Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Actually I've read the entire Bible. Several times.
For God's sake why?
I tried to read it from beginning to end once, and got bogged down in the 'bagats'. Of course I'm not a Christian and had no motivation to read it beyond curiosity. I have read most of it at one time or another (I majored in philosophy and religion so I felt that I should) but not straight through, cover to cover. There are still probably a few of the more obscure OT books that I've never read.
My scriptural interests these days are focused on the Pali canon. (I don't know that anyone has ever read that straight through, it's just too voluminous. Maybe a few monastics.)
It does say that whales (which are mammals) came at the same time as fish.
It also says that the Sun came after plants.
I wonder how that worked.
Look we are talking on living organism evolution , don't bring other things , we can have other time for planets
Duck didn't mention planets. He mentioned plants. Genesis one says that plants (seed bearing plants no less) were the first kind of life created, and that they appeared before the creation of the Sun.
That's not how modern science imagines it. The Sun was there first. The Earth is currently estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old. It's early days were hellish, as it was constantly bombarded by asteroid impacts. The Moon may have been torn from the Earth by an impact with a Mars sized body. So the Earth's earliest days wouldn't have been very conducive to the formation of life. The division of land and sea had to wait for the Earth's surface to stop being molten.
It appears to us today that the first form of life on earth was some crude kind of procaryote close to 4 billion years ago. (In the 3.8-4.1 bya range, it appears.) Simple bacteria or archaea. These microscopic organisms were life on Earth for most of Earth's history. They were all the life there was around here. Eucaryotes only appeared much later, and multicellular organisms much later than that, perhaps 600 million years ago.
Flowering plants are multicellular eucaryotes and they are comparatively recent, derived from a line that branched off the gymnosperms (pine trees and their relatives) about 200-250 million years ago, with the first flowers appearing about 160 million years ago.
So, bottom line, there seems to me to be a basic inconsistency between the Biblical and scientific sequences. Even if we play around with the time-scale, reinterpreting 'day' to mean 'eon' or 'undetermined period of time', the differences in the order of appearance of fundamental things remains.
One might still try to argue that the precise order of events isn't as important as the fact that Genesis 1 was an evolutionary account of a sort, at least in the sense of being a sequential ordering of events.
I'll introduce Greek speculations about the origin of species for comparison. The fact that some of the Greeks imagined something very close to the idea of natural selection is applauded as an illustration of their intelligence and proto-scientific acumen. And that's despite the fact that the precise details about the speculative history of life that they generated with their natural selection idea are no more consistent with modern science than Genesis 1 is. So if an inconsistent sequence isn't a deal killer for the Greeks, why should it be for the Hebrews?
I have a couple of comments about that. First, Genesis 1 isn't unique in any way, since pretty much all of the ancient cosmogonies were sequential. It isn't the first evolutionary account, or the prototype of evolutionary thinking or anything. It's just an illustration of a whole class of ancient myths.
And more importantly, what's drawing applause to the Greeks isn't the history of life that they produced, it's how they went about trying to produce such a history. The Greek accounts (at least some of them) were naturalistic. They sought to explain events and states of affairs in this world by the observed principles of this world. They didn't fall back on hypothetical divine interventions.
I'm not sure that's any more brilliant than what the Hebrews were doing, it was just a different set of metaphysical and epistemological assumptions. The purposes of the speculations seem to have been different, for one thing. The Hebrews weren't trying to create a modern-style biology or cosmology. They were just trying to say (in the ancient 'mythical' idiom in which philosophical ideas were presented in the shape of stories) that everything that exists is dependent on God's will, God's choice and since it comes from God, is therefore good. (It's leading up to Genesis 2 with its garden of Eden story about how bad came about, how mankind became estranged from God and God's reality and how suffering came to be.) The underlying message of Genesis 1 seems to me to be ethical.
The Greeks on the other hand were trying to uncover the abstract principles that they believed underlie events in the physical world (what they might have called the world's logos, its "logic"). That's a more metaphysical and less ethical motivation and it's more in keeping with the motivations of modern physical and biological science. The Greeks were more interested than the Hebrews in underlying mechanisms and in how the principles of the world bring events about. What people applaud in these Greeks is what appears to be the origin of science's methodological naturalism.
Admittedly methodological naturalism is just a philosophical assumption about how to go about understanding the world, and not a metaphysical revelation about what does and doesn't exist (that's the error of metaphysical naturalism). But the assumption that the natural world needs to be understood in natural terms has proven very fruitful pragmatically over the years, especially since the 'scientific revolution'.
If we agree that Genesis 1 is inconsistent with modern scientific understanding in its detailed sequence, and very unlike science in its method, style of presentation and purpose, is there anything of Biblical understanding that isn't swept away by science?
I suppose that if the basic idea is not only that reality is dependent on God's will, but that everything God wills is fundamentally good in some ethical-evaluative sense, that message needn't be swept away by modern science. And if that was the original underlying motivation of the Genesis 1 story, then it can probably be argued that the message of Genesis 1 can still hold true, even if we agree that the sequence of creation and how we should go about understanding the universe's behavior have next to nothing to do with Genesis 1.
One might even argue that a feeling for the beauty and mystery of the universe (Carl Sagan's reverent "billions and billions") is another way of expressing a very similar feeling, the feeling that reality is something good, something with transcendent possibilities, something that mankind should seek to know.
I think that might be the best way to harmonize Genesis and modern science. (Not being a Christian, Muslim or Jew, I don't feel any need to do that myself.)
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