From Brigham Young University's Maxwell Institute, this is the Maxwell Institute podcast, Faith Illuminating Scholarship.

In 26, we are releasing a series called Old Testament Reflections. Each week, a scholar offers a short

reflection on the Come Follow Me reading. Today's reflection, creation accounts in

Genesis, Moses, and Abraham is written and read by Stephen C. Harper. Imagine that your Sunday

school class starts a new year with Genesis 1 and 1.

Your prayerful and prepared teacher wants to communicate exactly what the Bible says,

but communication is challenging and the Bible is noisy.

In any communication, an encoder, in this case your teacher and the Bible, sends a signal.

A decoder, you, receives the signal.

Noise between the encoder and decoder inevitably hinders transmission and reception

of the signal.

If the fire alarm rang, just as a class member began reading, in the beginning, that

physical noise would obviously disrupt the communication, but less obvious kinds of noise

do too.

If you were fasting and worried about a loved one, you might find it hard to concentrate on

the words of Genesis 1-1.

That would be physiological noise.

If you heard the words, God created the heaven,

and you thought of heaven as outer space or the place where God lives,

that would be cultural or semantic noise,

because in Genesis, heaven includes a dome that holds back the rain

or the water above the earth. Cultural or semantic noise occurs when the encoder intends

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