View on Genesis 1:1-2:3

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What's your perspective?

Mine is:

(1) I take it as it reads. Why interpret it to death to make it say something it doesn't?

By that I mean I'm a young earth creationist.

All religions have creation myths. Accepting them literally requires rejecting science and distorting the truth.

According to a creationist I heard on radio, one reason is that the Hebrew word which gets translated as "day" in Genesis has several different meanings, only one them being "day, another being a lengthy but not clearly specified length of time. The word also shows up in three other places in the bible, and when you look at all four cases and assume the word has the same meaning throughout the bible, you can't call it a day. It's possible that it's meant to be a day in Genesis and other periods of time elsewhere in the Bible, but do you have a specific reason for that? If you want the simplest option, why not assume the same meaning throughout the Bible?

A second reason is that if both the Bible and the universe are the works of the same author, then the interpretation of 6 days about 6000 years ago is so much at odds with the estimates you get from looking at the universe that you must conclude that one or the other is a lie. Either the book is wrong, or God made the universe look different from what it is, for example by creating light that seems to come from galaxies millions of light years away. If you assume God to be deceptive, what can you believe?

That someone of reasonable intelligence can literally accept the words of the Bible which are so totally in conflict with the discovered evidence as to the creation and age of the universe is, to me, simply astounding.

The book of Genesis is a historical account, and is going to naturally read differently from the sections in the Bible concerning prophecy, where the terminology is symbolic. The context of the text itself makes it an applaudable literal day... "and there was evening, and there was morning, the first day."

And it's true; either the Bible has got it wrong, or scientists have got it wrong. To try and get the Bible to fit an evolutionary worldview really requires too much imagination.

No kidding. I say some scientists have it wrong and some have it right. It's the evolutionary worldview that some scientists hold that I disagree with, not science.



Because a word's mean depends on its surrounding text:

Gen 1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

The word for day is the same in both instances but the first it refers to the light period of a day and the second refers to a period of earth rotation. "Day" when it is light outside in the morning and "Night" when it's dark during the evening. A complete "day" having both an evening and a morning. It is the same word, but in its context the meaning is defined.

The simplest answer is not always correct, especially when dealing with complex subjects.

As for starlight I accept the whitehole cosmology in Starlight and Time by Russell Humphreys. Radiometric dating, meh, it is more like fashionable number crunching.

If so many people believe the Bible, and that fact is really "astounding" to you, I guess the logical indication is that you need to open your mind more until you understand why.

Last edited by Ragtime on 29 Nov 2007, 3:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

X-ray Images? Aaach!. Just black and white pictures that are like roscharch tests. The doctors should give up photography and try practicing medicine.

IMO The creation story of the Bible is not literally true. Taking it as literal truth is to misunderstand the genera to which the narrative belongs. Having said that, I do believe that there are elements of reality in the story as there are in most mythologies. They point of the story is to describe the relationship between humans and God, not to provide scientific data.

Why is this?

Why is it not?

The question is why accept this and reject other stuff? if it is just because it appeals to you more for not contradicting the Bible while others do, I understand, however it doesn't make things accurate just because it goes with dogmatic christian beliefs, as a scientist if you are limited to what a religious book like the Bible says, less likely you would get an actually objective result when studying some things including the starlight thing for example. One of the reasons for not considering such things as true science is because there is no place for doubt, in such cases.

well, I suppose it is for explaining it in a way that it could make more sense in an era with scientific advances and knowledge, as I can say a literal explanation had a lot more sense back then that it is now to a lot of people, because of that.

Because if God just wanted to show His relationship to us He could of just stopped at Genesis 1:1 - In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. But He didn't, he detailed:

Day 1, light.
Day 2, stretched out the heavens.
Day 3, formed the surface of the earth and created plants.
Day 4, Sun, moon and stars (including the wanderers.)
Day 5, sea creatures and flying creatures.
Day 6, land animals and Adam then Eve.
Day 7, rested from creating and blessed this day.

Why the detail if it's just to show relationship? He could have just said, "I made you: get over yourself." But He didn't.

I have read the Epic of Gilgamesh and its creation account is way off -working with pre-existing materials to make things (like Ishtar threw a rock and made a man to make out with and such weird nonsense of the like.) The only thing good I found in it was a description of Noah building the Ark with paid workers, however, unlike the Bible, the Babylonian Ark was a cube with 7 levels and not a wide bottomed rectangular solid with 3 levels.

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Cosmology.html

Not a Christian link, these cosmologies and others are just guessing games until more data is available. I like Humphrey's cosmology because it explains redshift, background radiation and why there is old starlight.