Posted on 09/05/2017 8:27:10 AM PDT by fishtank
So you don’t really believe the biblical account that God literally formed Adam out of dust and then formed Eve out of a rib from Adam’s side? You believe that Adam (and Eve) literally had parents, who presumably weren’t quite fully “human”?
Not trying to play games with you. Just trying to understand your views.
Not a semantic. Evolution and Creation are polar opposites.
I think the term “dust” was figurative for a lower life form. On the other hand, He could have been referring to the chemical elements he used, or the components of the elements like neutrons, etc.
I think the important part of the message was GOD created man out of NOTHINGNESS, base materials, and made him what he is. That he gave man free will and the ability to know the difference between good and evil, and man, being weak, was seduced by Satan in the form of a Serpent and disobeyed God. Consequently all kinds of bad things happened to him, and he was lost until God sent a savior to redeem him.
The rest of the message is not as important as those points to my thinking.
No, they are not. Evolution is a form of creation the way I view it.
So Adam had non-human parents. And God didn’t create Eve at all like described in Scripture, because she had non-human parents as well.
I just can’t reconcile those narratives with what I read in Scripture. :-/
A clear reading of Scripture shows that God created Adam (with the appearance of age), He didn’t oversee his birth. And that Eve was specially created for Adam out of his rib.
Furthermore, the concept of death preceding sin is a very doctrinally problematic one. If Adam’s sin wasn’t the cause of death, then the Second Adam’s life-giving death is kind of baseless.
It is very difficult to refute the geological record. Dust of the earth is certainly a “non-human” “parent”. The Bible says nothing about Adam being created as an old man that I know of. And God may have made Adam as intended to be deathless but his sin of disobedience changed that
Then your view is corrupt. Creation requires a creator and purpose. Evolution requires random chance and the lack of design.
Wow. Thank you for pointing out my view is corrupt.
God created the rules through which evolution operates and his hands guide it. By YOUR statement on the subject, you agree with atheist evolutionists who think evolution is purely random chance. THAT sounds like a corrupt view to ME.
That, by definition, is CREATION, not evolution.
“... Adam being created as an old man ...”
You misunderstand. I wrote about Adam being created “with the appearance of age” — God created Adam as “a man” from the dust of the earth, and on his first day of life, when God first breathed life into this man, he appeared to have some years on him. Perhaps he appeared to be 13 or 17 or 21. Of course we don’t know. But we do know that on Adam’s first day of life, he wasn’t a helpless newborn baby, but “a man.”
The fact that man was created *first*, and then woman was crafted out of man *second*, is a foundational concept in Scripture. Paul’s writings lean on this truth, for example.
It really does seem that you have to twist a whole lot to defend an evolutionary interpretation of creation. And believing in evolution causes so many biblical doctrines to fall apart, to have no foundation, to be baseless.
If death preceded sin, for example, then God is a liar. The whole of Scripture rests on the fact that sin results in death, and Jesus’ entire ministry rests on the fact that He is the solution for the problems of sin and death.
You sincerely believe that the earth was populated by many non-human almost-human creatures, and that at one point in the generations, one human male and one human female emerged (each with apish, non-human parents)? Or is the account of the man Adam and the woman Eve simply an allegory?
As far as “the geological record” ... a catastrophic global flood — one that begins with the “all the fountains of the great deep” bursting forth, followed by torrential rains — would explain much of what we see. But that’s another conversation.
Whatever. Glad you agree with me.
The Bible is replete with allegory. Its a book about salvation and how to lead one’s life. Its not a biology or genetics text. I think you are missing the forest for the trees.
We don’t know any of the details about Adam except the very little the Bible tells us. I believe God created Adam, the first man, out a lesser being and that immortality was part of that package. But Adam disobeyed God and everything fell apart until a savior arrived.
If you keep fighting atheists on minor details which fly in the face of proven scientific facts and are incidental to the main message, you bring the entire belief system into disrepute and question over trivia.
If Adam and Eve are mere allegory, then the following verses — which are crucial to our understanding of salvation and relationship — are baseless:
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man [Adam], and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned — for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. (Romans 5:12-14)
For as by a man [Adam] came death, by a man [Jesus] has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. (1 Corinthians 15:21-22)
Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam [Jesus] became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. (1 Corinthians 15:45-47)
For Adam was formed first, then Eve. (1 Timothy 2:13)
And then there are the genealogies in the gospels tracing Jesus back to Adam.
Claiming that one portion of Scripture is allegorical opens the door to taking other “hard” sections of Scripture as allegorical. The virgin birth — allegory? Jesus’ resurrection — allegory? Noah, Jonah, Methuselah, Elijah, the Israelites’ escape from Egypt, Lazarus, the miracles, the Holy Spirit — allegories?
As for me, I will interpret biblical poetry as poetry, biblical parables as parables, and biblical history as history. That’s how Jesus and the writers of the New Testament interpreted Genesis, and that’s how I’ll interpret Genesis. I don’t think God will find fault in that approach.
Whatever makes you happy Theo. And I will believe what I believe and I feel my views deal with geological and biological facts as we currently understand them and reconciles those facts to scripture without fracturing either.
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