- Thread starter
- #61
Regardless, He created the sun on the fourth day.On the fourth day, God created the sun (1:14-19). Science tells us that the earth formed after the sun.For once we must agree to disagree, PC. Genesis may parallel some of the knowledge we have in these modern times, which the ancients did not have, unless the belief that the earth was created before the sun was is knowledge. It would be a fantastic knowledge, no doubt."Genesis is not science."
Actually, in the larger picture.....it is.
While much of the Bible is allegory and metaphor, the parallel with the modern view of evolution is truly astounding.
1. God’s first command in Genesis is “Let there be light.” Nor is this the only introduction of light in the Genesis creation account, but it is the first, it represents the beginning of the formation of our solar system. And that was ‘The Big Bang’…some 13,700 million years ago. Quite an event…it lasted just 10 to the minus 35th seconds, beginning the universe, generating time and space, as well as all the matter and energy that the universe would ever, ever, contain! Big Bang…explosion….energy….light. But no atoms to form the sun for some time. Light…but no sun? So says science. And so says Genesis. Parker, “The Genesis Enigma,” chapter two.
a. For reference, Genesis 1, verses 1-4: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
2. Modern science has largely revealed the earth’s history with respect to the land and the seas. Coincidently, the first chapter of the Bible relates a formation, a creation narrative, strangely similar to scientific understanding.
a. Genesis 1: 6-10…”And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dryland appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
b. “The formation of the sea as well as the land is chosen as the second stage in the creation on the Bible’s first page. Modern science reveals that land and sea certainly were in place before the next stage in the scientific account of the history of the universe.” Parker, “The Genesis Enigma,” p.54. What a coincidence….or confluence.
Curious, the author of Genesis lived in a landlocked region; and Moses wandered in the desert, not along the coast. Yet…sea and land appear in this prominent position in Genesis. Must be a coincidence….
3. The opening page of Genesis asserts that plant life appeared after the seas were formed, and names specifically, grass, herbs and fruit trees. According to the author of Genesis, this is the stage where life actually begins: this is the first mention life of any kind. Plant life. Yet, the simple forms of life that are considered plant life were not discovered until a couple of millennia after Genesis was completed. So…how come Genesis mentions grass, herbs, and fruit trees at precisely this moment on the creation narrative? Parker, “The Genesis Enigma,” chapter four.
a. Genesis 1: 11-12 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
b. “ From about 400 million years back to 600 million years, all kinds of complex multicellular life would have been confined to the waters of the earth….Our world's ecosystems depend upon photosynthesis to construct the fuel that all life runs on; in an ancient world with conditions similar to today's, you would need plants (as organisms that can make complex "fuel" molecules using simple building blocks and energy available from the environment, plants are known as one type of autotrophs, or "self-feeders") to evolve first, or there would be no bottom link to the food chain.” Biology of Animals & Plants - Origins & History of Life on Earth
4. Track the events in the creation account of Genesis and it’s amazing how closely the events conform to the current view of modern science. An explosion- the universe – oceans/land - plants- …And next, in verse 20, we find: And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
Kind of unusual…since the author of Genesis, and, if we are to believe that the first one to speak those words, Moses, didn’t really live in a habitat that one might call ‘sea side.’
Would have been understandable if this space in the Bible had, instead, have focused on the numbers of land mammals, birds, or insects found in ancient Israel, wouldn’t it? But, instead, marine organisms are specifically named: ‘Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life,…’
Wouldn’t it be interesting if science find lots and lots of marine organisms extant at this point? Imagine if Genesis actually parallels the history of life on earth as expounded by science. Be a heck of a coincidence.
a. A truly important development took place some 521 million years ago, in the geological period known as the Cambrian. “The most abundant and diverse animals of Cambrian time were the trilobites. Trilobites had long antennae, compound eyes, many jointed legs, and a hard exoskeleton like many of their modern arthropod relatives, such as lobsters, crabs, and insects. The Cambrian is sometimes called the "Age of Trilobites"…” Paleobiology | Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
b. No earlier fossils were found during Darwin’s lifetime: “If the theory [evolution] be true it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited ... the world swarmed with living creatures. [Yet] to the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these earliest periods. . . I can give no satisfactory answer. The case at present must remain inexplicable.” http://www.paleosoc.org/Oldest_Fossil.pdf
....life at this stage, about 500 million years ago, was entirely marine.
How could the Genesis writer have gotten this right?
That writer…he’s landlocked, knows little of diversity….what are the odds that ‘chance’ is the answer?
What are the odds?
5. The sequence of events from the creation of the universe, to the present, begin with great explosion that produces the universe, including the earth. The earth cools enough for oceans to form. The first life is plant life, able to photosynthesize, and add oxygen to the atmosphere. All sorts of simple non-plants fill the seas, most wormlike, with soft bodies. Along come the trilobites, hugely advanced, with hard bodies…and most amazingly, with true eyes! This makes them the primary predators….but, imposes enormous evolutionary pressure on the other organisms. The result is the Cambrian explosion, lots of small organisms with defensive armor and hard exoskeletons, some 521 million years ago. So says modern science.
a. “…Genesis shows remarkable accuracy when compared to the scientific story of life’s evolutionary journey. Here, the Genesis writer envisioned great creatures evolving from those tiny Cambrian forms, eventually making their way out of the sea….Genesis seems to have picked out all the events of the highest order of importance, and put them in the right order….I don’t know the odds against such a parallel- against making a successful guess at the scientific orthodoxy of three thousand year into the future from a knowledge base of nothing- but they must be extraordinarily long.” Parker, Op. Cit., p.163-164.
b. An interesting sidelight is the ‘evolution of the Bible’ itself. Christians have incorporated a great deal of science’s process. Early in the 20th century, the Scofield Reference Bible was published. This was a new version of the King James Bible with which added a note to Genesis, suggesting what is called the “gap theory.’ It allows that millions of years could have passed between God’s creation of the heavens and the earth, thereby freeing Genesis from the literal six-day process. “What it left was a series- the same series- of timeless events; and it is these that match the scientific account of life’s history.” Parker, “The Genesis Enigma,” p. 160.
6. Unavoidable is the recognition that, once the restrictions due to the ‘six-day’ view are removed, the order of events established by modern science conform to the sequence in the first chapter of Genesis, written millennia earlier: light from an explosion (the Big Bang), universe/earth formed, the seas from the cooling earth, plants as the first life forms; abundant sea life (the Cambrian explosion), the (evolution) of the flora and fauna we see today. Neat, eh?
Lucky guess by the author of the creation account of Genesis?
7. If it is not evidence for the God, then the author of Genesis 1, or Moses, perhaps, must have understood that the universe formed first, then the seas appeared on earth, and that life forms were photosynthetic. Following that, he had to have realized that an eye evolved in an early animal in the geological past, which triggered the evolution of all the major groups of animals that exist today. Still further, he must have felt that all of this occurred in the seas, before animals moved onto land, and only when they did move out of the water did mammals and birds evolve.
The Old Testament was written, although not compiled, almost three millennia ago. It is extraordinary that the writer of the creation account in Genesis, chapter one, got it right in his exposition of the series of events: his sequence turns out to be scientifically accurate in terms of contemporary knowledge.
Wow! What an incredibly lucky guess! What a considerable stroke of good fortune!
The alternative explanation is divine intervention.
- “ a majority of scientists (51%) say they believe in God or a higher power, while 41% say they do not.” What do scientists think about religion?
Earth is a term whose biblical meaning has donned a more literal cloak in the last 150 years or so, and consequently lends to a more dispensationalist, or futurist, eschatology. When Hebrew writers wrote of the earth, did they really mean the planet earth? When the earth is empty and made desolate and its inhabitants scattered, as Isaiah says in 24:1, where do the inhabitants scatter to if the earth is the entire planet? Wherever they go, they’re still on this empty and desolate earth.
In his book The Parousia, J. Stuart Russell clears up some confusion with a brief etymological overview of the verbiage:
Much confusion has arisen from the indiscriminate use of the word ‘world’ as the translation of the different Greek words xxxx, xxxxxx, xxxxxxxxx, and xx. The unlearned reader who meets with the phrase ‘the end of the world,’ inevitably thinks of the destruction of the material globe, whereas if he read the ‘conclusion of the age, or ӕon,’ he would as naturally think of the close of a certain period of time – which is its proper meaning. We have already had occasion to observe that xxxx is properly a designation of time, an age; and it is doubtful whether it ever has any other signification in the New Testament. Its equivalent in Latin is xxxxx, which is really the Greek xxxx in a Latin dress. The proper word for the earth, or world, is xxxxxx, which is used to designate both the material and the moral world. xxxxxxxxx is properly the inhabited world, ‘the habitable,’ and in the New Testament refers often to the Roman Empire, sometimes to so small a portion of it as Palestine. Xx, though it sometimes signifies the earth generally, in the gospels more frequently refers to the land of Israel. Much light is thrown upon many passages by a proper understanding of these words.*
Earth is regional. The cosmology of the ancients did not extend to the Americas or Australia or the Falkland Islands. They indicate not one whit that they knew of any of these places.
God may well have created the biosphere, but that is not the story of Genesis. In Genesis, God creates covenant man called Adam, a people distinct from those who worship idols, who wander in the land of Nod.
* Greek words deleted due to USMB restrictions.
My post showed that Genesis parallels the steps that modern evolutionary theory espouses.
- The Old Testament was written, although not compiled, almost three millennia ago. It is extraordinary that the writer of the creation account in Genesis, chapter one, got it right in his exposition of the series of events: his sequence turns out to be scientifically accurate in terms of contemporary knowledge.
- The images in that writer’s mind of how our planet and life came to be must have seemed curious for the knowledge and experience of the time! Yet….he presented it as though it had been dictated to him, as though he had been spoken to by God.
- If it is not evidence for the God, then the author of Genesis 1, or Moses, perhaps, must have understood that the universe formed first, then the seas appeared on earth, and that life forms were photosynthetic. Following that, he had to have realized that an eye evolved in an early animal in the geological past, which triggered the evolution of all the major groups of animals that exist today. Still further, he must have felt that all of this occurred in the seas, before animals moved onto land, and only when they did move out of the water did mammals and birds evolve.
- Wow! What an incredibly lucky guess! What a considerable stroke of good fortune!
- The alternative explanation is divine intervention.
What is our disagreement?
Did the ancients even have a word for cloud? Not a cloud in which God accompanies His people, but a puff of condensation in the troposphere. In Genesis, we read of clouds not as clouds per se but rather as “waters that were above the expanse.”
It's as if naming conventions and taxonomy were not even a concern.
Fundamentally, we agree on creation and the Creator. I just don't see that the ancients were at all concerned with science.
"God’s first command in Genesis is “Let there be light.”
Merely localized the light that had been created in the big bang.
