Monday, March 4, 2013

Genesis 1: The Reason Evolution Is Not True

Check out today's episode

The Creation of the World (v. 1-31)


Pic found here
Day 1:

God created the heavens and the earth, but it was without form and there was darkness everywhere. God was hovering over the waters and said "let there be light" and said the light was good. God separated the light and darkness, he called the light day and the darkness night.

So God created the heavens and earth, but it was all dark and without form. But there was water for God to hover over. The phrase that God separated the light from the dark doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense as darkness is simply an absence of light. But it does go on to say that he is calling this day and night, so we can be charitable and assume that God separating the light from darkness is creating the cycles of day and night.

From Guzik
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth: This tells us that God used no pre-existing material to create the earth. The ancient Hebrew word bara (created) is specific. It means to create out of nothing, showing that that God created the world out of nothing, not out of Himself.
In all honesty, I simply don't believe him. Does Hebrew really have a word for "created out of nothing"? No way! No human being has ever created something out of nothing in the way he is claiming God created something out of nothing. When we 'create' things, we rearrange matter and energy that is already there. We are transforming things that are already there. And we can look at the bible lexicon to see that 'bara' means "to shape, create", that sounds a lot more like what I am talking about than what he is talking about.

It is hard to know what to make of "without form and void", but Matthew Henry and Jamieson, Fausset & Brown seem to agree that it indicates some kind of chaos. 

In regard to the "darkness on the face of the deep", Guzik has this to say
Darkness was on the face of the deep: This may describe a sense of resistance to the moving of the Holy Spirit on the earth. Some speculate this was because Satan was cast down to the earth (Isaiah 14:12; Ezekiel 28:16) and resisted God’s plan, though his resistance was futile.
I don't really even know what to do but laugh here. It really seems like they are just making stuff up. It's darkness because he's about to create light, why would you interpret that as Satan? And if it was supposed to be Satan, why the hell would God make his first act to throw Satan down there?

Day 2:

God created a separation in the waters, some water above and some below. He called the expanse in the middle heaven (footnotes says this could also be translated as 'sky')

This is interesting, on the second day God created the sky, and that's it. Also, it suggests there is a body of water above and below the sky. Below makes sense, if there was no land yet there is nothing but ocean below the sky, but above? It sounds as if it is saying there is an ocean below and an ocean above the sky. It makes me wonder what their view of cosmology must have been, did they think there was an ocean in the sky that...leaked...on us when it rains or something? Also, if there was no sky yet on the first day, where exactly was God that he was hovering over the water?

From Guzik:
Here, the Bible recognizes the existence of water vapor in the sky.
From Matthew Henry:
divide the waters from the waters, that is, to distinguish between the waters that are wrapped up in the clouds and those that cover the sea, the waters in the air and those in the earth. 
From Jamieson, Fausset & Brown:
the atmosphere from its appearing to an observer to be the vault of heaven, supporting the weight of the watery clouds. By the creation of an atmosphere, the lighter parts of the waters which overspread the earth's surface were drawn up and suspended in the visible heavens, while the larger and heavier mass remained below. The air was thus "in the midst of the waters," that is, separated them
I guess the bible is so obviously wrong here they need to some up with some explanation, is it really reasonable to assume that the bible meant clouds here? It seems like quite a stretch to me.

Day 3:

God let the water gather in one place so dry land could appear. The land was called Earth and the water was called seas. God created vegetation, plants bearing fruit and seeds according to their kind.

So instead of the earth being one giant ocean, God created some land and sea, fine. He then created a bunch of fruit bearing plants. That whole "yielding seeds according to their kind", is that the basis of the bible being anti-evolution? If so I'm going to be pissed.

It appears that this is indeed the case, from Guzik:
According to its kind: This phrase appears ten times in Genesis chapter 1. It means God allows variation within a kind, but something of one kind will never develop into something of another kind.
Day 4:

God created the stars to separate the day from the night, and to be used for signs, seasons, days, and years. God made the sun to rule the day and the moon to rule the night. He put them all in the sky to separate the light from the darkness.

Here we have somewhat of a problem. God created the sun, stars, and moon to separate the day from night and the light from darkness. But we already separated light from darkness on day 1. Further, God created light on the first day, but he is creating the light sources here, on the fourth day. This clearly makes no sense, unless they didn't realize that the sun was the source of all the light. Think about the sky in the daytime, light seems to be coming from everywhere, but the sun is just in one spot. It's reasonable to think the people at the time didn't realize the sun is actually the source of the light in the rest of the sky. Obviously, God shouldn't have made this mistake though.

In regards to where the earth is in relation to the sun, Guzik says:
God knew exactly how far to set the sun from the earth. A few million miles more or less and life as we know it would be impossible.
Wrong, the orbit of earth varies by about 5 million miles at it's extremes

I would also like to note that the common complaint I hear on this point is that God created plants on the third day, but the sun on the fourth. While this is ridiculous, I think it misses the point that is more at the heart of this, that God created the light before he created the light source. If you follow what the book says here, there was light for the plants on the third day, because light was created on day one, it's just that the source of that light doesn't come until day four.

From Guzik:
Genesis tells us that light, day, and night each existed before the sun and the moon were created on the fourth day (Genesis 1:14-19). This shows us that light is more than a physical substance; it also has a supernatural aspect.
Right, light is supernatural, it couldn't just be that the people writing this didn't know what they were talking about. Also:
Those who propose these days of creation were not literal days, but successive “ages” of slow, evolutionary development have a real problem here. It is hard to explain how plants and all vegetation could grow and thrive eons before the sun and the moon. No modern evolutionist would argue plant life is older than the sun or the moon, but this is what the Genesis record tells us.

Day 5:

God created all of the creatures in the sea and all of the winged birds in the sky. He told them to be fruitful and multiply, and they multiplied according to their kind to fill up the sea and the sky.

God created the animals in the ocean and the animals that fly, fine.

Day 6:

God created livestock, creeping things, and beasts of the earth.

What a strange way to describe "all land animals"

God said "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" and give him dominion over everything we have created. God created man and woman, then told them 2 more times that they have dominion over everything.

Who is God talking to? Who is 'us' and 'our'? I suppose Christians would argue that this is evidence of the trinity. It can't be the holy spirit, as he is just a ghost, I suppose it could be Jesus. Seems much more likely though that this is evidence of a pantheon.




With regard to creationism/evolution. Is this seriously the reason that people can't accept evolution? Because in Genesis 1 the creation account doesn't match up properly? It's so obviously written by people who don't know anything about space or the history of our planet. I took a quick look over at Answers in Genesis, and they really do seem to be using this as their reason for not accepting evolution. For example
It is important to note that the order of events listed is not compatible with current secular thought about the origin of the universe and life and, thus, precludes any attempt to allegorize the text to fit unbiblical ideas. For example, evolutionism posits that plants did not appear until after the sun coalesced and the first life appeared. However, the biblical account is quite clear that God created plants even before He made the sun.
Are you shitting me?





For the Verses of Note page:

--Science--

Genesis 1:3,16 God created light before he created the Sun and Stars

"3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light....16 And God made the two great lights--the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night--and the stars."

3 comments:

  1. Welcome to the beginning of it all! Great post!

    The waters above was indeed the storage of precipitation, and doesn't really indicate that God knew anything about the water cycle. Reference Job 38:19-30 for some metaphorical explanation. :-)

    Check out this post for my explanation of why creating light before creating the sun probably didn't seem to strange to them back then.

    The "let us... our image" thing is definitely used to indicate at least Jesus, and is probably what the author of John 1:1-18 was thinking about. But it may have been just an emphasis of power, like the royal "we" used in medieval times by kings, or, as you note, the vestigial remains of a pantheon.

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  2. The idea that light comes from the sun is apparently an exception to the omniscience rule.

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  3. Thanks TWF, that was a great post. It was along the same lines as what I was thinking about, although I love your point that you can actually see light from the sun before sunrise and after sunset.

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