Replies

As a minor note, “a diety made them out of dirt” is a bit more of a yarn. ( Muridae)
Kind of weird isn't it? They're more offended by primates than dirt. ( A perfect lady)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

What I find amazing is how closely the Genesis account conforms to what we do know to be true from science. It is unlike other primitive creation stories that have turtles and other animals carrying the sun on its back, etc.

As for the dirt part, What **does** Genesis say? Try reading it.

Now,,,,Could your **great** mind write as concise and accurate explanation to a primitive people explaining the creation of the universe, earth, the appearance of the various forms of life upon it and man? How would **you** explain it in a manner ( for a primitive people) that did NOT seem magical? Huh?

Here's another project.

Explain the NASA trip to the moon in 500 or 600 hundred words for a primitive people who likely hadn't even seen a wheel yet. Try it. See how well you do. My bet is that your story ( understandable by a primitive people) would sound grandly magical as well.

So...This is what Genesis1;27 says:

” 27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.”

( no mention of dirt or any details as to how it was done. )

As for the second creation story, ...Ok bright light, how would **YOU** explain to a primitive people who knew **nothing** of chemistry, atoms, or elements that man is **indeed** made of the common elements of the earth? Let's see if **YOU** could do better. You're so smart, being a professional government teacher and all that.

Genesis 2: 7

“Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

So....From this we know that living and breathing man is composed of the common elements of the earth.

Before mocking Genesis, perhaps you should should try writing a creation story (understandable by a primitive people) that has more clarity, or more beautifully composed.

>What I find amazing is how closely the Genesis account conforms to what we do know to be true from science. It is unlike other primitive creation stories that have turtles and other animals carrying the sun on its back, etc.

Well there are two ways we can take about this. On the one hand, I could simply point out that if people tried and tried to come up with (mythological) explanations of the world, life, and all that, someone’s bound to come up with something that can be reinterpreted in a way that might fit if you wedge it in with a hammer and squint. The second way is to examine and address your claims (which also feels like less of a cop-out). So, let’s have a look:

...well, ok; more generalities first. We begin with an insistence that I read what is actually there. If you like, I can start at the *very* beginning, and point out that in the creation story according to Genesis, it all starts with waters being parted, which is rather inaccurate, as water wouldn’t have been around for some time after the big bang, at least long enough for the early stars to fuse some oxygen. But I expect this sort of piecemeal debunking is really not what you want, based upon this line:

>Now,,,,Could your **great** mind write as concise and accurate explanation to a primitive people explaining the creation of the universe, earth, the appearance of the various forms of life upon it and man? How would **you** explain it in a manner ( for a primitive people) that did NOT seem magical? Huh?

At which point we understand that the creation story is, in your view, metaphor - a tale told to a primitive people by a creator to explain something that by all rights they don’t have the capacity to understand. That fair, if unfalsifiable, but it does have a few more problems - simple mistakes such as the land plants arising before fish in the sea (evolutionary backward) and other questions of the story getting the order wrong seem like something that would be fairly easy to avoid if I were telling the tale.

In short, there are still problems.

I don’t mock Genesis, but I do read it for what it is - an oral tradition containing (among later things) two creation stories; mythology. It’s an (arguably) lovely bit of poetry, and an interesting anthropologist view as to how humans explained themselves and the world in more primitive times, but it’s clearly not a scientific work, and not something I’m going to base a lecture on in a science classroom.

While I appreciate the point put forth by apologetics such as yourself that it was a story aimed at a fairly ignorant, warlike people quite a long time ago. It’s an interesting point to consider. But that point is, on the one hand, unfalsifiable - what evidence could you possibly find that a god did *not* give the story to the people - and therefore not exactly useful, while on the other hand a bit of special pleading, and requiring of a number of other assumptions.

Plus, it does indeed bring up other questions, often things along the lines of “why did god choose them, when they couldn’t understand, to give his story to when as an omniscient being he’d be able to give it to a later generation that would get it?” or “why doesn’t god come back and correct the mistakes?” or “If he were omnipotent, couldn’t he have found or made a way for them to fully understand?” and so forth. And the fact that most of these questions can’t be answered (or answered satisfactorily) is a bit of a problem.

This sort of apologetic rhetoric leads to a number of theological questions about the nature of god and why he acts like he does; it’s a fairly sticky issue, all things considered.

This is, as a note, one of the reasons that I prefer to dwell in the scientific; it deals with evidence and tests and all things empirical. Theology is generally too ephemeral for me.