The first part took a critical look at the very first line of the first
book of the Bible, the Answers in Genesis (AiG) logo "1:1"; itself a
very interesting website. Even more so if you have some understanding of
science and history. Quite how AiG misinterpret the evidence against the Genesis account of Earth's chronology is
spectacular. I recall one article1, complete with testimonies from
rather questionable 'academics', about the dinosaur Triceratops; unsurprisingly
it places Triceratops well within the Bible chronology (the last 6000 years)
making it much younger than paleontology/radiometric dating says it is, but
that is perhaps a topic for another time. Let us return to the Genesis as
it continues with the creation of the Earth...
Now God has created the heaven and the
earth Genesis states;
And
the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the
deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Gen
1:2)
This is quite an interesting little
passage as it appears to have taken a step backwards; Genesis 1:1 states that God created the earth
but 1:2 states that the earth has no form - so how could it be the Earth?
There are, again, some possible
explanations for this (the Bible thrives on ambiguity and it is not for nothing
that literally everything is open to interpretation - something I will cover
later); that God did not create the planet Earth but created earth, as in rocks
and dirt and dust and that kind of thing - the solid constituents of the planet
yet to be formed into a planet. The other option is that God did create the
planet but it was simply blank, just a sphere of rock floating in space. The
problem exists with the word 'form'. When something has a form it has a shape,
it looks like something, it has structure. 
Without a form it is nothing; a car
before it is formed is simply a pile of parts, there may exist
all the parts of that car there, but it is not a car. However, there is no
mention of God forming the planet out of anything so it
leaves room for only the second option; that "without form, and void"
means blank - a blank planet just hanging there in the universe, or not, it’s
not explicit on whether the greater universe exists at this point, it never
really says God made the rest of the Universe either. 
There is no mention of
God creating the rest of the universe in the Bible, there is indeed no mention of God creating anything other than this planet. If we are to take the Bible as the word of God one has to consider why he would leave this out. If 'glory be to his name' would not it make sense to claim more than to have only done less than half a job...?
The next lines are equally ambiguous
and in reality don't say very much at all; "...and darkness was upon the
face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters". We are again forced into a leap of faith with the second line
here; that the world was without form and void, yet, there was water - which
means that it wasn't really void. So when God created the earth
it came with some basic stuff, like a starter pack I imagine. The darkness
line could be regarded as fairly self-explanatory; anyone even basically
initiated in the Bible knows that God has not yet created light (in fact the
stars come a long time after light, not until 1:16 in fact. Go figure) so it is
obviously going to be dark. What “The spirit of God moving along the face of
the waters” means is very much open for any interpretation anyone could imagine
to put on it.
So the second verse of Genesis is perhaps even more
ambiguous than the first and this is primarily because it used more words, the meaning is equally obscure. Another
argument that Creationists, and indeed the Bible, use a most of the time,
it comes up right alongside the triple-fallacy that I discussed in part 1.
However, this author is not deterred and plans to tackle the bible in
spite of its supposed complexity and intimate details or lack of them.
The second
verse in the book of Genesis is also very much like the articles
published on Answers in Genesis; spectacularly unhelpful at
explaining anything in realistic terms. Something which
I personally think the book of Genesis is actually
an attempt at doing. However, when the people who wrote it tried
to explain more complex things their lack
of understanding in the area shows and of course they posit the
old argument, in one of its many forms, that when something cannot be explained
therefore it must be some higher being - God. Given the fact that this argument was fallacious
3000 years ago, although perhaps more excusable before
the advent of modern scientific understanding,
it calls into question how people can possibly still rely on
this argument today?
Another point which this next passage
will aim to cover is the problem with translation and interpretation of the
Bible, particularly the earliest books, of which Genesis is one.
It would, of course, be possible to
give a far more rigorous treatment of the translation in the Bible, however,
this would do no service to the content of these articles other than to
highlight and exacerbate the problems of interpretation; the King James version,
arguably the most widespread and available version of the Bible, dates back to
1611. Which would make that version alone over four-hundred years old; it is
worth noting that other than when looking into history, there are no books that
old that are used as a current reference for anything besides historical study;
one would not base current medicine on books from periods even as recent as the
1970s. Indeed, academic textbooks are considered out-of-date within a couple of
years. Such is the progression and speed of knowledge and understanding.
The top selling Bible is currently the
New International Edition which still traces its roots to the 1950s with the
rather ambiguous mantra of creating a,
"faithful translation of the Scriptures in the common language of the American people”3.
The key word in this
mission statement is 'faithful'. Faithful to what exactly? Faithful to the
Classical Hebrew that most of the Bible was originally penned in, a language
itself that goes back nearly 3,000 years?
It is worth nothing something at this
juncture; there are modern languages that share the same roots - such as Latin
based languages - that some phrases and words simply cannot be translated
through. Such as from French to English or Spanish to Italian, because the
meanings are completely incompatible. In this case all the best linguistic scholars can do
is get as close as they can. One can imagine the problem of trying to
translate, accurately, something as old as Classical Hebrew. Linear A (c.
1800-1450 BCE) still
has not been successfully deciphered, let alone had its texts translated into hundreds of other languages. If it weren't for the Rosetta stone we'd still be guessing about Hieroglyphs too.
In light of the this problem, if we
return to the "faithful translation of the scriptures..." one can
only come to the conclusion, based on the issues of working with even well
understood modern languages, that the translation is faithful only to what translators believe the
scriptures mean or what they want the scriptures to say, not to the
what the scripture actually say.
When it is clear that the Bible is open
to such a large amount of interpretation at the level of translation and the
level of reading, how could anyone base anything meaningful on this text, with
any kind of surety?
Part 3 of TAANIG will look at the next
five verses in Genesis in two sections; Gen 1:3-5 followed by Gen 1:6-7.
Thank you for reading as always.
Written by A.R. Bell (2015)
#LogicShotgun
@ARB_itrary
---
1 Hell Creek Formation Tells a
Tale of Triceratops (https://answersingenesis.org/dinosaurs/bones/hell-creek-formation-tells-tale-triceratops/).
A very interesting article that is
certainly eye-opening in more ways than one. The fantastic imagination of this
piece is really only matched by the spectacular misinterpretation of the evidence
and of course a rebuttal of evolution is a key theme in it as well, spurious
though it may be.
2 Ronald F. Youngblood, Glen G. Scorgie,
Mark L. Strauss, Steven M. Voth Zondervan. (2003) The Challenge of Bible Translation:
Communicating God's Word to the World : Essays in Honor of Ronald F.
Michigan: Zondervan
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