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Bill, we want to encourage people to go to defenders, go to the defenders series and we're going to talk a little bit about the defenders topic and series today.

That mentions John Walton and look at a response that he has made to you that's making the rounds on YouTube.

Tell us a little bit about what the series was and who John Walton is. We've discussed before.

I take it that this would be the series I did on doctrine of creation and I looked at Walton's views of the narrative in Genesis 1.

Where he argues for a mutually exclusive distinction between what he calls material creation and functional creation.

Material creation is bringing something into existence that did not exist before.

For example, when a carpenter makes a desk, that would be an example of material creation.

Functional creation would be when something begins to function in a certain way.

And the example Walton gives is above restaurant. Imagine a restaurant that is a renovated factory.

And you could ask, well, when did the restaurant begin to exist? Well, the answer would be when it opened as a restaurant.

Even though the building was already there, you don't go back to when the factory was originally created and say that's when the restaurant began,

rather it's when the building began to function as a restaurant.

And he uses this distinction to claim that Genesis 1 in describing God's creation of the light, the seas, the dry land, the sea monsters, and creatures, and finally man himself,

that this is really just specifying the functions of these things and not actually bringing them into existence.

This is from a podcast. It begins bill with a clip from you that Walton interacts with. Let's go to that now.

I think I have a clip here. Let me see if this will play. It's about 30 seconds and you can respond to it.

Whether Genesis 1 describes God as bringing into being the things that are described, whether he uses material or not,

or does he merely specify the functions for things that are already in existence?

I think that we have to guard here against erecting false dichotomies.

Just because a text speaks of God specifying an object's function doesn't exclude efficient causation as well.

Walton has to show that the text of Genesis 1 is concerned exclusively with functional creation.

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