Could Genesis be literal?

[Scotishfury09]

I've kind of been toying with this idea for a few days now, but I'm sure there are holes that I'm not seeing.

Could it be possible that the writer(s) of Genesis fully meant for Genesis to be taken literally? They could have assumed the world really was created in 6 days just as the Egyptians believed Ra literally drug the sun across the skies. Their intent was to establish theological truths that were given by God, but not necessarily clarified by him (how did we get here, when did we get here, etc.). They knew that God created everything and only God created everything but they didn't know how he did it, so they made something up and assumed it was right.

I realize there are kinks, but I'm just curious if any of you see this as having any merit? We've already discovered that the ancient world thought the earth rested on pillars and the Bible is not shy about pronouncing that. Could this be similar? The writers really thought this is how it happened.

 

[gluadys]

I've kind of been toying with this idea for a few days now, but I'm sure there are holes that I'm not seeing.

Could it be possible that the writer(s) of Genesis fully meant for Genesis to be taken literally? They could have assumed the world really was created in 6 days just as the Egyptians believed Ra literally drug the sun across the skies. Their intent was to establish theological truths that were given by God, but not necessarily clarified by him (how did we get here, when did we get here, etc.). They knew that God created everything and only God created everything but they didn't know how he did it, so they made something up and assumed it was right.

I realize there are kinks, but I'm just curious if any of you see this as having any merit? We've already discovered that the ancient world thought the earth rested on pillars and the Bible is not shy about pronouncing that. Could this be similar? The writers really thought this is how it happened.

Yes and no. The problem is with the meaning we assign to "literal". If we assign the meaning "scientifically verifiable", then no. The ancient writers simply did not think in scientific terms. OTOH did they think creation actually occurred in six days? Some did. Some, even in ancient times, understood "day" did not necessarily mean a human day. But there is little evidence that they made an issue of it as whether or not they were "literal" days was not a significant matter to them.

Philo, who like Augustine held that creation was actually instantaneous, gives a numerological reason for the six-day framework.

He notes that the numbers 1, 2 and 3 total 6 both when they are added and when they are multiplied. 1 is the origin of number, 2 the first even number and 3 the first odd number. 2 and 3 also signify male and female and 1 their unity. 6 symbolizes their marriage and 7 completeness. For all these reasons it is appropriate to assign 6 days to God's creative work and 7 days to the week including the Sabbath.

Philo's numerological analysis works just as well if one does hold to six actual days and would be more meaningful to a biblical writer than scientific accuracy.

This kind of dual perspective which accepts both a literal and symbolic meaning was very typical in ancient thinking.

 

[Mallon]

Could Genesis be literal? In the sense that the early Hebrews thought so, sure. In the sense that God expects us to think so, no. God accomodates His message to our limited understanding of the world. Just as those same Hebrews thought the world was flat and rested on pillars, so too did they think the earth was young and created in six days (although there are some reasons for thinking otherwise). I see the creation story of Genesis as having been understood literally by the first Hebrew people, but that doesn't address the question as to whether God intended for us to believe it that way.

 

[shernren]

I remember when rmswilliamsII (Was it him? Can't remember OTOH) would throw out the question: "To the ancient Israelites, when it was dark in Israel, was the rest of the entire cosmos dark as well?" At times, analyzing the cosmogony of the ancients can regress into this kind of pinheads and angels nitpicking. Nevertheless, let me say a little.

I have not much doubt, actually, that most people up to the 1600s or 1700s AD would have considered the universe to have been recently and rapidly created. The reason for this is that the physical processes they observed were all processes of large, rapid change. They didn't have the instrumental sensitivity to see how stalactites and stalagmites grow, how water erodes rock, how species evolve over time, etc.

So now, imagine that you're driving on a road that's 100m above sea level. And you "know" that roads are always steep. Also, suppose you know that you began your journey at sea level. What possibility is there? You must surely have had a steep climb right at the start of your journey, and then cruised along at 100m all the way from there until where you are now: a steep ascent followed by a complete flatness.

Theologically, that was the only option available before modern science:

In the beginning, there was nothing, and from that God created everything.
But the mountains don't change (in our lifetimes).
And animals don't change: horses breed horses and cats breed cats (in our lifetimes).
And the length of day and night don't change (in our lifetimes).
And the position of land and sea don't change (in our lifetimes).

Therefore, since these things don't change, God must have created them the exact way they are now. If horses breed horses and cats breed cats, and once there were neither horse nor cat, then God must have created the first horse to breed horses and the first cat to breed cats (how else could it be?) God poofs, and then everything comes into being exactly as-is.

On the other hand, with the coming of modern science came the instrumental sensitivity to detect extremely slow processes. We discovered that mountains change, living things change, and the skies change. And so, back to the road analogy, we discovered that the road we were on was actually sloping upwards just ever so little - a milimeter of ascent to the kilometer, or something like that - so that there was now an alternative: maybe we had started from sea level and instead of a cliff, we had climbed past millions of kilometers to get to where we are.

That's why I don't know whether to laugh or to cry when AiG tries to squeeze tremendous dynamical processes (like plate tectonics, the Ice Age and "micro"evolution) into very short times. I remember a Russell Humphreys paper saying that the magnetic moments of the planets were (roughly - don't say that too loud!) what you'd expect them to be if they were made from water somehow. It was amusing. All the Bible says is God spoke and it happened. The ancients didn't conceive of origin processes: things poof and then remain unchanging. AiG seems to think that the difference between the Bible and secular science is that secular science sees a rise of 100m in millions of kilometers while the Bible sees the same rise much steeper, in a matter of meters; but the true Biblical view doesn't involve slopes at all - rather, a cliff and then plateau.

In that respect, I think the Biblical writers did believe what they wrote. The things they saw every day couldn't have been gradually made, since they didn't know any gradual processes; therefore, if they were created from nothing, the only alternative was poof!-ex-nihilo.

 

[Vance]

I think the important point is that they would not have really *cared* as much as we do about the strict historicity of the details. Some may have believed they were strictly literal (although I think it was not the norm), but even they would not have thought those details were the intent of the accounts and, would not have been shocked to learn that it was NOT strictly historically accurate in the details or the science.

Now, what is true is that they definitely DID view the cosmos in the manner described, with the firmament, the geocentrism, etc. So, I think they would have been more surprised to find out that these basic concepts of the nature of the universe would have been more surprising than knowing that God did not create in six literal days.

One piece of evidence for this is the simple fact that they left in contradictory and logically inconsistent passages when they did their compiling. Would a culture that was worried about historical literalistic accuracy put in two different creation accounts that, on their very face, contradicted each other? Or put in the two flood accounts with different numbers of animals? Or left that "Cain's wife" or "who was he afraid of" conundrums out there? No, they would have found a way to smooth those out and make them consistent. The fact that they left them there glaring for all to see is a HUGE piece of evidence for me that they were not bothered by such details of historicity.

 

[cleminson]

I believe that the Genesis account of Creation is “literally literal”, but I believe that our interpretation of these verses is based on primitive interpretations of the Bible. In much the same way that Christians used the Scriptures to promote Geocentricism and the Flat Earth doctrines as being totally scientifically and doctrinally unassailable. I hope to be allowed to continue writing my thoughts on this matter in this Forum under the thread The Genesis Enigma.

 

[gluadys]

I hope to be allowed to continue writing my thoughts on this matter in this Forum under the thread The Genesis Enigma.

By all means do. Your thoughts are interesting and very welcome.

 

[Barachiel]

I do not tend to read Genesis literally. I do not think it was intended as an accurate description of how things went down, I think it`s a poetic reflection upon the creation of the earth whose main point is to tell us that there is a creator. The poetic features of the text are much easier to spot in the Hebrew version of the text, they are really playing with words.
So my conclusion would be that it is not literal as a scientific description of the creation of the earth, but its core point (God is the ultimate reason for the earths and our creation) is the point of the text.
That is my view at least

 

[gluadys]

Sometimes in the discussion of whether a section of scripture is to be understood as literal or not, we tend to lose sight of the fact that even what is not literal is meaningful. Not saying anyone here has done this. But sometimes it may be helpful to say more than "I don't think this is literal" and say why it is still significant even though it is not.

For example, most of us do not consider that the six days of Genesis 1 were literal. But that doesn't mean that the choice of six days was trivial either. So there is still a theological sense in which the six days of creation are appropriate and true.

 

[cleminson]

Sometimes in the discussion of whether a section of scripture is to be understood as literal or not, we tend to lose sight of the fact that even what is not literal is meaningful. Not saying anyone here has done this. But sometimes it may be helpful to say more than "I don't think this is literal" and say why it is still significant even though it is not.

For example, most of us do not consider that the six days of Genesis 1 were literal. But that doesn't mean that the choice of six days was trivial either. So there is still a theological sense in which the six days of creation are appropriate and true.

Happy Easter to you all. Great understanding Gluadys. We have spared over the meaning of "literal" before and I see no point in continuing that disscusion. I think we both know where we are coming from. I agree with your statement above.

 

[shernren]

(Really thought this would belong well in this thread.)

I just came back from a screening of Galaxy Quest by the Black Hole Society here at ANU. It was a good night, which included a classmate finally discovering who it was who persistently kept posting on our online discussion fora! But I was particularly excited by it because Galaxy Quest is precisely the kind of movie that demonstrates how bankrupt our culture's philosophical approaches are to fiction and art, and to their role in epistemology and theology.

The storyline is familiar and predictable enough. The main cast of Galaxy Quest, an obvious parody of Star Trek, is a dishevelled, disillusioned group of actors long past their prime. They are abducted by real aliens who have intercepted their broadcasts and remodeled their society after the interstellar culture of the show, and who ask for their assistance against an evil invading tyrant. After a series of mishaps, and after the big ugly alien has boarded their ship and left it to self-destruct, the cast finally wear their roles and rescue the ship, fight off the big ugly alien, and find romance - and a reimagining of their show!

I personally could not stop laughing throughout the movie. Not just because of the star cast (punintended), but also because of the numerous physics gaffes, many of them obvious homages to previous scientifically-questionable space classics. From ship steering in outer space without any visible lateral thrusters, to improbably humanoid aliens (besides the oppressed, who are improbably similar to squid), to unrealistically uncushioned planetary landing pods, to - oh, the joys of being a physicist. It's almost as if they hired a science advisor and asked him "How many things can we get *wrong*?" (Either that, or they really were really bad at science!) But of course, that's not why I'm posting about this here.

I'm thinking and talking about this because of the movie's penetrating, almost uncomfortable analysis of entertainment and fiction. The main tension of the show, of course, is that the people the aliens are looking to for rescue are really actors, not starship captains. The aliens don't realize this, and refer to every episode as "historical document"; the actors don't know how to communicate this, and their first try at explaining their profession goes like this: "Don't you have anyone on your planet who does things contrary to reality?" They respond: "Oh, you mean deception? This is a trait we have learned only recently from the tyrant, who will often promise one thing and do another. We indeed know what this is, at great cost." Obviously the crew dares not broach the topic again.

When the tyrant boards the ship, Tim Allen (the captain) breaks under a moment of stress and declares that he is not actually a captain. In a pivotal moment, he commands the crew to show the tyrant the opening sequence of every Galaxy Quest episode, naming the actors and their roles, and the tyrant instantly understands - and he realizes that he can break the aliens. He forces Tim Allen to admit the truth to the aliens, in an almost heartbreaking scene where he has to explain that everything the aliens believe in them is a lie: "The ship? It's about this big (holds up thumb and forefinger)." In a moment which is almost biblical the chief alien replies in anguish: "But The Protector is real! And it is vast! In it there are many rooms! I have seen them!" And Tim Allen has to continue: "Those are sets decorated to look like the inside of a spaceship ... none of it is real, not the National Space Exploration Agency. Our beryllium core is just plaster wrapped in wires; our matter transporter is just Christmas tree decorations - oh, I'm so sorry, I'm so, so sorry ... " The tyrant gloats, and the alien breaks down in tears.

I find it interesting that the movie chooses to make the revelation of fiction the second most pivotal and emotional scene in the movie. (The most pivotal and emotional one, of course, is where they beat the bad guy; more of that in a second.) Are we supposed to sympathise with the aliens? Not quite; they are portrayed as childish in their innocence. Their every emotional gesture is obviously fake: they laugh and cry in blocks, eerily like robots (for human actors!), impossibly polished and perfect. They all look like cookie-cutter exotic Asians, compared to the Caucasian cast. And their obvious lack of understanding of human culture is the source of much comic relief in the movie. They stare in awe at Tim Allen clad in nothing but pyjamas; they think one of the actors really eats bugs; when Gilligan's Island is mentioned they express deep grief at the fact that humans live in such conditions. We are meant to find that funny. They construct the ship in every detail as a replica of the representations of the ship on the show, so much that Tim Allen can call Galaxy Quest nerds back home to navigate the ship, and they copy everything, from a pointless corridor of dangerous crushing machines to a self-destruct button that stops with one second left. It is all meant to be a joke.

The fact that the aliens take fiction literally is meant to be a joke. And yet, what resolution does the movie offer us? When the tyrant is ousted, the alien proudly congratulates Tim Allen for a shrewd deception. Obviously this fine leader and his fine crew are real starmen, and not possibly actors; and in a sense, they *are* now really starmen. The aliens never learn that their "historical documents" are really just an evening TV show past its prime; an actor's ridiculous prosthetic forehead is falling to pieces, but nobody points to that and wonders why it is fake. The moment of heartbreaking revelation has been quietly swept under the carpet. In one sense, the resolution is that the fiction *has* become real, and that the actors are now starmen - but then the movie ends with the opening scene of a reimagined Galaxy Quest.

And suddenly the joke is on us. Just as the opening scene of the original series let the tyrant know that the series was fiction, the opening scene of this new Galaxy Quest reminds *us* that this is fiction. Have we really believed that this is real? Obviously not. Have we been lied to? In a sense; and yet we have swallowed it hook, line and sinker. We are stronger than the aliens; we are able to watch this stuff and justify its non-reality. The aliens were able to justify the non-reality of the series when it became actualized in their reality, when the Galaxy Quest crew really did rescue them; but we will have no such easy escape route. Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver will not be approached by aliens from a distant nebula who desperately need their leadership, and the numerous physical mistakes in the movie I take to be an inside joke pointing to the non-reality of this show, its separation from our universe. Has Galaxy Quest then lied to *us*?

=========

Tim Allen tries to explain what "entertainment" is to the aliens, but fails miserably; even the tyrant only sees fiction as an opportunity to sow deception, not as anything intrinsically good in itself, possessing aesthetic value. And indeed what have we relegated fiction to today? Fiction sells. The whole debate over filesharing is really a question of how much society ought to pay for fiction; many are beginning to think that fiction is not even worth any monetary returns on an individual level. Artists are being told that a possibility might be for an "entertainment tax" to be charged from society in general, who would then be allowed to download and share as much as they want; an artist then has even less contact with his public, even less visibility, than a farmer who goes down to the weekend market and sells his produce in person.

We have forgotten that in fiction is truth. The truth does not come out of fiction as easily as it did in the movie, of course, where the very ship that was just a storytelling device has been realized in world-spanning detail. No, the truth of fiction in our universe is not that simple or easy; it is a complicated thing to grasp hold of. Storytelling is an art as ancient as civilization itself, even though its monetization and recent dehumanization are much more modern. What did you tell a story for, in the old days? For bread and mead? No, certainly for the beauty of what you told.

And also for the truth in what you tell. And in Galaxy Quest, even though the entire show becomes actualized in the aliens' construction plans, we are meant to learn that not all messages are equal. The aliens' attempt to physically reconstruct a ship based on the visuals of the show is a joke, and we know it is; we are meant to laugh when the poor driver doesn't understand the controls, and scrapes the ship against the side of the starport on his way out. And yet we learn that the aliens' society has been rescued and transformed based on the *ideals* and *ideas* of civilization portrayed in the show. The actors begin to embody their lines and their roles, and even more so the positive character traits that their stereotypes displayed on the silver screen.

We are meant to laugh when the aliens consider Galaxy Quest starship-building blueprints; we are meant to be thoughtful when they consider it a source of morality and motivation - and so, implicitly, are we. We certainly shouldn't watch the movie and then come away drawing up plans for warp drives and interstellar communicators. We should watch it and learn what it is to be a hero, what it is to fall in love (or maybe not), what it is to have a cause worth dying for. And isn't this what all good art teaches us?

And so I don't think it is so surprising if Genesis 1-11 is not so much God telling us how to build a world, as God telling us how to live as humans in the world that He has built.

 

[Nachtjager]

I cannot for the life of me understand why the AiG crowd is so adamant about everything in Genesis being concrete indisputable history, when just about everything we've encountered for the last few centuries makes it seems to offer no validation for anything in Genesis.

I believe in God and Christ, but I do not neccesarily believe in the primitive understandings or rationalizing of the world as seen through the eyes of selfishly motivated Hebrew priests. God did create the world and everything else, how long it took, when, and why, are matters best left to Him, not us.

I can't figure out how to work a new LCD TV, and I'm expected to figure out the mysteries of creation? I don't want to figure out the mysteries of creation. Genesis was primitive priest's way of explaining to sheep herders how the world worked and why they themselves (the priests) were so important. Unless we drop our Christian beliefs and convert to Judism, I don't understand why so many Christians are adamant that the early Jewish books be taken literally and as history, but completely forget the same people who wrote and carried these books forward denied and crucified our Lord, denouncing him as a heretic based on these scriptures.

Augustine was right, not literal, never were, good lessons to be learned, but AiG does a whole lot more harm than good to those struggling with faith.

 

[Assyrian]

(Really thought this would belong well in this thread.)

I just came back from a screening of Galaxy Quest by the Black Hole Society here at ANU. It was a good night, which included a classmate finally discovering who it was who persistently kept posting on our online discussion fora! But I was particularly excited by it because Galaxy Quest is precisely the kind of movie that demonstrates how bankrupt our culture's philosophical approaches are to fiction and art, and to their role in epistemology and theology.

The storyline is familiar and predictable enough. The main cast of Galaxy Quest, an obvious parody of Star Trek, is a dishevelled, disillusioned group of actors long past their prime. They are abducted by real aliens who have intercepted their broadcasts and remodeled their society after the interstellar culture of the show, and who ask for their assistance against an evil invading tyrant. After a series of mishaps, and after the big ugly alien has boarded their ship and left it to self-destruct, the cast finally wear their roles and rescue the ship, fight off the big ugly alien, and find romance - and a reimagining of their show!

I personally could not stop laughing throughout the movie. Not just because of the star cast (punintended), but also because of the numerous physics gaffes, many of them obvious homages to previous scientifically-questionable space classics. From ship steering in outer space without any visible lateral thrusters, to improbably humanoid aliens (besides the oppressed, who are improbably similar to squid), to unrealistically uncushioned planetary landing pods, to - oh, the joys of being a physicist. It's almost as if they hired a science advisor and asked him "How many things can we get *wrong*?" (Either that, or they really were really bad at science!) But of course, that's not why I'm posting about this here.

I'm thinking and talking about this because of the movie's penetrating, almost uncomfortable analysis of entertainment and fiction. The main tension of the show, of course, is that the people the aliens are looking to for rescue are really actors, not starship captains. The aliens don't realize this, and refer to every episode as "historical document"; the actors don't know how to communicate this, and their first try at explaining their profession goes like this: "Don't you have anyone on your planet who does things contrary to reality?" They respond: "Oh, you mean deception? This is a trait we have learned only recently from the tyrant, who will often promise one thing and do another. We indeed know what this is, at great cost." Obviously the crew dares not broach the topic again.

When the tyrant boards the ship, Tim Allen (the captain) breaks under a moment of stress and declares that he is not actually a captain. In a pivotal moment, he commands the crew to show the tyrant the opening sequence of every Galaxy Quest episode, naming the actors and their roles, and the tyrant instantly understands - and he realizes that he can break the aliens. He forces Tim Allen to admit the truth to the aliens, in an almost heartbreaking scene where he has to explain that everything the aliens believe in them is a lie: "The ship? It's about this big (holds up thumb and forefinger)." In a moment which is almost biblical the chief alien replies in anguish: "But The Protector is real! And it is vast! In it there are many rooms! I have seen them!" And Tim Allen has to continue: "Those are sets decorated to look like the inside of a spaceship ... none of it is real, not the National Space Exploration Agency. Our beryllium core is just plaster wrapped in wires; our matter transporter is just Christmas tree decorations - oh, I'm so sorry, I'm so, so sorry ... " The tyrant gloats, and the alien breaks down in tears.

I find it interesting that the movie chooses to make the revelation of fiction the second most pivotal and emotional scene in the movie. (The most pivotal and emotional one, of course, is where they beat the bad guy; more of that in a second.) Are we supposed to sympathise with the aliens? Not quite; they are portrayed as childish in their innocence. Their every emotional gesture is obviously fake: they laugh and cry in blocks, eerily like robots (for human actors!), impossibly polished and perfect. They all look like cookie-cutter exotic Asians, compared to the Caucasian cast. And their obvious lack of understanding of human culture is the source of much comic relief in the movie. They stare in awe at Tim Allen clad in nothing but pyjamas; they think one of the actors really eats bugs; when Gilligan's Island is mentioned they express deep grief at the fact that humans live in such conditions. We are meant to find that funny. They construct the ship in every detail as a replica of the representations of the ship on the show, so much that Tim Allen can call Galaxy Quest nerds back home to navigate the ship, and they copy everything, from a pointless corridor of dangerous crushing machines to a self-destruct button that stops with one second left. It is all meant to be a joke.

The fact that the aliens take fiction literally is meant to be a joke. And yet, what resolution does the movie offer us? When the tyrant is ousted, the alien proudly congratulates Tim Allen for a shrewd deception. Obviously this fine leader and his fine crew are real starmen, and not possibly actors; and in a sense, they *are* now really starmen. The aliens never learn that their "historical documents" are really just an evening TV show past its prime; an actor's ridiculous prosthetic forehead is falling to pieces, but nobody points to that and wonders why it is fake. The moment of heartbreaking revelation has been quietly swept under the carpet. In one sense, the resolution is that the fiction *has* become real, and that the actors are now starmen - but then the movie ends with the opening scene of a reimagined Galaxy Quest.

And suddenly the joke is on us. Just as the opening scene of the original series let the tyrant know that the series was fiction, the opening scene of this new Galaxy Quest reminds *us* that this is fiction. Have we really believed that this is real? Obviously not. Have we been lied to? In a sense; and yet we have swallowed it hook, line and sinker. We are stronger than the aliens; we are able to watch this stuff and justify its non-reality. The aliens were able to justify the non-reality of the series when it became actualized in their reality, when the Galaxy Quest crew really did rescue them; but we will have no such easy escape route. Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver will not be approached by aliens from a distant nebula who desperately need their leadership, and the numerous physical mistakes in the movie I take to be an inside joke pointing to the non-reality of this show, its separation from our universe. Has Galaxy Quest then lied to *us*?

=========

Tim Allen tries to explain what "entertainment" is to the aliens, but fails miserably; even the tyrant only sees fiction as an opportunity to sow deception, not as anything intrinsically good in itself, possessing aesthetic value. And indeed what have we relegated fiction to today? Fiction sells. The whole debate over filesharing is really a question of how much society ought to pay for fiction; many are beginning to think that fiction is not even worth any monetary returns on an individual level. Artists are being told that a possibility might be for an "entertainment tax" to be charged from society in general, who would then be allowed to download and share as much as they want; an artist then has even less contact with his public, even less visibility, than a farmer who goes down to the weekend market and sells his produce in person.

We have forgotten that in fiction is truth. The truth does not come out of fiction as easily as it did in the movie, of course, where the very ship that was just a storytelling device has been realized in world-spanning detail. No, the truth of fiction in our universe is not that simple or easy; it is a complicated thing to grasp hold of. Storytelling is an art as ancient as civilization itself, even though its monetization and recent dehumanization are much more modern. What did you tell a story for, in the old days? For bread and mead? No, certainly for the beauty of what you told.

And also for the truth in what you tell. And in Galaxy Quest, even though the entire show becomes actualized in the aliens' construction plans, we are meant to learn that not all messages are equal. The aliens' attempt to physically reconstruct a ship based on the visuals of the show is a joke, and we know it is; we are meant to laugh when the poor driver doesn't understand the controls, and scrapes the ship against the side of the starport on his way out. And yet we learn that the aliens' society has been rescued and transformed based on the *ideals* and *ideas* of civilization portrayed in the show. The actors begin to embody their lines and their roles, and even more so the positive character traits that their stereotypes displayed on the silver screen.

We are meant to laugh when the aliens consider Galaxy Quest starship-building blueprints; we are meant to be thoughtful when they consider it a source of morality and motivation - and so, implicitly, are we. We certainly shouldn't watch the movie and then come away drawing up plans for warp drives and interstellar communicators. We should watch it and learn what it is to be a hero, what it is to fall in love (or maybe not), what it is to have a cause worth dying for. And isn't this what all good art teaches us?

And so I don't think it is so surprising if Genesis 1-11 is not so much God telling us how to build a world, as God telling us how to live as humans in the world that He has built.

But as Jean Luc said,
...Gilgamesh and Enkidu, at Uruk.

 

[hiscosmicgoldfish]

I just came back from a screening of Galaxy Quest by the Black Hole Society here at ANU. It was a good night, which included a classmate finally discovering who it was who persistently kept posting on our online discussion fora! But I was particularly excited by it because Galaxy Quest is precisely the kind of movie that demonstrates how bankrupt our culture's philosophical approaches are to fiction and art, and to their role in epistemology and theology.

I remember Galaxy Quest, it was quite a few years back though now. Not a bad film, which was a bit surprising, considering the rubbish in the genre these days.

 

[Ave Maria]

If Genesis were literal then the theory of evolution would not be true. The Bible clearly seems to state that God created the universe in 6 days and rested on the 7th. However, this is not true. God created and is creating the universe through theistic evolution.

 

[InTheCloud]

The 6 days were a late addition to Genesis and were more a symbolic justification of the Jewish feasts. And the Early Church like St Augustine saw them as a symbol of the stages of salvation and the ages of the Church. Both Origen and St Augustine did not believed in a literal 6 days Genesis.
Genesis 1 to 11 is a composite of two creation stories dating to the Jews ancestors in Mesopotamia and very similar to the cosmologies of the Babylonians and Sumerians, plust a much latter edition process. Only the fundamentalists still believe is was done by a single autor.
The key lessons of Genesis are in his ethical teachings and the meaning of human life not in the literal meaning, that borrowed in the cosmologies of bronce age Mesopotamia and were already obsolete by Jesus's time science.

 

[itisdeliciouscake]

well it was not written in poetic language.
it was set in a book (the first 5 books of the Bible were all written together in 1 book) which is historically literal.
it used literal words, then went on to actually DESCRIBE the literal words (there was morning, there was night....)

I really don't see any reason why it wasn't intended to be read as literal.

 

[Chesterton]

Could Genesis be literal? Yes. No one can say it couldn't be.

Is Genesis literal? No one knows.

To paraphrase my namesake, close your mind only if you're closing it on something solid. Otherwise, leave it open.

 

[Assyrian]

The issue is more: could Genesis be literal and true.

In which case the answer is no. At least not in the modern sense of literalism. The earth was not created in 6 days a few thousand years ago. Of course for Augustine, the literal meaning was not a six day creation, because the days were intended to be understood figuratively.

 

[artybloke]

I recently went to see Sophocles' Anitgone, a play set in the mythical city of Thebes concerning the daughter of Oedipus' attempt to bury her brother despite King Creon's decree against it. It is of course a tragedy, but for the ancient Greeks, it was based on things that really happened. Except they probably didn't; or if those characters did exist, they had very different lives. It's mythology, legend. But to the ancient Greeks, the stories were not important for their historical accuracy. The tragedies were performed to remind the citizens of Athens about their duties and responsibility as citizens of their fledgling democracy, and to warn against the hubris of going against the gods. Nobody wasted time proving the stories historically.

The same is basically true of the Genesis creation stories. They were meant to be the basis of the Hebrew society: they are foundation myths. They are the foundation myths of three religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam; but it's only certain Christians who seem to be so literal minded as to think the historicity of the stories are more important than their meaning.