I compare Genesis with other creation accounts, such as the mesopotamian one, and find this far more spare and elegant, as a description of the reality we know.
Let's get something straight. Science is perfectly competent to discover and comment on the world before it--the world that exists today. It is not competent to comment on a world and/or situations totally unlike the world we have today. This includes not only cosmogony, but the world as it operated originally before the sin of Adam.
The first eleven chapters of Genesis are theology and history--not biology, not physics, not chemistry. Science is not competent to comment on cosmogony (the process and events that brought our present world into being). The "laws of nature" cannot be invoked here because the laws of nature did not exist. Anyone who believes in a single miracle--be it the talking donkey, the floating ax, the virgin birth, the resurrection, the liquifaction of the blood of St. Januarius, or the "miracle of the sun" in 1917--has forfeited the right to invoke the "uniformity of nature" as an excuse to retroject current conditions into the actual events of creation. Those who persist in doing so are guilty of both hypocrisy and internal inconsistency.
There is one and only one reason for treating the literal truth of the first eleven chapters of Genesis differently from everything else: a sociological prejudice against "trailer trash," with whom this particular section of the Bible is commonly associated. That is it. That is all.
People who reject the very concept of the supernatural--total atheists, materialists, and naturalists--are perfectly logical to reject the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Anyone who accepts a single miracle elsewhere does not.
I note that EnglishCon apparently doesn't believe in his religion's dogma of the "fall of man," since according to his uniformitarian cosmogony there was never a paradise to fall from . . . and certainly no original immortality for a fictitious Adam and Eve!
Once again, here is an article by Hugh Owen illustrating the absurd internal contradictions of cosmogonic uniformitarianism by people who otherwise set "nature" aside for numerous miracles. I doubt it will be read this time either.
Finally, let me state something that almost all chr*stians seem to be totally ignorant of. While there is certainly much mystery and many esoteric secrets with regard to the Creation which are hidden from the vast majority of us, there are and always have been those who have an authentic knowledge of these great mysteries. There is an unbroken line of great sages who have received this knowledge in an unbroken line. Those privileged few who have received this knowledge are not going to broadcast it (since it is forbidden to expound it before more than two people). All the hot air and all the ink spilled by everyone else on this subject is mere speculation--legitimate in the case of naturalists, hypocritical and inconsistent in the case of everyone else. In the meantime we may rest assured that, whatever these great mysteries might be, the first eleven chapters of Genesis are inerrant history written by G-d Himself and dictated to Moses letter-for-letter, just like the rest of the Torah.
Your thesis confuses me.
On one hand you state that you’re drawing a scientific understanding of creation from Scripture.
On the other hand, you discard what Scripture says and instead regurgitate evolutionary theory and timelines.
I sincerely don’t know what you’re trying to say.
Let me step back and ask a couple of questions. Did Adam have a father, or was he created by God and in His image from the dust? Did death exist before sin? These questions become very problematic if you don’t take Scripture at face value.
I know the evo/atheists like to argue that science disproves the Bible but really what can be said more accurately is that science does NOT disprove the Bible.
Gen 1:1 In the beginning.....
There was a beginning supported by the Big Bang Theory and Einstein’s equations and Hubble’s observations.
Gen 1:2 The earth was formless and void,...
Supported by the solar nebula theory and the proto earth.
Gen 1:20 ”Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures,
Scientists say that life arose in the seas.
Gen 1:24 ”Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind...
Gen 2:7 Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground,
“Shaped from clay [origin of life]”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1515522/posts
Scientists have concluded that clay was necessary for the formation of life.
Eccles 1:6 Blowing toward the south, Then turning toward the north, The wind continues swirling along; And on its circular courses the wind returns.
Scripture describes the circulating system of winds.
Eccles 1:7 All the rivers flow into the sea, Yet the sea is not full. To the place where the rivers flow, There they flow again.
The Bible also describes the water cycle.
Lev 17:10-12 `And any man from the house of Israel, or from the aliens who sojourn among them, who eats any blood, I will set My face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from among his people. `For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement.’ “Therefore I said to the sons of Israel, `No person among you may eat blood, nor may any alien who sojourns among you eat blood.’
Blood is necessary for life. The life is in the blood.
Isa 40:22 It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.
Job 9:5,8 ”It is God who removes the mountains, they know not how, When He overturns them in His anger; 8.Who alone stretches out the heavens And tramples down the waves of the sea;
Earth is round. Could also refer to the orbit of the earth as seen from space. Also, in those verses, the expansion of the universe.
Col 1:15-17 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
All things are being held together; gravitation, strong and weak nuclear forces, magnetism.
The very idea of the big bang is implausible.
If the entire mass of a supergiant star that goes supernova is so great that when it collapses on itself it forms a black hole so that even light cannot escape its gravitational pull, what do scientists do with singularly, which contained the mass of the ENTIRE universe, not just one star?
How do they even dare to say that at some point, it just *let go* and expanded in a trillion trillionth of a second to fill all known space, without any outside impetus?
How could the gravitational attraction of that much mass EVER let anything go?
EnglishCon — You may find the following helpful as you continue your creation research:
http://creation.com/creation-compromises-questions-and-answers