# Does the Bible envision the universe to look like this?



## Pergamum (Mar 11, 2016)

Does the Bible assume that the world and universe looks like this? And that the earth is flat and is unmoved in the heavens?





How does this square with inerrancy? We all speak of the sun rising or setting, but the ancient Hebrews weren't merely using loose language - they appeared to believe that the universe really looked like this? Did God merely explain the universe and world in ways they could understand?


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## Contra_Mundum (Mar 12, 2016)

It is a tendentious conclusion. It assumes up front that ancient literature is all of a literalistic sort, that people never explored anyplace, that there never was any transcultural trade, that the curvature of the earth isn't apparent at sea level (it is), that no one ever climbed coastal hills to observe the curvature more obviously, etc.

These are simply some of the immediate chronological snobberies that come instantly to mind. What, did rational humans not use conceptual placeholders to simplify their cosmological descriptions?

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/ has addressed this sort of blinkered approach to studying ancient peoples generally, and ancient Israel in particular.

Another thing: Even now, pastors teachers and professors will use a schematic approach to explaining eschatology (and other concepts). We do that, not typically because we think the physical reality contains earth, heaven, and hell; but we use visuals to set these ideas forth. Do we think an archaeologist of the future should interpret our drawings in a literalist manner, and find us naive and backward? How presumptuous would that be? But, today's contemptuous scholars of the past think they can foist the least imaginative notions on ancient learning.

Job.26:7,10 "He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing.... He has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness" In v11, mountains are spoken of as "pillars" of heaven. This is poetry; so why would we suddenly attribute the most painfully literal apprehension to the idea of sky, unless we were determined to make the ancients rather dull?

The same should be said for "windows of heaven." It is more than plain the ancients in general understood the hydrological cycle. The Bible is full of literal appeals to clouds bearing rain, even mentions clouds arising from the sea. But neither is the Bible averse to using a "house" metaphor to describe the heavens above. It _looks like,_ has the appearance of, a vault or dome. And yet, why cannot appearances be set down beside more staid descriptions; without assuming a kind of reflex cognitive dissonance must have afflicted ancient peoples?

Is.40:22 It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;

According to the "literalist," does Isaiah think the heaven is a "solid dome," or a stretchable curtain? Are there folds in it? Is there a dark corner over there?

Again, the kind of static, literalistic read of ancient cosmography really says more about the limits the modern investigator is willing to assign to the people of the past, than about what they actually thought concerning the physical construction of the world and its containment.

Is the Bible a sophisticated literary work? Then it should have many layers of meaning. The Creation narrative of Genesis 1-2 uses Tabernacle (Temple) building imagery as part of the deeper structure of the literature; setting forth the Creation, and especially the Garden, as a divinely organized place of worship. Is it a "literal" building with walls and ceiling? Of course not, but it is intended to be _evocative_ of one. That's part of the message of Scripture.

Evolution-as-conceptual framework has corrupted our culture's ability to grant pre-modern people intellectual, literary, even natural sophistication, which is reserved for the modern "scientific investigator."

And even if, at the end of the day, an extremely limited and formulaic picture of the universe is the only one allowed to people of old by modern scholars, the idea that the ancients were bound to that view with an iron grip like a "fundamentalist"--and not open to improvements--is just more arrogance from the intelligensia.


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## Ask Mr. Religion (Mar 12, 2016)

Pergamum said:


> Did God merely explain the universe and world in ways they could understand?


I don't think adopting a phenomenological view makes sense without knowing how Scripture presents cosmology. For example, Scripture describes the earth as round, not flat (Isaiah 40:21-22; Job 26:7). As another example, is it not the case that Scripture presents the sun in motion relative to the earth? If we assume that Scripture presents cosmology in a way that could be understood by the audience at the time, accommodating mistaken perceptions, then miracles are easily waved off by the liberals. Was the miraculous account of the sun standing still in Joshua 10 an actuality of just a phenomenological account of what the ancient folks apparently assumed?

EDIT: I cross-posted with Rev. Buchanan. He has explained it well.


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## Pergamum (Mar 12, 2016)

It does appear that hell is "below" us geographically as per the Bible, right? It is a real place in the ground or under the ground it seems.

Also, even people on the PB here have seemed to assert that we must believe the earth to be the center of the universe and unmoving due to the verses about the earth being fixed and unmoved. They seem to take these verses very literalistically. So why not take the heaven being a dome as literally the belief of the ancients? And does it matter if Moses believed the earth to look like a snow globe with a circle and a firm dome over the top and that the stars were part of this firm ceiling of heaven?


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## Pergamum (Mar 12, 2016)

Thanks. Yes, the Triablogue is helpful. Here is a link to one of their articles on this topic: http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2010/05/firmament.html

And another: http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2012/12/yesterdayi-read-john-waltons-genesis-1.html

and here: http://www.auss.info/auss_publication_file.php?pub_id=1659&journal=1&type=pdf


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## arapahoepark (Mar 12, 2016)

Noel Weeks has helpful stuff on this, I'll try to dig up some gems in his Sufficiency of Scripture later.


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## Miss Marple (Mar 12, 2016)

There is obviously legitimate analogy and etc. For example Jesus said I am the vine, you are the branches, that does not mean we are made of wood.

One must discern whether one is reading chronological history, historical narrative, poetry, allegory, etc. All are true. But not all are literal.


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## arapahoepark (Mar 12, 2016)

Skimming quickly through Weeks' work I didn't find mention of cosmology issues. But, I did find this:


> Sometimes it seems that those who claim that the Bible used the symbols of its day are merely trying to say that it used a naive as opposed to a scientific cosmology, or, to put it more popularly, it did not bother to correct the prevalent three-storey cosmology. If we assume for the sake of the argument that this is the case, then it should be clearly recognized that all we have established is that scientific dogma should not be made out of biblical cosmology. The argument has no relevance to other parts of the account like the creation of animals, man, etc. Unfortunately this argument is generally used without this careful delimitation. Generally it is argued that the fact that one element shows the use of non-scientific concepts proves that the whole uses naive ideas whose details may not be pressed.
> Yet once more the validity of the basic premise must be questioned. Was there ever a pure ‘three-storey universe’ idea in antiquity? For the pagan contemporaries of the Bible writers, cosmology was theology. The heavens expressed and were controlled by the various divinities. The sort of abstract spacial/mechanical interest involved in the idea of a three-storey universe is a product of the demythologization of Greek rationalism and Euclidian spacial concepts. One should not try to project a late idea back into biblical times in order to explain the Bible. In its rejection of polytheism biblical cosmology is of necessity radically different to its surroundings. It is not popular cosmology.
> Secondly, what is so wrong about a ‘naive cosmology’? It is probably as close to the ultimate truth as modern cosmology. If we had not deified modern science we would not be embarrassed by those points in which biblical thinking diverges from prevailing modern ideas. Certainly biblical cosmology fits into a different structure of thought from modern cosmology, but it is the validity of that very structure of thought that is at issue. We tend to assume that the assumptions underlying modern physics are unquestionable. If we assume the validity of the structure of physics from any period with its philosophical presuppositions and concomitants1 we run the risk of accepting a structure which, because of its ultimate origin in a total humanistic philosophy, must clash with a biblical world view. What has generally happened is that the structure and method of modern science has been accepted as truth. When the conflict between this and a biblical view has been appreciated, an attempt has been made to give the biblical view a validity in some sort of restricted religious sphere. The basic question is whether our interpretation of the Bible is to be determined by the Bible itself or by some other authority. Once science has been set up as an autonomous authority it inevitably tends to determine the way in which we interpret the Bible. From the point of view of this discussion the outside authority may be Newton or Hoyle just as well as Darwin or Kant. The issue involved is still the same


http://creation.com/weeks-does-the-bible-really-teach-a-three-storey-cosmology


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## Peairtach (Mar 12, 2016)

There is a typological aspect to the natural world in Scripture, such that God's Heaven is associated with the sky and "above" and Hell associated with "nelow"; whether anyone really believed that - i.e. took it literally - is another matter. Were they obliged to believe it literally?

On the "firmament" being a solid dome see 

http://49ft7fdv9kp7kqhm12yk1d17.wpe...s/2015/12/2015Poythress-RainWater-WTJ77.2.pdf


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## Peairtach (Mar 12, 2016)

> Also, even people on the PB here have seemed to assert that we must believe the earth to be the center of the universe and unmoving due to the verses about the earth being fixed and unmoved. They seem to take these verses very literalistically.



The question of the sun is unusual in that even, as with most people today, you believe that the earth moves round it, you will admit that relative to the earth it looks like it's moving and you will speak of it rising and setting.


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## Contra_Mundum (Mar 12, 2016)

***edit, atop my earlier post below***
Trent,
Your quote from Weeks is excellent. It states much of what I intend to say in my post.

*****************************




Pergamum said:


> It does appear that hell is "below" us geographically as per the Bible, right? It is a real place in the ground or under the ground it seems.


You only get that if you assume that the Israelites (OT) and Jews/Gentiles (NT) were incapable--unlike we enlightened moderns!--of employing metaphors. Of using concrete terms to convey conceptually expansive ideas.

I'm not suggesting that some very simple folk might not have thought of the whole, real universe as if the conceptual language was literal description. But the proposal that educated people of those ages did not know they were employing symbolic language--again, this is mere sophistry. It is chronological snobbery. It aims to make the fathers really dumb, and their sons really smart.

In fact, I'd be so bold as to say that whereas in bygone days, men readily distinguished between their _observational_ descriptions of the world at hand, and their _theoretical_ descriptions of _worlds_ beyond the limits of their senses; NOW, due to naturalistic hegemony among scientific elites, it is common to deny there is any meaningful space between the quality of their observations and theoretical underpinnings for them and extrapolations from them. According to this religion, we inhabit a "single-story" reality which is the whole of it. "Imagine there's no heaven... no hell," _J.Lennon_.

In other words, while moderns have vastly increased the quality of their local observations (by which term I'm not excluding astronomy or particle physics), they have generally sought to eliminate as "irrational" and "useless" study of reality that is beyond sense and quantifiable data. It is reductionism on a vast scale; by trying to eliminate philosophy and religion as valid tools of description, they have become less sophisticated, not more.

For our part, we don't have to surrender the more recent accuracy in describing the natural realm--though we don't have to blindly rubberstamp every authoritative "finding"--we can keep modern pictures of the earth and the solar system, etc., while retaining the biblical _*concept*_ of the universe.

For the Bible's presentation of reality: better than a "three-storied universe" scheme is a "two-storied universe" scheme. Above is the realm of the Spirit and life; below is the realm of spirit and death. The Boundary is where men dwell. On one "surface" men walk, the "live, move, and have their being." When they die, they are put below the Boundary (the surface) where they belong, as residents of the dead zone. Their dead bodies don't walk that Boundary from below; they simply lie there.

Their spirits, on the other hand, are imprisoned there--UNLESS, they have remained in life, unless by faith they ascend to God. Those living at the Boundary do not communicate with them; all that is past. Necromancy seeks communication with those imprisoned beneath their feet. But, so far as we know, the only communication this work "achieves" is with demonic spirits which, cast down from heaven, still patrol the Boundary, until sent into the Abyss.

Now, do I think that the physical universe corresponds to that scheme? Of course not; but I know that REALITY is more than the physical universe. And I think sophisticated ancients sharing this scheme were also capable of distinguishing between burying their dead "out of my sight," and digging a mine below the surface.

As far as modern people believing in a _literal_ geocentric and immovable earth: let them be. It does them little harm, and it does you and I no harm. Right interpretation of the Scripture is, I say, unaffected. We might think: "that person, and maybe those around him, will not do much for the school of astronomy." Big deal. It was Rome, and her pretended dominance of all learning, and her importation of Greek philosophy into theology, that led to Gallileo's suppression. That was an abuse of theology, and the Bible, rather than the right use and appreciation of the light the Bible shines on reality.

Moses perception of the world _may have been_ constrained by the limits of his knowledge. But even if he had a "snow globe" idea of the world--which I'm not conceding--his religious understanding was still more sophisticated in his grasp of Reality than modern naturalism.


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## Ask Mr. Religion (Mar 12, 2016)

Pergamum said:


> And does it matter if Moses believed the earth to look like a snow globe with a circle and a firm dome over the top and that the stars were part of this firm ceiling of heaven?


I does matter, especially given that Moses did not believe as you state he believed.



Pergamum said:


> Thanks. Yes, the Triablogue is helpful. Here is a link to one of their articles on this topic: http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2010/05/firmament.html
> 
> And another: http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2012/12/yesterdayi-read-john-waltons-genesis-1.html
> 
> and here: http://www.auss.info/auss_publication_file.php?pub_id=1659&journal=1&type=pdf



That last link above is useful.


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