Minutes of May 12 meeting for attendees to review and correct

Okay, folks, here is an experiment. This is the draft of "minutes" of our last meeting. We never really got to the topic we planned to cover, but I think we had a lot of fun.

Please look this over and see if I've captured what you said accurately, and if not, post a correction. Also, please post any additional comments you made that I've left out. This will become an article in the e-Newsletter for June, and there will be people all over Texas who will read what we said - they've told me they read and enjoy them and are stimulated by them!

Anyway, let's see how this experiment goes. Give it a try!

Scott
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Proceedings of ASA OK-TX Section meeting in Houston 2007-05-12

Present: Christine Smith, Ed Nelson, Roger Rowe, Scott Robinson
Missed: Bruce Koons, Andy Coleman

We met at Star Pizza on the porch from 12:00 to 3:30.

Scott got there first. Christine came second, and we talked about ASA. [Christine, it sure was good to have you there! We were all glad to meet you!] Roger and Ed came next in that order, and each met Christine. Then we talked about our cars and emissions control since Christine works for the state in emissions prediction (Christine has heard of Sabrina Strawn in her role as director of GHASP. Scott told her we go to the same church as the Strawns).

We started to discuss Chapter 4 of Creation as Science at about 2:00. The following are my words, their thoughts.

Ed: Objected to Ross’ inconsistent appeal to metaphor. “Stars as numerous as grains of sand” is called a metaphor. But Ross goes to great lengths in a later chapter to explain Noachian Flood as history.

Rog: You’re the first person I’ve met who called the Flood account a metaphor.

Ed: It doesn’t pose a problem for my faith if it is; like Joshua making the sun stand still. I doubt it stopped the earth. I think it just seemed to them like time stood still, because they moved so fast and accomplished so much.

Rog: But that’s just one sentence [in Joshua], whereas the Noachian Flood covers many chapters.

Christine: Ed asked Christine (who had taken a break and missed the start of the Flood topic) what she thought of Noah’s Flood. She sighed, took a deep breath, and said she’s inclined to think it was a regional, local flood. Roger and Scott agreed.

Ed: We’re all aware that there have been floods everywhere, including big, devastating floods, throughout history, so it’s no wonder that accounts of a colossal flood are common. They’re virtually everywhere.

Scott: I think there’s something to the account of Noah’s flood. Christian missionaries have some interesting stories to report about the long, long ancestral memories of primitive tribes.

1. It is almost universal for people groups to have an account of some catastrophe (sometimes fire, most often water) in which the people group has displeased The God and is wiped out except for a very few survivors, enough to repopulate the earth.

2. Stories can go back a long way. A missionary we support was one of the pioneers in the 1990s who brought Christian Navajo to Mongolia because they seemed similar to the Mongols. Everyone was astonished to find out how similar. Going from my memory, I recall him saying that they had the same ways of serving food at the big feast, same living structures (one of felt, the other of logs and adobe), many of the same “toasts” and other customs, and both herded sheep. The Mongols recalled that their early ancestors told a story that some of them once went East – way East – and never came back. Scott didn’t remember all the details (it was a missionary newsletter from the ‘90s) but it was somehow clear these Mongols went to America. The Navajo were not in the first wave of Asian immigrants to America, but a later wave – like 12,000 years ago.

Ed objected that Europeans brought sheep; they weren’t native to North America.

Scott still thought it suggestive that the culture found the same way to handle sheep, as if they had a cultural propensity for doing it the same way their ancestors had.

[I think Rick Leatherwood just wrote a book, Glory in Mongolia, about the spread of the church there since the fall of the Soviet Union, and it may mention these accounts. Otherwise I’d have to dig through my old newsletters to find the one about this. - SER]

3. In his book Eternity in Their Hearts, Dr. Don Richardson (missionary to Papua New Guinea) tells the stories of several Stone Age tribes in the mountains of what are now Laos, Viet Nam and Cambodia, who have been there since before the “civilized” people invaded the lowlands. When these tribes were first contacted by Norwegian missionaries in the 1800s, they found that these tribes all had similar ancient stories about having come from far West across an enormous mountain range, and having angered The God by capitulating to the mountain spirits and worshiping them. However, The God said He would someday give them another chance, and not to blow it. For generations they kept that memory alive and waited. A generation or two before the missionaries came, a few tribes’ shamans had revelations from The God that the person who would bring them reconciliation with Him would sit under such-and-such a tree, and would have white skin (none of them had that). And when missionaries came, they fulfilled those visions and the peoples became Christian almost overnight. They are still there in Southeast Asia, but are treated like scum and persecuted by the “civilized” Buddhist or Muslim peoples that dominate those countries.

Oral societies can preserve history a long, long time. I have no doubt this is what the Hebrews did.

The tribes we call “primitive” are full of intelligent, articulate people who just happen not to have technology. That doesn’t make them dumb. Their languages and culture are very sophisticated and complex, as much as any technological culture and even more. We’re very chauvinistic about other cultures’ intelligence because it doesn’t look like ours, isn’t expressed in what we value.

Ed: All this could just mean that we, as a race, like apocalyptic stories.

Scott: I know we can’t say for sure, but I think these accounts are highly suggestive that there’s more to Genesis history than most people imagine.

Scott: I have the Scriptures for Ross’ list on page 75. Maybe we could see if we think these Scriptures make those points. We’d better give some time for people to read that section. [Conversation pauses as some read the passage. A conversation starts.]

Ed: I don’t need a literal exodus [from Egypt] to have faith.

Rog: Lots of peoples’ faith would be torn asunder if any of it is myth.

Ed: That’s OK. There are lots of rooms in the mansion.

Christine: There are lots of parallels between the symbolism of the O.T. and the fulfillments in the N.T. - Adam and Jesus, the serpent on the stake, etc. Something else must be going on besides just myth. Otherwise the entire N.T. history just happens to perfectly fulfill and complete the mythical accounts of the O.T.

Ed: Like the Iliad, the O.T. has a historical basis. I’ve read that in the mountains of Anatolia, farmers still retell the Iliad in Homeric fashion.

Rog: In this chapter [chapter 4], Ross addresses a question that’s been bothering me for months. He places the creation of Man at about 50,000 years ago. How could it take 47,000 years for writing to occur? Ross’ answer is that God is outside time, so in a sense it all passes in an eyeblink to Him. Time just doesn’t matter to Him because he’s outside it.

Scott: There was no need for writing before agriculture. We know that widespread agriculture started about 7,000 – 8,000 B.C. in the major river valleys. Mesopotamia has the oldest evidence of it. The surplus food gave those people the ability to specialize for the first time, to have crafts and trade and business. The earliest writing was to track mercantile accounts. Before that, writing was not needed.

Ed: That’s true for MesoAmerica. They had obsidian, didn’t need metal.

People had to go by this time (it was 3:30), so we broke up until we reconvene in July.