Exactly six days of creation - why is this so important?

Factual Questions
41

As I said before, you do have a totally different religion. That’s what the sects of Protestantism are. They do pick and choose among literal and metaphoric interpretations, in large ways and small ways. Should you keep still and quiet in church or dance and be loud? Should you abjure alcohol or drink copiously? Is homosexuality allowed or forbidden? Was Jesus born mortal or godlike or both?

These are arguments that go back centuries and yet still create fissures. If a charismatic pastor wants to emphasize a particular interpretation and can convince a flock to follow, a new sect is born. That’s all it takes. There are literally thousands of such sects in the U.S.

There is no need to parse either science or the Bible. You state what you want to believe and that is the religion. It’s a very human process, which is why it is so prevalent.

42

The big three are Catholic, Orthodox, and the Anglican Communion (the latter two being offshoots of the first, rather than outright rejections of it). Together, they make up the majority of Christians in the world. All three reject the Creationist / Literalist interpretation of the bible. Add in all the Protestant sects that also reject it, and I expect you will find no more than 20%, and probably less than 10% who accept the Literalist view.

43

When I went to Hebrew School we did read Genesis in Hebrew, and specifically these verses. They are even more poetic in Hebrew than in English, by the way. It is very clear that when they wrote day they meant day. As mentioned above, they say “it was the evening and the morning, the nth day.” It is a bit hard to understand how they could mean thousand year of million year or billion year days out of it.

I think in wondering whether a passage was meant to be taken literally it is important to see if the passage is referenced in other parts of the Bible. If you yanked Job and Jonah out, or considered them as fiction, the rest of the Bible would soldier on with very little or no changes. But the Sabbath, which is vitally important, comes directly from God resting the 7th day - not the 7th millennium. So calling days metaphors for some other period ignores how the rest of the Bible treats this passage.

That the world wasn’t created in 7 days is clear, but not an issue here.

44

The reason is because Man was created on the sixth day, according to the Genesis account.

45

And seven is the number of completion, fullness. From a Staff Report on 666 (mentioned above): What’s up with 666, the “mark of the beast”? - The Straight Dope

I’ll just echo what everyone else has said here: this isn’t about the Biblical text, but about this particular pastor’s perspective. You might start asking your friend (politely, if you want to retain his friendship) about whether it’s permissible to question the pastor.

Personal aside: I’m a reasonably devout Jew, and I have no trouble reconciling science/evolution with the Genesis account. The biblical account is poetry, not physics or mathematics or biology. I haven’t yet found a better description of the Big Bang then, “God said, ‘Let there be light!’ and there was light.” No, it’s not full of mathematical equations, but it’s poetry. Similar with “there was evening and there was morning” and the rest of the Genesis story: beautiful poetry, written in the language of the people of that time, at the level they could understand.

46

Only as a matter of factual correction, there was no light right after the Big Bang, and in fact the universe did not become opaque until about 380,000 years afterward. Cite.

47

There was plenty of light; it just didn’t go very far. In fact there was a phase early in the Universe when the contents of the Universe were dominated by light, rather than matter. And you meant to say that it became transparent, not that it became opaque.

48

:smack: I was thinking of the opaque period. Whether the existence of photons which interacted with matter to an extent that the universe was opaque could be called light is not clear. Thinking in terms of an observer, as I’m sure Dex was, would indicate that in this view there was no light.

Mostly, I was pointing out that while I bet most people visualize the Big Bang as a blinding flash, nothing could be further from the truth.

49

This is just wrong in every possible way.

Actually, I think it’s a pretty strong argument why, if you accept the sacrifice of Jesus, you have to believe in a literal Adam and Eve, else the whole thing unravels. Adam and Eve committed the Original Sin, tainting all people everywhere, requiring a sacrifice from someone, and Jesus sacrificed himself for all mankind.

My understanding is that this is the central concept of Christianity, and there aren’t any denominations I can think of that don’t subscribe to the idea of Original Sin.

50

I’ve been trying to come up with what I’d say to the OP’s friend. I am a Biblical literalist. If you put a gun to my head and made me pick evolution or young-Earth creationism, I’d go with the latter. Which is not to say that I think they’re right. Still, I have a major problem just putting aside the six day thing myself.

However, I’ve increasingly come to two conclusions, presented as questions:

**1) Does it really matter? **

It’s not like Genesis Chapter 1 is a guide I can use for my daily behavior, and it’s not the kind of thing that would affect salvation in any way.

**2) How arrogant are we to believe that we’d know the answer? **

To elaborate on the second point, let’s think about the major church vs science debate in Galileo’s time. Galileo argued that the Sun was the center of the universe, when the common church view said that the Earth was the center. There wasn’t a lot of Biblical support for the geocentric view, but there were plenty of church-folk who insisted on it as a point of doctrine. And yet… it turns out that the heliocentric view of the universe was wrong too. The sun is only the center of the solar system… not the galaxy and not the universe. Furthermore, we came to our senses and realized that the Bible didn’t really care what was at the center of the universe.

I can’t help but think we’re in the same position here. The traditional Sunday School version of creation isn’t even 100% consistent with Genesis. (In Genesis 2, Adam is created before plants are on the earth. Then Adam has a chance to name the animals before Eve is created. Yet Gen 1 says that plants were created, then animals, then “male and female he created them.”) In fact, the more I look at Gen 1 and 2 together, the more I think that the Garden of Eden was a completely separate act of micro-creation done at a separate time from from general creation. Maybe not.

But maybe the Genesis account is something like what we see in Revelations. It could be both literal and true… as seen from heaven through a spiritual perspective. Or maybe it is purely poetry and not even a version of historical truth. I don’t like that explanation. In fact, I hate it. But it would be a little cocky for me to assume that I, or my pastor, or even my denomination, are in possession of the one single correct interpretation of the Bible.

As for the scientific position: our current understanding of the universe doesn’t account for 23% of the mass and 72% of the energy. Surely any theory based on the 5% we can see is going to undergo major revisions in the years to come. Just ten years ago, it was assumed that the universe’s expansion was slowing or reversing, but we’ve now established just the opposite. Science still can’t decide whether life came from deep-sea vents or intertidal pools (or even from space itself). I’m not necessarily taking the stance that YEC’s push (that there is some kind of fundamental error that will totally overturn science as we know it), but no honest scientist is going to say that we’ve seen more than the tip of the iceberg.

Something else for the OP: Have your friend read the book of Job. In case he’s not familiar with what’s really happening there, Job is a debate between five people (Job, his wife and three others) about how suffering can exist in the world and what it really means. They use logic, scripture, conventional wisdom and more. Each of them is pretty much convinced he’s correct. At the end of it all (chapter 38), God steps in: "1 Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said: 2 ‘Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?’ " Ironically, God is taking Job’s side: "After the LORD had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” (Job 42:7)

So… there’s just no way for a believer to win by taking a dogmatic approach on these kinds of things.

51

I just want to give a huuuuge round of applause to a “Biblical Literalist” with intellectual integrity and humility. And a clear grasp of the place of religion and science in the world.

52

The Master has an article about the pi=3 issue. The real legislation doesn’t have anything to do with the Bible, and Cecil doesn’t say anything about it in the original article. There was, however, a follow-up letter the brings up the Biblical calculation. It goes without saying that the position is demolished.

53

Taking it to why a literal Six-Day/Young Earth Creation is important to many Christians- Paul says in Romans 5 that Death came through the Sin of Adam, and that as Sin & Death comes through One Man, even so by One Man Jesus comes Righteousness and Eternal Life. An ancient Earth of millions of years of animal species rising & falling is one in which death had dominance long before Adam.

Now, I as an Old-Earther have my own explanation- that through Adam (yes, I do believe in a literal Adam & Eve, just not sure as to how long ago they existed) came the spread of Sin & Death to ensouled Humanity, but that had nothing to do with death in the animal kingdom or among pre-Adamic hominids.