> In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Kind of glosses over the ~9b years that the ‘heavens’ existed before the Earth formed, and the vast difference in scale.
You’d have to wonder how any explanation that wasn’t obviously made up by a race that lived on the Earth and understood nothing about the wider universe could get the facts so wrong.
In a book written for people on Earth with a purpose other than explaining physics? Of course it glosses over a bunch of stuff before any of Earth as we know it existed. Really - if one doesn't believe in God, fine, but the number of arguments I hear where people say, "An omnipotent being must not exist because I obviously know better and would have done this differently" just astounds me. It's as illogical a train of thought as anything you hear from religious crazies.
That's a valid point. The parent one is not. My beef is with atheists criticizing the irrationality of religion and then being as irrational as what they criticize.
Light in a general, diffuse form started to penetrate the atmosphere at some point (this is the "creation" of light at 1:3). Then there was an expanse created to form a division between water below and those above. For an observer on earth, light would have only gradually penetrated the waters above as they formed into clouds. Eventually, the sun and moon and stars, and their motions, would become visible (1:14-18)
I was of the understanding that the opening statement covers the entire universe, and the rest of the explanation covers the formation of the earth from the perspective of someone on the earth. That will explain why the sun and moon only become visible later.
You take this stuff too literally. It's a story from a time when people were just starting to wonder what everything was made up of, and lacked our current understanding of the world.
No. The point is those omnipotent fairy tale believers must prove whatever they say. Nothing more.
Also, why the Abrahamic God? Goku is more fun. Or Kami Sama.
> You’d have to wonder how any explanation that wasn’t obviously made up by a race that lived on the Earth and understood nothing about the wider universe could get the facts so wrong.
You'd have to wonder how a scientific understanding could possibly be reflected in a poem that makes heavy use of reflective structures.
It's a poem, of a particular kind. The people it was written for would not have taken it literally. IIRC the Talmud doesn't say that it is obviously something literal. That's a more modern trend of Christianity, and even there, many sects don't.
There's problems with taking it literally. That it isn't scientifically accurate is the least of those.
Biblical Literalism is a biggest plague on modern Christianity. Nothing else has done as much damage. It drains the Bible of its real meaning, and forces Christians to choose between rejecting reality and rejecting faith.
It is a relatively recent development; in the Middle Ages, the literal interpretation was only one of four levels of interpretation, and generally seen as the least important one. It's about the last 2 or 3 centuries that Biblical Literalism became big.
> Curiously it became a poem that doesn't have to be taken literally after it was proven to be completely wrong.
Not really. The Mishnah, of the Talmud, originates from around 200CE. The first commentary on the poem treats it as a purely symbolic construction. These commentaries sum up thinking that was already common at the time, based on long oral traditions.
I'm a christian, but there are even bigger issues with Genesis from a scientific point of view: how about the dinosaurs, bacteria, viruses and so on.
There are some Bible quotes that seem to show transcedental, accurate insights -- like the Earth floating in void, but not much, that's not something central to the Bible.
Why is there an expectation the the Bible will talk about dinosaurs or bacteria/viruses specifically? It would not be meaningful for a book focused on the spiritual to provide a treatise on dinosaurs, bacteria/viruses, unless the authors were somehow trying hard to address possible disbelief thousands of years later, which they were not.
However, the existence of dinosaurs does not conflict with Genesis at all. The Bible simply says animals were created before man. For how long animals existed before the creation of man is not specified, it could have been millions of years. This allows for dinosaurs to have existed and gone extinct before man came along.
Also, the Bible does not talk about bacteria/viruses, but in the books of Moses, scientifically sound instructions are given as to how to curb the spread of disease through personal hygiene (e.g., burying human waste) and quarantining, etc. This implies a knowledge of the germ theory of disease. Contrast this with the ancient Egyptian "medical" practices of applying human waste poultices to open wounds, and the practice of open defecation common in many parts of the world even now.
Exactly. People try to make the Bible into something it was never meant to be. It's a spiritual book about the relationship between humans and God. Although much of it takes place in history, it's not meant to be a historical treatise, and certainly not a scientific one. It has to be read and interpreted in the context in which it was written, not our modern context. Many things may still apply to us, but many don't, or need to be reinterpreted from that context to ours.
Dinosaurs are believed to have been here before the flood by some. As for bacteria and viruses, well when you bring sin, you bring forth death, and death has many forms.
Course there's bacteria that isn't necessarily bad, and that's just part of the balance of things.
DNA is literally a language / coded instruction set - something that had to be designed and created, I've written a lot of code, it never ever accidentally writes itself, I have to design it and think thoroughly of what I want it to do.
Kind of glosses over the ~9b years that the ‘heavens’ existed before the Earth formed, and the vast difference in scale.
You’d have to wonder how any explanation that wasn’t obviously made up by a race that lived on the Earth and understood nothing about the wider universe could get the facts so wrong.