RE: Narrowminded Views #2 - When a Day is Just a Day - Understanding that God has set limits on interpreting Scripture
I think I understand better where you are coming from.
- When people refer to "evolution" they often mean one of two things. The first is as a useful model which explains how certain things take place, for example, how it is that a given species of animal changes over a period of time to adapt to a significant change in its environment. There's the classic example of a certain type of moth in England gradually changing from white to black so that it can be camouflaged by buildings increasingly darkened by soot as the Industrial Revolution progressed. People have observed and even measured that, and evolution is the model to explain it. You can expand that model to consider whether or not one species might have evolved into an entirely different species over a much longer period of time, but no one has been around long enough to actually observe and measure that, so any honest scientist would have to concede that it's speculation at that point. That's what I mean when I say "evolution" and it's probably because I trained in science.
The other meaning the word has is more of a religious term than a scientific one. And I think that may be what you are talking about. Any time a scientific theory (and I don't care which one it is) starts getting used as a way to attempt to push God out of the picture, it has crossed the line from science into religion. Science honestly cannot answer theological questions--it's just not what science is meant to accomplish. That doesn't stop people from trying, though, but when they do, then their assertions become religious ones, not scientific ones. At that point, you have to address them on the basis of theology, but there is no need to try to force the Bible to refute the original truly scientific model that's also called "evolution."
The confusion between science and religion comes from the fact that so many people in the intellectual pursuits (which include scientific inquiry) have turned away from God and claim to have no religion. Unfortunately, the human being is specifically created to be religious and of course to be rightly religious, meaning to walk with God. When people turn away from the true religion, well, their entire beings have a vacuum which will be filled with something. In other words, everyone is going to be religious about something because there is no way to not be. So scientists who have rejected God turn their science into a religion, and it really doesn't work well. The answer isn't to come up with our own version of a science religion that we might call "creationism" or "young earth creationism." The answer is to keep science in its proper place, and recognize when people are overstepping its proper bounds by turning science into a (false) religion.
Two. I hear you about using the poetic metaphors of the psalms as an "excuse." That wasn't my intention here, and I totally agree with you that the verse you quoted is true in its literal sense. My point was simply to caution against missing a larger and deeper truth by fixating on the literal interpretation of the imagery. Scripture needs to be approached with the intention to know and obey God (on His terms, not ours); otherwise it's going to be misinterpreted.