YECs and Tohu & Bohu

Miller Jones has a new post up where he comments on the nonsense of Young Earth Creationism in light of a course he's recently completed on dinosaur paleobiology. I sat back and silently applauded.

Then, as one does, I poured a coffee and thought about it some more. In the church circles Miller and I once bounced around in, the standard YEC position was definitely not the version of creationism we promoted. We were keen on "the gap theory". In fact we used tohu and bohu as if the use of those Hebrew words in Genesis (1:2, "without form and void") took care of all the objections to a literal reading of the creation stories - once we'd applied the appropriate spin. The dinosaurs were, according to this understanding, pre-Adamic, part of an earlier, failed creation which culminated in Satan's rebellion and fall. Problem solved! This made us feel smugly superior to the old school creationists.

The reality is that the Gap Theory is just as addle-headed as the YEC interpretation. It's addle-headed on both exegetical and scientific grounds. Yet it's still played as a "get out of jail card" in certain fundamentalist circles. If we're going to whack the YECs over the head, it's only fair that we also direct a well-placed slap in a direction that's closer to home.