Thanks for writing this. You have put into words, far better than could I, thoughts I’d had for a number of years. The Genesis story mirrors current levels of understanding to a degree I find implausible to be accidental. God is wonderful, His creation vast; our understanding shallow at best.
Thanks for your writing!
God gave us a clue. He did it. From a strictly scientific viewpoint, tell us how hot of a temperature was created at "The Big Bang". If that did not sterilize the universe, I don't know what would. Even with all of the nutrients and organics available, life was only able to exist because God created it.
Thank you!! My brother and I have had several discussions about this very topic and the limits on our education in the sciences holds us back a bit. (He was an art major who somehow became a cop, I have an MBA and am a banker by trade.) I took the liberty of emailing a copy of your post to him and look forward to his response.
The Lord be with you!
In Genesis, God takes credit for creation and explains it in a manner suitable for a primitive people to understand. Exactly how he did it, he doesn't say. If he did say, there wouldn't be enough space on earth for all the hard disks needed to contain a precise description of creation.
A couple of things that would make your story more powerful.
First, mention the level of science that existed at time of the writing of the Bible. Since non-believers insist the Bible is made up, what scientific knowledge existed then that would have possibly caused the “writers” to think that the entire story began with a flash, that the earth was covered with water and the waters receded to form land, and that life began small, and got larger and larger until man appear. An awfully lot of lucky guesses for such an unscientific society.
And second, following the non believers idea that it was all made up, how come no other religions offers anything that remotely resembles what science today says happened? Hindus are a good example. Why does no other religions story of creation even come close the the current accepted scientific version?
The ‘writers’ of the Bible, with absolutely no science to guide them, made an incredible number of lucky guesses - or they had Somebody give them the answers.
As to your remaining conundrum concerning the time involved for Creation: Time is relative according to Einstein. The amount of time it took for these events to transpire depends greatly upon the perspective of the individual relating the events. Keep in mind what God says about his relationship with time so primitive (relative to us) people could understand: A thousand years is like a day and a day is like a thousand years. It sounds a bit to me like He is not governed by linear time as we are.
I read a very intriguing opinion the other day, in which a woman imagines that God revealed the entire evolution of the universe from the time of the Big Bang on, until the formation of the solar system and evolution of life. But the primitive people to whom God revealed the scientific history had no clue what was revealed to them. Their interpretation of what they didn’t understand became the creation story of Genesis.
>>By their works shall you know them. <<
Prepare for stoning. Rational discourse is a nono when the endgame is “am I a monkey’s uncle?”
Many of the most scientifically educated the Freepers learned this the hard way. They have joined the choir in the vestile. This FReeper is no more... (etc.)
I will utter the URL of The Site that Dare not be Spoken: http://www.darwincentral.org/
Scientific facts from scientists, many of whom are Christians, most of whom are Conservative (to their core).
Tread lightly...
A keeper!
Before one begins to make verse 3 the point a couple of things need be addressed. Genesis 1:1 is a declaration, without any time signature as to when the beginning began, or how long.
Verse 2 begins with that big word AND meaning a continuation and explanation of what happened to the 'state' of the perfect creation. Now other elected writers pen much about verse 2 such as Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Solomon, Moses in the book of Job, Peter, Paul and Christ made mention to verse 2 in referencing the 'foundation' as translated in the New Testament.
Verse two describes as Peter calls the heaven/earth that WAS being flooded in IIPeter 3, as does Moses. Genesis 1:2 describe the rebellion of Lucifer described in Isaiah 14:12..... and Ezekiel 28:12 .....
What Genesis 1:3 does is describe an 'environmental' clean up to make this earth once again inhabitable. Peter says in IIPeter 3 there are 3 different heaven/earth ages and we in the flesh are in the world that is now. And Peter also explains how God keeps time, that a day with the LORD is as a thousand years.... so that would mean the 8 days of creation took 8 thousand years.
"...let's turn to a passage in Heller's Creative Tension. He points out that recent developments in deterministic chaos theory have demonstrated that "there are strong reasons to believe that a certain amount of randomness is indispensable for the emergence and evolution of organized structures.... Randomness is no longer perceived as a competitor of God, but rather as a powerful tool in God's strategy of creating the world."
"He quotes the physicist Paul Davies, who wrote that,
"God is responsible for ordering the world, not through direct action, but by providing various potentialities which the physical universe is then free to actualize. In this way, God does not compromise the essential openness and indeterminism of the universe, but is nevertheless in a position to encourage a trend toward good. Traces of this subtle and indirect influence may be discerned in the progressive nature of biological evolution, for example, and the tendency for the universe to self-organize into a richer variety of ever more complex forms."
"In a similar vein, he quotes A. R. Peacocke: "On this view God acts to create the world through what we call 'chance' operating within the created order, each stage of which constitutes the launching pad for the next."
"So the bottom line is that if your life were totally planned, it couldn't be. In other words, the more you attempt to tamp down randomness and chance, the more you are likely to create disorder. To put it another way, there is a higher principle at work, which uses randomness and chaos to break up evolutionary impasses and "lure" the system toward its own destiny, so to speak. We must surrender to this destiny, as each of us, to paraphrase Sri Aurobindo, is a "unique problem of God."
"Or you could say that "the answer is the disease that kills curiosity," or that twoness resolves the problem of oneness through the discovery and synthesis of eternal threeness, in which Love abides. ....."
bttt
Your entire note makes Genesis verse 1 a lie.
If Genesis verse 1 is a lie, the account of creation is a lie.
If the account of creation is a lie (and if your theory were correct it would be) all of Genesis is a lie, and so also is the whole Bible. Be honest and say so.
One has two options:
(1) By man came death
or:
(2) By death came man.
I choose (1) and therefore I believe in The God and His progressively revealed Word.
Your scheme necessarily requires that you have chosen (2), and hence do not believe in God's Word; hence you do not believe in the God of the Bible.
I am a reasonably competent Ph. D. in the physical chemistry of inorganic oxides and semiconductor materials, and a successful scientist in both academics and the commercial world. I believe true science supports a six-day literal creation as exactly described in Genesis. I believe as well that the entrance of sin and death into a perfectly created world was due to deliberate disobedience of The God's single, non-negotiable command by our federal and genetic head, under the agitation of the Consummate Liar, who is also the source of the evolution falsehood.
I was not there at creation, therefore I believe.
Prove that I am wrong, if you can (and you can not).
I reject your "science" and repudiate your doctrine. Evolution and Genesis are not miscible and cannot be harmonized. Day-age theory is a farce.
Wishing a greater faith for you --
Four questions:
1. Does God live in this Universe or outside of it?
2. What role does perspective play in understanding Genesis?
3. You have noted God’s signature in everything from the laws of physics to the microwave buzzes of the universe. How powerful is God?
4. What does Hebrews 11:1 mean?
"Without a doubt, the ultimate Black Swan is whatever it was that permitted merely genetic human beings to emerge into full humanness just yesterday (cosmically speaking), some 50,000 years ago. .....
"....once man consciously enters the sensorium of time and space, he is implicitly aware of both Absolute and Infinite, and therefore Love, Truth, Justice, Beauty, Virtue, and Eternity. These are the things that define man, not his genome. ....."
"It is terribly naive to say that science (especially modern science) deals with the "real world." It actually begins with the ponderable world -- the everyday world of the senses -- but eventually creates a wholly abstract world that is taken to be more "real" than the ponderable world. (Importantly, it also begins with certain implicit religious assumptions purloined from the Real, such as the idea of an intelligible cosmos that can be comprehended by rational observers,....)
... This process of abstraction leads to patent absurdities such as the belief that DNA explains life or that the brain creates consciousness, rather than vice versa. Both the brain and DNA are digital, while the human is analogue. ......Suffice it so say that revelation deals with the Real world, not the abstract world of science or the ponderable world of everyday existence. (To be perfectly accurate, it also has has to do with the dependence of the ponderable upon the Real, or their intersection;we are not dependent upon physics, but upon the Creator who created physics.)"
"....science is always provisional, whereas theology is always about the permanent and atemporal. What we call the "Big Bang" is merely the extrapolation of a certain model used by physicists to understand the physical world. In these models, at a certain point, the "history" of subatomic particles disappears into "nothing." Therefore, some people make the hasty conclusion that this must be the same "nothing" out of which God created the universe.
But this is not only wrong, but it demonstrates a peculiar lack of imagination. The "nothing" of the physicist is merely the area beyond the horizon of his model. There's still "something" there -- it's just that the physicist's model does not permit him to even hazard a guess as to what it might be.
But the Nothing of theology is a much vaster principle, having to do with the emanation of Being from Beyond-Being. This is what I meant the other day when I said that in my book I was not trying to equate the Big Bang with God's eternal creative act, but to use it as a "fable" to retell that timeless story. As I said on p. 2, "Borrowing freely from Christian, Greek, Jewish, Hindu, Taoist and other sources, the creation to which it refers did not happen just 'once upon a time,' but occurs continuously, in the timeless ground anterior to each moment."
"Put it this way: neither the cosmos nor this book have a proper 'beginning,' but both have a center, a center that starts where science ends and must therefore be described in mythological terms. The purpose of myth is to help us re-collect what we have forgotten about our timeless source, our eternal nature, and our ultimate destiny. ........"
Gerald L Schroeder, The Science Of God: The Convergence Of Scientific And Biblical Wisdom