Reading from the Old Testament, Holy Gospels, Acts, Epistles and Revelation, our priests' and bishops' sermons, and commentary by the Church Fathers. All Forum Rules apply.
..."why should we assume that Moses was writing a scientific account of creation, as opposed to a theological one? Why try to harmonize it according to science at all, if that was not Moses' intent?"
Not to be overly contentious, but how do we know with such certainty what the "intent" of Moses (and the Triune God) was in the writing of the Torah? The Hebrews have long believed that the entire history of the cosmos was encoded within the Torah--which is why Hebrew scribes were carefully instructed for centuries to not alter a single letter of the Torah, lest they alter the course of the cosmos. And they didn't. Medieval copies of Old Testament texts correspond very precisely with those found among the Dead Sea scrolls. I think Schroeder (an Orthodox Jew) makes a rather compelling case that the text of [i]Genesis,[/i] properly translated, may be more astoundingly scientific than modern Protestant (and Orthodox--viz., Tarazi) Bible scholars ever imagined, in their wildest positivisitic interpretations.
Not knowing the original intent of the authors would be tantamount to not knowing how to read or understand the text at all, right? True, we can't have absolute certainty, but we can make educated guesses based on the evidence. And the evidence suggests that Moses was writing theology, not empirical science.
For instance, one of the most exciting areas of Biblical research is in comparitive literature. Now, more than ever, it is clear just how old the first books of the Bible are (something not always evident if we only look at the archeological evidence), and it gives us a better idea of what Moses (or God through Moses) needed to accomplish in order to distance the foundling religion of Israel from her pagan co-patriots. How was Israel to understand her place in the cosmos given the competing cosmological (and polytheistic) claims made by the culture around her? Answer: The theology of creation out of nothing found in Genesis 1 and 2.
Do you know what "positivism" means? I think that the term was used originally by Auguste Comte as a definition of "Enlightenment" epistemology. "Let us assume that there are no "metaphysical" causes for empirically discerned phenomena..." (including, for example, the writing of the Torah...)
I understand your positivistic, anthropological explanation above, but is it possible that the Torah describes the creation of the cosmos [i]ex nihilo[/i]--something which is entirely possible in the view of modern physicists--because it is an actual revealed truth of the Triune God?