Proposition 12 of Walton’s book claims that “other theories of Genesis 1 either go too far or not far enough”. Walton considers Young-Earth Creationism, Old Earth Creationism, the Framework Hypothesis and the Gap Theory. Walton’s criticism of the YEC position is that it “goes too far in its understanding of what we need to do to defend the Biblical text…The YEC position begins with the assumption that Genesis 1 is an account of material origins and that to “create” something means to give it a material shape. It would never occur to them that there are other alternatives and that in making this assumption they are departing from a face-value reading of the biblical text. In fact they pride themselves on reading the text literally and flash this as a badge of honor as they critique other views. Reading the text scientifically imposes modern thinking on an ancient text, an anachronism that by its very nature cannot possibly represent the ideas of the inspired human author” (p.109).
Turning to the OEC position, Walton points out that by using the same ingenuity in interpreting Babylonian or Egyptian accounts of creation, one could presumably achieve a harmonization between them an modern science. “It is proof of our ingenuity rather than evidence of some ingrained underlying science” (p.110). Walton adds, “Taking the text seriously is not expressed by correlating it with modern science; it is expressed by understanding it in its ancient context” (p.111).
The nature of Walton’s precise disagreement with the framework hypothesis, which emphasizes that Genesis 1 has a literary structure used to make a theological point, is unclear to me. He emphasizes that he does not disagree with this viewpoint, but is only adding to it (p.112). But it is not entirely clear to me, apart from emphasizing the functional and cultic/temple elements of the text, Walton’s theological understanding of the implications of the text for today differ in any concrete way from the framework approach.
Walton adds a brief treatment of “other theories” before emphasizing his conclusion, namely that “science cannot offer an unbiblical view of material origins, because there is no biblical view of material origins aside from the very general idea that whatever happened, whenever it happened, and however it happened, God did it” (p.113).
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