How much is too much evolution?

Exactly!  I have to say I've been a little surprised by some of the comments.   Some of the reactions treat the sound practice of interpreting within the proper historical/cultural context as if it were 'anathema' or 'heretical', when as I've said and now you're also confirming the same *every* pastor learns this, because that's how it's supposed to be done.  It's foundational, the correct way to interpret and understand the Bible, and basic Hermeneutics 101.

You will have to let me know how you can alter the meaning of the text to not mean what it clearly says so it isn't an issue with common ancestry.

No one's altering the true, correct actual meaning.  But I don't see the point in trying to explain further if we can't even get past basic Hermeneutics 101.  I mean if you're going to reject sound principles of Bible interpretation that every scholar and ordained pastor who's been to seminary follows...

Really, you take text that says God created this type of life on one day, another type of life the next, and so on till man was made. You think Hermeneutics has this properly lining up with, no it didn't happen that way, it happened that all life started in one lifeform and evolved into all the life we see today. Are those verses in Chapter one or elsewhere?

You don't follow correct, sound principles of biblical interpretation, but make scripture a matter of private interpretation.  Your type of approach leads to a multitude of problems and wrong, incorrect interpretations throughout Church history like when people erroneously take Jeremiah 10:1-5 to be a 'clear', 'obvious' prohibition against Christmas trees. 

If one follows sound hermeneutical principles, then the apologetic, polemical nature of Genesis 1 against Ancient Near East pagan cosmologies and Egyptian cosmologies in particular cannot be denied, and Genesis 1 must be interpreted in that context.  Sound principles of biblical interpretation require it.

You can still 'give me the four-hundred and eleven' you owe me though.

   Every pastor is not taught your methods of interpreting the Bible. That may be a common method in modernist colleges, whether Catholic or Protestant, but many Christian churches and groups are neither Catholic nor Protestant (in that they never came out of and don’t trace their roots to the Catholic organization). Independent Baptist colleges (and some others) do not teach the nonsense you are espousing, but rather teach that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, was written to every generation, will be preserved for every generation, existed in heaven before on Earth and in the original autographs is perfect down to the very letters of the words. They also teach that there will be opposition of false science that is to be rebuked and avoided. 
   Your denial of the plain truth of the Word of God is nothing new, we see it from the serpent in the garden (but I suppose you have an alternate Egyptian based theory on that) and it carries on in his spiritual descendants today. 
   You have a bigger issue to deal with than trying to bring believers around to your unbelief, you need to examine your own soul, whether you be in the faith. My assumption is that you give a mental assent to Christ dying on a cross, and rising three days later (though you probably dismiss it as an allegory) and somewhere in your past a Sunday School teacher talked you into praying a prayer and you now believe you are safe. You are not. 
   I’m not your final judge, but I wouldn’t bet 5 cents on the salvation of someone who criticizes the Word of God as you do. There is no repentance in your past, and please don’t tell us of your reliance on the Grace of God, whose Word you don’t believe.

   You’ve become proud of your education (it’s not, it’s indoctrination). Academia has gotten ahold of you and made you two-fold more the child of Hell than itself.

I believe in a systematic view of scripture. It cannot lead to multi-able translations; all text has to agree with all other text that is not something that allows for someone to alter the meaning into something that disagrees with the rest of the scripture. Your view does just what you are complaining about; the things in that chapter and other things in the book were quoted by various speakers/writers of other books as true events. You've turned them into something other than the reality that they portray. As I said, there is truth, points of view don't shape truth, there is truth, opinions will vary with the wind, reality doesn't bend to our feelings or will, or our desires to see reality look like as we want it to be.

I have to agree with Stephen ( #'s 314 & 315 ) here. The specific dimensions of the Ark seem to lend credibility to the story. As i understand it it's specifics like this that cause literary's ( if that's the right word to use...) to give credence to ancient texts. I also find it hard to believe that Moses or any of the scribes he had copying what he wrote would embellish a story or intend to have it believed in any other way than it was written regardless of writing style.

Ultimately, the bible tells us 'God cannot lie,' ( Numb c 23 v 19 ; Titus c 1 v2 ; Heb c 6 v 18). 

It could happen

At the risk of seeming pedantic, there isn't a separate set of facts that are 'scientific', only facts.

Science is a method by which the matter of fact of some natural process is established (as best it can be) but never proven beyond all doubt.

I must have missed this if it's been explained before but what does "ANE" (ancient near east?) mean in this context - what is the ANE interpretation?

I think I need to clarify a point here hello. I meant that such technical details might well be believed by ancient peoples simply because of the context of the narrative, namely that the Almighty himself was directing and guiding the construction. And as the faithful are taught to believe - nothing is beyond the Almighty!

I didn't mean to suggest that anyone in modern times should believe such a large wooden craft would ever be able to float because we now know so much more about the physical limitations of building vessels in wood.

This is why the argument that such extravagant claims would never have been believed, even in the Bronze Age, don't entirely convince me. Where I wonder is the evidence that Jews in particular dismissed those aspects of their holy writings?

@Kjav,

You're confusing *historical criticism* with *historical-grammatical method*.  The latter is what I've been talking about which is focused on determining author's original intent by grammar, syntax, and interpreting within the correct historical/cultural context.  I'm sorry this is hard for you, but your statements are false and incorrect as is your assertion that such an approach is inherently evil and opposed to God.  The historical-grammatical method IS what every ordained pastor is taught in seminary, and it is also the correct method of interpretation taught in biblical hermeneutics, and it is also the only method of biblical interpretation endorsed by  the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

The irony you can't see is that you've read your own modern cultural understanding into the text where it doesn't belong.  I do not advocate multiple interpretation readings.  There can be only a single original meaning and this original meaning doesn't change.  This is exactly what the *historical-grammatical* method every pastor learns in seminary is intent on determining: the author's original intent by looking at the grammar, syntax and the historical/cultural context. 

The irony is that your interpretation is simply another erroneous interpretation in a long line of them down through history that is colored and skewed by the modern worldview you've been raised in.  It's just like those who read Christmas trees into Jeremiah 10:1-5 because it's so 'obvious' that that's the 'clear meaning' of the text--even though it can't be since Christmas trees are a relatively new invention that have only been around since the 16th century.  It's like those who read dinosaurs into Job because it's so 'obvious' and 'clear' that behemoth and leviathan are descriptions of dinosaurs, even though dinosaurs are only a relatively recent discovery of science and other verses in the Bible show that things like leviathan can't be dinosaurs.  It's like OECs who erroneously read the modern day notion of the Big Bang into Genesis 1:3.  It's like YECs who erroneously read a 'water vapor canopy' into the 'waters above'. 

What you, YECs, and OECs can't seem to see is that you actually give modern science more credit than you realize and allow modern science to influence your reading of the Bible more than you realize, whereas ironically, I, as a scientist, do not because I know modern science is a relatively new phenomenon that hasn't always been around and therefore can't have any bearing on the original intended meaning of the text. 

The correct meaning is the original intended meaning.  The original meaning does not change.  The application of it may, but the original meaning does not.

(And on a side note you need to 'give me the four-hundred and eleven' you owe me)

It’s the interpretation of Genesis that @tbwp has been arguing for. Basically, Genesis exists to combat other ANE cosmologies (@tbwp gave the example of Egypt, and that’s one flavor of the interpretation), specifically arguing for monotheism vs polytheism by using the same basic creation story, but changed to make a theological point (same as Jesus did with the parables; he took common stories known to the Israelites, but changed a part to make a point). 

    I’m not going to defend the CSBI, but it’s simple statement of the fact that some parts of Scripture are poetry is very, very short of an endorsement of your belief that Genesis is poetry.

@stephen_33,

I do appreciate how difficult it is to comprehend that Bronze Age people may not have been as naive and simple minded as we think.  Yes, they definitely had erroneous views about the world, but so do we.  They had erroneous views but there was a logic to them based on *human observation*.  For example, there is daylight well before the sun rises and total darkness does not exist during an eclipse but there is still daylight.  So logically and empirically based on the observational 'science' of the day the sun is an additional light that is separate from the source of light for daylight, which is why we see daylight created on Day 1 while the sun is a separate luminary created on Day 4.  Yes, this pre-scientific view is in error, but it comes from the same experiential observation that is the foundation of modern science.  I'm sure future generations will shake their heads at how 'stupid' we are today in some of our views and what we were just sure was 'scientific fact'.

But there's also a distinct cultural difference too that is separate from any science or pre-science.  It is a distinction between the Western mind and the Eastern/Middle Eastern/Ancient Near Eastern mind (what older academia would refer to as 'the orient/oriental' mind).  It is very difficult for us to understand and wrap our minds around things like the importance of table fellowship and hospitality customs and heck arranged marriages, the significance of families, clans, tribes, and the great importance of honor in shame-honor societies. 

Our way of looking at things and reading things is so rigid and linear and inflexible literal, much more so than the 'Eastern' mind, which looked at things more organically, and looked for patterns and types.  Thus, we can't understand how the oversized dimensions of the ark could be seen as purposeful exaggerations.  Just like why give the dimensions of the 'New Heaven/Jerusalem' in Revelation in the New Testament if the author's not intending to convey literal dimensions?  Thus, our Western mind thinks this is what the early Christians believed the future heaven would be like.  A Borg-shaped cube 12,000 stadia (about 1500 miles) in length, width, and height.  Of course, our Western mind doesn't understand that the significance is not in the 12,000 but what the 12,000 represents, nor are we supposed to come away thinking they believed it will literally be a 3-dimensional cube.  We miss the typology and patterns that they would be interested in like how the new heaven/jerusalem is patterned off of Ezekiel's heavenly temple from the Old Testament and the significance enhanced by changing it from two dimensions to three. 

The added ironical twist is that while understanding the author's original intent IS the correct way to properly interpret, this is not how the 'Eastern' mind saw things, and this is something we must keep in mind when we interpret by the historical/cultural context of the time.  As noted above, they were far more organic and less rigid in their thinking and found more signifiance in patterns and types.  And yes, this was true of the ancient Israelites and later Judaism as well, just like the Jewish typology methods of interpretation we see in the New Testament.  For example, pretty much all the prophetic fulfillments in the life of Jesus cited by Matthew: the virgin birth in Isaiah, the flight and return from Egypt to evade Herod's killing of Bethlehem children, the wailing prophetic fulfillment due to Herod's action.  All these fulfillments are not literal fulfillments but fulfillments in pattern and type.  Thus, when Mary, Joseph and Jesus return to Judea from Egypt after Herod dies and they learn it's safe to return, Matthew says this was to fulfill the Old Testament prophecy where Yahweh says 'Out of Egypt I have called my son'.  Yet when you look up that Old Testament quote you see that it has absolutely nothing to do with Jesus--not directly that is--it is not a direct literal fulfillment.  The 'son' being referred to is the nation of Israel.  The Western mind reads such things and sees contradictions, when it's really just a problem with the Western mind not understanding how the Eastern mind thought about these things.  Throughout the gospels then, we see Jesus portrayed as Moses typologically--a new Moses in type who leads Israel out of Egpyt, but also simultaneously the Son of God in place of Israel as God's 'son'.  It is naturally all very difficult for the Western mind to comprehend, because our categories of thought and what we deem important are so different.  The same applies to things like the story of Noah's flood.  Far more important to them than a rigid, linear, and literal reading were the types and patterns the stories conveyed like Noah as a type of Adam, and the flood as a return to pre-creation chaos and then re-creation as we clearly see from the numerous points of correspondence structurally and grammatically between Genesis 1-3 and Genesis 6-9.

https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/how-much-is-too-much-evolution?page=16#comment-60760331

You're actually not hearing me correctly.  Genesis is NOT poetry.  It is mostly narrative prose.  I don't know why people keep misquoting me.  It does contain poetic elements, but it's NOT poetry.  And some parts of Genesis contain more poetic elements than others.  The account of Noah's flood for example, is highly poetic, stylized and presented as a chiasm/palistrophe with mirror image parallel structure.

Genesis 1 is also highly poetic compared to the rest of Genesis, but it is NOT poetry.  It is a combination of poetry AND narrative prose: *poetic prose* or *exalted narrative/prose* as it's been called. 

Some of this you can only see in the Hebrew but a lot of if it plainly evident in the English as we see from the repetition of 'And God said...And there was...And there was evening and morning day X';  'And God said...And there was...And there was evening and morning day X'; 'And God said...And there was...And there was evening and morning day X'.  It reads like stanzas in a psalm or hymn (but it is NOT a psalm or hymn or poem; it simply contains SOME of the same features/characteristics).

It's not either-or: either it's narrative OR poetry.  That's a very Western way of thinking and a false dichotomy.

But most importantly, poetry DOES NOT automatically mean allegorical.  I completely agree with you about that.  The problem is people see me write the word 'poetry' and think 'allegory' when I'm the first one to say that is incorrect and does not automatically follow.  Genesis 1 DOES contain poetic elements, but poetic elements DON'T make something allegorical.  

Yep

And yes, @stephen_33, ANE is just shorthand abbreviation for Ancient Near East.  And 'ANE interpretation' is simply a direct, 'cut-to-the-chase' way of saying interpretation by the *historical-grammatical* method, which is focused on determining the author's intended meaning from the grammar, syntax, genre and historical/cultural context.  With Genesis, that historical/cultural context is the Ancient Near East (ANE), so an 'ANE interpretation' simply means interpreting Genesis within its proper historical/cultural context in which it was written.

From Wikipedia: "The historical-grammatical method is a Christian hermeneutical method that strives to discover the biblical authors' original intended meaning in the text. According to the historical-grammatical method, if based on an analysis of the grammatical style of a passage (with consideration to its cultural, historical, and literary context), it appears that the author intended to convey an account of events that actually happened, then the text should be taken as representing history; passages should only be interpreted symbolically, poetically, or allegorically if to the best of our understanding, that is what the writer intended to convey to the original audience.  It is the primary method of interpretation for many conservative Protestant exegetes who reject the historical-critical method to various degrees.....The historical-grammatical method distinguishes between the one original meaning of the text and its significance. The significance of the text is essentially the application or contextualization of the principles from text."

*I just noticed that Wikipedia goes on to contrast with Orthodox Christianity (which reflects more the 'Eastern/Middle Eastern" approach, BUT not exactly, there are important differences): "The Orthodox Church primarily employs a spiritual, allegorizing hermeneutic heavily dependent on typological connections drawn by New Testament writers and the church fathers of the first several centuries of Christianity."

@Kjvav There are young earth creationists who accept the Ancient Near East background of Genesis, particularly the Egyptian background and are saying a lot of the same types of things I've been saying.  In fact, some of them take the connection between Egpyt and Genesis creation and flood accounts further than I would go.  I can understand how you don't trust anything I say, but maybe you should at least consider what fellow young earth creationists are saying about the ANE background.

https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/how-much-is-too-much-evolution?page=16#comment-60733007

That said, you should know that I actually REJECT the allegorical interpretation of Genesis 1.  I believe that is incorrect.  But what Protestants like you and I sometimes forget is that Christianity is a whole lot bigger than fundamentalism or even evangelical Christianity.  And while we may have sharp disagreements with Roman Catholicism and East Orthodox, we still must be careful not to take things too far.  For if your very negative assessment of me is correct where you basically portray me as an unbeliever non-Christian, anti-Bible depraved unrepentant reprobate who is leading believers astray--well if you get all that from my use of the PROTESTANT *historical-grammatical* method, then I'd hate to be one of the early church fathers from the 2nd/3rd century, because many of them believed the Old Testament should be interpreted allegorically.  If your low view of me is any indication, then you've essentially condemned the second generation Church of early Christianity to hell!

Some of these 2nd/3rd century early church pastors also recognized what you would call 'errors' in the Bible such as Matthew citing the wrong Old Testament prophet in his gospel.  But they weren't bothered by such things because they didn't believe inerrancy extended to every tiny little punctuation mark or every little detail but inerrant and wholly true in its theological claims.  You see, it's hard for us to see the influence of our own culture when we're immersed in it.  We forget that the staunch, rigid inerrancy evangelicals/fundamentalists insist on that requires 100% scientific and historical and grammatical accuracy---an important standard in our MODERN culture--is a relatively recent phenomenon that is NOT representative of most of Church history.

***I'm not trying to pick a fight with you but I do think this is an important topic because of the unbelief you mention but I truly believe the situation is reversed.  And I think former Christians and atheists on this forum like @stephen_33 will back me up on this and say I'm correct when I say it's less the *historical-grammatical* method that I and others use that's the problem and causing unbelief, and that it's actually the fundamentalist/evangelical insistence on this rigid 100% scientifically historically perfect Bible with no errors of any kind (where if there's one single error, mistake or discrepancy you throw out your whole Bible!) that has been MORE responsible for causing people to leave Christianity today than anything else; by heaping extra burdens on would-be believers where it's almost a prerequisite for salvation (which is totally unbiblical!) and imposes on the Bible MODERN standards of science and historiography that are foreign to it and that the Bible is not required to meet.  In this regard, it is similar to adding the extra burden of the Jewish Torah that some of the early Christians wanted to impose on Gentile Christian converts.  In short, it is imposing MODERN standards and ideas on the Bible that the early church and greater part of church history has not recognized, and would mean that most Christians throughout history were actually UN-believers and the *real believers* have only been around in the last 100 years or so of church history since the inception of this overly staunch fundamentalist view that is NOT representative of the views and beliefs of most Christians throughout Church history.

The more I look at this YEC article from the 2013 Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism the more impressed I am with it. 

Egypt's Hieroglyphs Contain a Cultural Memory of Creation and Noah’s Flood (2013 YEC article)

I don't agree with all its conclusions, but just about everything I've said about the anti-pagan apologetic and polemic of Genesis and the ANE background, particularly the Egyptian background relationship with Genesis is endorsed by this YEC article.  It even cites the same scholarly articles I've been citing and is in agreement with them, and notes all the many correspondences between Genesis 1 and the Egyptian creation accounts just as I've said.  It even goes further and believes there is an underlying Egyptian background that corresponds with Adam and Eve, the serpent and garden of Eden, and Noah and the flood and the post-flood table of nations in Genesis 1-10 as well.

It also illustrates another thing I keep saying: that the ANE historical/cultural context of Genesis has little relevance or intersection with the modern 'creation-evolution' debate. Like @TruthMuse you keep asking me where I see evolution and common ancestry taught in Genesis 1 and I keep telling you that it isn't taught at all.  'Evolution' isn't even on the radar of Genesis 1.  Genesis 1 does not have as much relevance to the creation-evolution-ID debate as people seem to think.  

***That is why this YEC researcher can endorse the ANE and Egyptian context of Genesis, while still holding to his YEC beliefs.  Recognizing the ANE/Egyptian historical/cultural context of Genesis does not directly conflict with YEC (or OEC, or ID, or evolution for that matter).  @Kjvav as I said above if you're going to reject what I say, at least consider listening to fellow YECs like this one, who effectively confirms virtually everything I've said in this YEC-approved article.