Open Genesis to chapter 1 verse 1 and start reading. What you find there largely depends on your presuppositions about the Bible. If you have previously decided that everything you are about to read is the infallible complete word of God, then some details might be lost on you. Or you may take some iffy passages "on faith" assuming God knows what he is doing and wouldn't in a couple of thousand years put any glaring contradictions in his complete work. The mistake would have to be your own misinterpretation of the text.
I have heard folks cite Genesis chapters one and two as having two contradictory depictions of the creation of Adam and Eve. In a way, I was scanning for these contradictions when I started to re-read the account recently, but what I found was a little vague:
This is the account in chapter one:
"...So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." (Gen 1:27).
And chapter two:
"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul..." (Gen 2:7)
"...And the Lord said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him..." (Gen 2:18)
"...And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of a man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh..." (Gen 2:21-24)
If one were inclined to defend these seemingly contradictory passages as infallible word of God, one would only have to say "Ah, but chapter two gives a much more detailed account of the events surrounding the creation of Man and Woman; an inset, if you will, such as one might find on a map..." I myself would not have a valid rebuttal for this argument, so I would avoid it all together. However, as I dig deeper, I find much more compelling arguments for the fallacy of the work.
Lets backtrack to the events preceding the creation of Adam. There are greater and more specific problems contained here. I will first present you with chapter one verses one through twenty five. Please read through it as though you are reconstructing a crime scene by listening to a witnesses account. Anything seem out of place to you?...
***please note: I have just downloaded MacSword, an electronic Bible. All further scripture quotes will be derived from this program. I will use the King James Version unless otherwise noted.***
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.6 ¶And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.9 ¶And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.14 ¶And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.24 ¶And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
The first snags I came across were the order in which things came to be according to this account, and some unusual properties that didn't make a whole lot of sense:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
My first question is this: As a whole, this passage depicts the first day. Now as we learned in grade school, the Earth is a sphere rotating on an axis around a stationary star*, thus giving us the days and nights and years that we can set our watches to with predictable accuracy. If light (the sun) weren't created for some time after verse one, and the world was without form (not a sphere?) then where does God get his calculations that one full day has passed? Assuming the Earth was in fact a sphere at this point, there would have to be twelve hour difference on the other side of the globe. So when day one was beginning, day zero would simultaneously be ending 180 degrees latitude, and at the same time the sun was setting on day one, day two would be just beginning elsewhere...
Did you catch my mistake? The sun had not been created yet! Instead we have some diffuse nebulous "light" that God created pre-sol. So did the earth rotate while orbiting around this unnamed light source; on a holding pattern awaiting the arrival of the sun? We have no idea because the author of Genesis didn't deem it necessary to indulge us with this small piece of doubt-crushing text. Or maybe, when Genesis was penned, no one had a sense of a spherical earth or a light giving sun (the blue sky, to some at the time, may not have appeared to be lit by the sun's rays diffusing and refracting in our moist atmosphere, therefore it could have been interpreted that the sun was not the cause of the light we see during the day, but an addition to it).
Now consider verses four and five:
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
What is darkness? Darkness is the absence of light. More specifically, in the presence of light, darkness is a shadow. Where ever there is an object to reflect or deflect direct light photons, you will find a shadow on the other side. So a shadow is a byproduct of an object "getting in the way" of light. When a person flicks on a flashlight in a dark room full of clutter, he is not intentionally turning on the shadows cast by the light beam. They happen as a byproduct.
Now let's consider the earth. The earth is an object. God has created a light source. We should instantly see a shadow or shadows created by the earth and objects on its surface (today, we call the largest shadow created by the earth "night"). Since it would seem God is not producing any of the light, we can assume He is also casting a shadow (in the Old Testament, God is depicted as a physical being, presumably with some physical properties). So why then go through the procedure of "separating" the light from darkness? Darkness separates itself from light as a function of light deflecting from objects casting a shadow.
Here is a glaring problem:
11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
Here we see God commanding plant life to spring forth. Nothing unusual about the Almighty doing some necessary ground work in preparation for the coming of the center of the universe (that's us). Problem is, most plants use photosynthesis to produce energy. Plants really need the sun to do this. God hasn't created the sun yet. Bad timing? Who knows. "The Lord works in mysterious ways..." Mysterious indeed!
There are schools of thought that posit this idea:
8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. (I Peter 3:8)
By this math, The plants would have to wait one thousand years in anticipation for the life giving sun.It would have made more sense to create the sun before plant life, but when the book was written, photosynthesis was unknown to us.
Here is the account of the creation of celestial bodies:
14 ¶And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night...
First, God has put the light in the firmament that divides the waters above and the waters below (Gen 1:7). Early skywatchers could have easily mistaken our blue sky for "all there is" and therefore assumed the heavenly bodies must exist within the firmament. Perhaps the waters "which were above" were responsible for the daytime skies' blue color. If I were a bronze age individual gazing up at the blue expanse, I could suppose it is a layer of water above the firmament. Next, we find a redundant account of God dividing day from night. Not only that, the bodies are created for a specific purpose: to serve humans: "...and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years..." The bodies are for signs and their movements are only there to serve our time keeping, agriculture and fortune telling habits. Seems a gratuitous waste of resources to create an entire universe 78 billion light years across just so we can know when to plant our corn or whom we should marry. A mind bendingly massive portion of the universe is beyond our capacity to see without instruments; not much good to early agriculturists and soothsayers. And the moon is not a light. It reflects light from the sun. If the sun were to suddenly disappear, we wouldn't see the moon, but how was a bronze age author to know this?...
What about the rest of the universe? We know roughly how big it is, and every time we develop a new instrument to detect a new wavelength, we see further into space and the universe grows. I have quantified exactly how much of the creation account in Genesis is devoted to the creation of the rest of the universe...
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
Thats right, FIVE words! The ENTIRE universe seems to be an afterthought to the creator, "By the way, maybe I should create trillions and trillions and trillions of tons of matter beyond what my subjects can actually see. Yeah, that'll be a good way to use up all this left over stuff." Also, there is no mention of galaxies, nebulae, black holes, gamma ray bursts, basically events and bodies that cannot be seen with the naked eye from earth. Had the author of Genesis had access to our modern technology, he no doubt would have invested volumes of writing to the creation of the REST OF THE UNIVERSE.
Take a look at this video narrated by Neil Degrasse Tyson about the Hubble Deep Space Field. Here you fill get an idea of how big the damn thing is and how small we really are...
Simply Awesome.
God either did a terribly inefficient job creating an oversize universe full of stuff that is of no practical importance for the survival of his followers, or he did a terrible job dictating the whole thing to his author, OR I am misinterpreting the whole thing and just need to suspend my cognitive reasoning and simply take it "on faith". Now I must say, I think the universe is SPECTACULAR. But, there are many things about it that are too sloppily executed to have been done by the greatest intelligence imaginable. He got the quantity in spades, but the quality?...
Evolutionary biologist and astrophysicist are simply enthralled by the biodiversity and sheer size and complexity of the world and universe around them. A creationist is enthralled by the guy who they sincerely wish made the whole thing. It would be like throwing out the entire works of Shakespeare and focusing all our time and energy on what the Bard liked for breakfast, or what color his favorite tunic was. Way to miss the point!
Anyway, I'm going to wrap up by saying you should read scripture for yourself. Most Christians only know the scriptures they hear as sound-bites lobbed at them from the pulpit. And if you are an atheist or agnostic, READ THE SCRIPTURE! I often am tempted to take someone's opinion and scripture references at face value without verifying for myself. This is suspending your cognitive capacities and is no different than belief without evidence. Demand you be compelled! Dig and search for information even if it stands to challenge your preconceived ideas. Most people go out of their way to avoid hearing the other side of the story. If someone "on my team" offers an opinion on a particular topic, I'm not obligated to accept it. This is how I differ from a religious person.
Much much more on Genesis later!
__________* The sun is actually not stationary. The sun rotation period about its axis at Equator is 25 Earth days, and at poles is 35 Earth days. The sun orbits the galaxy at about 220 km/s, taking nearly 220,000,000 Earth years to complete one full orbit (galactic year). How do we know this? because we can see it!
The first snags I came across were the order in which things came to be according to this account, and some unusual properties that didn't make a whole lot of sense:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
My first question is this: As a whole, this passage depicts the first day. Now as we learned in grade school, the Earth is a sphere rotating on an axis around a stationary star*, thus giving us the days and nights and years that we can set our watches to with predictable accuracy. If light (the sun) weren't created for some time after verse one, and the world was without form (not a sphere?) then where does God get his calculations that one full day has passed? Assuming the Earth was in fact a sphere at this point, there would have to be twelve hour difference on the other side of the globe. So when day one was beginning, day zero would simultaneously be ending 180 degrees latitude, and at the same time the sun was setting on day one, day two would be just beginning elsewhere...
Did you catch my mistake? The sun had not been created yet! Instead we have some diffuse nebulous "light" that God created pre-sol. So did the earth rotate while orbiting around this unnamed light source; on a holding pattern awaiting the arrival of the sun? We have no idea because the author of Genesis didn't deem it necessary to indulge us with this small piece of doubt-crushing text. Or maybe, when Genesis was penned, no one had a sense of a spherical earth or a light giving sun (the blue sky, to some at the time, may not have appeared to be lit by the sun's rays diffusing and refracting in our moist atmosphere, therefore it could have been interpreted that the sun was not the cause of the light we see during the day, but an addition to it).
Now consider verses four and five:
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
What is darkness? Darkness is the absence of light. More specifically, in the presence of light, darkness is a shadow. Where ever there is an object to reflect or deflect direct light photons, you will find a shadow on the other side. So a shadow is a byproduct of an object "getting in the way" of light. When a person flicks on a flashlight in a dark room full of clutter, he is not intentionally turning on the shadows cast by the light beam. They happen as a byproduct.
Now let's consider the earth. The earth is an object. God has created a light source. We should instantly see a shadow or shadows created by the earth and objects on its surface (today, we call the largest shadow created by the earth "night"). Since it would seem God is not producing any of the light, we can assume He is also casting a shadow (in the Old Testament, God is depicted as a physical being, presumably with some physical properties). So why then go through the procedure of "separating" the light from darkness? Darkness separates itself from light as a function of light deflecting from objects casting a shadow.
Here is a glaring problem:
11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
Here we see God commanding plant life to spring forth. Nothing unusual about the Almighty doing some necessary ground work in preparation for the coming of the center of the universe (that's us). Problem is, most plants use photosynthesis to produce energy. Plants really need the sun to do this. God hasn't created the sun yet. Bad timing? Who knows. "The Lord works in mysterious ways..." Mysterious indeed!
There are schools of thought that posit this idea:
8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. (I Peter 3:8)
By this math, The plants would have to wait one thousand years in anticipation for the life giving sun.It would have made more sense to create the sun before plant life, but when the book was written, photosynthesis was unknown to us.
Here is the account of the creation of celestial bodies:
14 ¶And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night...
First, God has put the light in the firmament that divides the waters above and the waters below (Gen 1:7). Early skywatchers could have easily mistaken our blue sky for "all there is" and therefore assumed the heavenly bodies must exist within the firmament. Perhaps the waters "which were above" were responsible for the daytime skies' blue color. If I were a bronze age individual gazing up at the blue expanse, I could suppose it is a layer of water above the firmament. Next, we find a redundant account of God dividing day from night. Not only that, the bodies are created for a specific purpose: to serve humans: "...and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years..." The bodies are for signs and their movements are only there to serve our time keeping, agriculture and fortune telling habits. Seems a gratuitous waste of resources to create an entire universe 78 billion light years across just so we can know when to plant our corn or whom we should marry. A mind bendingly massive portion of the universe is beyond our capacity to see without instruments; not much good to early agriculturists and soothsayers. And the moon is not a light. It reflects light from the sun. If the sun were to suddenly disappear, we wouldn't see the moon, but how was a bronze age author to know this?...
What about the rest of the universe? We know roughly how big it is, and every time we develop a new instrument to detect a new wavelength, we see further into space and the universe grows. I have quantified exactly how much of the creation account in Genesis is devoted to the creation of the rest of the universe...
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
Thats right, FIVE words! The ENTIRE universe seems to be an afterthought to the creator, "By the way, maybe I should create trillions and trillions and trillions of tons of matter beyond what my subjects can actually see. Yeah, that'll be a good way to use up all this left over stuff." Also, there is no mention of galaxies, nebulae, black holes, gamma ray bursts, basically events and bodies that cannot be seen with the naked eye from earth. Had the author of Genesis had access to our modern technology, he no doubt would have invested volumes of writing to the creation of the REST OF THE UNIVERSE.
Take a look at this video narrated by Neil Degrasse Tyson about the Hubble Deep Space Field. Here you fill get an idea of how big the damn thing is and how small we really are...
Simply Awesome.
God either did a terribly inefficient job creating an oversize universe full of stuff that is of no practical importance for the survival of his followers, or he did a terrible job dictating the whole thing to his author, OR I am misinterpreting the whole thing and just need to suspend my cognitive reasoning and simply take it "on faith". Now I must say, I think the universe is SPECTACULAR. But, there are many things about it that are too sloppily executed to have been done by the greatest intelligence imaginable. He got the quantity in spades, but the quality?...
Evolutionary biologist and astrophysicist are simply enthralled by the biodiversity and sheer size and complexity of the world and universe around them. A creationist is enthralled by the guy who they sincerely wish made the whole thing. It would be like throwing out the entire works of Shakespeare and focusing all our time and energy on what the Bard liked for breakfast, or what color his favorite tunic was. Way to miss the point!
Anyway, I'm going to wrap up by saying you should read scripture for yourself. Most Christians only know the scriptures they hear as sound-bites lobbed at them from the pulpit. And if you are an atheist or agnostic, READ THE SCRIPTURE! I often am tempted to take someone's opinion and scripture references at face value without verifying for myself. This is suspending your cognitive capacities and is no different than belief without evidence. Demand you be compelled! Dig and search for information even if it stands to challenge your preconceived ideas. Most people go out of their way to avoid hearing the other side of the story. If someone "on my team" offers an opinion on a particular topic, I'm not obligated to accept it. This is how I differ from a religious person.
Much much more on Genesis later!
__________* The sun is actually not stationary. The sun rotation period about its axis at Equator is 25 Earth days, and at poles is 35 Earth days. The sun orbits the galaxy at about 220 km/s, taking nearly 220,000,000 Earth years to complete one full orbit (galactic year). How do we know this? because we can see it!
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