Barron on Genesis

In his video on Misreading Genesis, Bishop Barron limps through the old tale of 'genre' to avoid offending the materialists and the now defunct documentary fantasists.

My comment:

Let's clarify a few things.

> Genesis 1, etc. has the genre of 'history'. The grammatical constructions and vocabulary are congruent with other Hebrew history. It has the form of a list of events, similar to other lists in Numbers 7 and 29:12-25.

> If God is all-powerful there is no problem with a one-day creation of animals. If you disagree, tell me the problem. It is not about the creation of species of organisms, but 'kinds'. Species is a modern invention in a broader taxonomic system. The genesian kinds are possibly at the genus or family level, if not order for some microscopic forms. Behe's recent book (Darwin Devolved) clarifies the way this works out at the species level. You might also look at Sanford's "Genetic Entropy" and "Evolution's Achilles Heels" ed Carter, R.

> It is not unscientific for light to be created before the sun. The sun is an 'accidental' body that produces light. If light did not exist, the sun would not be able to produce it. But light is merely the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. For light to be created, the whole spectrum would have been created. 'Light' is then a metonym for the energy field essential for the rest of the creation to occur. It represents the creation of the entire cosmic energy infrastructure essential for the material existence. No energy, no nuthin' else!

> That God created in a few consecutive days has nothing to do with 'science' which is a retrospective examination of the results of God's creation. Because the creation is rationally accessible (being created by a rationally coherent mind) we can do science, and by the 'Genesis mandate' to care for the creation, we must, should, and love to do so.

> And, for those for whom 'day' is pummeled into something other than a day, the author went to great lengths to ensure that we understood a standard day of ordinary experience as an interval of time (not of lighting conditions which came on day 3 to mark that passage of time): they are calibrated as 'evening and morning' type days, and are numbered as a day list: Numbers 7 and 29 again are similar.

> The point of God creating in a rhythm related to our existential bound shows God in a fellowship space of our ordinary experience and demonstrates the world in our ordinary experience as the place of fellowship: not in imagination, not in 'transformed consciousness', or by smoking funny cigarettes, but in our ordinary life. God is thus existentially patent and engaged in a 'commutative' relationship with we, creatures in his image.