Can genesis be reconciled with science? (page 2)

Awakened07

Allegory or not, the correct order of events should not be wrong. I guess it could be said that over time, the order got mixed up as the story was told orally around the camp fires before it was written down, but I thought God protected His Word? If this got mixed up somehow, how can we trust the rest of it? If it's an allegory that further got mixed up, what's the point of "printing" it in God's message to us? What did we gain in knowledge about the origins? Why not let the holy spirit slap the writers and copyists upside the head and say "No, no, no, no - this is what it's supposed to say." ?

inkling

Allegory or not, the correct order of events should not be wrong.

I know, and it would be SO easy to get it right too! I'm not asking for detailed biological
theory or other concepts that would incomprehensible to the target audience of nomads and
shepherds, but a simple and poetic description forshadowing the vivid and epic truth that
humans would one day unearth. Sigh... God needs an editor. [inkling]

Bring_the_Light

yes, Genesis, the Bible, the notion of God in Society can ALL be explained by SCIENCE. No conflict whatsoever. :) Ahh love the Light! Bring_the_Light

Gill

What is so fascinating about the Genesis account is that it is an apparantly (disregarding it's Babylonish origins and pre babylon) a story about how God made the Jews and everybody is Jewish.

It is therefore the tale of a Nation that was seriously into navel gazing and apparantly the whole world was made for the first Jewish man and his wife, Eve and their children and how the whole world originated with them.

There is the problem with the whole Bible , in one.

It is the mythology of a nation that claimed it was God's chosen people and which a lot of other people then chose to believe to be true.

It is no different from the Americans perhaps saying, 'we are God's Chosen People' or the Malaysians saying 'We are God's chosen people' and 'Why?' Simply because our old book says so.

LIke Genesis, the whole Bible makes no sense at all unless you look at the reasons why people WANT to believe it. Then it all begins to fit together as something that some people want to believe and nothing more.

There is nothing scientific about people being misled by others and more importantly, by themselves.

Bring_the_Light

Americans ARE Gods chosen people :)

hooberus

First, the order is hopelessly shuffled- In the fossil record:

Birds appear late on the world stage, well after land animals and "creeping things"
Seed plants appear well AFTER both sea and land life
Fruit plants and grasses don't appear until after birds

The problem with this is that that fossil record is not a record of the creation week of life, but instead a record of the later destruction of life (Genesis 6-9). Hense, there is no need for it to allign with the creation week sequence.

Further answers to other anti-Genesis claims (similar to the ones on the first post) can be found in resources available from: http://www.creationresearch.org

For some of the difficulties in reconciling evolution to science see http://saintpaulscience.com/contents.htm (available from http://www.creationresearch.org)

Rapunzel

The accounts found in Genesis are poetry - a form of poetry that uses figurative and metaphorical language to express its ideas. When a person interprets Genesis in a literal manner, that person does so at his/her own great peril. Interpreting Genesis in a literal sense does almost obscene injustice - both to the account itself and to one's individual thought processes.

dorayakii

The writer of Genesis was retelling a story which belonged to the Babyonians which probably belonged to an ancient civilisation way before the end of the ice age. Like many oral traditions, it suffered from the effects of 'chinese whispers syndrome' until it was written down, and probably furthur 'chinese whisper' like problems after being written.

Not only that but the Genesis account was re-written at least 3 times, with at least 400 years between the different authors. Then the multiple versions were superimposed on each other and subsequently edited to fit the in vogue political ideology of the time the most salient of which is the reform towards monotheism in the time of Hezekiah.

Hooberus: The problem with this is that that fossil record is not a record of the creation week of life, but instead a record of the later destruction of life (Genesis 6-9).

The "later destruction of life" (flood) you refer to would have killed all the animals at the same time. They would be found at the same geological level. In reality they are found at different levels. Therefore the fossil record is a record of the destruction of life, but not of its simultaneous destruction as you imply. You never find a mammouth fossil next to an trilobite fossil because they did not live at the same time. Therefore, the fossil record can act as a record of which animals lived at which time relative to each other.

With the multiple dating techniques (that all agree with each other) the picture we get of the different periods and epochs is practically undisputable (although science, being science is always open to new data which may contradict the status quo). We have carbon-14 dating, and other radiometric methods such as:

rubidium/strontium dating,

thorium/lead dating,

potassium/argon dating,

lutetium/hafnium dating,

samarium/neodymium dating,

argon-40/argon-39 dating, and

uranium/lead dating

Even if one of those methods was flawed, it is highly unlikely that they are all erroneous. Moreover, if we really didn't trust radiometrics (isotopic stratigraphy), we also have at our disposal:

paleomagnetics (volcanic / seismic stratigraphy),

sedimentary facies analysis (sedimentary stratigraphy),

biostratigraphy

Moreover there are so many more other geologic and non-radiometric relative dating methods whicch agree with each other. I could reel off a few more, but I'm sure that's enough to prove the point.

If the Bible is going to be considered an article of faith or a poetic history of mankinds early thoughts, hopes and dreams, let it be so, but don't let it impinge on the domain of science where it has proven again and again that it has no jurisdiction.

inkling

poetry that uses figurative and metaphorical language to express its ideas.

Ok, fair enough- What "ideas" are expressed by "figurative and metaphorical language" that discribes things being created in the wrong order?

Philippus79

'Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.' - Albert Einstein Phil

Can genesis be reconciled with science?

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