam, and their physical deaths supposedly are unconnected to Adam's sin. Some of those deaths, I might add, are quite disturbing. Now, this holds whether one views Genesis 1 as a long period of creation, or whether one says, as Michael is alluding to the possibility, that maybe there was a creation before and Genesis 1 is functional or what have you. No matter to the, to the timeline presented here.

Now, as I said, some of this is a little bit grim. Two thousand years before Adam, a group of 26 people were executed along a lakeshore in Kenya. Some of them were bound, some of them were shot point-blank with arrows, and one of them was a pregnant woman. Their bodies were dumped and left aside, covered by the sediments of the lake. Going back a little bit further in time, you can see a group of Neanderthals in Spain who were also executed, and their bodies dumped down a shaft, now known as Sima de los Huesos, the Pit of Bones. Excalibur is the name of the stone hand axe, the single weapon found amongst the bodies. And the skull there that is shown is, as far as we know, the oldest direct evidence of, uh, interpersonal murder in the fossil record. Or consider the calculated evil that is found in Gran Dolina, Spain, not far from Sima de los Huesos, or the bodies of several children and teenagers of *Homo antecessor* were found. These children were kidnapped, murdered, and eaten by cannibals. Cut marks on the bones made by stone tools are a testament to the butchering of these children for their meat. Animal bones were also found in the cave, leading the researchers to conclude that the cannibalism displayed here was deliberate, not an act of desperation. So, what do we say about this? Is this the morally neutral work of pre-Adamic hominins? Or are murder and cannibalism not wicked? And if wicked, then sinful? And yet, Romans 5 reminds us that sin cannot be in the world when Adam is not. Theistic evolution declares that these people and these heinous events must be "very good" because they're before Adam and Eve. This is God's good creation. There's something wrong. I can see it in your face. You don't like that.

Third for tonight are a number of biblical challenges that relate to Noah's flood. I'm going to have to skim through these for sake of time, but I hope that we can explore them a bit more during the Q&A. These problems arise because theistic evolution generally, and Michael's presentation here in particular, reject a universal flood. Now, returning to the geological column, I can see why. Because of the commitment to an extremely ancient earth and death before Adam, theistic evolutionists, many old earth creationists, and my secular, non-believing colleagues look for the most recent sediments on earth. They're basically looking for the dirt under our feet and conclude that at the top of this column, there's no evidence for the flood. And I agree with them. If you look at the dirt around our feet, there's no evidence for the for the flood. However, the, the situation changes if you're willing to look at the rocks below that dirt. And I'll discuss that again tomorrow in my breakout session. Here, my focus remains on comparing the biblical text to evolution's proposed history. Now, I presented a scholarly review of the textual and scientific evidences for a worldwide flood in Zondervan's *Dictionary of Christianity and Science*, and I'm going to look at three of those issues here: universal terms in, uh, the, the Noahic account, the parallels between the flood and creation, and the parallels between Noah and Adam.

The impressive density of universal terms in the flood narrative tips us off to its universal nature. Here are the 60-some odd instances of the Hebrew word *kol*, which is translated as "all," "every," or "everything." There's also a few other things like "only" and "none" up over there. These constant and repetitive inferences impress upon the reader that indeed, "all flesh was destroyed," and "all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered," with no relief anywhere on earth. This destruction must be global because not only humans, but all animals, birds, and creatures along the ground were killed. Everything was wiped out. Now, the universality of the flood is also attested by many parallels to the creation account that we can see between Adam and Noah. This is because the purpose of the flood is to reduce the entire creation to ruin and begin it afresh. Genesis 8 in particular here is astonishing in the way that it follows through thematically the Genesis 1 account. Let me check out a couple of these things. I mean, can you see what God is up to? You see how Moses is showing us the entire cosmos must be started over again, starting from a water-covered earth, just like it was in the beginning. God is once again making all things new. The universal scope of the flood is all the more apparent when we see the numerous, uh, parallels and contrasts between Noah and Adam. Noah is the second Adam, and from his children, all the nations of the earth arise. Indeed, Noah is in fact superior to Adam because he is faithful.

All right, with that, let me just say this last concluding remark because I do want to end on saying thanks, right? I submit that, um, let's see, sorry, just make sure. So, is evolution compatible with scripture? I think the answer is no. From Moses and Jesus to Peter and Paul, it seems that the Bible is making a unified statement here. I think that Genesis through Revelation have stood in resolute harmony in providing a consistent historic perspective as a young earth, a singular source for humanity in Adam and Eve, and a global flood at the time of Noah. And this consistency is one that we can see both when we look at the, uh, the Bible for the first time, and even after we've spent years searching out its riches. So, thank you very much. [Applause]

All right, so now we're going to move into a time of cross-examination. And as I mentioned, the corrective, we're going to do a total of 20 minutes, so 10 minutes for Michael cross-examining Dr. Ross, and then 10 minutes the other way. So, let's begin with 10 minutes. And Michael, try to stick to questions. And I'm going to ask the same for you, Dr. Ross. So, questions for the other person. We'll try to stick to that. So, uh, let me get my timer ready. And when you start your first question, I'll start my timer. Good. Go ahead.

All right, uh, thank you for that. Appreciate that very much. Uh, so you mentioned in Genesis, the flood account, the use of the Hebrew *kol* implies universality. Is that correct? It can. Do you, what about Genesis 2:9 where it says, "The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens." Do you think the fear of every animal, including my cat, is upon him humans? Like, do you think that implies universality as well? A general principle, yeah. So, he's a general. And your cat does fear you, I believe. I mean, he loves you. And because fear is not something that is always fear and trembling. Fear is a reverence. And in all, we fear the Lord, not simply because we are worried that he will destroy us, but when we come to know him through Jesus Christ, we still fear the Lord in reverence, love, and awe. I hope your cat does that. I don't think my cat has any reverence for me, let's be honest. Uh, I want to at least don't fear the cat. That could be the wrong way. Do you, in Genesis 8:9, it says, "The dove found no place to set its foot, for the water was still on the face of the whole earth." Whole earth, yeah. Well, Genesis 8:5 says, "Tops of mountains were seen." Yeah. So, how could the water be on the face of the whole earth if they can see tops of mountains? Yeah, the answer for that relies on the context about Genesis 8 that I was just showing. Remember how Genesis 8 is paralleling the creation account? So, when the mountains rise, that is paralleling, uh, paralleling the third day of creation, and the waters of the earth are not yet in the...

seas where they ought to be. So the waters covering the face of the earth is an indication that the waters are not where they should be in the seas. They are still over the land itself. So you're reading that a little too woodenly here of saying, "Oh, because there's mountains, the water's not covering the earth." No, the water's all over the earth. The mountains are rising, the flood is going down, but there's still no place for the dog to go. But you would agree it's not hyper-literal. There's still land that's seen, correct? Like mountains or land. Would you agree? Yeah. Okay. But also the water is over the earth, correct? So that, that's exactly what the text is telling us. Not the whole earth. No. Well, the whole earth as far as there's water everywhere and there's peaks and mountains that are showing up. Okay, I'm going to move on. I want to talk about Genesis 1 some more. So you believe, uh, seven literal days? So day one was one day, evening and morning. Day two, evening, morning. So classic question, why was the sun, if the sun was not created until day four, what is causing evening and morning? What is the earth rotating around so that there's an evening and a morning without a sun? There light. Does light exist in our universe without a source? If God wants it to. So there's just light somewhere floating around. Is there another light source that's causing evening and morning? We don't know, right? The Bible simply tells us, God says, "Let there be light." So he created some kind of light, and he doesn't gather that light together into something like the sun until day four. So then there's some sort of other evening and morning. It's evening and morning is defined as a condition in which the earth is experiencing light and dark. Wherever that light came from, we have light and dark, that makes evening and morning. Okay, so I mean, is that a problem for, for God to create light before he makes a sun? Sorry, just questions from Michael. So my question is, like, is, like, if we know evening and morning is directly caused by the sun, why would we expect it to be there, not to be a sun there? Because we know that's dictated. Evening and mornings are dictated by the fact that the earth rotates around the sun. Evening and mornings are dictated in Genesis 1 by the fact that there is light and dark. The fact that the sun comes in later is a way of de-prioritizing the sun, uh, in cosmology. Just light with no source, though? Correct. We have light from some source. We just don't know what it is. Okay. Would that be adding an additional light source that the text, that the Bible does not speak of? Because it's just as light, generally speaking, whatever the source of light is, God created the light. Okay, so I made white and later on that light became the sun. So you mentioned pretty much what the text tells us. You believe Genesis 2 is a recap of Genesis Day 6? Correct. Yeah. Do you believe, uh, that the Hebrews drew a lot from the creation account for, like, the Sabbath, for example? Like, they got the Sabbath from the fact that God rested on the seventh day? Correct. In part. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, God seems to say that in the Ten Commandments. Do you think they would get other things from the creation account, such as? Okay, well, Benjamin Kilker, uh, says that I don't think they got him from the creation account. No. Do you believe Adam was, like, a priest of creation? Like a priest in some sense, even if he was the first one? Adam has a, has a priestly role, function, sort of thing. I mean, it's a, it's a comparison. Do you believe the little biblical priesthood looked back to Adam as, like, the first priest in a sense? So Benjamin Kilker's got an interesting argument. He says, read together with Genesis 1, the act of appointment implicitly dates to the eighth day, which links to the appointment of priests in Leviticus 9:1. So, in other words, in the Levitical law, a pre-, a priest appointment happened on the eighth day. If Genesis 2 is a sequel, Adam's appointment happens on the eighth day. Would that not align with scripture, make a more coherent account? Oh, so, uh, so Adam was created on the eighth day? I would say possibly. Asking the clarification question, I would say, yeah, based on the implicit understanding of Genesis 2 being a sequel. So that means 2 is the eighth day. But it's never said to be the eighth day. Well, it's implied because they got rest on the seventh day and then picks back up if the land of Eden on the thing. All right, it's an argument. Okay. Interesting. Okay. Appreciate that. Uh, you mentioned, um, First Corinthians 15, Adam is the first human, time and time again. My question is, is Jesus the last human? He is the last in terms of, he is the ultimate, yes. But is he the last literal physical human? He's the last Adam because he is able to do what Adam did not, right? You're able to help us to attain eternal life and joy with, with God. So Adam and Christ are set up in a special category. Adam being the first of the special category, not necessarily Christ. So Christ being the last human does not imply he is literally the last human. Why would that imply? Why would you use that verse to say that Adam is definitely the first human if the same language is not designed to play Christ as the last physical human? Okay, so, so the question might be, put it this way, why does Adam have to be the first human and not simply an archetype? Well, all first things end up being archetypes. Adam as the first human being is going to be an archetype, and he's also going to be the first person. Paul's theology is very, very consistent when you look at him from Acts to Romans, First Corinthians to Letters to Timothy, um, and you look especially also at the way that Paul's theology influences the book of Luke, right? Because Luke wrote Acts with a lot of work from Paul. And when we take a look at that, Paul's theology is really built around Adam as the first of all human beings. Acts 17: "From one man God made every nation of men and appointed the places and the times where they would live." And that is a clear allusion to Adam, and he's going back to Adam and talking about that, not mentioning the name Adam because he's talking to a bunch of Greeks who haven't read Hebrew scriptures, they don't know this. So when we take a look at that type of argument in Acts, when you see that argument in Romans, when you see that argument in First Corinthians, reading Paul in some other way, as for example, William Lane Craig has tried to do in his book, Quest for Historical Adam, results in a rather, if you're trying to parse out, oh, it could have been this way or this way, this, it's all Paul. We don't want to read them schizophrenically. I got to move on. Can you clarify on what you mean when it says "they shall surely die"? Can you quickly clarify what you mean by that? Yeah, mote to moot. So when, "in the day that you eat of it," that's, uh, "in the day" is the Hebrew construct, beyond means of "when," uh, or sorry, "of the day," and it's basically an idiom of "when." So, "when you eat of this, tamut, dying, you will die." So that phrase, "mo tamut," is used 13 times in the Old Testament, and every single time it is an indictment of certainty. A great example of where this is given and death does not follow immediately can be found in First Kings 2, right? So you would agree that it's basically an absolute infinitive coupled with a finite verb? Robert Alter, Walton translated as "doomed to die." Would you agree with that? Yeah. Okay. So it doesn't mean, so it can refer to physical death, but it's just not going to happen that day. It can happen later on. Oh, but it is physical death. I agree. When, when you get "moat to moot," I agree. How did, how does God make that sentence though? Like, he doesn't. Does he change their bodies to make them mortal? Is there any indication? Kicks them out of the garden, right? Right. And what was access to the Tree of Life? Okay, that is the only thing that made Adam and Eve immortal. I don't know. But we do know that if they got access to the tree, such as the fruit of the tree of the, no, of life, then they would be able to have immortality. Last question, I guess. I have Romans 8. Where does it say, where does it mention Adam's sin is what, subject creation to fertility? Oh, well, it's an allusion. So there's not a direct reference. So maybe it could have happened prior to that, like Genesis 1:28. Again, we're talking about Paul in his very consistent theology about where sin comes from and where pain comes from and where death comes from, and he always roots that in Adam. You have to ask the question. But he doesn't in this verse, though. Correct. Right, because Paul's not always just going to spell out exactly what you want. He's going to make allusions. This is how language works. Um, and so in Romans chapter 8, what you've got is, "the creation was subject to frustration, futility, etc., by him who subjected it." So who subjected it? Well, I think the implication would be God. Wouldn't you agree? Okay. So when did God subject creation to futility? Why would I argue based on Genesis 1:28 prior to that? I'm sorry, based on Genesis 1:28 prior to that? One, uh, 1:28 prior to that, because he calls humanity to subdue creation. It already needs subduing at that point. Oh, that's good. We'll get to talk about subdue, because there's something really going on in Genesis 1 with that. Okay. Yeah, that's time. Yeah, let's go ahead and switch. So now, questions from Dr. Ross. Well, likewise, thank you. Uh, you, uh, Mike, you always give just really, really good, solid presentations. They're styled well, you're an excellent speaker. And so, you know, coming to an event like this, like, I, I know what I'm up against, and it's, it's tough. Oh, you're too kind. Well, just buttering you up. Questions only, please. Sorry. You reset the timer if you want to. All right, so, um, Genesis chapter 1, verse 1. You, uh, cite Michael Heiser and Homestead saying that this is an a dependent clause that is dependent on Genesis chapter, uh, sorry, verse two. And yet you also favor Walton's, um, functional view. You realize that those authors are not in agreement with one another about how to take Genesis? I'm aware that Walton translates as "in the beginning." I don't agree with him on that. I agree with that when he talks about the days. That's where I agree with him. But with Genesis 1:1, I don't agree with him there. Okay. Do you, do you realize that Walton translates it as "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" because his functional cosmology requires him to do that? I think within his specific framework, yes. But I don't think I have to take all of his framework there. I can take parts of it. Ah, that's going to be, oh, it's an interesting, interesting approach there. So you quoted Matthews, and that's really interesting about "baraq" because you mentioned that he says, you know, "baraq" doesn't always have to mean physical creation. I agree. Are you aware that he believes "baraq" does mean creation ex nihilo in Genesis 1? I am aware. But again, that's, uh, something he has on the table. Okay. So you quoted him in order to support your idea that "baraq" would mean other things without following through his detailed excursion about why "baraq" means creation ex nihilo in Genesis 1:1. I'm basically saying, look, this guy even admits this is not necessary for a new material creation. It can refer to new activity. So he may give these other arguments, I don't agree with. But here, I'm only saying, look, even Matthews will say, "Hey, this can refer to new activity." Matthews is simply saying that the word "baraq" can have a range of meanings. Right. But he then says the context of Genesis 1 dictates that meaning because context dictates. So this sounds like it's in a guilt by association. I can agree with certain scholars here. No, no, no. Entirely. In this case, it's a question of scholarship because you're presenting Matthews as if it's part of an agreement text with you. And yet 13 pages later, he's saying the exact opposite of what you're saying. You can do with the text in that point. So, is, is Matthew saying it can refer to new activity? Yes. Okay. That's all I'm saying. I did not say he agrees with my entire interpretation. No, but he definitely makes the point that it means creation ex nihilo. And, uh, you're putting him, I think, and I think he supports what you're saying. I think he's adding his modern context, and there's nothing in Genesis 1 that would necessarily imply that. Quick reminder to try to stick to questions. All right. Uh, so let's see. Tofu about you. You go to, uh, Jeremiah 4. Why do you read the text backwards from Jeremiah into Genesis? I'm curious. Well, no, I'm saying there's a comparison. Okay. There's a comparison. But, uh, Jeremiah, I mean, what's the context of Jeremiah 4? Right, northern kingdom of Israel. Yeah. And Jeremiah is, uh, you know, he's, he's making an excoriation, you know, and he's making a lament. Um, why do you think that that lament means that we should read "tohu wa-bohu" in Genesis 1:1 the same way? Well, if he's able to take this language and use it metaphorically to describe how a kingdom went from functioning properly to not functioning, it can imply that that language was used in that cultural context to imply that something goes from functioning to non-functioning or non-functioning to functioning. Yeah, but the entire premise of, there's a ton of creation imagery in that passage of Jeremiah 4. He's clearly borrowing from it to make a new type of argument. So why argue backwards from Jeremiah and then say, "Well, this is how we can understand what 'bohu' means in Genesis 1?" Well, I'm not, so I'm a little confused here on what you're trying to say, but I'll try to answer as best as I can. So basically, what I'm saying is, look, someone in that culture, someone who wrote part of scripture, was able to take the same language and use it in a metaphorical sense. It doesn't mean material annihilation. And how he's using it. So if he understood this language could mean that way, it's like, for example, if I said, "I saw a car flying down the road." Okay, that's, I'm obviously using "flying" metaphorically. If I got it from like a line in a book about, you know, like, it likely implies that if you're going to see it somewhere else, that's also being used metaphorically. Doesn't mean I'm getting it from someone to use it literally to begin with. Likewise, Jeremiah could be doing the same thing. Okay. So Jeremiah can use the same word in a very different way than what it means in Genesis 1. He could, or it could be using the same way, metaphorical language. That's the point, right? Yeah. The metaphorical language usually goes in a different direction than the original. So, well, here's the thing, unless you've got a flying car. Well, I mean, if we have metaphorically, if I'm using metaphorical language up here, like I said, you know, like, you know, "don't screw the pooch." Something like that. All right, you obviously mean that we're just, that's an idiom in the culture. Okay, we don't mean that. If I got it from, you know, I heard someone else say it, that they were also using it literally to be horrible. But you get the point. I mean, you can see how some people can use metaphorical language that they got from other people that we're also using in a metaphorical sense. Okay. All right. Uh, let's see. Going on to, uh, Adam and Eve as, um, a subsequent creation. So I presented a number of our arguments that, uh, Genesis 2 should be read in concert with Day 6. Um, and yet you make the, uh, claim that Genesis 2 is a subsequent event. What do you make of Exodus 20:11 where God creates the entire world in six days? Yeah, well, Adam and Eve fit into that. Well, he says he borrows the heavens and earth. And I, I said, I hold to the temple inauguration view. So I think it's literally seven days. God inaugurated the cosmos to be his temple in seven days, rested on the seventh. Okay. But in Exodus 20:11, God says specifically, "This is the finger of God," right? So we've got to be really kind of careful with this one. "For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that's in them." So it's everything, the entire world. Do you agree on that? That that phrase, "heavens and earth, sea, and all that's in them," keep a rod, all on. Okay. He brought all of that and the seven-day rest. So if Exodus 20:11 says that God created everything in six days, then how is it that Adam and Eve could be created outside of that six days? Well, first of all, my actual view is an election point. I actually take that more specifically. However, I'm open to Swaminasa's view that they could be de novo creation as well. However, remember "baraq" is not, as I mentioned in my opening talk, in Exodus or, I'm sorry, Isaiah 42, it says, "I have created 'baraq' Jacob, Israel." Okay, that obviously happened later. I don't think we need to take this hyper-literally that literally everything was created there. When God says later in Isaiah 42 that he created Israel, he brought Israel. Yeah, but that still doesn't explain how it is that the two most important humans of all time are sitting outside of the six days of creation. Why? I would say Jesus is the most important human. Yeah, we were talking about before that. We're still in the Ten Commandments. So the two people that start off all of humanity are not part of the thing when God says, "I made everything." There's nothing in Exodus that would indicate that. Yeah, kind of looking at Exodus, and he says he made everything, but he didn't make the people. Did he include Israel that he says he made in Isaiah 42? You're using "baraq" in a different sense than what "baraq" is being used in Exodus 20. I'm using Exodus 1. I'm using "baraq" in the same sense. I would say that he's giving you activity. I'm sorry, you're saying what I'm saying. I'm saying there's no indication in there that, uh, you have to say that God literally made everything. If he said, says later, "I made Israel, I created Israel." Yeah. Um, we have words that can have multiple meanings, and I think that's the problem that we're running into here, Mike, is that you look for a meaning elsewhere in scripture and then apply it to a place where it doesn't belong. I would say we should have scripture interpret scripture. Yes. Well, yeah, scripture does interpret scripture, but context interprets the passage first. And when we don't understand that passage, then we have to move. I agree. But there's nothing in the context of Exodus 20 that necessarily applies this hyper-literal reading. I would say that's a, that's a difficult statement to justify. A quick reminder to, uh, ask questions, otherwise, otherwise, yeah, otherwise we've just moved into, uh, the dialogue. So, okay, let's see. Okay, so you've quoted from a number of scholars whose views on Genesis 1 and other passages are at odds with one another. It seemed to me like this was kind of a grab bag between different perspectives on Genesis 1:1, etc. How do you adjudicate which one of these are the same, and what is kind of your final perspective? I'll leave that a nice open one for you. So I'm just, can you kind of clarify because, so for example, you've got, uh, you've got Heiser, who says Genesis 1:1 is talking about pre-existing creation stuff, and it's an independent, as a dependent clause. You favor Walton's functional view, even though he's got a different perspective on this. And so it kind of seems like you're throwing whatever you can out and saying, "Well, we don't have to interpret it the way the young earth-ers do. There's all sorts of ways that we can interpret it." But you haven't given us an actual interpretation. You haven't given us a synthetic view. I see young earth creationists do a lot of the same thing where they try and fight against evolution by just throwing the kitchen sink. What's, what's the? As I said, my view is the temple inauguration view. I hold to that. That's what's happening in Genesis 1. And yes, I do use a lot of different scholars. I don't agree with everything they say. I understand, like, when I go with Genesis 6, I don't agree with Heiser on his interpretation of that. But I agree with how he interprets other parts of Genesis 6 or parts later and or earlier in Genesis. I mean, I don't agree with everything that every scripture that I understand. But I'm looking for coherence and consistency here. And, uh, that didn't quite pick up on that. So, okay, let me ask about, um, you favor Josh, and Josh is here. Josh has heard me talk about genealogical Adam and Eve issues, for example. So you favor his approach to, um, to genealogical Adam and Eve? Sorry, missing out on which page I had this, but anyway. So Adam and Eve are the first humans that God kind of really cares about for the Bible. He's the first one they make a covenant with. He makes a covenant with these two people to be the priest of creation. Okay. So he doesn't make a covenant with any of the people outside before that? Well, no, I would say that they are the priests. They represent humanity. They represent humanity. Okay. Israel is a light to the nations. So when God creates them, are they in a state of moral innocence before Adam and Eve? Well, I don't personally think they were created in this instance. I say it's a possibility. I tend to look at this as an election point. Right. No, no, I mean, the people that are created or through evolution before Adam and Eve, are they morally innocent? Are they more? If they have not broken the covenant, yes, then yes. The covenant God makes for Adam and Eve. But before Adam and Eve time? No, because Romans 5:13, "sin is not counted where there is no law." Yeah. So what we'll do is we'll just continue this dialogue. Oh boy, it's continuing. So my basic view is that Paul says sin is not counted where there is no law, but sin abounded anyway. So in that context, we can understand that sin was around, as you mentioned in some of your examples, but it wasn't counted yet because a covenant had not been made with humanity. But the covenant with humanity is referring to the covenant with Moses. But notice the context, he makes a covenant with Moses. Now, is that going to include now? That's basically saying that, you know, sin is about breaking God's law. But if God has not given the law until Adam and Eve, any sort of law. Okay. The same sort of logic can apply. But there's no view of pre-Adamites in in Romans. The logic of Romans goes from general creation over to Israel, and then into the with the law, and that's what he's talking about. It's the span between Adam and Moses that sin is not accounted where there is no law. Right. And we can extrapolate from that. If he, if there's no people before Adam, the Bible makes no claims for there to be humans before Adam. I would say that's kind of implied in Genesis 1 when it talks about the Imago Dei. All mankind gets the Imago Dei. Now I'm going to hone in on Eden. I'm going to have these two priests. I'm going to elect. Right. But Adam and Eve are the two people on Genesis. Well, you're assuming the view that you have there. We need two. You know, and I don't have that same view. I know you don't have that same view. But that is the scriptural view. So we need to work on this, right? So Adam and Eve, I presented a number of different arguments for why we should be reading Genesis 2 as part of Genesis chapter 1. What do you do with the fact that the genealogy of Genesis chapter 5 blends the two of these things together such that they read as unity, then Adam is the first man? I'm so glad you asked me that. Great. Okay, so first of all, I'm not rejecting the scriptural view. I mean, rejecting your interpretation of the scriptural view. I want to be clear on that. Now, with Genesis 1 or Genesis 5. Okay, so you mentioned this for one thing, it mentions language that we don't see in the earlier accounts. It says, for example, "I will call them man, both male and female." We don't find that anywhere in there. Now, let's compare this to Exodus 5:1-7. "All the descendants of Jacob were 70 persons. Joseph was already in Egypt. Then Joseph died, and all his brothers and all that generation." Notice it does not mention that Jacob died. Are we to assume that now? But it mentions "all that generation died," and it implies it happens after Joseph. Are we to assume that this contradicts Genesis and it says that Jacob died in that generation? Because it refers to the generation that went down to Egypt, that he died after Joseph? I don't think so. I think we cannot read too much into these brief statements and imply so much from them. Genesis 5:1-2 is just giving us a brief recap of things already covered in much more detail prior. Look, Adam is what is a human. Humans are made in the image of God, male and female. He's able to pass his likeness down to his sons. I don't want us, I don't think we can read too much into brief statements like this when we've already been given the full context prior to this, and we can see that there can't read too much into brief statements. Okay, so these are brief statements that are written by Moses. He incorporates Genesis 1, Genesis 2, Genesis 3, Genesis 4, all into the five verses of Genesis 5:1-5. And yet we're not supposed to believe that Moses or we're supposed to believe that Moses has actually had a disjointed set of humanity between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 through 4? Jesus didn't read it that way. Paul doesn't read it that way. It doesn't seem like anybody in scripture reads it that way. So this is a really forced attempt to invent a class of people that have no existence within the scripture. Well, Moses also wrote Genesis 1 and 2. Yeah, Genesis 1 speaks of humanity in general, and then he maybe told formula, implying there's another chapter change here. Then we see it honing on to people. So again, yeah, we could say that Moses wrote that part, but he also wrote Exodus 1. Is he going to contradict himself? And is he implying that Jacob died after Joseph? I don't think so. This is just a brief statement. All those people died, Jacob, Joseph, all the brothers, and we move on to the story. We cannot just jump to the conclusion that this is somehow contradictory from that. Uh, no, I think that, uh, looking at Genesis 2 as a subsequent story is the contradiction. I think that when you got Moses and Jesus in agreement, it's probably a good thing to keep going with them. Um, so you bring up the toledo. So the toledo death of Genesis 2:4, and it seems like we're more into the dialogue aspect. Are you going to be? We've been there. Questions here. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we, we're about four minutes into the dialogue. So, yeah, you, I mean, uh, so can I read the, uh, the, the, uh, the toledo here of Genesis 2? Sure. And then I'd like to tell you if you have something that you'd like to talk about. So the toledot, that's the, the transition point here. It says, "These are the generations of the heaven and the earth when they were created." And "the day that the Lord God made the heavens and the earth." Jack Collins has noted something really, really insightful here, that is that this phrase is what's called a chiasm in Hebrew. That is, when you have a set of of statements that are reflected again in a, in a usually forward and backward sort of way. So listen to it again: "These are the generations of the heaven and the earth when they were created." In the day the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. So we have a statement that it keys in from Genesis chapter 1, that is the heavens and the earth created, right? That's like Genesis 1:1 right there. And then we have the Lord God, we have the covenantal name of God, Yahweh, we have Elohim, the name that is used in Genesis chapter 1. And then we reflect it all back as we focus on the earth when he made the earth and the heavens. And so Collins has noted that we can't break this thing up. This is a hinge point that is connecting the events of Genesis 1 with the events of Genesis 2 in a seamless fashion, not as a subsequent event, but actually as a continuation and expanding of the days on Genesis, uh, of Genesis, sorry, Genesis chapter 6. Um, and to, to try to break that up or turn it into something else seems to go against not only Genesis 1 and 2, but 5, over in Matthew, etc. So, so my response to that is that we don't see any other place in Genesis where we see a toledot formula and then it introduces a long recap of things that already is covered. It doesn't do that. It tends to say, "We're going to continue on and show what comes after this thing." It seems like a very weird, as Walton and Heiser, or others have noted, this sort of saying, "Chapter 2, then God did this." And when it comes to Genesis 2, what's sort of happening here is it's focusing in on the land of Eden. It says, "When there's no bush, there's no man to till the ground." This is referring to how the, the land of Eden is wild and it's not been cultivated yet. Bush of the field, cultivate is qualified, and then it's referring to agriculture. It's not referring to this idea of, if some people say that it's a recap or that it's a contradictory account. God has made the cosmos his temple, and now he hones it on Eden and says, "Look, in this land, it's still chaotic. There's no man to till the ground, but I'm going to put my priests here. We're going to set up a garden. They'll serve, they'll tend to the garden, and this will be why I'll meet with humanity." So I don't, I don't see this as a recap. It seems like it's falling forward. And with the idea of the installment of priests on the eighth day, as Kill Cruz pointed out, this seems to just flow naturally. That God rested, he took his Sabbath rest, day seven, day eight, back to work, priest appointed. Now, it's, it's an interesting way to read the text. I wish I could say that it was a good way, but I don't really think that it is. Um, let's let him come back on that. Do you want to talk about Matthew? Matthew 19. Do you mind if we switch gears? Okay. Okay. So Matthew 19. 19, Jesus starts off by saying, "Have you not read?" So it seems to be referring to how the book, the Bible's written. In Matthew 23, Jesus said, "All the martyrs from Abel to Zechariah, the blood shall be spilled on this generation." Now, the reason why he says there were martyrs, I mean, John the Baptist happened after Zechariah, who was a martyr, but he's talking about how the scriptures were ordered in that day. Chronicles, as Roger T. Beckwith knows, with at the end of the Tanakh. So martyrs from the beginning of scripture to the end of scripture. Okay. So he's not talking about chronology necessarily. He's talking about how scripture has been ordered. Likewise, with Matthew 19, he's talking about how scripture has been ordered. I don't see this necessarily being about chronology, but how what we see in scripture. I don't, I think it's, we're reading way too much into these brief statements like with Matthew, with Genesis 5, trying to imply much bigger details, which we should be focusing on is what Genesis 1 says. Well, that's what Jesus is doing. I mean, he is clearly saying when he says, "Have you not read?" First, this is an important aspect of the Gospel of Matthew in particular. When Jesus responds to the Pharisees, he says, "Have you not read?" Because they're the ones who read the law. When he speaks to the, uh, to the masses, when he speaks to the people, he, uh, says Beatitudes, for things like that. He says, "You have heard it said." So there's a shift in the way that Jesus responds to the people. He says, "Have you, you know, you have heard it said," because they're usually listening to the law, the Pharisees and the scribes. Those are the ones who actually read and teach. So there's a difference in accountability that Jesus has given using this language. "Have you not read?" is, is effectively for him as a, as a rabbi, a defeater argument. This is a chance for Jesus to own the Pharisees, right? "Have you not read?" This is in the scripture from the beginning, "He made them male and female." And then he quotes from the end of the chapter of chapter two. He unifies that text to place Adam and Eve in context. There's, I doubt anybody in, uh, Second Temple Judaism around the time of Christ would have ever thought that Adam and Eve would have been, uh, something that came about long after the creation. Actually, Jesus, Jesus's response says it's all unified. Well, this is kind of my point. He's not talking about the timeline of the earth. He's talking about the chronology of scripture. Go back and read the beginning of scripture. What did it say there? It says there's a theology here. He's talking about, "Can a man divorce a woman for any reason?" And Jesus's response is, "It shouldn't be this way, right? Because of the hardness of your heart, you got this, and it wasn't this way at the beginning." "At the beginning," "from the beginning," clearly is his statement. It's, you know, "apo arche" in, um, in Greek, that brings anyone at that time who would hear those words immediately to Genesis 1:1. So if I said, you know, "From the beginning of creation, no one liked the Dallas Cowboys until Troy Aikman made them kind of popular." Okay. Would I be meaning people 2,000 years ago? Hey, Dallas Cowboys? No. But you're not a Second Temple Jew. Well, I mean, be the Second Temple Jewish rabbis use this exaggerated language. Jesus says, "You have to hate your father and mother." This is exaggerated again. It's a, it's a legal defeater. It's, "Haven't you read? Go back to the scripture. From the beginning, God made them male and female. And for this reason, a man shall leave." So let's put the setting. God made Adam and Eve. We know who they are. They're the male and the female. They're not supposed to divorce people for every, for any reason. And that was a big debate at the time, uh, amongst those funds. The Pharisees are a couple of differences of opinion. And Jesus stands firmly on the only reason you're supposed to, uh, to give someone a certificate of divorce was because of infidelity. You would agree this is not hyper-literal. Adam and Eve were not there on day one in Genesis 1:1, right? No, but Jesus is putting together the context. What he does is he's, he puts their creation within the context of the creation week because that is the beginning. So the beginning of creation, uh, is actually part of, um, the first day. Genesis 1:1 is part of the first day. So we might want to transition and start talking about our understandings of, uh, that verse, because I obviously have a little bit of difference here. Okay, there was one thing that I wanted to sort of address in your opening statement. You made an argument that, uh, you, you cited some examples of some horrendous stuff that happened. Yeah. And you said that that was sort of inconsistent with what's going on in Genesis 1, God calling it "very good." What is your response to that type of argument? Again, well, I use other verses that show that "very good" is just used generally to refer two times after sin entered the world. Land of Canaan, for example, figs. That does not mean an absolute state of perfection. You can have a good earth that still needs to be subdued, that still has death in it. That does not imply absolute state of perfection that we're reading too much into these brief words, and that scripture does not imply that's how they should be read. Any thoughts? Again, uh, pulling as Michael does from Romans 5 to try and make an allusion back that these are people who are living before the law, sometime before Adam, just doesn't square with Paul's writings. Is that what he just said? Is that what you just said? I'm talking about Genesis 1:31, "very good." The idea, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so, I mean, I'm sorry, I was looking at something over here. So, um, this is, this is very good in that it's functioning adequately. So it's okay if people are killing people and people were eating babies. No, needed some dude. God said that, but it's still good. I mean, for example, the rainforest, you would say is good, right? We don't want to get rid of that. There's death in there happening all the time, there's suffering, but I'd still say it's good. We need it. So there's not a contradiction in there. You can have a good something that is good that there still needs to be subdued in some way. Uh, yes and no. The, the term "subdue." It's, it's an interesting one, right? I've looked at all the instances of it in the Old Testament, and "kavash" is a harsh term. I totally agree with you. It's militaristic, it's often violent. At its best, it's firm, you know, but, uh, for the most part, it's really bad, which is really fascinating that God uses it in Genesis chapter 1. Uh, because in order to understand what "subdue" means in the context of verse 31, there, what we have to ask is, what's going on on Day 6? And what are the relation, what is the relationship that's being established between people and the world in Day 6? Right. God tells them to subdue and have dominion, and he tells them, "I want you to eat plants." Okay? And he tells the animals, "I want you to eat plants as well." That seems rather peculiar. As we go into Genesis chapter, or if we take a look at Genesis 1 as a whole, we might ask the question, how does God subdue the world? Right, in his creation of it. Is there any violence? Right, does God engage in any violence with the world? Is there any sort of, you know, mechanism, kind of like in other ancient pagan accounts of the creation of the world, there's often a lot of violence. God doesn't seem to have any sort of struggle with the, with the world. Well, when God commands Joshua, "Take the promised land," he commands violence. But I'm talking about in creation week, right? We, in order to understand what a word means, where it is, we have to investigate its context first before we go somewhere else. And we can go elsewhere to help us, like I said, everywhere else we see "kavash," that's a hard word. In Genesis chapter 1, he's giving humanity, same thing with Joshua, "subdue the promised land." Humanity, "subdue the earth," right? There, well, there's, there's Canaanites in the promised land, and they're, they're not nice. But in Genesis chapter 1, what's there that's not nice? Well, the interaction that we're supposed to have with animals is, uh, non-predatory in Genesis 1, because we're commanded to eat plants, and they are as well. God's very specific about that. Again, the context of Genesis 1, God's creation of the world involves no violence, no forceful subjugation, no warfare with the world or with other gods. Stands in total contrast to everything else in the ancient world. And then in Genesis chapter 2, how do we see mankind engaged in dominion and subduing? Right. So subduing refers to the earth. How does Adam subdue the world that he's in? He tends a garden. Okay, that's violent stuff right there, right? Okay. But I think you're kind of just reading this perfection. How is dominion? How is dominion approached? And dominion is approached by Adam naming animals. That is the way that he is shown to have dominion over them. If you take a look at Genesis 1, it's fascinating because Genesis 1, God names things, right? He names the, the light, he names the dark. On Day 2, he names the sea. And on Day 3, he names the land and the seas. On Days 4, 5, and 6, God names nothing, not a thing. Instead, that, and I like you, I liked how you connected to Heiser in his view of imaging God. I think that's a brilliant, uh, approach that he has. How does Adam image God? He names things. He names the animals. He names woman. And he names a woman a second time. He names her his wife, Eve. So how do we see dominion and how do we see subdue? He names animals. He tends a garden. There's no violence here. Genesis chapter 1 is actually presenting us with a way to understand that subduing the world could be done without violence. The Israelites have this word of subdue, they've got "kavash," they know what it means, and God turns that word on its head and shows that there was a better way to do it. Let me say that before you come back. Okay, so if you guys have questions, we're about to move into Q&A. We've got about, I think, three minutes left. If you have a question for Michael, line up behind this microphone over here. Oh, there they go. There they go. If you have a question for Dr. Marcus Ross, line up on this microphone over here. So I want to use the loneliest number. I want to respond, but I want to say really quickly, even, interestingly enough, Robert Alter notes that the word for helper in Genesis 2 refers to someone being like a military sustainer. Eve is much more of a role than a helper. But I think exactly about being our help. The Bible never says in Genesis 2, "This is how Adam is subduing things." These are just things he is doing. And I think we can't make sure we don't read other perfection back into the text and assume that that's what's going. The idea that the fact that the text says that you have to subdue the earth implies in itself that it does need this sort of war-like conquest on it. It isn't in a state of perfection. If we assume perfection, then read that into the verse, then yeah, we get what you're saying. But we can't start with that. We have to let the text speak for itself. If it was in a state of perfection, we should use more like the words like "tend to" or "help" or "aid." But the fact that he's using such "subdues," I would say that humanity's going to image me, and I am taking these cosmos, and now I need you to help me. I'm going to work through creatures to subdue it further. So I don't, I just, when it seems like we're sort of reading the perfection, reading back into Genesis. No, Genesis never uses the word "perfect." We live in a physical world, which means that there are always going to be trade-offs and and there's going to be, uh, you know, imperfections in a sense. But one of the things that Genesis does is Genesis does a lot of things by showing us rather than telling us. Genesis chapter 1 does a lot of telling. After that, in the narratives, we find a lot of showing. And so what Genesis is telling us is that we are to subdue and have dominion. And then what it does in chapter 2 is it shows us what that was like. And that was a world that was not one that was stricken and rife with violence. It wasn't something that where there was hard struggle until chapter 3. And then in Genesis chapter 3, the world changes because, as I said in my presentation, the ground is cursed, and the ground is now at war with us. Thorns and thistles, which if you live in the ancient world and you can't go to, go to Lowe's and get yourself a set of leather gloves, thorns and thistles are a serious impediment to doing work. It's hard. The ground is now at war with us. So we must subdue. Now we must work hard now. We must enact.

Our will the animals no longer are going to work the way that they ought to because they have been cursed. The serpent was cursed above all other animals, implying that other animals are affected by the curse. Do you think the surprise, the realm of work, the realm of dominion, all are affected? And so now there's struggle that has to happen with subdue and dominion, but in the beginning it was not so.

Do you think the serpent was an actual animal? In your view, it was an animal being used by darker powers. So do you think it's entirely possible it was just Satan? The Bible doesn't say so. Have you read Heiser a little bit? He, um, actually makes a pretty good argument. You know, I mean, John certainly makes the claim that Satan was the one there at the beginning, the liar from the beginning. So Satan is there, yes. Um, but I think that he was probably using an organism. But then again, you know, Heiser talks about it, for example, as a spirit being. I thought that was a really interesting art. Have you seen ancient iconography of seraphs from the ocean? Yeah, they're, they're winged serpents. Yeah. So, you know, and so the ISV translation doesn't even use the word serpent, it translates into shining one. Sure. That is time. The, the word there, however, Remus refers to all manner of, uh, reptilian sorts of things and and what not. Uh, yeah, I think it was a seraph. I think it was a seraph, a serpentine divine being. Right? I mean, it's, it's described as an animal everywhere else in the Bible. This is a, this is an animal of some kind. But it's certain, but it's certainly an animal that, um, that we all know. Again, it's telling, it's showing us, not telling us. We know when the serpent talks, something's not right here. Something is definitely not right here.

All right, that is time. Let's, uh, give our debaters a hand. Yeah. [Applause] That was a great debate. That was a great debate. That was really good. All right, let's start with a question for Michael. And it looks like we've got Dr. Josh Schwammados on the microphone. I mean, welcome. So, oh, let me, let me mention this. So we're gonna do two-minute answer, one-minute counter-response. And we're going to, so we're going to keep it short so that we can get through as many questions as possible. So I'll be, uh, I'll be keeping track of that. And I will be a question for both of you. It seems like the topic was, is evolution compatible with the Bible? But the debate has gone to be more about whether or not Michael's particular view is compatible with the Bible. So even if, even if you were successful, Marcus, it seems like you have a really big challenge because you still haven't shown all the other different. I mean, I disagree with Michael on certain things. Like Andrew Lope disagrees on certain things. Um, and, you know, we don't even know how to adjudicate it between ourselves. So, but it seems like if you're going to be arguing that, and I'm, this is more like a philosophical point that honestly, it seems like the strength of the position that Mike has too is that he doesn't, he doesn't have to even commit to the places where you're certain most certain he's wrong, because you could change those and there'd be another way to make sense of it with evolution. So how could you even be possibly successful in demonstrating that evolution is not compatible with scripture when you really have only dealt with one of the Spiderman and the multiverse? This is a question for me. It's kind of a question for Marcus, because it seems like it just seems like the, the lift of actually showing it's not compatible is far harder. And, and even if you were successful in the narrow case of demonstrating that Michael's wrong, and Michael, even if you can see it, okay, I guess my view isn't compatible with scripture, that doesn't demonstrate that evolution is not compatible.

Yeah, I'll briefly answer and then Mark and Dr. Ross can go. Uh, I, yeah, that's my main point is there are, there are many views out there. You may think they're, they're, they're not the best interpretation, but to say that it's not compatible with the scriptures, to me, it's just absurd. There's plenty of evidence that the scriptures are open to numerous interpretations. I'm not rejecting the scriptures, I'm rejecting certain interpretations of the scriptures. In, in Galileo's opponents, even said, if we're wrong about this, it just means we have interpreted scripture wrongly. And that's fine. There's, there could be many things we've gotten wrong about it. And so this just happens as time goes on, we find out more things and we realize we've interpreted scripture wrong. We need to go back and make sure we get this right. The more we study about the engineers, the more we learn about it, and I think that's a good thing. So we should be open to this idea, and I don't think there's any reason to say they're not compatible.

I think that the, um, the clear testimony of the church's interpretation and Jewish interpretation over time, uh, makes it pretty clear that there is a favorite perspective on what the history of the earth is supposed to be. Does evolution line up with that? No, it doesn't. That doesn't mean that you can't be a Christian and hold evolution or seek for some explanation that might work. Um, and so, yeah, Josh, you and I were talking about this last night. I mean, you already, you already had decided before the debate started that, you know, I was doomed on this. But the reality is, is that from, from the 1800s to today, there has been this revolving carousel of disparate and difficult arguments to try to make the Bible say or be compatible with something that it's not. And so we've gone through gap theory, we've gone through day-age, tried out, uh, framework hypothesis. We've got other trendy approaches that are going on right now that are not going to survive the day. And the one constant that's been there the whole time has been young earth creation. And it's, you know, we are stubbornly still here. And that might embarrass a bunch of people, but it's because this is the natural way to read the text. And the deeper you go into the text, the more it makes sense. Sorry, no follow-ups. Ah, apologize. I can't follow up. Uh, no, no. Dang it. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how this works.

All right, question for Dr. Marcus Ross. All right, so again, just a quick reminder for me so that he doesn't get to answer and then I can't respond. [Laughter] So, uh, two-minute response, one-minute counter-response. I want to say, I greatly, uh, like the debate. One thing though, that wasn't really covered in detail was Noah's Flood. And so, question for you, because of course, you accept that, you know, the geological layers are from Noah's Flood. But does your young earth creationist model break down if Noah's Flood from the text is regional instead of global? And the reason I, I ask that is because, you know, for three reasons. One, the phrase "kol arets," you alluded to it a little bit. "Kol" meaning whole or all, but the word "arets" meaning land. Most of the time in the Old Testament, it's referred to a specific geographic area and not the entire globe. Examples of this, even without qualifiers like "the whole land of Egypt" or "the whole land of..." are Genesis 41:25, "was famine over the entire earth or whole land," um, you know, obviously except for Egypt. And then another one is, you know, Daniel's prophecy of Greece taking over the entire earth. And, you know, of course, unless it's a failed prophecy, you know, Greece didn't take over the entire globe. Um, but, you know, there's the second reason is the word "tevel," which translates as a world. It's not used, obviously, it's not, it's a later word, not used in the Torah. But every time in the future, "tevel" is used with "arets," it means worldwide. Um, which we can see in Psalms like, you know, "The earth is the Lord's fullness." So, basically, since, you know, that's another reason. The third is the tribes listed after Seth. Yeah, I think, I think we've got it. Sorry, sorry about it. Just those three points. How would you respond from the text? Yeah, and in the future, let's try to keep the questions to like, one sentence. I appreciate the question. Thank you.

So, um, yes, the word "kol" means all, every. And it can be, I had, I ate everything on the table, even if I didn't, right? That sort of thing. So the question is, again, it comes down to context. How is the word being used in a particular area so that we can understand what that area is talking about? And as I showed with that visual, 60 instances of "kol" being used throughout Genesis 6, 7, 8, and 9. That heavy usage is telling us repetition. As I told the group earlier today, repetition is the way to build emphasis in the ancient world because you don't have bold, you don't have PowerPoints, you don't have emojis. Praise God. Uh, we don't have the emoji Bible, right? And so repetition is the way that you build it. The other instances that you brought up, these, these things like, you know, they went over the whole, there was a famine in the whole earth and over the whole earth came to Egypt, right? Those are one-off statements. They're in the text and they throw off this statement of universality that is intended to be hyperbole. And you recognize it because it's obviously not true that the whole earth went down to Egypt because Jacob stayed there and sent his kids, right? So your context is telling you that this is hyperbolic. The context of the flood is anything but. It is directly tied to the creation of all things and the destruction of all things and the recreation of all things. And uses "kol," "kol," "kol" all the time, right? In order to build up that emphasis. So the glo, the perspective of the writer is that this is everything. Whatever the known world is, it is covered. Uh, no, sorry, no, no follow-ups.

Yeah, it's, uh, Michael, so you got a minute. Yeah, I would just disagree. I think it's used hyperbolically. We see this right in Genesis 9, where it says, "every beast shall fear you." No, not, not their cattle. They trusted them quite well. Not cats. Cats have no fear for humanity, trust me. They don't. We cannot read too much. I mean, with Genesis 8, 9, my whole point earlier was the fact that it's not the waters on the face of the whole earth if mountains already being seen. Sure, if it's a global flood, there's still water all over the earth, but it's not literal. It's not hyper-literally in that sense. So we can't read too much into this when it comes to that, because it uses this hyperbolic language elsewhere, like with the whole world coming to buy grain from Joseph.

All right, so next question for Michael over here. Hi, I'm Kelton. Speak a little bit more into the, try to speak more into the mic. Better. Yeah, perfect. So the first thing I can join, I think that one thing I did just want to kind of acknowledge is we have a lot of tension in this room right now because this is kind of a controversial subject. Energy, energy, energy, energy. I got good vibes. Yeah, and that's good. And we got, we got good vibes here. Yeah, and I like that. Um, and so we have a lot of knowledgeable people. So we try to maintain faith, hope, and love. Yeah. Question. I got you, Cam. My question would be this, um, for Michael. Um, if they're elected to be priests, it's a federal headship, is that correct? Okay. And it would be a Neolithic population? Yes, possibly. Yeah, possibly. Um, so I was kind of thinking about the population estimates for that time period. We'd have maybe five to 40 million people. Those are the population estimates that I've seen. That's kind of the range. So would that be the section, or would that be the number of people that they are representing? And wouldn't they be spread over the entire earth? Yeah, yeah, they would. Yeah. And so then my only question there would be, that's a quite a lot of people that they would be representing. And, um, with that being said, those people who lived prior to Adam and Eve on this view, to those who were elected or chosen as a, you know, federal headship, would they enter oblivion? Or would they, like, because then you kind of have a situation that's entailed where, um, it seems as if there would be a generation of people, um, whose parents, uh, would enter oblivion. Yeah, forever.

Yeah, so here's the thing is that we're not God. We're not omniscient. We can't say about that kind of thing. Same thing with like a man born in the year 200 AD who's never heard of Christ because he lived in Australia. Uh, this is for God to know. It's not for our knowledge. Our, our call is to spread the gospel. We're just given limited amount of information on this type of thing. It's not for us to know. He is the ultimate judge. He'll know. Jesus says in like John 9:41, John 15:22, "I have come and now they have no excuse." But if I not, you know, this idea that they've been given the knowledge, so now, you know, they're not without excuse. So the idea is that God is in control. He would know best way to handle these types of situations. We're not. And I would say, uh, from my perspective on this, Romans 5 and First Corinthians are very, very clear that only those who, uh, come from Adam and physically come from Adam are capable of being saved. So whoever was living at the, uh, in Mike's view, prior to Adam, but I would say anybody who was living even at the same time and was not geneal, uh, genetically or genealogically connected to him, um, they're outside of the possibility of salvation through Christ. Which I think puts us in a horrible, horrible theological position.

All right, question for Dr. Ross. Um, and I realize now this is actually a little bit more directed toward Dr. Jones, but it's really for both of you. Like, what, what is that, what, why are you both, how much do you emphasize the role of, like, the difference between perfection of creation and the very goodness of creation? Like, why that distinction? And where would you both sit on that distinction, I guess?

Well, um, since the Bible doesn't use the term "perfect" to refer to the creation, right? So we're a material world again. We've got design, we've got constraints because of matter and energy as to what things can be. There is no perfection that can be made because it's always about trade-offs between how fast can you be versus how strong, enemy, type of thing. Um, but the word "very good" is intending us to understand that creation functions properly. It's working well. God made it. It's operating and it's healthy, uh, in a sense. And I would say that, um, the, the overall image that we're getting from Genesis chapter one and chapter two is that there is a harmony of nature, uh, that is different from the disharmony that we see today.

Yeah, holding to a functionalist understanding, I completely agree. That's the whole point. God caused it to function properly. There you go.

All right, question for Michael. Nice outfit. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Glad you got our message about coordinating. Yeah, yeah. So, uh, if it's all right, since you both are replying, do you mind if I offer a question to each? Is that all right? Fine. Go ahead. He's making your job easier. So, Michael, um, I want to offer a question to you that I've actually asked to John Walton himself, which is something that always bothers me with this account, which is that he's separating functional and efficient material causation too much. Which appears to be a post-Aristotelian logical distinction that I don't see in any of these ancient Near Eastern literature. Even in like things like "create in me a clean heart," that's implying some sort of substantial effective action from God himself. So I think that he, it actually might be Walton himself who is too modern. So that's my question to you. Now, to Marcus, my question to you is, I notice that you put the flood at the Cambrian, is that right? Beginning of the flood somewhere around the beginning of the flood, right? But then my question then becomes, what about Precambrian? Like the Ediacaran or the Great Oxidation Events, which you can witness in the Great Lakes region, where we see a cycle of growth, death, growth, death, growth, death, which implies a long period of fossilization, right? What do you do with that?

Okay, all right. So two minutes each, I guess. Okay. So for one thing, one of the things Walton notes is that he's being building on a scholar named Jean Patero, who knows that in the ancient area, something really didn't come into existence until it was named. So John Patero says in his work, in his book, Mesopotamia, you know, like, you know, the name was sort of giving it sort of its existence. And that was the sort of the idea of the ontology of the ancient Near East. So by the, so you could have material things that were not named yet. This is what we see in the enumerability in the heavens had not yet been named below, and the earth had not yet been called by name. So they're there, they're just not been named. So they're not been brought into the sphere of existence in that sort of room. And on day one, for example, to talk about light. Well, the ancients did not think light is a physical thing. They didn't have any concept of photons. They thought of it as something that was not physical. D.H. Cline talks about on day two, it's really in relation to its purposes, the firmament as well. This is what it's being, it's about giving these things their existence by giving them certain functions, is what Walton is sort of saying. So it's not even about material creation on Walton's view. It's, it's more about how he is giving them the functions, how they're going to work within the divine cosmic temple. And then they are brought into the sphere of existence on that sort of view. So it's about taking it out of our mindset and getting into the minds of the ancient Near Eastern context. And so this is why Walton builds on scholars like Patero to sort of argue this kind of thing. And Walton's been taken to task on that by a number of Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern scholars because "bara" (create) and "asa" (make) are used interchangeably. And "asa" is a very physical sort of thing. God says, "Let us make man in our image and after our..." I see he's not, but he's not, right? I got examples. And, um, so there's a, there's a blend between those two, create and form and make. And that's all very physical. And what you said about naming is important because again, God names nothing on the next three days of creation, on days four, five, and six. So what they don't come into existence? They're not part of the actual functioning of the world until when, right? They're left. So this functional view is, is really interesting. And it's got some, you know, there's a couple of things about it that I like. But in the end, this is kind of like cotton candy. It tastes really good and then it just dissipates.

Okay, so what is your response to his question for you? So question about the, you know, flood boundaries. Uh, so that's a very in-house young earth creationist type of argument that's going on, um, at the moment of where do we start. And the flood, as far as the Ediacaran fauna, this is a group of animals before some of the more complex animals that are found in Ediacarans. We're not really sure what they are. Those are probably part of the flood as well. The, the flood boundary at the Cambrian is kind of like, you know, somewhere right around over here. I actually put it slightly below. And we do have some questions. What do you do with, uh, some of the other aspects of things that might indicate time in what I think are creation week rocks? There's a variety of different perspectives on young earth creationists about how to handle that. And whether or not one can draw a firm line amongst all those different rocks across the world. And I, I tend to think that there are probably a few other, uh, more abiotic reasons for seeing things like banded iron formations, etcetera, and the Great Oxidation Event. As you alluded to, we've got, you know, conventional geologists look at those in a particular way. I might look at them a different way. That's not an area of geology that I'll claim very much expertise on. Precambrian geology, why? Because I'm a paleontologist and pretty much anything interesting is way up above that stuff. So I would say that for, for young earth creation, there's an active debate and discussion right now about where to put those boundaries. And they could change. Any thoughts? I'm not an expert on that stuff. Okay.

All right, so question for Dr. Ross over here. Hello, Dr. Ross. Um, so you made the argument in your debate, in your opening statement, that evolution is problematic because the pre-endemic world, as you said, was filled with evil. Yet God said it was very good. Well, my question is, wouldn't it be equally, or even more problematic for the young earth creationist God to curse the earth and to deliberately cause all natural evils, predation, parasites, etc., because of Adam's sins? There's nothing that implies that God be morally obligated to cause all natural and animal evils due to the sin of Adam. So that's just my question, basically. Like, why would he do this? Yeah, thank you. I mean, sort of, thank you. That's a hard question, but I appreciate it. Um, why did God, why did God decide to do that? I, I don't know. But if I think about what sin is, sin is an expression of selfishness, right? It's a decision that I'm going to do things despite, you know, the better, the better path that God has laid out. In a world in which selfishness is now introduced and can run rampant, I think biology's got to run on different rules. I think animals are going to have to know how to protect themselves. I think animals are going to take advantage of their environment. So the environment has got to be able to fight back. So I think about thorns and thistles frequently. Those are things that plants are using to defend themselves against predation by animals in various ways. I think that when the curse, when sin happens and is introduced to the world, God's curse on the world, uh, is to protect it for the long term. There's a lot of evil now, and there's a lot of very bad things. And I don't know that I can make sense out of all of them. But I think that ultimately, it is for the, the benefit of the creation to be able to withstand the evil of sin that has now been introduced. Thus, yeah, you can see my video in Genesis 3B where I go into more on that for the issues up there. But I think I'm reading Kenneth Gentry's book, "He Shall Dominion," and he's talking about God as a gradual God. He's always trying to gradually make change, gradually, real scripture, gradually builds his church, gradual change. And he's always wanted to work through humans. I think this is the whole point. It was not so much society that it was a perfect world and then God just cursed everything because Adam messed up. It's the idea that God wanted humanity to subdue creation because he was a relational being. He wants to work through creatures to make the world better. And we messed that up. We messed up that relationship. And that's why sin entered the world. And Christ has come back so that we can get back to that of bringing Eden, in my view, to the whole universe eventually. It's just that pro, gradual process has just been delayed.

All right, and I think we have time for one more question from Michael for Michael over here. Uh, yeah, my question, Michael, is about, uh, you use the Greek Septuagint to support your reading of a "when, then" construction for Genesis 1:1. Mike, wasn't it unclear to me how that supported, considering the Septuagint rendering is an independent clause rather than a dependent clause like you want to render it? So my question is, how does, how does reception actually support rather than oppose your?

So talking with Ben Stanhope, he actually helped me with the blog on this. He says it should be "entei arche" if it was a, if it was that, to sort of play in the beginning. Really, it's like "in beginnings" or "initially." Heiser says this as well in some of his talks. But I can even just say that you're entirely right and throw it out because I would, my main argument was relying on Robert Holmstead, who discovered, uh, certain rules of Hebrew grammar that we have not previously known until this point. So this is why he can make such, uh, strong claims when he says, "in the beginning" just should not be there. End of story. And most scholars now, it seems, are going in that direction from what I've seen. Robert Alter, McClellan, all the scholars I listed up there. It just seems like this is now where the scholarship. In fact, the NRSV, the new updated version, has translated it that way. "When God began to create." So does the, um, CEB, Robert Alter's translation, JPS, as well. It seems like we're moving in that direction now. So, John Day, in his book that just came out this year, he's a British Old Testament scholar, really takes that that position to task. When it comes to the Septuagint, it's "en arche," and what you have to understand about Hebrew and Greek is that these languages have a definite article, "the," but they don't have an indefinite article. And as a result, their use of the definite article runs on different types of rules than ours do. Frequently, the indefinite, sorry, the definite article is implied by the text. In Genesis 1:1, it's implied. And we can see that it's implied as Day makes the case that it's frequently implied in temporal clauses. And we can see this in the days. The days of creation in Genesis 1 are not all said as "the first day" or "the second day." Some of them are, and some of them are not. It's a hodgepodge. Why? Sometimes it's because it just makes better sense out of the syllables that are being said and it's easier to say it a certain way. And in every single case, it is "the day" that is implied, whether it's got the definite time or not. Oh, wow. You were done. Good job. Oh, I thought somebody said time. I did. I did. So let me just on the Septuagint, it's the same thing. The Septuagint has no, uh, definite article there because it's just following the Hebrew correctly. But if you started to try to, uh, interpret the Septuagint as saying "when God created," then you end up screwing up John 1:1, which follows the Septuagint wording precisely to say, "In the beginning was the Word." All of a sudden you have, "When the Word was in the beginning, the Word was with God." Or "When the Word began." That's even worse. "When the Word began, it was with God." And now your Christology is all messed up. So we've got to be really, really careful not to follow along with some of these things. And again, I would point you to John Day's recent book, "From Adam to Abraham." His first chapter is devastating. This is a guy who's a documentary hypothesis guy. He's not, again, evangelical. Uh, and he goes through this language and and shows, yeah, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is the universal attestation of this from the earliest manuscripts we have, even the earliest transliterations where the Hebrew was transliterated into Greek, the definite article was vocalized in those. So as far back as we have evidence, we have evidence that the understanding of this was, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Let's give our debaters one last round of applause. [Applause] Been sitting down a while. Thank you very much, Mike. Thank you. Appreciate it. Amen. Thank you. Thank you. Brotherly love. Look at that. Beautiful. All right, well, uh, thank you guys for tuning in. If you're watching this online, thank you guys for hanging out with us for the debate. And there were some people still in lines, but tomorrow, the good news is that we're doing a breakout. You'll be able to ask questions to each of these guys. They'll be doing breakouts tomorrow. So, uh, thank you for coming. This was awesome. It's time for dinner. Dinner. Oh, and then, uh, tomorrow, we will see you bright and early at 9:00 AM. So not too bright and early, but 9 AM. We'll see you tomorrow.