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To: AntiGuv

If you try and believe that evolution and Christianity are compatible how do you explain the genealogy in Matthew that goes back all the way to Adam? If it is not literal history it would be a lie and thus the bible could be full of lies. It says Adam and Eve were the first humans but I guess it would be silly to trace it back before adam and include the monkees huh?

Not sure how it would eviscerate Genesis being literal history though. Maybe you could help me on that one.


54 posted on 12/20/2005 8:18:56 AM PST by laxin4him (They will know by our love not our picket lines)
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To: laxin4him
how do you explain the genealogy in Matthew that goes back all the way to Adam?

Easy. It's mythology, no better or worse than the Greek, Roman, Norse or Egyptian variety.

64 posted on 12/20/2005 8:20:37 AM PST by Ace of Spades (Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)
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To: laxin4him
Not sure how it would eviscerate Genesis being literal history though. Maybe you could help me on that one.

Sorry, I didn't phrase myself well. From a scientific standpoint Genesis as literal history has already been gutted, sliced, diced, and incinerated. My actual point was that proving a God exists would hardly contradict the evidence in support of evolution. It would merely indicate that the God which exists is not the one you and others who take Genesis literally imagine to exist.

70 posted on 12/20/2005 8:23:54 AM PST by AntiGuv (™)
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To: laxin4him
If you try and believe that evolution and Christianity are compatible how do you explain the genealogy in Matthew that goes back all the way to Adam? If it is not literal history it would be a lie and thus the bible could be full of lies.

This is what the most brilliant theologian (so far as I'm concerned) in the history of Christianity said about 1800 years ago:

Now what person of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and stars? And that the first day, if we may so call it, was even without a heaven? And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, "planted a paradise eastward in Eden," and set in it a visible and palpable "tree of life," of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life; and again that one could partake of "good and evil" by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when God is said to "walk in the paradise in the cool of the day" and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events.

--Origen, On First Principles, Book IV, Chapter 3, Section 1

If he could figure it out from the state of science back in the Roman era, I see no reason why anyone should have a problem with it today.

83 posted on 12/20/2005 8:28:35 AM PST by AntiGuv (™)
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To: laxin4him
1. "If you try and believe that evolution and Christianity are compatible how do you explain the genealogy in Matthew that goes back all the way to Adam? If it is not literal history it would be a lie and thus the bible could be full of lies."

Evolutionary analysis of mitochondria (inherited by the mother only) and the Y-Chromosome (father only) has actually confirmed that there is at least one common male and one common female ancestor. (It can neither confirm, nor deny, that they existed at the same time; but, by default, the common ancestor would have parents, making this point moot.) It's called the "Y-Chromosome Adam" and "Mitochondrial Eve."

2. "It says Adam and Eve were the first humans but I guess it would be silly to trace it back before adam and include the monkees huh?"

One, monkeys ("monkees" are a singing group I think, but I can't spell, either) are not ancestors. The theory is that all primates have a common ancestor that is neither monkey, nor man.

But one starts with Adam and Eve, of course, because they ate from the tree of knowledge (in biological terms, became self-aware). Anything that came before would merely be an animal, and not man.
107 posted on 12/20/2005 8:36:28 AM PST by MeanWestTexan (Many at FR would respond to Christ "Darn right, I'll cast the first stone!")
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To: laxin4him
It says Adam and Eve were the first humans but I guess it would be silly to trace it back before adam and include the monkees huh?


722 posted on 12/20/2005 12:24:10 PM PST by Oztrich Boy (so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about - J S Mill)
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To: laxin4him

OK, I'm a bit rusty on my bible studies, but I don't remember the geneology in the new testament going back to Adam...
http://www.cforc.com/kjv/Matthew/index.html

1:1 The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
1:2 Abraham begat {snipping out the begats}
1:16 And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.

If you are going to justify your beliefs based on biblical passages, at least you should get said passages right.


1,215 posted on 12/20/2005 3:28:05 PM PST by 2nsdammit (By definition it's hard to get suicide bombers with experience.)
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