Not long before Benedict XVI resigned, he did make a statement along the lines that Genesis is not a scientific explanation of Creation. He set forth the reasoning that as an Ancient story, Genesis makes the point that God did create the world and man and that man became aware of both God and right and wrong. The six days of Genesis could just as as easily have been 6 trillion years. A literal interpretation of Genesis leaves way too many questions that go unanswered (who did Cain have children with?) and set up a false logical conflicts between science and religion (6000 years verses the age of the Earth/fossils that are millions of years old, etc.)
It seems that in approaching the work of Darwin, far too many Darwinists and Christians lump all of his work together and see no distinction between his scientific observations of evolutionary processes and his theory that evolution is somehow the explanation of the Origin of Species. Where the evolutionary observations provide a sound scientific theory for explaining changes within species, they do not explain the origins of any species. Darwin’s theory that random evolutionary processes somehow explain the origins of life itself remains an unproven theory with strong evidence that it is scientific error.
(I wrote a little bit about this idea in God’s Sudoku http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2964965/posts.)
Bottom line; science does point toward the need for a Creator to put life here. All the Darwinists molecular biologists nor all the Big Bang theorists have still not come up with scientific proof of the origin of species nor of man evolving from lower species.
The stories in Genesis were written for ancient societies who had no knowledge of science, but made the eternal point that it was God who created the Heavens and Earth and put us here. I believe we will soon get back to the point where many scientists will arrive at the conclusions of Louis Pasteur, the father of modern Micro Biology, that all the scientific knowledge we gain points to the need for God to create it all.
All the Best!
Bill
I’m actually more in the “literalist” camp when it comes to Genesis—at least compared to those who label it ancient folklore. Benedict is right though—it’s not a scientific text.
And I’m with you on the 6 days...since time has been proven by empirical evidence to be relative anyway (what did St. Peter say...”a day of the Lord is like a thousand years”?), it seems crazy to get so hung up on the absolute time it took for Creation to unfold. It took what it took depending on how you measure.
I do think that placing Adam in creation/archaeological time is the tough part. Here I think is where the 6000 years ago comes in—and judging by the geographical clues in Genesis, seems to me that we’re looking at a Neolithic Adam in the Sumerian plain. Who married Cain, and who did he fear would kill him, and how did he build a city? Ah, old old questions and as you know, all this involved his siblings was the traditional answer. For myself, I am looking into the possibility of preAdamic races without polygenism. I.e. Adam is genuinely the father of all men, and we all take natural descent from him, but without excluding the possibility that his descendants bred with autochthonous populations. But I could be way off on that.
Either way, I don’t find it coincidental that archaeologists believe that full-fledged humanity as we know it began in the Sumerian plain about the same time.
Exactly. Are those days in God Time or our time?
What is our day? One rotation of our Earth.
What is a day in God Time? One rotation of...?
Hmmm, how does He mark time? What is one cycle, one Genesis day for Him?