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Post by TJ Wagner on Feb 10, 2014 12:54:24 GMT -5
In Genesis, we read about the world being created in seven days - but how are we defining a day? We typically think of a 24 hour period, but it was the Egyptians who credited for that definition. In the bible it says (I'm paraphrasing here) that a thousand years is like a day unto the Lord. So, what if instead of what we think of as days, it's actually referring to eras?
After that debate, I saw a lot of people talking about this and there were some that seemed to feel that science or attempt to explain things was evil. I don't believe that. We were given minds to think and question and I think that we are expected to learn and grow. I don't think that religion and science have to exclusive of one another. At least, that's how I feel.
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Post by Coaster on Feb 10, 2014 14:08:17 GMT -5
In my opinion, it's not a point of salvation whether you believe it was seven "days" or seven "days"; the more important part is that God made it in an orderly fashion as part of a master plan, and sin entered the world through the disobedience of these first two people in the garden, because that's where it's no longer a semantic point.
I'm still partial to the short view because there's nothing saying God can't accelerate growth (magiiiiic) when he feels like it in order to preserve his creation, but even if I'm wrong, winding up before God someday, I find it unlikely the question on his mind will be "Did you believe all the right things about history?" let alone "Why didn't you see that it took me longer than you expected?", but "Are you forgiven by my Son?"
(it is a bit annoying when people chuck out the Bible entirely because they can't explain certain points about it, though, and the foregone conclusion of common-ancestor evolution/big bang/etc. is one of the reasons I avoided biology in my schooling, aside from it being irrelevant to my career interests and annoying memorization besides)
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Post by TJ Wagner on Feb 10, 2014 14:18:39 GMT -5
That's actually a very good point. I like to think about it, but it's not really as important.
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Post by Breakingchains on Feb 10, 2014 16:33:11 GMT -5
In my opinion, it's not a point of salvation whether you believe it was seven "days" or seven "days"; the more important part is that God made it in an orderly fashion as part of a master plan, and sin entered the world through the disobedience of these first two people in the garden, because that's where it's no longer a semantic point. Hey, can I jump in here? Because this, to me, raises a larger question than just the "days" thing: Is that even the important part? See, the thing is, I was raised in a really traditional, bible-belt form of Christianity where evolution was a "lie from Satan" (I'm not even joking), and it was treated as though even researching it and exposing myself to the ideas behind it was somehow scandalous and wrong. But I no longer can say I believe in a literal Adam and Eve, or a literal Noah's flood. Nor can I really say, with the information I have, that I don't believe evolution is a thing. I did, up until about age 20 or so. But I can't really defend those positions any longer with the knowledge I've gained. I know a lot of people feel like they can, and have their varying explanations that work for them. But that's me, personally. But does it even matter? Is God going to quiz me on whether Adam and Eve are actual people or an allegory? Is the fact that my beliefs have changed on certain aspects of Christian tradition going to cause the pearly gates to get slammed in my face, despite the fact that I still believe? Are points like Adam and Eve central to the faith, or are they window dressing? I mean, historically, Christianity's system of beliefs and doctrines is more mutable than we might want to believe. Rules get dropped, translations turn out to be... questionable (unless we're to believe that Moses grew literal horns on his head), etc.. To me, this no longer seems to matter. Because in terms of applicability, the biggest points of the entire text would seem to be (1) Jesus, (2) Jesus, and (3) showing compassion and love for the people around us and not giving in to hatred, judgment or greed. So once you've accepted those, is all of this stuff about what-happened-when, was-it-an-apple-or-a-fig really that critical of an issue? |
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Post by Nimras on Feb 10, 2014 17:11:26 GMT -5
*sigh*  I would like to revive this thread because, well, I'm going through a bit of a crisis at the moment - a crisis in my faith. You see, last week there was this big debate between creationist Ken Ham and Bill Nye the science guy over whether creationism was an acceptable science or not. I have been hearing many things on the Internet since this debate - most of the things I've been hearing are rather troubling. I was raised and schooled in an environment where six-day creationism was taught as truth. Over the past week, I've heard so many statements, many of them in response to that debate, stating that creationism is absolutely wrong and that the book of Genesis should not be taken literally. I have been flooded with evidence that supports old-earth theories and opposes new-earth ones. I'm not trying to be close-minded here; maybe the earth is a hundred million years old; maybe God didn't create the universe in six days; maybe the creationist theories I have been taught are wrong. I know that I can have beliefs that turn out to be false; I know I can be wrong sometimes. The problem is that a portion of the Bible may be inaccurate. If one portion of the Bible is inaccurate, it's quite possible that everything else in the Bible is inaccurate too. Who can say that the whole Word of God is without error if one portion of it can be proven false? There is just so much I could say about what's been going through my mind about all this but to avoid a huge textwall I'm just going to wrap up here and see if this discussion can be revived. There is just so much to this personal crisis and I just can't see evolution fitting in with my faith in Jesus. It all just doesn't add up. Out of curiosity, which version of the 6 day creation were you taught? Because there's two in the Bible, and they're quite different: There's the Genesis 1:1-10 : The order of creation is: First day: creating heavens, the planet, light, separating day and night. Second day: creating the sky, separating out dry land from the waters. Third day: commanded the earth to make plants. Fourth day: created stars, the sun, and the moon. Fifth day: created fish and birds. Sixth day: created land animals and humans (male and female humans, at the same time). Then there's Genesis 2:4-22 The order of creation is quite different. There's no "days" listed, but the process goes from an existing heavens and earth, and God summons streams up though the earth to water the land. Got creates man (not woman) and gives him life. God plants a garden in the East with the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the center, and places man in the garden. God separated the river near the garden into four rivers (Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates), and commands man to care for his garden. God then decides that man needs help tending for the garden, and creates all the wild animals and birds for man to name and select from as his helper. Man names all of the animals (and names himself Adam), but can find no suitable helper from all the animals on earth, so God creates woman from Adam's rib. There's no days listed, but the order of creation is: heavens, earth, water, man, plants, all animals, woman. Now, for me personally, I don't believe the Bible is the literal word of God. I believe that the bible is a 4,000 year record of man trying to understand God. And we mess it up a lot. That's why for a long time people thought Moses had literal horns coming out of his head. And the big debate today about the Red Sea vs. The Sea of Reeds for the escape from Egypt narrative. I also believe that the Earth is about 4.54 billion years old -- because I believe God and the laws of the universe are nothing but constant, and that date is derived from the oldest rocks we've found on Earth with radiometric dating. I believe the universe is old. Other than our Sun, the closest star (Proxima Centauri) is 4.2 light years away -- this means it takes the light from that sun 4.2 years to reach us. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2 and a half million light years away. If God made the heavens 6,000 years ago, we wouldn't be able to see it for ... well, a very long time. I lived for some time in a six day creation home, but really, unless one takes the mindset that God has deliberately set traps to make the earth seem older than it is to trick people into believing that the Earth and the Universe are billions of years old (and I've met them -- one of my parents friends believes that God created the dinosaur fossils on the same day he crated the earth), the evidence is overwhelming that the earth has been around a lot longer than 6,000 years. |
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Post by Komori on Feb 11, 2014 21:51:46 GMT -5
The Bible's full of parables: stories to teach a lesson. Jesus told a lot of them, and his friends wrote them down like "Here's another parable Jesus said." But if Jesus was writing a book instead of John, maybe He wouldn't have said, "Now here's a parable." He would've just written it down. So just because other books of the Bible don't start with, "Now here's a parable," doesn't necessarily mean they have to be taken as literal.
Take the story of Jonah and the whale/fish. Is it even possible to be eaten by a sea-creature and stay there for 3 days without drowning? Not without divine intervention from God. So did God send an angel to protect Jonah from drowning the way He protected David from the lions? Maybe. Did it actually happen? Does it matter? The point is to learn a lesson about obedience, not to argue marine biology.
You're actually supposed to suss out the Bible's truths with help from the Holy Spirit. (ESV)
If the Bible was written out entirely as one big fact checklist, then people will spend their lives fighting facts and figures and dates, and missing the forest for the trees. It'd eliminate prayer and soul-searching entirely, because all you'd have to do was disprove one little thing and the whole shebang would fall like a house of cards. But the Bible's pretty complex, full of fabulous stories and miracles and laws and names and seeming contradictions and rules for living your life, and there's a LOT of interpretation to be done, and that's the entire reason why people never stop studying it.
But as the Word of God, would you expect anything less? XD
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Post by Pacmanite on Feb 12, 2014 9:20:16 GMT -5
*sigh* I would like to revive this thread because, well, I'm going through a bit of a crisis at the moment - a crisis in my faith. You see, last week there was this big debate between creationist Ken Ham and Bill Nye the science guy over whether creationism was an acceptable science or not. I have been hearing many things on the Internet since this debate - most of the things I've been hearing are rather troubling. I was raised and schooled in an environment where six-day creationism was taught as truth. Over the past week, I've heard so many statements, many of them in response to that debate, stating that creationism is absolutely wrong and that the book of Genesis should not be taken literally. I have been flooded with evidence that supports old-earth theories and opposes new-earth ones. I'm not trying to be close-minded here; maybe the earth is a hundred million years old; maybe God didn't create the universe in six days; maybe the creationist theories I have been taught are wrong. I know that I can have beliefs that turn out to be false; I know I can be wrong sometimes. The problem is that a portion of the Bible may be inaccurate. If one portion of the Bible is inaccurate, it's quite possible that everything else in the Bible is inaccurate too. Who can say that the whole Word of God is without error if one portion of it can be proven false? There is just so much I could say about what's been going through my mind about all this but to avoid a huge textwall I'm just going to wrap up here and see if this discussion can be revived. There is just so much to this personal crisis and I just can't see evolution fitting in with my faith in Jesus. It all just doesn't add up. I spent quite a few years crossing and crossing back across the evolution vs creationism debate. I've finally settled on the Old Earth side. It took some time because, like you, I felt something of a culture shock through the process... I remember the first time I went Old Earth it was in early high school, and I thought to myself in frustration, "Here's the plan. I'll ask Jesus when I get to see him in heaven which side is right, and THEN I'll agree with him, whichever it was." When I later went Old Earth for good I wasn't quite as blunt as that, but the thought was similar, in that I do not believe Jesus requires his followers to subscribe to Young Earth Creationism, and so many, many observations made more sense in an Old Earth model of history. I'm prepared to be wrong on natural history, but since I can't be absolutely certain of a 6-literal-day Creation I might as well choose the theory that makes more sense. It has some knock-on effects, like I now believe that there were animal deaths before the fall. But the venerable Bede (7th-8th century) and Thomas Aquinas ( Summa Theologica, Part 1, Question 93, Article 1) also believed that animals died before the fall, so it's not altogether unheard of in more than a thousand years of of mainstream Christian theology. So perhaps this might be comforting to you. Not all historical Christians were literalists, some notable theologians were quite the opposite. St. Augustine was one of the greatest fathers of early Christianity, and he did not think it was wise to adhere to a rigidly literal interpretation of the genesis creation. He wrote about creationist interpretations: You may choose whichever you prefer; only avoid asserting anything rashly, and something you don’t know as if you did; and remember you are just a human being investigating the works of God to the extent you are permitted to do so (Augustine 2002c, 9) Augustine actually found it very difficult to accept the 6-day Creation theory, in part because of his Christian theology. He felt that if God was all-powerful, why shouldn't he have made everything all at once, not even in a day but in a second? Augustine was not satisfied with a rigid literalist interpretation of Genesis. The saint even felt ashamed that some other Christians of his time were talking up how well they knew how God created the world. Not only did this strike him as prideful, but he also felt that it was harmful to the mission since it gave a bad impression of Christianity to the pagans: Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. Augustine lived in the 5th century AD, long before the culture wars of our times, but his words and the words of other Church fathers still have the power to put things in perspective. At least for me. |
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Post by Stal on Feb 12, 2014 14:05:48 GMT -5
I actually do believe in creation, and I'm sure my more enlightened friends are aghast to hear me say that, of course. But it's true, I do.
The account in Genesis doesn't have to mean that's when creation itself happened and there are plenty of old earth creationists to subscribe to what is colloquially called "the gap theory". That there is a gap in time between Gen 1:1 and 1:2.
This relates to the fact that in the creation account of Gen 1 (and Gen 2, they're not so different as Nimras points out. Merely two ways of telling the same story, one with more detail and one more summarily. How different you view them is entirely based on the premise you have going in and what you're willing to accept) there already appears to have been an Earth with water and so forth. As well Gen 1:2 could be translated just as easily that "And the earth became without form (tohu) and void (bohu)." Which would imply an older earth and that the creation was a replenishing, a recreation of a destroyed and devastated Earth (which could likely have been the result of Satan's rebellion-- destroy the things that God had been working on out of spite, etc).
Above you see where I mention the Hebrew words that were translated as form and void. There are other verses in the Bible that indicate God did not create the earth in such a state.
In any case it is quite easy to believe in an old earth and a creation account. They are not disparate views.
Your question as to whether invalidating one part of the Bible from your belief system invalidates the whole thing is a good question. Instead of relying on what you've been taught you should do some study on what you believe. Claim it, own it, figure it out and don't rely on a house of cards of teachings you've been given. But build on the rock of what you can internalize and you'll be in better shape when things like this come along that start to contradict what you believe. Because you'll know why you believe it and you'll know what the extent of reevaluating that belief will bring you.
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Post by Huntress on Feb 13, 2014 7:36:40 GMT -5
Here's something this got me thinking about: just how good is our time perception really?
As far as I can tell, it's honestly pretty abysimal without calendars and media and old photo albums and facebook newsfeeds to chop our past into nice tidy digestible chunks. Thought exercise: if you had no way to find out how old you are, what would your best guess be about your current age?
But we have history books that tell us that the world wars happened in the early 20th century (Before Grandma Time), the French revolution in the 18th century (ancient oldie-time people), the Middle Ages in the... uh, Middle Ages (my mental perception just drops that somewhere between the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment), dinosaurs Really Very Long Time Ago (may as well have happened on a different planet), etc.
So now I wonder how people in the Bible-writing era would have perceived the very start of time. The actual length of a century is basically imperceptible unless you live that long. The actual length of a millennium... hey, one millennium back from this current point in time, my ancestors would've been happily gallivanting in pagan forests because our relevant crusades were still 200 years away. One millennium is really bloody long time.
Now try to pin this down in a written record without much in the way of written record before that point.
"In the beginning, God created the universe."
"So when was that?"
"...A really, really long time ago."
"Like, a hundred years?"
"No, much longer than that."
"A thousand years?"
"Even longer than that."
"...Two thousand years? (At this point it basically becomes a DBZ power level. When the numbers get too big, they don't tell you anything any more.)"
"Mmmmlonger."
"Six thousand?"
"It could be six thousand, I guess."
I don't really see how the record can be accurate unless a) someone's kept a nice tidy timeline through early millennia (there's a fantasy series in here somewhere) or b) the literal Word of God has handed a specific number down at some point.
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Post by Nimras on Feb 13, 2014 10:39:12 GMT -5
I don't really see how the record can be accurate unless a) someone's kept a nice tidy timeline through early millennia (there's a fantasy series in here somewhere) or b) the literal Word of God has handed a specific number down at some point. Most of the dates for the YEC came from counting the ages of people in the Bible (and when they started having kids) listed in geologies and adding those numbers all together to arrive at Year 0. |
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Post by Huntress on Feb 13, 2014 12:44:44 GMT -5
I don't really see how the record can be accurate unless a) someone's kept a nice tidy timeline through early millennia (there's a fantasy series in here somewhere) or b) the literal Word of God has handed a specific number down at some point. Most of the dates for the YEC came from counting the ages of people in the Bible (and when they started having kids) listed in geologies and adding those numbers all together to arrive at Year 0. Is there a full timeline of people provided in the Bible from Adam all the way down to Jesus or are there gaps in there anywhere? Although even with a full timeline provided (Genesis 5 is an especially curious chapter), I still wouldn't really trust a record spanning four thousand years to maintain an unbroken line of names and ages. That's a lot of potential to occasionally mix up two dudes with the same name who lived in the same city two hundred years apart. |
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Post by Kozma on Feb 19, 2014 4:36:06 GMT -5
I'm sorry it has taken me so long to respond here after my initial posting. I needed some time to think things through and decide what to say. Anyway, I'm feeling a bit more confident with my faith now and I've now come to the conclusion that my understanding of the origin of the world may be flawed. I cannot say with complete certainty that the universe was created 6,000 years as I was taught - it may be a lot older than that. People have this tendency of misinterpreting things in the Bible; it's quite likely that I'm misinterpreting many things as well. I'm coming to the conclusion that evolution does not necessarily contradict the Bible. A couple of days ago, my cousin posted an excellent article from the Christian Post on Facebook that really helped me understand that you don't have to believe in young earth creationism to believe in Biblical inerrancy and believe Jesus as your savior. I guess it was folly for me to believe with certainty that the world was created 6 millenia ago and that evolution was undoubtedly false. I guess the best thing I can do is to study and learn more about the world God has created and learn more about His Word. There is so much for me to learn and there may be many things I am wrong about. Thank you for everyone who given their thoughts and views on this discussion I started. If possible, I'd like to continue this discussion because I think it's good for believers to help each other in their understanding of the Bible. Proverbs 27:17 says: "As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." And for anyone interested in reading that article I mentioned; here it is: www.christianpost.com/news/does-believing-in-inerrancy-require-one-to-believe-in-young-earth-creationism-114464/ |
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