Scientists Should Not Dismiss Genesis So Quickly

by Chris Tann 112 Replies latest watchtower bible

  • prologos
    prologos

    Do not dismiss genesis quickly, dismiss it very slowly, savour every contradiction, to see how wrong it really is, the older bibles call the "expanse" the firmament, because the original writers thought that there was a firm ceiling holding the waters up (even the chariot with the wheels in wheels with eyes had a firm glass ceiling)'

    perhaps these desert people that were at the origin of these writings lacked water, so they dreamed up these unsustainable* (pun intended) of water everywhere.

    * how do you keep a layer of ~ 9 km of water sustained above the surface? a firm support dome? pressurized airtight bubble? orbital speed?(like saturn's rings?)

  • Vidiot
  • Vidiot
    Vidiot

    konceptual99 - "For years I read material and watched programs discussing anthropological, biological, physical, chemical and geologic evidence that flies in the face of old earth creationism but found ways of rationalising, compartmentalising, and dismissing it."

    Ditto; thinking back, there were a number of major turning points for me.

    1) Actually reading about evolutionary biology (and how it worked) from sources not automatically biased against it... and surprisingly finding many aspects of it * gasp * actually plausible.

    2) Discovering how virtually all creationists (young- and old-Earth) sneakily misquoted scientists, ignored or misrepresented relevent evidence, and/or attempted to discredit evolution's proponents (i.e. all dirty-lawyer tactics) in defense of creationism (which, in turn, led to my favorite personal aphorism).

    3) Realizing that the only real obstacle to accepting it was ideological (rather than evidential).

    4) Subsequently realizing that the WTS (and creationists in general) had painted themselves far too tightly into a theological corner for far too long to ever be able to budge.

    There was a minor "Black Swan"-type instance that initially prompted me towards #1 (I've actually talked about it here: http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/beliefs/251953/1/Neanderthals-Early-Modern-Humans-and-a-Creator - starting 10th post down).

  • Chris Tann
    Chris Tann

    Thanks Shana. The word firmament was derived from the Septuagint translation. These Jews were instructed by the Pharoah of Egypt to make a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. The Egyptians believed in this hard dome concept,so the translators choose a word to fit their belief. However,the original Hebrew word means expanse or to flatten out,it does not denote a hardness.

    Also, the serpent was later identified as Satan, the rebellious spirit, in Revelation. He talked to Eve through the serpent.

    Of course there would be other ancient religious traditions thar are similar to the Genesis account. Even dating before Genesis. Orally,this true account would first be passed along within family circles. As populations grew, it would spread, become embellished and become the foundational belief of many different cultures. This happened with the flood as well.

    Usually, if a story is prominent in many various cultures around the world for several centuries, it has truth to it. Although it may have been added to or taken away from through it all.

  • Apognophos
    Apognophos

    Sorry, but the Bible consistently describes the sky as a vaulted ceiling that holds the waters back: http://contradictionsinthebible.com/genesis-1-waters-above-firmament/. This was exactly the kind of conclusion that we would expect an ancient thinker to arrive at.

    The ancient failure to realize that light came from the Sun also makes sense, since they did not understand how light rays disperse in atmosphere. Since they observed that daylight could be present without a direct line of sight to the sun (before dawn, or on a cloudy day), they thought day and night could exist without the sun and moon. Thus Genesis tells us that the two "luminaries" were simply for "shining" like torches, and for marking the change from light to darkness, but not that the sun was the cause of daylight (they also thought the moon emitted light, instead of reflecting the sun's light).

    The serpent was indeed later identified as Satan, but only by Christians, not Jews. Religions are entities which evolve over time. Just as Christianity was initially a form of Judaism before it deviated under Paul's teachings, so Christianity has continued to evolve. For instance the New Testament has little to no inkling of several later Christian doctrines like the Trinity and the Immaculate Conception. We can even see the story of the life of Jesus evolving when we read the Gospels from oldest to newest.

    Widespread stories like that of the Flood are just as easily explained as "people everywhere have experienced floods". There is simply no special knowledge to be inherited from our ancestors. All the records we have of their beliefs are scientifically and morally primitive, and that includes the Bible. We can see a steady increase in knowledge as we look at each successive civilization throughout history. Jews did not have any special knowledge, for instance, that the earth was round despite claims that their scriptures say such a thing, nor did they grasp the true nature of the sun and moon.

    Everything that we reliably know and upon which we have based our civilization was learned by observation and experimentation -- science -- not received through divine revelation. God apparently did not see fit to leave even one useful piece of scientific information in his book, such as how to cure diseases, leaving people to suffer from polio, for instance, until the 20th century when the vaccine was invented.

    It will always be possible to represent Bible verses as being scientifically sound if one is willing to layer enough additional explanations on top of the actual texts. It all hinges on how hard one is trying to believe that ancient sheepherders actually knew more about our world than we do today, as scientists do things like study the cosmic microwave background for evidence of multiple universes.

    Do yourself a favor and read what scholars have written about the Bible -- not these unqualified apologists' web sites. Like science, Bible scholarship has advanced a lot since the 1800s, though fundamentalists don't know that.

  • Chris Tann
    Chris Tann

    Apognophos: very good replies. What would you say about the Hebrew word chug as describing the earth? This word denotes a sphere not a circle,which could still be flat. Also in its reference to God hanging the earth upon nothing. Can one really say this is mere coincidence?

  • Viviane
    Viviane

    This word denotes a sphere not a circle,which could still be flat.

    No, it doesn't.

  • poopsiecakes
    poopsiecakes

    The bible also says that the earth has foundations, four corners, pillers and having a cornerstone. There are more verses that state those as descriptions than the one saying that the earth hangs on nothing. The verse that speaks of the earth being a circle follows that statement by desbribing the heavens as a curtain that are stretched out like a tent.

    It's definitely hard to start asking difficult questions and it's nice to see you doing that, Chris. :)

  • OnTheWayOut
    OnTheWayOut

    I didn't take time to read this, so sorry.

    I imagine it's pretty flimsy from what I scanned- basically that by looking at someplace else in the stars, people who are die-hard believers can sort of make the reality kind of fit the vague description of creation in Genesis- provided you really allow jumps to conclusions and leaps of faith, and then ignore everything outside of the brief description of the days of creation like the garden of Eden and the age of everything and the flood.

    Oh, and you have to ignore archeaology that proves huge hunks of Genesis and Exodus wrong also. And ignore the contradictions within even the first chapters of Genesis. And don't forget to pretend the biggest killer of people ever really only does good for them.

  • Apognophos
    Apognophos

    Actually, what I've read about the "circle of the earth" in Isaiah 40:22 is that chug does mean a circle. Looking at the word's entry on BibleHub, you can see that the concordances give the definitions "circle", "horizon", and "vault". It would be nice if there were more usages from which to get a sense of the word, but there's only three. As you can see, the second is in Prov. 8:27: "when he inscribed a circle on the face of the deep". Both the Isaiah and Proverbs verses would make sense if referring to an Earth that is flat and round.

    The other usage is in Job 22:14, where it refers to God walking on the vaulted ceiling of the sky. This complicates the definition a bit and I'm not clear on why chug can mean both "circle" and "vault". Perhaps the three-dimensional nature of a vaulted ceiling is why some claim that chug can mean circle, but all it tells us is that God is dwelling above some kind of round structure, which could also refer to the firmament as a sort of hemisphere.

    If you look at the page I linked to on Contradictions in the Bible, there's illustrations (approximate ones) which show a literal interpretation of the Bible's word-picture. Part of that word-picture is given in Genesis 1 when God hammered out an inverted bowl shape (raqia, the firmament) in order to create a space for life in the formless waste. The reasoning for calling the raqia a bowl shape is given in footnote #1 in the Contradictions article. You can see the same definition of raqia if you look at the Brown-Driver-Briggs entry for the word on BibleHub.

    As for the scripture about hanging the earth upon nothing, the verse takes on a different sense if you focus on the word "hanging" rather than "nothing". The writer is not necessarily saying that the earth is in the middle of an empty place like outer space; he is simply saying that it's not hung from anything. That's because the Bible speaks of the earth resting on foundations (Prov. 8:29). Contributing to the idea of a flat earth (more accurately, a flat land) are scriptures like Isaiah 41:5, 9 which refer to the "extremities" of the earth (a sphere has no extremities, right?).

    The fundamentalist argument is that this sort of phrasing is poetic language, and certainly that's what I believed as a Witness. It was a striking thing when I first contemplated that these verses might have been meant literally at the time they were written (similar to how the Bible refers to the heart as a place where thoughts occur, which is taken poetically now but was meant literally at the time).

    This post may not be as coherent as I would like because of my tiredness, but hopefully you get what I'm trying to say.

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