Can we take Genesis Seriously

With carbon dating and such, how can anyone take the story of genesis literally. If you do i would love to hear your opinions.
Thanks..

I find both creation and evolution interesting, but I don't know enough about both. Perhaps I just find nature as a whole interesting anyway.
It'd be useful to understand how carbon dating worked, is there an easy way to explain it?

Not everyone believes in a literal interpretation of Genesis 1.

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"Death but not Sin!"

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Basically Carbon dating is a way of seeing how old something is. Firstly we must realise that atoms can decay over time, the time taken for it too decay in half, is called the half-life.

Each atom has a individual half-life. In this example we shall take carbon to have a half-life of 900 years.

For example if there is a box and we no there should be 100 atoms in it then, but when we open it we only find 50 then from this we can work backwards to find out how old it is.

We can see that there is exactly half the amount of atoms there should be. So from this we can deduce that this particular box is 900 years old.

In reality carbon does not have such a short half-life is more in the range of 5730 years.

So with this information we can see that the earth is much older than the figure set in the bible (6,000 years).
Sorry if this not the best explanation but it is hard to articulate.

I do know not everyone believes in the literal interpretation of genesis. This is a question to people who do, Because I think this view harms Christianity.

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Anyway, to add my thoughts, I would like to refer you to the website answersingenesis.org. Here is an article explaining Carbon dating in and how it does or does not disprove the Bible.

I've heard of cases where one leg of a mammoth dated (I forget, but an estimate) let say, 50,000 years old, but another leg dated 80,000 years old. Now either that's a slow birth, or carbon dating doesn't work.

You see, it's based on the concept of uniformitarianism, aka "the way things are now is the way things were before". So it would work, assuming that there has always been the same level of carbon 14 present in all matter since the dawn of time. However, I don't believe there was. Scientific data is provided in the link I provided.

Thoughts?

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Jeez, tpk, getting a little big for our mod-selves? I kid, I kid.

Anyhoo, I believe in the theory called evolutionary creationism. This is a belief where the Creation story is a metaphor/basically true but not precise retelling of what really happened. I believe this is supported by the presence of multiple words for time in some translations of the Bible (Greek, specifically). One of these words is "Chronos," the Greek word for "one time," or time as we perceive it. Seconds, minutes, hours. Measurable time. "Kyros," the other Greek word for time used here, talks about time in the metaphorical sense. Time as God sees it. As God created the universe, and the mechanics that governed it (time included), he is not subject to these laws (again, time included.).
Basically, this boils down to God created the universe and set in motion all of the scientific events we have seen ourselves, such as evolution and radioactive decay (what we use carbon dating for, for those of you who don't know).
Please ask me to further explain if there is anything I didn't make clear.

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Matthew 7:3-5
3"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.
Simply put, this world could use a lot more understanding and self-reflection, and a lot less finger-pointing.

How so? (I believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis) I get your point, and I think that believing in it literally all boils down to trust that God can do things how he wants. He made the rules so he can break them. If you're going to say that the creation story was imagery, you can just as well say that any of the rest of Genesis is imagery.

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It is harmful to Christian faith because it puts stress on somebody's choice between science and religion, where as OEC and/or a metaphorical enterpretation of the bible can strengthen one's faith by having science be compatible with it

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