Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the creation of life and biological diversity, part 11.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Today we want to turn to an assessment of what I'm calling the monotheistic Hebrew myth interpretation

of Genesis 1. You remember we concluded last time by saying that the question raised by

Soden and Miller's book is whether or not Genesis belongs to the literary genre of myth, as do the Egyptian

creation myths. The difference between them would lie, not in their literary genre, but rather

in their theology. In contrast to the polytheistic, Egyptian myths on this view,

Genesis is a monotheistic Hebrew myth. So what might we say by way of assessment of this view?

The exploration of this question requires us to say a word about the nature or the character

of myth. The biblical scholar J. W. Rogerson observes that today the range of meaning of the word myth is so broad that, he says, quote,

the word can hardly be wrongly used, end quote. For example, on April 4 of 2019, I saw a Reuters

news headline that read,

Major study debunks myth that moderate drinking can be healthy.

Here is the popular understanding of the word myth to mean a falsehood.

Now this leads the eminent folklorist Alan Dundas to exclaim, nothing so infuriates a folklorist

more than to hear a colleague from the anthropology or literature department use the word

myth to refer to anything from an erroneous statement to an arco-typal theme, end

quote. Rather, ever since the groundbreaking work of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the famous

brothers Grimm, whom you know from their study of fairy tales, there are three types

of narrative which are studied by students of folklore, namely myths, folk tales, we often call them fairy tales, but they're not all

really about fairies, folk tales, and then legends.

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