Genesis: is it to be taken literally?

Which part of Genesis does that literally come from, exactly?

Does that chronology give ages? Or is someone just making ages up?If someone's making stuff up, that's not a literal position, now is it?

That didn't really answer my question, though. How can you claim you have a literal account when you're basing it on an extra-Biblical estimation of the ages of the people in your chronology?

Is that all you guys have? Non-answers to my question?Again, if the claim is that a literal reading of the Bible means the Earth (or life) is only 6k years old, then where is that to be literally read in the Bible?It's not a difficult question. You just have to point me to chapter and verse in the Bible where it says, literally, "and lo, all that happened 6,000 years ago."

I'll go with Buz on this one. It's hard to believe that an ancient people meant 24-hour time periods when they didn't even have clocks.

Why does it have to be literal to be true? Don't they already, though? Isn't it obvious that everybody, even the Biblical literalists, comes to their own conclusions about what the Bible means? At the very least every different Christian sect seems to have come to different opinions about the Bible, even those that claim to be fundamentalist. I'm not sure what the relevance of this question is. Obviously, you've hit it right on; the first time you coin a word, it's defined by what you used it to refer to.But the Bible doesn't predate the languages it's been written in, so why is that an issue?

Wouldn't that be a lie, though? And isn't that a kind of stupid useless wasteful thing to do? If God wanted pretty stars in the sky, a series of reflective asteroids would have sufficed.Oh, right. The LORD moves in mysterious ways. I guess there's nothing you can't have God accomplish if he's exempted from the laws of physics, and the laws of sense besides.

Well, weren't you using analogies between human designs and things in the universe to "detect" intelligent design in the first place?You can't have it both ways. You can't support ID by reference to similarity to human-designed objects and then, when the argument is turned against you, claim that human design has nothing to do with the design of the universe.

But the analogy is all that you have. Analogies constitute the entire support for the ID argument. It's quite refreshing to see you admit the inherent limitations in analogy, but you don't seem to see that that cuts the knees out from under the ID position.It may very well be that everything cool in the universe can be joined, analogously, with some artifact of human intelligent design. But it's exactly because of the limitations you describe that this is no reason to assume design in the natural world. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. If Joe rebuilds Bob's carburetor, and it performs more efficiently than the stock model that came with his car, maybe Joe's input on the manufacture of Mustangs isn't as idiotic as you make it sound. Certainly humans have sufficient artifice to improve the bodies we've been given, or to rectify "failures" inherent in the "design" of the human being. If we can literally bring people back from the brink of death, or heal them of conditions that they were born with, surely we're qualified to at least advance an opinion on the effacacy of God's design?

I definately think you're going to regret the argumentation you've put forth, because it undercuts almost every argument you've made for creationism.If we can't trust Arach's views on God's creation because he isn't as good as God, we can also discard your theological views for the very same reason. You may be certain that evolution can't be reconciled with a universe where the Bible is the Word of God, but can't we say that, because you're an idiot compared to God, it's simply the case that you don't understand how the two could be reconciled?I mean, your argument makes it clear that, as soon as the word "God" is mentioned, we're all supposed to shut the hell up because none of us are smart enough to guess how God "really" did things.Quite frankly I find your argument insulting, and a rollback to a millenia of refusal to investigate the natural world. You and your ilk would take us back to the Dark Ages, before the enlightenment of science. Which is weird because you're sitting there using a computer and reading this.

What's your training, specifically, in myth studies?For instance, did you miss the fact that God rests on the 7th day? Seven being a commonly used number in myths to connote "infinite" or "forever"?Or the constant, poetical repetition of phrases: "And he saw that it was good"? Did you miss that, too? Repetition is a clear indicator that what we're reading is poetry, and hence, mythical.Myths don't have labels on them that say "Bullshit." That would defeat the purpose of a myth, which is to be culturally true, not literally true. You have to read the signs to see they mythology, and they're there. They're staring you in the face, plain as day, if you know what you're looking for.To say that there's nothing in Genesis that suggests its not literal is to betray a stunning ignorance of how cultures construct myths. The reason you see no indication of Genesis's mythical status is simply because you refuse to look for it.

No, by "mythical" I mean it's a body of knowledge developed by a culture to answer certain questions within a narrative framework, in a means easy to recount to subsequent generations.So, yes, because it is poetic, it is mythical. See, this was what I meant. You say that you find nothing that tells you you're supposed to take it mythically, but that's because you don't know anything about myths. "Myth" doesn't mean "lie."

Which is not a very useful definition, now is it? Only an idiot would suggest, as you do, that all that are not lies are true. Again, your inability to distinguish between those things that are literally true, and those things that are only metaphorically true, is how I know that you're incapable of recognizing the markers of the myth of Genesis that you say aren't there.

Reasonably, we would only expect it to be literally true if it had been written for the purpose of being literally true; my contention is that its quite obvious that the authors of Genesis did not have that intention. Rather they were writing for the purpose of being culturally true; providing their audience with true information, not about the history of the world, but about the Hebrew culture.In the same way that Romeo and Juliet contains true information about love, and about culture and family, but is not itself a true story. Shakespeare's aim was to communicate truth, certainly; he chose to do it through a story that was not literally true. It's metaphorically true because Genesis is not a story about the creation of the world. It's a story about the creative nature of God, and his relationship to the Hebrew people. For what it intends to get across, its a true story. It isn't, and was not meant to be, a history textbook. You simply misunderstand its message. I'm sorry, their what? Well hell, Shakespeare tells you the entire plot of Romeo and Juliet in the first five minutes. But you're not supposed to leave before you even see the actors, now are you? What would be the point of that?

Clearly that's not the case; the people who first disproved the Genesis timescale of the Earth were people who originally believed in the inerrancy of the Bible. Creationists, basically.There's no evidence for a 10,000 year-old Earth.