?= the creator do we know who or what the creator is?
Do we know why the creator created a universe?
These are the two questions we need to find answers for so that we can understand the reason that we exist
The best answer to this is found in the Books of Bokonon.
I may be sorry I asked, but what is “blue touch paper” and what might it have to do with creation?
Collins English Dictionary.
I have no idea what T.M. is trying to say.
Touchpaper is a fuse to ignite gunpowder. “Light the blue touchpaper” is a metaphor for initiating something, often something dramatic. The metaphor is seen as apt here due to the misconception that the Big Bang was an explosion within pre-existing space and time. The poster was correctly noting that the Big Bang model breaks down at the singularity; his more dubious inference is that there must have been a creator who “initiated” the universe.
The poster presumably implied some form of the Cosmological Argument.
A succinct parody of one common form of the argument is
“Everything that happens must have a cause, therefore Jesus”
As noted, creation myths are not intended for proselytizing. They provide a framework on which to hang other beliefs held by the group. (All mythology is the expression of Truth–as perceived by a group–in the form of Story.)
In that context, the following misses the point:
Genesis 1 was written as a counter to various competing mythologies that portrayed the creation as the result of various gods manufacturing a chaotic universe in the midst of conflict. In contrast, Genesis 1 begins with chaotic waters, then God creates the observable world in an orderly fashion from that chaotic waters.
Day 1 Light, Day 4 Luminous objects
Day 2 Sky, Day 5 Add living creatures to sky and water
Day 3 Dry land and boundaries of water Day 6 Add living creatures to the land
This provides a story of order bound by a god who blesses his creation in contrast to various gods or demons accidentally creating the world as the result of conflict.
The separate, (and contradictory), story in Genesis 2 and 3 portrays God working with an existing land to form the creating a man from the earth, then creating creatures as companions over whom God grants authority to the man. Man and the final creation, woman created from man’s body, then disobey God, bringing disorder to the world. In this story, disorder and evil are portrayed as the result of human action, not the natural state of the universe.
Each of these separate stories provide a basis/reinforcement of Hebrew views of the world, but neither are intended as an inducement for others to convert to the religion of the Hebrews.
Just as a side note, what I find interesting is that actual reality uncovered by scientific advances is the most unbelievable of all. So in fact a major problem with most creation myths is that they’re not imaginative enough.
Were it not for scientific understanding, could anyone have imagined something like the Big Bang, in which the universe comes into being from a singularity that creates space and time? Could anyone have imagined the true scale of the universe? Or how about the scale and the properties of the quantum world? Some of those properties aren’t just “unbelievable”; to our intuitive preconceptions they are flat-out impossible. Yet they’re real.
This is a great point. But, now that we know evolution is the game, it does seems logical that reality is way beyond anything we might have imagined.
Our ancestral minds evolved to operate efficiently on a human timescale, from a second to a few generations. So our intuition and imagination, the source of the creation myths, also operate most naturally on that timescale. To the authors of the Genesis myth, a few thousand years seemed like almost unimaginably long ago.
But abiogenesis and the evolution of self-aware intelligent beings must take a vast number of generations. So the reality of the universe must be orders of magnitude more ancient than the single-generation timescales that our minds evolved to exploit.
In fact, when the theory of evolution was developed, cosmology and astrophysics were in their infancy, and for a while there was a serious problem. Evolution seemed to require far more time than any known mechanism to keep the sun and stars alight. Eventually, stellar nuclear fusion turned out to be the answer.
Similar arguments can be made about scale. Our minds operate at human-sized scales, from ants to the sky. But, to evolve intelligence would seem to require (a) a much larger universe than the local human scales for which our minds evolved, given that conditions conducive to life are somewhat rare; (b) sufficient smaller-scale structure from which to actually build a complex brain. So again it seems logical that reality includes scales many orders of magnitude both larger and smaller than the grasp of our evolved imagination.
Of course, none of that implies anything necessarily quite so bizarre as QM and curved expanding space, but it does account for the fact that it’s all far stranger than anything our evolved minds ever came up with before the tools of science expanded our imagination.
A myth is a totally different animal than a scientific explanation. Indeed, the idea that religion can or should be reconcilable with literal reality is a fairly new one, brought about by the way that the scientific method enables people to actually get at objective truths.
Myths explain the world through narrative and metaphor-- which is still some of our strongest tools for organizing knowledge (look at the world of fiction. Humans are natural storytellers). They are about making sense of the world, but in the context that you are in. They don’t purport to tell you what happened last Tuesday, they purport to tell you what matters, whats important, what binds people together and how to organize your world.
If this seems really fuzzy, think about the story of Exodus. We now know it’s unlikely to be true. But does that matter? To biblical literalists, it might matter, because they are trying to tie myth to history and have hung their credibility to that.
But for most people, the actual events are beside the point, trivia at best. It’s the STORY of Exodus that has been profoundly important, and a driving force of history and identity. It’s a set of metaphors that have shaped how some people think about the world. The literal history is just a neat side-note.
This seems a rather odd (or, less charitably, breathtakingly false) thing to say about religion. Are you suggesting that Christians did not historically believe that heaven and hell are literally real, of that Jesus was literally the Son of God, or indeed that the whole of the bible is literally true? Religion has always made wide ranging and utterly rigid and absolute literal truth claims.
The change since the advent of modern science is that virtually all of the falsifiable truth claims of religion have, in fact, been proved false. The change has been toward metaphor to try to rescue religion from its abject failure to describe reality.
I infer that you misunderstand “supernatural, credibility straining”. Creation myths are credible explanations in terms of existing understandings. All creation myths, including “the Big Bang theory” and “Darwinian Evolution” are credibility-straining if you don’t accept the common axioms of the faith. None are credibility straining if you do accept the common axioms of the failth.
You will have a much more accurate understanding of traditional animistic beliefs if you think of them as “science” instead of “religion”, because the role they play is much closer to the role “science” plays in your life than to the role “religion” plays in your life.
Ancient writers of scripture who relied on the knowledge of their time cannot be held responsible when we find fault through modern knowledge. In a thousand years time the knowledge of the day may prove our cherished theories false. Religion only remains a constant because religious dogma holds it in the past. As new knowledge becomes available religion should not shudder and scream heresy they should adjust to the truth and remain relevant.
The problem with people of faith is they love their traditions far to much even when proved wrong they still hang on to them. Which begs the question. Are they people of faith? As blind faith can be worse that no faith at all.
As a Christian I dont know anyone who tries to use creationism as a proselytizing tool. Personally I see a mixture of things evolving but a creators hand in it. Their are just way to many amazing things in biology and nature for it just to have happened by itself.
I think basically we are in agreement. I am what I call a None Dogmatic Christian, I keep an open mind and am willing to listen to what some pre Abraham religions have to say. God did not wait until Abraham to have first contact so who was he talking to prior to Abraham, I believe in the possibility of truth in all religions
Well its like the other day I was posting on another thread (I’ll have to look later) and we were talking evolution and I brought up the question about what animal would rise up to our level of technical ability if humans dissapeared.
Someone made the excellent point that maybe high intelligence and technical ability (ex. use tools, written language, fire, wheel, etc…) may not be the level all creatures evolve to and a species might just evolve into what niche they are already in.
To me that says God created man to be different like it says in the Bible that we were created to have dominion over the world. To me the process of the millennia of different groups of animals like dinosaurs rising and falling and ice ages and such, was God’s way of either allowing animals to develop or a type of thinning out and cleaning up of the world.
This is probably true. It has always struck me as odd how unbelievable most CMs are. But I probably haven’t sat down and given context to the idea that I should.
And maybe the very nature of the event is hard for human brains to comprehend. Still, it seems to me that they all rely on believing an event or set of events that no one has ever personally witnessed. Maybe I myself would be hard pressed to invent a CM that addresses the how-did-it-all-start concept and keep it in naturally occurring or common (enough) happenings.
But at first blush, it has always seemed to me that ‘supernatural’ would be a harder sell. I realize of course it’s worked just fine but that thinking is what spurred my OP.
I know of three different creationist features on the radio that do exactly that. First they say why evolution is wrong, then they say why evolution is wicked, and then they preach the Bible as the only source of truth. Day in and day out.
(The only one I can actually name is “Beyond Intelligent Design” by Mel Mulder. It, and the other two features I’m thinking of, are broadcast on El Cajon’s “Family Radio,” KCR, AM 910.)
These guys absolutely are using creationism to proselytize. (They also still use long-debunked arguments, such as the Thermodynamics argument. They act as if science hasn’t advanced since 1970. Or even 1770.)
For example?
Here’s one of many sites that lists the parallels between Gen 1 and the Sumerian Enuma Elish, which is probably 1000 years older, and possibly 2000:
http://www.biblicalheritage.org/bible%20studies/gen_parallels.htm
Enuma Elish Genesis
Divine spirit and cosmic matter are coexistent and coeternal. Divine spirit and cosmic matter are coexistent. *
Divine spirit exist independent of cosmic matter. Divine spirit exist independent of cosmic matter.
Primeval chaos; Ti’amat enveloped in darkness. Primeval chaos; TeHOM enveloped in darkness.
Light emanating from the gods. Light created by word of /ELOHIYM.
The creation of the firmament. The creation of the firmament.
The creation of dry land. The creation of dry land.
The creation of luminaries. The creation of luminaries.
The creation of man. The creation of man.
The gods rest and celebrate. /ELOHIYM rest and separates the seventh day.
Sorry about the formatting, but neither tabs nor spaces seem to impress the software here. Click on the link to see it properly tabulated.
It’s also interesting to look around at various apologetics sites and read why the two accounts are completely different, unlike Genesis and modern science. 
By a happy coincidence, I just saw this article, about how Egyptian astronomers were making accurate observations of the variable star Algol long before Genesis was written — which destroys the argument that the cosmology of Genesis was all that primitive people were capable of understanding.
And even if it were true, there are many obscure passages in the Bible whose meaning is still debated today. It would have been so easy for Yahweh to include something about Saturn’s rings or Jupiter’s moons in Genesis 1 (not to mention including something about washing your hands before preparing food, or treating the sick, wounded, or pregnant, amongst all the ceremonial minutia in Leviticus, and saving millions of lives over the centuries). People would have argued and debated for centuries about what those verses meant, until they discovered telescopes and found out. Then you’d have some real evidence that the Bible is divinely inspired, instead of it being exactly what you would expect from Bronze Age authors, who weren’t even up to date with the science of their own time.