Genesis chapter one is clearly false and here's proof

Great Debates
21

Similarly, any over-simplification could be argued as being “false.” The statement that “things fall down” is obviously not true past the orbit of Pluto, nor is it true of a helium-filled balloon.

And, similarly, poetical expressions could be called “false.” When the Declaration of Independence says, “All men are created equal,” that’s obviously false – I don’t have anywhere near the money of a Rockerfeller or the looks of a Brad Pitt or … When Homer mentions “rosy-fingered dawn,” do you get all tingly because dawn doesn’t actually have fingers?

Genesis is NOT a science text. It doesn’t cover astronomy, chesmisty, physics, biology, or mathematics. It doesn’t mention osmosis or fission. Don’t condemn Genesis for what it is not. Genesis is a poetical expression of a process, and as such, I find that it corresponds reasonably well to modern scientific notions.

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jmullaney:

It’s certainly translated properly (“hover over”) in the King James version. I guess not all that’s “new” is “improved” after all.

Ah, yes, the old “different authors” thing. Sorry, but that’s not part of my (Orthodox Jewish) belief. The fact is that the Bible has so many cross-references in it, and so much cross-pollination between the supposedly different “books” (J, E, etc.) that to ascribe it to different authors is as much a leap of illogic as to ascribe it to one (which we say is G-d).

I’m not going to say that the description of the primordial “days” as epochs is completely outside of mainstream biblical interpretation. However, the creation is still clearly a supernatural story.

I dare say you are, because I believe that they are true as well. I find it pretty odd that you’re interested in trying to shoehorn modern paleobiology, which the ancients, as far as we know, didn’t even speculate about, into the Bible, but are willing to write off the parts that they claim to have witnessed as total myth.

Neither do I. You tell me which is more complicated: believing that the Bible is a single document, literally true and describes supernatural events, or believing it’s a partially true document which describes, in figurative terms, evolution and geological development that as far as we know, people of that era had no knowledge of, mixing in fictional events in accurately-described historical settings, thrown together from scraps by different authors whose styles are intertwined so that even today’s best scholars can’t fully separate one author’s book without some intrusion of another author’s style. (And yes, I know that there are some of you out there who simply say the entire Bible is fiction. I’m not addressing you here; I’m talking to jmullaney, who feels a need to ascribe some truth to it by inserting his figurative reading as described in the original post).

Enjoy your “simpler” version.

Chaim Mattis Keller

23

Well, I’d argue that the difference between “hovering over” and “floating upon” is fairly trivial in this sentence. The difference is the way in which way the force is coming – whether the object is being pulled up or pushed up. Is an air bubble rising from the deep pushed up or pulled up? We might say pushed because we know that acting force is the difference in pressure gradient. But that only works because due to gravity, the water is being pulled down relative to the air bubble. The net effect is that, were you in the bubble, you’d have the impression you were being pulled up, and hence “remain suspended” over the surface of the water.

Did you by any chance read that thread that was “spotted” a few months back about the farmers and the parson and the pot of gold? It was one of those stories where each paragraph is written by a different poster. There was a really funny part, because halfway through the parson leaves, but somebody who hadn’t been reading the thread too closely accidently ressurected him again out of nowhere. And someone immediately posted the parson looking around confused and screaming “I can’t leave!!” and running off again.

Obviously, this inconsistency implies multiple authors.

Now I’m not going to try to argue that everything from Genesis 2 to the last chapter of 2nd Maccabees (or whatever the last book is in the Jewish canon) isn’t by the same author. But just looking at Genesis chapter one and Genesis chapter two, apparently man was created twice much like our friend the parson.

I know it can be argued otherwise but that discontinuity implies to me multiple authorship between these two chapters as the simplest explanation.

The word “mythical” does not imply falsehood, only unverifiablity. I didn’t mean to offend.

“As far as we know is the key phrase.” The fertile Crescent was the center of human culture since we were monkey’s uncles. That is a very long time to figure a few things out and it is pure vanity to think that the ancients from this location might not have recorded such an oral tradition as the very first sacred text in what ultimately became a much larger book.

Your reasoning is somewhat circular as well. Sure there are other creation myths from places that, at the time they were written, were outer-hickville to the extreme or are otherwise more akin to the parable in Genesis 2. But the main reason people cite that the ancients obviously had no knowledge what-so-ever of the history of life and the planet (whatever -ology you want to call it) is Genesis chapter one itself. Are you saying the ancients did not have this knowledge because this chapter is not scientifically accurate therefore this chapter is not scientifaclly acurate?

I don’t think that is an exact science. How many ways can you put nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc, together to get a definitive style, especially if your primary reading material is the book upon which you are adding? People attempted to imitate the style of the parts of the work already completed and those who were successful in this endevour were the ones whose writings were ultimately added to the canon by the editors. So, this can all be explained as a perfectly natural process. Ancient texts from other cultures tend to be no different.

Am I supposed to believe Chuang Tzu lived for 500 years because the book which bears his by-line took that long to write and the style is fairly solid throughout? Or that he wrote the first part and his disciples added parts later?

You too.

24

<< Well, I’d argue that the difference between “hovering over” and “floating upon” is fairly trivial in this sentence. The difference is the way in which way the force is coming – whether the object is being pulled up or pushed up. >>

I think this misses the boat entirely. The sentence from Genesis is that “the spirit [or breath] of God hovered over the face of the waters.” To me, that is a beautiful poetic imagery: One imagines a mother hovering over her child, a sculptor hovering over the clay that he is about to form into a work of art, the artist’s face hovering over the blank canvas.

That’s the difference between “floating upon” like pond scum and “hovering over” like a protective artist at the beginning of a creative process. ANd it has nothing to do with where the force is coming from, whether pulling or pushing. It has to do with what the poetry is trying to convey.

Note that my position is independent of whether the poetry is written by God or by men; it is still poetry that conveys depth of meaning through the choice of words and the juxtaposition of phrases. Poetry written almost 3,500 years ago that can still be moving today is, IMHO, divinely crafted – regardless of the process by which it was written down.

25

No.
The main reason that people cite that the ancients had no knowledge of the natural history of the planet is that the various people who discussed nature, (such as, but not limited to, Aristotle), explained the natural world in non-historical terms.

The second significant piece of evidence that the ancients had no knowledge of the natural history of the planet is that we do have the earliest records of people discovering that the earth had a changing history (with Lyell’s speculations on geology and the first tentative descriptions of biological evolution that occurred in the eighteenth century).

Genesis is not held up as the reason the ancients did not understand natural history, it is pointed out as one example of many depictions of nature that do not describe historical development in nature.
(A few long-day Creationists have attempted to wedge Genesis 1 into a retrospective depiction of an evolving earth. 6-day Creationists, such as Chaim, need no such appeals to a hybrid science-supports-religion-supports-science theory. Jewish and Christian Evolutionists look at Genesis 1 as a myth (a story that expresses the truth of one’s belief) that shows that God was the author of all and that he created a universe that was internally ordered and that his creation was good. The details of matching events to scientific knowledge are irrelevant.)

You appear to want to have a debate with a long-day Creationist. Unfortunately, there are very few of them posting to this MB. Your arguments are simply not relevant to a 6-day Creationist or to a religious Evolutionist.

26

CKDextHavn – I actually like your interpretation too. The important thing is that, either way, the face of the waters is where life began.

That is not surprising that over the course of many millenia even people with cultural roots in the fertile crescent would have lost the transmission of information from the ancients. I can’t read Babylonian or ancient Hebrew (as cmkeller points out so well).

This is probably a bad example – I know you are a stickler for detail. I’m sure the Romans invented the steam engine. I am under the impression, perhaps mistakenly, that someone reinvented this, and was probably largely credited with the discovery, until someone figured out the Romans had the idea first. Don’t tell me Genesis, even devoid of poetic interp., doesn’t describe a changing history, even if this is only over six days.

I know. Vanity, vanity, everything is vanity.

But it’s been weeks since a good creation debate popped up. I’m just adding my two cents.

27

Okay, now I’m confused, and I thought I was paying attention, too.

So, JMullaney, you’re arguing that Genesis is NOT the Word of God, because it has factual flaws. But, you do believe that the ancients DID develop enough knowledge about the development of the universe that Genesis APPEARS to get some things right. And then people forgot all of the scientific knowledge the ancients developed, leaving only a flawed myth, until in the modern era we rediscovered all of these facts.
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Hey, man, whatever works for you.

–Keenan
I don’t like this compromise. Is there another?

28

CMKeller wrote:

Write it off! Write it off! Everything I’ve read in jmullaney’s posts is trollish provocation and deliberate obfuscation. Do a little research on the threads he’s posted to and you’ll notice similar patterns.

He’s not interested in honest debate, and I, for one, refuse to get suckered into any more of his nonsense. Please don’t encourage him.

29

Personally, I prefer the Creation story from classical mythology, with Chaos forming Gaea, and Gaea giving virgin birth to Uranus, and Uranus turning around and getting it on with his mom Gaea to father the first race, the Titans.

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:rolleyes: Flattery will get you nowhere, Dave.

I’ll admit this particular thread OP was a little tongue-in-cheek, but you are wrong to slander all my others posts because of it. I am completely commited to honest debate. Take a chill pill, dude.

31

And then Zeus whacking off Chronos’ nads with a scythe and hucking them out into the ocean.

That’s without a doubt my favorite bit.

32

Have to agree with Dave here, jmullaney. I have found your posts, those I have seen, simultaneously irreverent to points of view you don’t hold as worthy of discussion, and contemptuous of those who dare find that with you; literal and unswerving when that type of interpretation serves your purposes, and more flexible when that fits the bill; off point and disjointed when someone presents you with a specific criticism that you choose not to address (or that you address with non sequiturs and obfuscation that seems deliberately disingenuous).

More than all this, I have found you to be bigoted and close-minded. You are a provocateur for the sake of provocation. It’s a shame, because you clearly are intelligent and capable of constructing elements of logical debate (when it suits you). “Completely committed to honest debate”?–I don’t think so. I won’t go so far as to say I won’t ever engage you in discussion–as Dave seems to have–but I’m close. I’m truly sad to say that, based on your track record, I expect that any response you post will likely push me over the line into Dave’s camp. And please, I understand this won’t leave you heartbroken, so don’t feel compelled to point this fact out.

33

Bob: Nice post, dude. Nicely restrained but told it as it is. :cool:

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Very well, Bob Cos. Your exception is duly noted.

I can only assume the posts you and Dave are taking exception with are ones in which I have been a Christian apologist, and I find it interesting, though not surprising, that I unearth the exact same spite now as I did when I actually held the beliefs I was espousing. Heartbreaking? Perhaps, but not to my heart. There is another out there with a sacred heart and he is the one you should be concerned with.

If you are talking about interpretation of the Bible, I assure you that the Holy Spirit must be our guide in its interpretation. But what exactly do you think my purposes are?

I try to find time to address all criticisms. If I address with “non sequitors” this is only because apologetics require wisdom and not logic and wisdom can not be crammed into the same mold. If you have chosen to interpret some point I have made as disingenuous, you should have brought that up at the time as there is no way for me to know what you are talking about now.

Bigoted against who exactly? Close minded about what?

I do occasionaly take on debates with points I know would be difficult. If I have provoked some thought because of that, so be it.

You launch slanders at me and then expect me not to respond? And they say my responding in and of itself will very likely result in you not bothering to respond to me? Talk about a hit and run!

35

jmullaney:

Read it? Heck, I participated in it!

Not necessarily. It could have been (for the sake of argument, of course; I know that this was really different authors) a single author, who wished to be extra-concise and so, when the parson walked back in, he didn’t bother to mention it, but rather, decided that the reader can infer it from the fact that he is back in later.

Of course, here we know that there are multiple authors. Or, if such a story were found with no witnesses or attribution of where it came from, multiple authors is certainly a reasonable reference. However, what if someone handed you that story and claimed to have written it himself? Or received it himself from the writer? Or even if it was found as a document with a single author’s name on it? In such cases, single-authorship is not an unreasonable theory…especially if, with a little bit of work, the inconsistancies can be resolved, as below…

However, looking at it carefully shows that Genesis 2 is not a story in addition to Genesis 1, but to elaborate on Genesis 1. It states this at the very beginning of the “second” creation story (emphasis mine): Genesis 2:4 - “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created. When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens” In other words, it is offering further detail on the creation event that was described, not telling us of something else that occurred after the creation event. And this isn’t a “Hebrew translation” issue like the hovering bit, it’s always properly translated…but often glossed over by readers such as yourself. The prepositional phrase: the unjustly overlooked language construct.

So you’re willing to believe that they knew more than we give them credit for…but were unsophisticated enough to mistake otherwise mundane events for miracles (e.g., the plagues of Egypt). I don’t know…if I think they’re smart, I’d tend to believe their recorded observations rather than doubt them.

Well, no, I’m saying they didn’t have this knowledge because such knowledge appears nowhere in historical writings, even though there is much recorded science that does. For example, there are records indicating that the roundness of the Earth was known before Columbus, and that the heliocentric model of the solar system was known before Copernicus. There’s nothing indicating that evolutionary theory was known before Darwin.

But the multiple-author theorists maintain that they have certainty re: the conclusions they’d drawn.

(being serious here, not sarcastic) Really? Are there theories that the Iliad and Odessy were written by committee rather than by a single individual named Homer?

I have to say I’m not familiar enough with the work to answer that question. But let me ask: what source says that that book was written over a 500 year period?

Chaim Mattis Keller

36

An aside on the multiple author theory: CMK, I find it helpful to think of it as a sort of modern midrash, a commentary on the text. I recommend Richard Friedman’s book, WHO WROTE THE BIBLE, which reads like a detective story in tracing the history of Israel and assigning different authors to different time periods. It’s intriguing: I’m not saying one needs to believe it, just like one needn’t to believe every midrash, I’m saying it’s an interesting and intricately woven intrepretation.

However, even if there were multiple authors, there was certainly a single Editor (called Redactor), and we are compelled to look at the work as a single work of a single Editor/Redactor (whether that was a human scribe or God the Author.)

OK, back to the main topic: The text was written for the audience of its time, regardless of who you think is the writer. It expresses concepts in terms that the contemporary reader could understand, so it speaks of the “four corners of the earth” and of the sun going around the earth, and of the moon as a “lesser light” rather than as “reflected light.”

I repeat my contention, that this is a poetical description that still is applicable. OK, so God starts the Big Bang with the command, “Let there be light!” rather than by uttering Maxwell’s equations. If the text had started out with the equations for matter-energy conversion, it would have been lost long ago, because no one would have read it but physicists and astronomers.

OK, so the text describes primordal chaos in terms of darkness and unleashed water; that was a very apt poetical description 3,500 years ago, and is still a very apt poetical description today. Far better than describing chaos in terms of electron attraction and nuclear fission, at least if the text is going to be generally available.

OK, the text describes the creation of man from dust, rather than from primordal sludge. Reasonable enough as poetic license, I think. Far easier to grasp the main concept – the humbleness of mankind’s beginning – than describing the creation of man through evolutionary mutation of chromosomal matter. “Dust thou are and to dust thou shalt return,” has a lot more poetical oomph to it than, “Basic DNA strands thou are and to component atoms shalt thou return.”

Notice what the text DOESN’T do that so many other creation-mythos did. The text DOESN’T talk about life springing from the body of a slain god or hero. It DOESN’T describe the stars as the outlines of dead heroes or monsters. It DOESN’T describe the sun as a big chariot of fire, but as a “light to rule the day.” In short, the poetry is still meaningful, despite our much deeper understanding of how the universe works. Most of us may not be able to take the text as a literal, word-for-word scientific description; but we can take the concepts and imagery as still valid.

That, to me, is as much proof of divine authorship (or editorship) as anyone could ask for.

37

Cmkeller: what exactly is wrong with the idea that there were muliple writers of the early Bible? Let us concede that it is the Word of G-d. But it still had to written down by scribes. And, two people can tell the same story, with all the important details exactly right, but still put their own 'stamp" on it. Or is it an article of faith that Genesis is an exact dictation, word for word by “Y”?

38

No offense, but I don’t know if any of those examples can be said with certaintly to apply to the Bible.

But I understand the problem. If you start saying some parts of the Bible are not directly from God, you can really start fouling up your moral compass – so this belief system has a potential upside. The downside is anyone who comes along and cannot belief some portion of the Bible are true will likely throw out the rest of it as well. I realize that Orthodox Judaism believes everyone goes to heaven anyway, so that is not much of a downside from your perspective.

Islam has the same problem. The Koran can not be translated out of Arabic because there is a risk it could be mistranslated. The downside is a whole bunch of us who are too lazy to learn Arabic are presumably going to hell because we’ll never know the teachings of the Prophet.

Good point.

Didn’t that include raining frogs or something? I don’t know if that counts as a mundane event. And I don’t discount the possibility of miracles but if a more mundane explanation would do I think that is acceptable.

Perhaps not the theory as such. Darwin definitely had precursors.

Yes. Homer is believed to have written down what was already an oral poetic tradition with multiple poets involved in forming it over the years.

It is all very murky. The number of chapters in what is considered the official text now has 33 chapters, though copies dating roughly 650 years after Chuang Tzu’s death had an additional 20 chapters. The current belief is he wrote the first 7 himself and various other parts were added as time went on.

I agree with CKDextHavn that compared to other creation myths, Genesis 1 has a lot more going for it versus science.

39

Another infidel who does not accept the Fortean gospel.

40

Danielinthewolvesden:

Answer to your last question: yes. It is an article of faith that the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) were dictated, word-for-word, letter-by-letter, by G-d to Moses. Moses and Moses alone was the scribe who wrote down these five books.

My comments about single-authorship are meant to refer to these five books; the others were written other prophets with lesser levels of prophecy than Moses’s.

From the Jewish prayerbook, here’s a quote from the thirteen principles of faith as described by Maimonides (the exact wording is not Maimonides’, it is a paraphrase of part of Maimonides’ Talmud commentary by a later author):

jmullaney:

Well, the original generation of Israelites claim to have received it directly from G-d (transcribed by Moses). For millenia, it had that single author’s name attached to it.

Well, almost everyone, but that’s a subject for a different thread.

Not raining frogs, but frogs rising up from the river in huge numbers. And I’ll concede that if a mundane explanation can be found for some events, it doesn’t exactly damage the credibility of the reporting of those events, but clearly, there are some reported events that can’t possible be explained in a mundane fashion. Either they were supernatural (in which case, supernatural can’t be ruled out as an explanation for other biblical events that cannot be reconciled with currently-understood science) or they were reporting errors (in which case, it’s pointless to try and reconcile the Bible with known science as you did in your original post).

Thanks for the Birttanica links, by the way. Very enlightening…although it doesn’t say what the source of the doubts about the later chapters of Chuang Tzu’s stuff, or your statements that it was written over a 500-year period are, which would be necessary for me to properly address that part of your posts.

Chaim Mattis Keller