....ok
regardless of what interpretation it is, why does there have to be a contradiction?
There doesn't have to be, as Hugh Ross has shown you can have a Day Age interpretation that fits the geological record, you could take an Intermittent Day and follow the same pattern but with literal evening and mornings. Of course you might need to take the God as a potter imagery in Genesis 2 figuratively since we know mankind evolved, although Glen Morton reads that as God resurrecting a dead hominid with a fatal chromosome defect, our fused chimp chromosome, chromosome 2. The dead hominid was dust because died and 'returned to the dust'. So to is not that there has to be a contradiction, just that most creationists insist on a literal six consecutive day interpretation that does contradict science.
You are operating under the assumption that because these two accounts have a different focus (Genesis 1: focus on 6 days of creation. Genesis 2: focus on creation of Man as God's apex of creative activity) that they must either remain identical in form, or not pretend to be creation accounts at all.....
Why shouldn't Genesis 2 be a creation account? Didn't I tell you that Job 38, Psalm 104, Prov 8 were also creation accounts? You can have creation accounts that aren't focusing in on Genesis 1. Would a text focusing in on another text have to be identical in form? Of course not. But if you are going to make claim about the purpose of a text, there should at least be some evidence to support the claim, I you have the same author referring to the same same events he described in the previous chapter, wouldn't he use the same language, drawing the terminology he uses focusing in from the chapter he is focusing in on?
Genesis 2 does not explicitly state that animals and plants were created after Adam. Genesis 2:19 uses the past tense when referring to the creation of the animals... Just because they are mentioned later in the chapter than man does not automatically mean that they were created later chronologically....
Except that he used the form of the past tense that is used throughout the chapter, and in narratives throughout the bible to describe the next event that happened in the past. The writer could easily have avoided this by using the perfect which he used in Gen 2:8 to describe God's previous creation of Adam Gen 2:8
And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. It is there in the story too, that God creates the animals because he saw Adam was alone and needed a companion, but when Adam saw all the animals none of them was suitable. The text tells a beautiful story, which you completely lose when you try to change the text into something it is not, a focusing in, and try to reconcile it to your literal interrpetation of another Creation account, which there is nothing in the chapter that suggests you were supposed to do this.
Genesis 2 Also does not say that the earth started out as a barren wasteland...You are assuming that is says that....Genesis 2:4-5 says "
4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.
5 Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth
[a] and no plant had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground"
If plants could not grow because of lack of rain, that means the land was completely dry, the dry land was completely devoid of plants as a result. Sounds like a barren wasteland to me.
Notice that it doesn't say that the earth started out as a barren wasteland, it clearly picks up the story after the land was created.....
Interestingly, depending on how you translate Gen 1:1 (
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth or
In the beginning of God's creation of the heavens and the earth, or simply as the title of the chapter) you have the creation in Genesis 1 starting off with a watery chaos, while the creation in Genesis 2 start of with a barren and howling wilderness (ok maybe the text does not say howling
).
which is in line with the Genesis 1 account; land came before plants...
Not really. If a lack of rain was the reason there were no plants, that means there would have been time for plants to grow if there was rain. While in Genesis 2 there wasn't enough time for plants to grow and the land had been under water just the day before. In Genesis 2 there were no herbs or plants or fruit trees until God created a man to till the ground, while in Genesis 1 the plants and fruit trees were already bearing fruit and seeds three days before God created man.
And so, understanding that the writer of Leviticus and Genesis would have used the vocabulary he was familiar with; how does this invalidate that God created some general kinds of animals that then evolved and progressed into what the writer saw around him?
I am not saying it invalidates the interpretation, just that doesn't exclude other interpretations, that if you want to read Genesis 1 literally, there is no problem with the earth producing all the different kinds through evolution (apart from the time constraint if you interpret Genesis as six literal consecutive days).
As long as God was the one that caused the earth to form those animals, sure...
How about God giving the earth the ability to do what he commanded it to? Incidentally, this is a very old reading of the text that goes back to the church fathers, including one who took the days of creation literally, they thought the timescale was a lot faster but they did think it meant God gave inanimate mud the ability to generate life.
And? It seems to me that they do.....
So as long as you are not stuck with six consecutive 24 hour days, there is no problem life evolving. Let show you something hidden in the text of Genesis. If you look at the way Genesis counts the days, most translations say the
first day... the second day... the third day... the fourth day... the fifth day... the sixth day.
And indeed the way a series of consecutive days are counted out everywhere in scripture. But it is not how Genesis counts them, thought you have to look around to find an accurate literal translation. What Genesis 1 says is
one day... a second day... a third day... a fourth day... a fifth day... the sixth day.
or
one day... second day... third day... fourth day... fifth day... the sixth day.
That is the sort of numbering used when things are being listed and counted out but not in any order. If using the definite article 'the' means you list is a series of consecutive days, then leaving the definite article means they don't have to be consecutive. A second day is another day down along the line, not the second day ever. And 'one day' is very different from 'the first day'. So there is no reason why Genesis can't be talking about a series of six great works of creation millions of years apart (intermittent days) or that these numbered days are literal days that mark the end of great works of creation spanning millions of years.
Then you have the Day Age interpretation which has the great advantage of being based on how Moses himself interpreted God's days. Of course most day Agers are progressive creationists who reject evolution, but once you have the geological timescale, there is not reason for God not to have used evolution.
I'm not sure how literally one can interpret a single word....But since "kind" is the word that is used, it leaves the taxonomic definition of the original created organisms some flexibility genetically.....But also since "kind" is the word that is used, it makes it hard for someone to say that the organism that God originally created was one single organism....
Why not? You start of with archaea kind which splits into bacteria kind prokaryote kind and eukaryote kind, then eukaryote branches into fungi kind, plant kind and animal kind, then...
You will have to define "consecutive" for me, because they sound pretty consecutive to me......How do you know that the 6 creation days don't fit with the geological record? Regardless of how long ago they were, what in the "geological record" (which I feel is flawed) eliminates the possiblity of 6 days of creation at the very beginning?
The geological record may not be complete but we have more than enough to know what happened and when it happened, how long before the earth formed that the universe was in existence, how long after the earth formed before the moon was formed in a catastrophic collision that remelted the surface of the earth, how long (much more approximately) it took for the first life to appear, how long for the first oxygen producing cyanobacteria, when multicellular began to take on complicated forms when animal crawled out of the oceans onto land we know when mammals began evolving and when hominids slowly evolved into modern man.
You will have to explain this more....I'm not following you....sorry
Most creationist see a false dichotomy between the work of God and natural processes, that is you say life evolved through natural processes it excludes God. Now this is in fact an are where creationist understanding of God is strangely compartmentalised, most creationists will have no problem pray to God for their daily bread even though they are well aware of all the natural processes involved, or praying for healing and for God to give the doctor wisdom as they sit in the doctors waiting room. They will happily pray for good weather for their crops or the church picnic, adn see no problem at all the meteorologists explanations when they watch the weather forecast. It is only with evolution they see a contradiction between natural process and God being the creator. The beauty of Gen 1:24 is that we see God commanding natural processes to produce all the different kinds of animals. Genesis 1 show God in a very different relationship to his creation than creationists claim.
yep; mostly because of the "former" part....But I'm not trying to be impertinent... I promise
That would be the hope certainly
Ok, the process for creating ATP is not really a part of "metabolism" per se....All organisms have to produce ATP, and they all use the same 1 or 2 processes to do it. Just because yeast can use a human gene for ATP synthesis does not mean that they are descended from the same common ancestor. It means that they are similar in design. And Why is God forbidden from using common design features and common building blocks in His Creation? I don't honestly understand why this is such a big issue for naturalistic evolutionists....
Surely the metabolic needs of a yeast cell are very different from yours or mine? Wouldn't creating a very different metabolisms for such wildly different organisms living make much more sense here? Or if you are going to have similar metabolisms, why does it need to be ATP, wouldn't a different chemical work better in yeast? Or why is there a need to use such similar genes to produce the ATP? However there is a very good reason why we share the ATP with yeast if we evolved from a common ancestor, because once you start off with a common ancestor using ATP, every generation is going to keep needing ATP to survive.
No actually, it doesn't. The "common ancestor" that most people refer to was actually a very simple organism that had (presumably) a very simple genetic code.
You are thinking of a much earlier organism and a very different question, abiogenesis how the first cells arose. The common ancestor of us and yeast came much later than that and had the genes to produce ATP and a complicated metabolism capable of using the ATP.
Complexity is a huge problem for macroevolutionists...What mechanism do you know of that allows for such huge increases in complexity that are demanded by macroevolution?
Gene duplication allowing one gene to mutate and produce a different protein while the other retains it original function, polyploidy, when the organism inherits two or more whole sets of chromosomes, giving the organism vast amounts of genetic material to play with. Retroviral inserts which add whole chunks of genetic material, frame shifts which can throw up who new genes by accident, but as long the frame shift didn't delete a vital gene that there isn't another copy of and the new protein isn't a lethal poison, evolution will find the best use of this new protein
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