We are, in the words of the medieval scholars, "rational animals" -- i.e., creatures with bodies on the same mold as the animals with whom we share this world, but with reason, intellect, and a soul and spirit that can apprehend God and matters spiritual and moral.
I have known a few -- very few -- people whose faith was such that they approached death peacefully,
knowing that they were going to a better place. They were at peace with God, their world, and themselves.
Contrast that to our view of death as an evil, to be avoided, etc.
I suspect that what changed with the Fall was not the
fact of death, but our
feelings toward it. From an assurance that, our mortal lives being past, we would progress to what He had in store for us, we moved into a state of separation from Him and a fear of death as the end. (And do note that there is nothing that says that the interior soul necessarily and automatically survives the death of the body -- everlasting life is supposed to be one of His gifts through the Atonement.)
That, however, is abetting a hijack of
tyreth's basic question into the theme of death. So let's take a look at exactly what the problems are.
First, a
completely literal reading of Genesis 1 says that God created the world on six successive days. And by working the mathematics of when Adam became father of Seth and so on, we find that He supposedly did this about 2200 years before Jacob died in Egypt. The numbers get a bit hairier after that, but best estimates show that this date is either 4000 years before Jesus's birth or extremely close to that date.
But the overwhelming amount of scientific evidence suggests that the world had things happen at dates enormously farther back than 4000 BC. This stuff can be gotten into in depth elsewhere -- the Open area forum has a lot of material on various events and their dating, and how reliable the dating can be.
However, notice that I mentioned a
completely literal reading. And the one thing the first few chapters of Genesis cannot be is literal history in the sense that parts of II Samuel or Acts are -- neither Moses nor the Priestly writer were around to record the events. Unless you accept direct dictatorial inspiration (God saying, "Okay, Moses, now write down, 'In the beginning, I created the heavens and...'"), the best that can be said for this stuff as historical writing is that it is a precis of traditions handed down through the generations from Adam to Moses.
On the other hand, the Bible is full of forms of writing that are not historical repertorial accounts. Jesus tells parables; Ezekiel reports visions; the Song of Solomon is a long poem celebrating marriage. Most scholars think that Jonah and Job are not literal accounts, but inspired "religious historical fiction" describing the lives of, respectively, the reluctant prophet to the Assyrians and the proverbial patriarch who kept his faith through travails -- making, respectively, the points of the universality of God's grace -- He loves even them evil Assyrians that attacked and conquered us -- and the falsehood of the "prosperity gospel" of O.T. times -- the conventional wisdom of Israel that God rewards the righteous with riches in this life, and punishes the evildoers correspondingly, is torn apart and fed through a paper shredder.
Now, a short excursion: George Washington and the cherry tree is a pious falsehood about the man, though throwing a silver dollar across a river is apparently true; Abraham Lincoln and splitting rails happens to be true. But both are preserved because of what they say
about the two men's characters. They are
story -- and the truth they contain is valid whether or not the historical incident is factual.
Genesis 1 is written in the finest of story style. It uses formulae: "On the __th day, God said, 'Let there be ___.' And there
was ___. And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the __th day." Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it uses repetition to bring ideas home memorably. (Tell that story to a little kid, and he'll be giggling and echoing along with you, "And the baby bear's chair/porridge/bed was
just right.") And it uses the formulas and repetition to drive home some important points:
- It is God Himself, not some angel or demiurge, who does the creating.
- He doesn't "get down in the muck" like some pagan Gods did -- He calls things into existence.
- He creates by His Word. I trust on a Christian board where people have read the first chapter of John's Gospel, I don't have to spell this one out -- though it was not a part of the Jewish concept, it's important nonetheless, and not merely typologically -- His command is sufficient to make things come into existence, all by itself; He doesn't have to kill a giant and shape mountains and people from its body, for example. The Babylonian God Marduk created by conquering the great sea monster Tiamat; God makes the monsters of the deep. (A lot of the creation story has little "throwaway phrases" like this that are intended to refute the pagan stories and the Babylonian one in particular -- showing God as innately superior to their gods.)
- He creates sequentially, not all at once but step by step.
- All that He creates, He calls good. This answers an ongoing weird idea that crops up again and again that the world is somehow evil and that salvation consists in God releasing us from the world. It's His world; He made it, and He called it good.
- Finally, and vitally important to the Jewish faith, the Sabbath, with its rest and communion between man and God, is an integral part of Creation. We Christians look at the six day story and miss the fact that the story describes seven days -- and on the seventh day, God created the Sabbath. Remember that this is in origin a Jewish story.
Now, if this is true, then the supposedly factual detail is secondary to the
points that were the reason behind the story -- the important concepts of what God did and what He thought of it -- and need not be read as literal. The point to the six days is to create the seventh day, the Sabbath, and to show that God didn't create all at once, but in stages.
Now, a part of what He created were the natural phenomena that behave in describable and predictable ways. The Sun will come up somewhere around 6:00 AM and set somewhere around 6:00 PM; if you let go of a rock, it drops to the ground; put things in a fire, and they burn, and the fire provides you heat and light.
So it makes perfect sense for God to have put the world in motion to develop according to His Plan, and then let each step work out according to that Plan, by natural means. And we need not read the story literally to believe in its truth -- in fact, focusing on the six-day account obscures the more important truths that the story conveys -- because the
point why it's in Scripture the important thing, not the detail.
Story doesn't have to be factually accurate to contain important truths -- just look at Jesus's parables to see that proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
