Well, this approach doesn’t seem to be convincing many creationists. I want to try a different approach, and I would like to know what arguments I am going to get.
I’m reading Genesis 1:20, and not quite getting this. Is there are reference site that can compare Genesis to evolution that you know of?
Actually, you are the one not being allegorical and symbolic enough. If you interpret Genesis correctly, God is not even finished with the first “day” yet. The first 14.3 billion years of the universe’s existence is still the “darkness” and Genesis 1:3 “Let there be light” hasn’t even happened yet. We still have at least 15 billion more years to go before the concept of “day” is to be segregated.
Also, do not be confused that Genesis is written in past tense. Although we live in the present tense, it won’t make sense to you unless you can wrap your mind around the fact that what we experience is not present tense at all. The Bible’s story itself is unfolding right now. Genesis is not a history, it’s a prophecy.
I assume you didn’t catch all that from your reading of the Bible? If not, I’ll give you a hint why: you’re being too literal with it.
Fails to do what job? I did say that this is a start.
Hey, I was just using your own calculations. If you’re going to try and be quantitative, you’re always going to be wrong unless you completely fudge the numbers.
What does the first chapter of Genesis have to do with the definition of what evolution (ie, the scientific theory) is.
Why not just assume the simpler explanation-- it’s a made up story that has nothing to do with science. We have no real idea what the source of the story is, and probably never will.
Sure, up is down if you’re standing on your head, I guess.
Well, sweetie, I did believe that you were repeating an assertion you had already made without even acknowledging a challenge to it. Unfortunately I was not clairvoyant enough to realize you were planning to do so at a later time.
You quoted the New Testament as half your argument. The NT is based on stuff said around 1AD. Charles Darwin lived during the 1800s. That’s more than a span of 1800 years.
If you don’t include the NT statement then the time lapse would be all the way back to the formation of the Tanakh (the Old Testament), which adds another 500 years.
If we use the Shinto or Navajo creation stories, the time lapse would of course be different yet again, but certainly still quite a large number.
Zyada, will you make a comment about the Flood and evolution?
Genesis Creation is a popular topic for those wanting to reconcile evolution and the Bible, but I don’t hear the Flood problem discussed as often…
You can look upthread and see my question, but it boils down to this: if the Ark was the starting point for animals, why isn’t a given species distributed everywhere along a path between Ararat and the location of the animal? Say, a given species of shrew or something…wouldn’t we find the distribution of that shrew to include at least all possible ecological niches between where it is now and the ark?
Evolution says those animals developed locally, in isolation. The Bible says all living animals were housed in the Ark and started the current populations when they were saved from destruction by Noah. How do you propose to say evolution is consistent with the Bible?
Now if you say (as do many folks with Genesis Creation): the Bible doesn’t mean those stories literally…well then you haven’t made evolution consistent with the Bible. You’ve simply taken a position that the Bible doesn’t mean what it says if what it says is different from fact. What’s the debate, in that case?
No, it isn’t a manufactured inconsistency. It is an assumed truth necessary to make the argument “The story of Creation is literally true,” true, but it is an inconsistent assertion. This is ignored in a literal interpretation of this story of Creation because Adam and Eve’s grandchildren can’t be reconciled in a literal interpretation of Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel and Seth being the first five humans on earth. The modern practice of literal interpretation of Scripture asserts that later parts of Scripture are internally consistent with earlier parts, mental gymnastics and Scriptural content notwithstanding.
Vlad/Igor
I agree with your conclusion, but I don’t think either of your allegories are usable. The bible isn’t an on/off switch indicating one state, it’s a very complex cultural document and basis for a belief system.
The only problem with the second analogy is that while you and I would turn to scientists, too many people are going to turn to their spiritual advisor for understanding. And far too often, those spiritual advisors are going to use creationism as a way to reinforce their power. They can do this, because far too many people don’t understand science and want to be patted on the head and told that it’s "much simpler than what those nasty scientists would want us to believe:.
If you’re actually trolling for answers, then I suppose one would be that the exact number of days mentioned in Genesis 1:1 - 2:3 is to satisfy people who, if they were aware of it, would insist that the day defined by Earth’s rotation is in fact 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds as opposed to the 24 hour day that they and everyone else uses in practice.
Vlad/Igor
That’s when it’s time to thank them for their interesting questions and leave. You can’t fight what people don’t want to believe. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the freaking mug.
Wait, is it literalism or is it “an assumed truth”? And how is it necessary to make the argument “The story of Creation is literally true” when you’re using it to argue that it isn’t? You are stipulating that Cain, Abel, and Seth were Adam and Eve’s only offspring and then asserting that this leads to an inconsistency that demonstrates it cannot be literally true. But since what you showed not to be true isn’t in the Bible to begin with, it’s irrelevant to the issue of Biblical literalism.
I can’t parse this in a way that makes sense to me. A literal interpretation of the text does not lead to the inconsistency that you insist it does. By introducing your “assumed truth,” you add an inconsistency that was not there before.
Where does the Bible say that Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and Seth were the first five humans on earth?
Posting more than one version is not necessary, I’m quite capable of looking it up. And it doesn’t really make me more likely to adopt your position, any more than shouting at me would.
For reference, I use the New International Version.
While God called the light “day” and the darkness “night” on the first day, it is not until the fourth day that the Sun and Moon are created:
Thus a day - as we normally define it, the revolution of the earth so that part of the day the sun shines on one spot, and part of the day is dark- did not exist until the fourth day.
I agree, but how do we convince those who don’t agree? What arguments are they going to use? Where are they coming from mentally?
Most people agree that the Bible and evolution aren’t (particularly) enemies.
People argue against creationists who believe that the universe, the Earth, and everything on it was created in its current form 10,000 years ago. And we argue against Intelligent Design. But I’ve never seen anyone (except creationists) say that the Bible specifically denies evolution.
So I guess really you’re trying to argue with creationists. I don’t think we have any of those about. 
And yet the light and the dark, the morning and the evening, together making one day, did. How God created these before creating the sun and the moon, I’ll leave to the literalists to explain, but it’s there in black and white, as explicit as anything in the text. If you are going to argue that not only does day not mean day but morning does not mean morning and light does not mean light, I wonder why you don’t just go ahead and argue that man does not mean man and God does not mean God.
As any good Star Trek fan knows, it’s always possible to fanwank your way out of a conundrum. I’m an atheist, and I don’t think any of the mystical stuff in the Bible is true. I don’t think it’s any different than any of the other myths different religions have clung to (some of them remarkably similar to the events in Genesis - the epic of Gilgamesh, for example).
That said, let’s try a little physics translation…
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
The Big Bang happened.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
For the first 400 thousand years or so of the universe’s existence, there was no light. It was opaque. The temperature was too high for free electrons to bind to atomic nuclei, and therefore there was no light, and no form.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
When the universe cooled to a certain point, then almost like a light switch going on, there was light. The universe became transparent.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
God saw that it was a good idea to have periods of dark and light, so when he created the Earth, he made sure that it rotated so that humans could live in both the darkness and the light.
So we have two periods at the very earliest part of creation - a dark, opaque period where the universe is just a sea of electrons and atomic nuclei, then suddenly things start to form, the lights go on, and the universe looks a lot like it does today, only a lot hotter and more dense.
You could argue that God spoke of this period of light and dark as a ‘day’ to make it comprehensible to Moses, who doesn’t begin to have the knowledge required to grasp the real explanation.
See, this is the the tricky thing about not taking things literally. If you can interpret it all as allegory or as a story retold from the mind of a pre-technological human, you can pretty much explain anything.
Anyway, if you take Genesis literally, of course you can’t make it work. Not only is it not consistent with science, it’s not consistent with itself. For example, in Genesis 2:17, God says to Adam (regarding the forbidden fruit), “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Adam ate from the tree, and didn’t die that day. He lived for a long time after - hundreds of years. So either God’s pretty loose with the definition of ‘day’, or he somehow changed his mind, or by ‘die’ he meant something else. Again, we have to come up with our own interpretation, injecting elements not literally in the book, to make it make sense.
Here’s a good Wikipedia entry on Allegorical interpretations of Genesis.
This the end result of a literal, inerrant interpretation of Scripture: a dogged insistence of the words printed on a page, rather than the message conveyed by the author.
From the top:
The literalist, inerrant position is that the Bible is the perfect, flawless word of God that is literally true as written, a necessary reflection of a perfect and flawless God. This literal truth means that:
a) The only interpretation possible is just what the words printed on the page say, however,
b) in practice, a literal reading of the Bible is tacitly interpreted to protect the main thesis: The Bible is the perfect, inerrant word of God and is literally true as it is written.
This view of the Bible glosses over the fact that there are indeed two contradictory stories of Creation as tomanddeb points out, as well as other contradictions and variations of the same story elsewhere.
The story of Creation involving Adam and Eve is used to assert several different inerrantist beliefs, but all of them stop short of getting to the grandchildren because:
a) they’re irrelevent to the inerrantist argument and
b) they lead an inerrantist argument to an indefensible point written in their perfect, error-free Bible: where did the wives come from?
If pressed, the inerrantist argument would conclude (from perfect, inerrant literally true Scripture) that if Adam and Eve were the first two people on Earth, Cain, Abel and Seth would be persons # 3, 4 and 5. But discussions never get that far because of points 3a and 3b.
As you rightly point out, because the Bible does not explicitly state that Cain, Abel and Seth were the only children of Adam and Eve, this does not require a belief that they are. This is an acceptable argument in an allegorical interpretation of the Bible, and one that I hold.
However, point 5 would not necessarily be acceptable to an inerrantist interpretation, and if pressed, and inerrantist interpretation would have to conclude that these were the first five people because of points 1 and 1a. In my experience, I have never gotten that far in such a discussion because of points 3a and 3b.
I have enjoyed this discussion, but I wont be able to get to it for a day, as I’ll be in Nashville, TN. (i.e. I’m not ignoring or fleeing from it). By the time I get back to it, it will have been to the moon and back. Twice.
Vlad/Igor
From the Wikipedia cite in my last post: