answersincreation.org (Literal Genesis AND Old Earth Creationism?)

Hi there achristian1985, and welcome to EvC,I have to agree with Coragyps, your ideas about the order of different groups in the fossil record are way off. Well Cooksonia dates back to about 425 mya, so that's wrong. It doesn't affect your order, but your dates are wrong. That's wrong as well and this mistake certainly does mess up your order. I have aquatic fossils on the shelf next to me as I type that are older than that.There is evidence of ancient aquatic life going back billions of years. Ancient cyanobacteria left fossil stromatolites;

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The cyanobacteria have an extensive fossil record. The oldest known fossils, in fact, are cyanobacteria from Archaean rocks of western Australia, dated 3.5 billion years old. This may be somewhat surprising, since the oldest rocks are only a little older: 3.8 billion years old!

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Source: Fossil Record of the CyanobacteriaSo I'm sorry to say that you are out by over three billion years. The Paleocene? The Paleocene? That's after the extinction of the dinosaurs!As far as I know, the oldest land animal fossil is this one;

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Scientists have decided that a fossil found near Stonehaven is the remains of the oldest creature known to have lived on land.

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It is thought that the one-centimetre millipede which was prised out of a siltstone bed is 428 million years old.

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Experts at the National Museums of Scotland and Yale University, US, have studied the fossil for months.

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They say the specimen is the earliest evidence of a creature living on dry land, rather than in the sea.

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The discovery on the foreshore of Cowie Harbour was made by an amateur fossil hunter, Mike Newman.

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To recognise his role in the significant find, the new species - Pneumodesmus newmani - has been named after him.

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Source: BBC NEWS | Scotland | Fossil find 'oldest land animal' This is in stark contrast with your proposed order and it does not agree with the order of creation in Genesis 1. No, the oldest anatomically modern Homo sapiens are only about 150 000-200 000 years old (IIRC). With respect, I very much doubt that your biology textbook is as reputable as you think it is. It hasn't changed. It never agreed with the Bible in the first place. you have been misled.Mutate and SurvivePS; David Attenborough?Edited by Granny Magda, : Grammar.Edited by Granny Magda, : Codes

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Hi again achristian1985, But that doesn't work either. That would mean that dinosaurs were around before before God made the dry land for them to live on and made plants for them to eat (on day three). Some of the groups on your list pre-date the dinosaurs; others overlap with them.Genesis 1:1 is just there as a chapter heading. It sets the scene for what is to come, then, from Gen 1:2 onwards, the story is told in detail. Then it's told again, slightly differently, in Gen 2. Are you aware that most modern scholars believe Gen 1 and Gen 2 to have been written by a different hands?Honestly, you're pursuing a dead-end trying to make Genesis 1 fit the fossil record and that's without even getting into the problems of the contradicting account in Genesis 2...My advice is to save yourself the bother and accept that the Genesis account is not in agreement with the fossil record.Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Sorry to keep pestering you achristian1985, but I still don't see how you can square the Bible with the fossil record without completely going off the deep end. Did you ever consider that it might be literal and allegorical?Or that it might be literal but simply untrue? I would dispute that the Bible has much in the way of science. There are few claims in there that touch upon science and most of what there is gets things very wrong indeed.I would be interested to hear some of the Bible passages that you feel represent good science and as it happens, there is a thread open for that very purpose; Where Science And The Bible Meet. Please feel free to post some of your ideas there. But it isn't correct, as demonstrated above. Wow. You're getting a lot out of "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." aren't you?Even if this fantastical notion were true, it is not relevant. Genesis 1 has birds being created before land animals. That's just wrong.Genesis has grasses being created before ocean life. That's just wrong. Demons or no demons, the order is wrong. No, that doesn't work either.The "geology involving Homo Sapiens" is only very tiny, a tiny sliver off the top of the geologic column. Even if we had no knowledge of the human fossil record, the order of creation is still completely wrong.Now if you want to believe that God stepped in and jumbled up the fossil record, the theological implications are bad enough - it casts God in an extremely unflattering light - but the real problem is simply that the fossil record is not jumbled up in this way. Geologists are very good at dating rocks and fossils and their studies reveal a story of gradual emergence of life forms over hundreds of millions of years.The "scientific chronology" is not interwoven with any primal age, it makes perfect sense as it stands. These are real rocks we're talking about and they really do reveal a story that clashes with the Bible's. Trying to mix up this empirical record for the sake of shoehorning it into the Bible's version of events is only going to lead you astray, both scientifically and theologically. The Bible authors simply had no concept of modern geology or the ancient history of life. Expecting their works to reflect realities that they were totally unaware of is not reasonable and it won't help you understand their intents as writers.Mutate and SurviveEdited by Granny Magda, : Fix code.

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Hi kbertsche, hope you are well, Okay, I can't really argue with your waw-consecutive argument, but nonetheless, this makes little sense to me. If God created the heaven in Gen 1:1, why does he make it again in 1:6-8? This makes no narrative sense. I am sorry to say that I think you are being dishonest with yourself here.If the events in Genesis did not happen, then the story is untrue. It's as simple as that. Stories that detail events that never occurred are untrue; anything else is sophistry. We know that the earth was not created in the way Genesis describes. None of it is accurate. You know this. Now you may consider that the text contains some allegorical or spiritual truth, but that is irrelevant. I could pick out any number of super-hero comics that contain allegorical truths, but that doesn't mean that stories about Spider-Man or Green Lantern are true.What are we to call a story that describes events which never took place save for "untrue"? Absolutely. Or it may have been intended to describe core events which the authors considered absolutely literal and true (God made everything) by means of details which were not literally true (What was made on each day, etc.).Alternatively, the allegorical interpretation might have been intended for an educated, priestly audience, the literal for the laity.Ultimately, we don't know how these books were intended to be read. Even if we did know the authors' intents, they still might not make much sense to a modern view point. My only goal here is to show AC1985 that the events presented did not occur as literal history.Mutate and Survive

Hi ac1985,You seem to have slid off-topic somewhat, but I will respond to a couple of things; I don't know about that. What is certainly true though, is that Schliemann found The Iliad much more useful. Does that mean that we should believe in Poseidon? Or Achilles? Of course not.Besides, this is not what we mean when we talk about science in the Bible. Whether the Bible is an accurate historical document and whether it is a scientifically accurate one are separate issues. Again, I urge you to take your arguments for the scientific accuracy of the Bible to Where Science And The Bible Meet. In this thread, we should really only be discussing a literal Genesis and OEC. I disagree. But then I would, since the only I'm still here because my life was saved by medical science. No spiritual revelation helped me live; only the fruits of empirical science. I would describe that as being a far more valuable source of wisdom.Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Hi kbertsche, But that isn't what it says! You are changing the text.In Gen1:1 God creates the heaven. Then, in Gen 1:6-7 God creates a firmament/expanse and in 1:8 he calls it heaven. Now if you want to claim that these are both events in a sequence, that means he made heaven twice. Previously, I have said this with regards to the kind of subjective truth that you are talking about; I think that makes it pretty clear where I'm coming from. The moral and personal lessons we might take from a novel might be true, but that doesn't mean that the story in The Grapes of Wrath is true. It's not true. It's untrue. It's fiction.You can insist that it's subjective truisms make it true if you like, but all you are doing is equivocating. When I made my original comment, it was perfectly clear what kind of truth I was talking about; objective truth; a story that matches objective reality. I suggested that the Gen 1 creation account "might be literal but simply untrue". Clearly I am talking about objective truth and objective reality. You are trying to equivocate.Just because it's true that "With great power comes great responsibility.", doesn't mean it's true that Peter Parker got bitten by a radioactive spider. Finding subjective truth in fiction doesn't make it true, but a failure to agree with objective reality does make a story untrue. Fictional stories are untrue.You are trying to raise the Bible to a status where it is true even when it is untrue. This is a fundamentally dishonest approach. Frankly you are being ridiculous now. I said "literal but simply untrue". Note the use of the word "literal". Your poem is not literal. If we were to take your poem literally, as I was suggesting for this interpretation of Genesis, then it is clearly not true. You are moving the goalposts. I wasn't talking about poetry and I made it perfectly clear that I was talking about a literal interpretation.The literal interpretation is not true. That makes it untrue.Mutate and Survive

OK kbertsche, this is going to be a message of two halves, one rather longer than the other...First, your claim that Gen1:1 is a merism meaning "everything". This actually makes a whole lot of sense and I find myself much persuaded by it. I would need to see other examples of the use of "heaven and earth" as a merism in comparable texts, but basically, you have pretty much convinced me.One thing to note though is that this provides no comfort for Old Earth Creationism of the kind that achristian1985 was advocating. The interpretation you suggest implies a formless universe, with nothing differentiated from anything else to the point where we could possibly have any meaningful history squeezed into Gen 1:1.Just for the record, you can mark this down in the "Granny Magda is not unreasonable" column, before we move onto part two...

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I was not talking about psalm 19! I was talking about fucking Genesis1! Why do you insist on moving the goalposts? You are being dishonest.Poetry is off bounds in this discussion. Know why? Because you were criticising something I said in Message 80. Here it is again. I am not talking about a "poetic" interpretation of Genesis. i am very clearly and specifically talking about a literal interpretation. A wholly literal interpretation. Why can't you grasp that? Do the words not appear on your screen or something? Maybe you should try a different browser, because from where I'm sitting, a child could tell that what I was calling untrue was a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and nothing more.Just to be clear, the literal interpretation is totally fucking untrue. It is fiction, a fabrication. None of the events described therein actually happened. Most can be completely falsified to the point where we know for sure that they never happened. The story is untrue.Now you may get some kind of allegorical message from Genesis, but that is irrelevant to a literal interpretation.You say that there is a significant amount of poetry in Gen1. Where exactly? All I see is a narrative describing the creation. I see a story, every verse of which serves to drive forward the narrative or reveal something about God's state of mind. This is not poetry. It may possess a lovely turn of phrase, but that doesn't make it poetry, that just makes it well written. You may be able to draw allegory from it, but that doesn't make it poetry either. You could draw allegory from the ingredients list on the back of a soda bottle.Can you point to an allegory in Gen 1 that we might reasonably consider true? Can you show me a verse which serves only as poetry and has no literal implication? Because I can show you a lot of verses that work when taken literally; all of them in fact. Obviously I would be much better with your definition of truth, which encompasses fiction, lies, mistakes, delusions and accounts that wholly differ from reality. No. Actually, I think your version of truth is debased to the point where it no longer has any meaning whatsoever. I have no idea how you could possibly have read what I wrote above and yet still have come to this conclusion. It's like you're not reading what I'm writing. This is why I am getting frustrated with you; I can't see how you can think this to be true when I have already made statements that show that it is false. Just for your benefit, here it is again; Got that? I fully acknowledge that there are objective and subjective truths. The point is that whilst there are many competing subjective truths, there is only one objective truth about the universe and its creation. We call this "reality". Genesis 1 does not not match up to reality. That makes any literal (there's that word again - pay attention to it this time please) interpretation of Genesis 1 untrue. I deem this comment to be a damn insult. I never said, or even implied any such stupid thing. Don't put words in my mouth.I never said that any use of a figure of speech was untrue. Just to clear up this little quandary that you have imagined for yourself, I am happy to state for the record that a statement which includes a figure of speech can be true. However, a statement which includes a figure of speech cannot be true if it viewed wholly literally. Whence the humour in howlers like these;

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"And he missed the goal by literally a million miles".

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"Cars have literally been in your blood since"

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"They're literally playing out of their socks out there."

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These figures of speech would be completely innocuous and the statements would be completely true save for one thing; the use of the word "literally". No-one literally has cars in their blood. To suggest that they did would be untrue. That cars might have been in someone's blood (i.e. important to their life) could be true, but as soon as you add the word "literally", the statement becomes untrue; being literal kills the metaphor.Similarly, when I talk about a literal interpretation of Genesis, it makes no sense whatsoever for you to start talking about poetry. It's irrelevant to a literal interpretation. Can you see why I'm getting frustrated with you here? Of course. But nor does poetry make a literal interpretation true. This is where you are desperately equivocating between the kind of truth that you are interested in (subjective, poetic truth) and the kind of truth that I was actually taking about (objective truth). It should be clear to even a drooling imbecile that a wholly literal creation account leaves no room for the kind of poetic truth that you are obsessing over. We absolutely do not! How the hell do you know what the author's intent was? Gen 1 is not a psalm. The psalms are clearly primarily intended as poetry, any literal intent must be considered as secondary to the poetic intent. This cannot be said of Gen 1, which is equally open to any number of different interpretations. You can't just throw away the literal interpretation. For all you know, the literal interpretation might be the sole reason it was written.I was trying to get the idea that there are multiple interpretations across to achristian1985. You are not helping. It would be if you tried to interpret it literally, as I was doing with Gen 1 in message 80.I have an idea for you kbertsche. As you go about your business this week, tell everyone you meet that Spider-Man is true. The comics, which after all, contain subjective and allegorical truths and were never intended to be taken literally, are true. Don't explain, just tell them that Spider-man is true. See what reaction you get. You'll be posting from inside a rubber room before the week is out. Why? Because Spider-man comics aren't true and because in the real world, people refer to fiction as being true. you are insisting upon a meaning that does not exist in everyday usage. Moreover, you are insisting that I must use your meaning even when I go to great lengths to tell you that wasn't what I meant.If you want to call the Bible true because it contains allegory, then are the following true;Star Wars? Is that true? It is highly allegorical. Does that mean it's true?
South Park? Every episode has a little "I've learned something today..." moral. Does that mean that South Park is true?
The Quran? It has just as much allegory and subjective truth as your holy book of choice. Is the Quran true?Or is it only the Bible that gets to be true even when every word of a chapter is fictional?Either you must accept that you are engaging in special pleading for the Bible or you must apply your definition of truth so broadly that it encompasses all of fiction. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that such a definition of truth isn't much practical use and you shouldn't be trying to force others to acknowledge it. For Christ's sake! I already determined that! I was using an example of a popular interpretation of Genesis, namely a literal interpretation. Here it is again; I never even said that I support this interpretation (in fact, I do not, at least, not on its own). It is clear that I am talking about a literal interpretation. And if that interpretation is correct and the author intended Gen 1 to be read literally, then the whole thing is untrue! How is this difficult for you? It seems pretty clear to me. No it isn't, don't be stupid. The Earth was not made in a day, you know that. there is zero possibility that Gen 1 is literally true. Don't tell me what I assume. For the record, your assumption is wrong. The bit that you have consistently ignored is actually closer to my real opinion; Genesis 1 is intended as both literal and allegorical.Nonetheless, this literal interpretation is what I was assuming in the sentence you picked out for criticism. Under this assumption, the account is clearly wrong and thus untrue. Notice how this interpretation excludes poetic interpretations.I also would like to point out that in this paragraph you throw out various differing interpretations as examples of what people might think; that is exactly what I was doing when you chose to criticise me. For (hopefully) the last time; I was assuming, for the sake of an example, one example amongst others, that achristian1985 might consider a literal interpretation; one which would make the account literally untrue.Your insistence in dragging other interpretations, interpretations that I was not talking about strikes me as desperate. You come across as being unable to hear the words "untrue" and "Bible" in a sentence together without throwing a fit. You are behaving obnoxiously by attempting to put words in my mouth and constantly trying to move the goalposts and address something that I was never talking about in the first place. Please stop it.Mutate and Survive

Hi kbertsche, I know you weren't. I know that you are a better person than to deliberately set out to rile me up. It's nothing personal. With respect, whether you intended to do so or not, you were trying to force your (minority) definitions into my statements. That is fundamentally dishonest. And as I have said, I was clearly talking about a specific interpretation, so your input was irrelevant from the start. I am nonetheless interested though to hear from you exactly what it is about Gen 1 that you consider true... No. We must only consider the truth or untruth of the particular interpretation we are examining at a given time. I was talking about a straightforwardly literal interpretation. Under that interpretation, Genesis 1 is untrue. Simple. Then practise what you preach and go around telling people that you think Spider-Man comics are true.In my opinion you are trying to force me to use your terminology. I disagree with your terminology. I consider it obfuscatory, the opposite of what you intend.I was trying to gently introduce achristian1985 to the idea that the Genesis creation account might not be quite all it's cracked up to be. Now you actually agree with that. You know perfectly well that Genesis 1 describes events never happened. In introducing this kind of equivocation, you are clouding the issue. I consider it important that folks like ac1985 get the message that their belief in the reliability is wrong. You are not helping. All you are doing is providing another layer of obfuscation and self/mutual deception. Typical apologetics in fact. All you are doing is engaging in special pleading for the Bible. If I had said that Spider-Man wasn't true, no-one would have batted an eyelid, but say the same about Genesis and suddenly it's all far more complicated than that...Saying that Genesis might be "literal but untrue" makes my position perfectly clear. All you are doing is providing Christians with a scrap of comfort to cling onto; Genesis might describe events that never happened, but it's still true... Like I say, self-deception and mutual deception. The sort of mutual deception upon which religion depends. I regard this as the purest bullshit.The majority of Christian Bible-literalists mean exactly what they say when they claim that the Bible is literally true.This is a case of one definition for the theologians and another for the laity. Sophisticated (or should that be Sophistic?) apologists have their rarefied definitions of "literal" and proceed as if everyone knew what they meant and used the word the same way. In fact nothing could be further from the truth, as the large numbers of literal creationist Christians amply demonstrates. The argument you keep bringing up about metaphors is a red herring; no-one ever claimed that a literal interpretation should take every last metaphor or allusion as literal truth. Not even the most moronic YEC would be so stupid as to claim that. This is one reason for my annoyance; I know that! Anyone with as much as half a brain would know that! I never intended to imply that. Yet you keep explaining it to me. It's patronising.I was talking about Genesis. In fact, I was only really talking about Genesis 1. Millions of people believe in a literal (as in bloody literal) Genesis 1. Waffle about parables is irrelevant.Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod

Kbertsche, the only person who has shown any signs of being confused about what I meant is you. You are not helping make things clearer. You are making them ever murkier.Mutate and Survive

Hi kbertsche, Exactly your problem. You are forced, by your absurd attitude to the Bible, to describe fantastical fiction as "non-historical" where any sensible person can see that it is simply untrue. There is no Peter Parker and he was never bitten by any radioactive spider. I consider this a reductio ad absurdum of your argument. Please don't. I make my own points in my own way. Yes it is. So close that they are effectively synonyms. Which is exactly the point I was making, before you stepped in to cloud the issue. This is exactly my problem with your attitude.I know that many evangelicals won't like what I have to say. That's fine; they don't have to listen. However I know what I think, I know my own mind and I know my own arguments. You clearly don't.This resistance to the truth that you describe is exactly the problem. A resistance to even considering the idea that the Bible might be largely fictional is exactly the problem. It is dishonest, closed-minded and it is simply wrong; the Bible is largely fiction.I am not going to compromise my arguments in order to soothe the sensibilities of Christians. That may mean that I persuade fewer people, but that is the way it has to be. If I were to pander to Christian delusions (such as Biblical inerrancy) I would be watering down my true opinion. In fact, I would be lying and I refuse to do that. Well that's just tough titty for me.In actual fact, I was only asking ac1985 to consider the idea. I was not planning on being particularly insistent about it. If he asked my opinion though, I would have had to say that I do indeed consider the Bible errant (which it manifestly is) and that I do consider Genesis 1 to be untrue (which it is).If I had offered any other opinion, I would have been being dishonest. I am not willing to lie to people in order to better persuade them. I can only give my real opinion, anything else would be to patronise others.For the record, I consider this attitude that the Bible is inerrant to be an extremely harmful and actively dangerous idea. I consider your watered down version of the same to be somewhat harmful as well; it encourages a lack of intellectual honesty and encourages sophistry. Hanging onto the idea that the Bible is true even where it is clearly wrong is simply bullshit. You may not like my opinion and I may fail to persuade you with it, but I will not patronise you and others by modulating my arguments until they no longer resemble anything that I believe. I see your point, but there is a clear difference; science is based upon observable facts. Theology is composed of 100% speculation. No theologian is any better placed to make judgements about reality that any member of the laity. This is clearly not the case in biology where there is a clear objective reality to be studied. Theologians may have a more sophisticated understanding of the texts they happen to favour, but the problem comes when they attempt to apply this understanding of scripture to an understanding of reality; as theists inevitably do.I consider theology to be nothing more than a jumped-up and self-important subset of literary criticism. Yeah well, thanks, but in truth, I don't consider knowledge of theology to be an especially valuable thing. Quite the opposite really.Mutate and Survive

I was mainly trying to get ac1985 to realise that the order of creation presented in Gen 1 could not be reconciled with the fossil record. The comments that sparked your interest ("Did you ever consider that it might be literal and allegorical? Or that it might be literal but simply untrue?") were simply an attempt to challenge ac1985's apparent certainty about how the Bible should be interpreted. We are all entitled to our opinions about how a particular passage should be interpreted, but no-one has the authority or the right to claim certain knowledge. Both. Depends which day you catch me on. Ultimately, my attitude is one of atheism, even anti-theism. I don't expect anyone to make the jump from evangelical Christianity overnight though. One step at a time...I should probably also mention that I don't have any particular hostility to Christianity as compared to other faiths. My problem is with faith itself, with all religions, not just Christianity. I happen to come from what you might describe as a Christian culture though, so it's where my attention ends up. I know you're not trying to do that, that's just how it comes across. Great! That's how it should be.I have to say that I believe there is a place for all kinds of voices when opposing creationism. Atheists, agnostics, theistic evolutionists, those hostile to the Bible and those who are sympathetic all have their place. This plurality of voices is essential; I may persuade some people, you may persuade others, but it is essential that we all remain true to our core values. I could perhaps persuade more people away from creationism by appealing to theistic evolution or a wholly allegorical Genesis, but I can't do that. I can make people aware that such views are out there, but I can't advocate them because I don't believe them.Mutate and Survive

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it." - Jacques Monod