Understanding the Bible – The Impact of Ancient Culture and Science

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I’m currently reading John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, and in the first proposition he states that Genesis 1 is ancient cosmology. In exploring this notion he suggests that cosmic geography, that is how the cosmos is ordered and works, is culturally descriptive.

A Cultural Understanding of Scripture

If cosmic geography is culturally descriptive, that is, that the Bible uses the cultural understanding of the cosmos to get its point across, then when Paul writes in Colossians (1:16-17) that God, through Jesus, holds the all things together, we can see an ancient understanding that the world is literally being held together by God. Is this at odds with science? Our scientific understanding suggests that there are natural laws which “hold” the universe together. Does this mean that God is not involved in this process? Some might want to suggest that it does mean that.

Science at Odds with Scripture?

However, if God works through natural laws, what evidence could science possibly use to prove this? What could it use to disprove it? If all evidence that science can find is natural, and if God is at work through nature, then science can’t say one way or other other. Thus, this doesn’t preclude that God is working in those natural laws somehow. So it seems, as Ard Louis once put it, science is the study of the customs of the Creator.

Science is not at odds with Scripture when we understand that God used an ancient cultural understanding of the cosmos to get its point across. The point of the Colossians passage is that God, through Jesus, is in control of the cosmos. The ancient understanding that God is the one who is literally holding the universe together (in their absence of understanding of natural laws) is not the point of the passage. How he is in control (whether literally holding it together as in an ancient understanding, or through the natural laws that science has discovered) is irrelevant to the larger point that he is in control.

Scriptural Implications

Getting back to Walton’s work. I think this demonstrates that Walton is definitely on the right track in suggesting that cosmic geography is culturally descriptive. While this sheds enormous light on Genesis (as he proposes to demonstrate in his work), I think it has implications for our understanding of the whole of Scripture.

What do you think the implications of this are (or are not)?