TerraRandom wrote:
I find what Clement of Alexandria writes curious. He says that we cannot know when creation took place from reading Scripture:
(snip quote)
There are also numerous other quotes like this here:
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/churchfathers.htmDon't get me wrong, I'm still suspicious of Old Earth Theory. (I'm still suspicious of both, really.) I'm just pointing out that there has always been a debate as to what the six days really were, and how old the earth was. (although they may not have been quite as extreme as +billion years old.) and I don't really know who most these people are, nor do I necessarily agree with them.
That particular quote from Clement of Alexandria seems to me to be a lear violation of the principle of using clearer passages to illuminate more obscure ones.
But yes, this idea that the Bible's teaching of the age and origins of the earth might not be literally true isn't at all new; remember that various pagan cultures, including various ancient Greek philosophers, have believed or held that either history is entirely cyclical or that the Eath is eternally old. Some of these systems even included myths of creatures of one kind becoming another, calling this "evolution", which is, I suspect, why Darwin's ideas were so vehemently opposed in his day even by intellectuals who didn't bat an eye at uniformitarianism. (In other words, evolution is not new; what
is new is the supposed mechanism, "natural selection", and the use of at least supposedly scientific rather than purely philosophical arguments to support it.) In any case, Theistic Evolution and the like look, to my eye, like just another example of trying to make Christianity fit with the pagan philosophy
du jour (in this case naturalism and what Lewis called "scientism") by changing Christianity.
