Karl Kluge

Lionel Tun is one of those rare literalists who read the Genesis
geneologies in the obvious way. Which raises the following problem
(repost of an old, old post of mine). L.T. should feel free to offer
a detailed realignment of Egyptian history if he feels the conventional
dates are in error (and, of course, support it with evidence)...but I
wouldn't advise it. Many have tried, and none have succeeded.

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Since this has come up again...

I Kings 6:1 says that 480 years passed from the start of the Exodus to the
start of construction on the first temple by Solomon. Gal 3:17 says that 430
years passed from the covenant with Abraham to the delivery of the Law to
Moses. The first several chapters of Genesis give numbers of years between
the births of certain individuals (regardless of whether the relationship is
father-son) giving 1656 years from the creation of Adam to the Flood, and
389 or 391 years from the Flood to the covenant with Abraham (depending on
how you handle the inconsistency between the age of Seth and the date of
birth of his son).

The Jews were neither the most literate nor the most extroverted nation in
the area, so it isn't too difficult to fix the date of Solomon's building of
the first temple -- around 950 BC, it turns out.

This means that the Exodus took place c. 1430 BC, the covenant with Abraham
c. 1860 BC, the Flood c. 2252 BC, and the creation of Adam (and the Earth for
those who believe in 6 literal 24-hour days) c. 3907 BC (not too far from
Usher's (sp?) 4004 BC).

Unfortunately, there were any number of vigorous, literate cultures in the
Near East at the putative time of the claimed global flood, and none of them
seem to have noticed it. The Great Pyramid, for instance, was build in the
26th century BC, 300 years before the Biblical date of the Flood.

I have a hard time seeing what meaning the concept of inerrency can have if
God would allow dates that allow the falsification of the Bible as historical
text to become corrupted, and I fail to see any way to escape the very plain
language of the geneologies in Genesis. The only rational alternative if one
doesn't wish to throw Judaism or Christianity out the window in the face of
this problem is to accept that parts of the Bible are (gasp!) myths, that
there is nothing wrong or deceitful about the Bible containing myths, and go
off and get some understanding of what myths are and what their function is
(say, by reading Joseph Campbell or Robert Graves).

Karl Kluge (kck@g.cs.cmu.edu)

Here's one from the March 1991 _Impact_:

 "Why should we believe that all species come one from
  another when no evidence has yet been found to prove
  that any species came from another?"

This is a reprint of a William Jennings Bryan writing from 1925,
but the editors (who write a note at the end) do not claim that
this statement would now be inaccurate.  Rather, they claim that
Bryan's words "constitute a strong case against evolution even
today."

Perhaps John Morris needs to debate the remainder of the ICR on
the "fixity" of species and get back to us when they have made up
their minds.

Further, my recollection (from a year-old _Science News_ article)
is that the number of dinosaur _genera_ discovered is constantly
increasing, and that there are now about 500.  If John Morris wishes
to have 100 "kinds" turn into 500 genera in the 2000 years between
the creation and the flood, he is quite a radical evolutionist.