I still need you to tell me how (with data) six consecutive days is outside the realm of possibility.....
I am not really sure what information you need here, but you can look any of these up in wiki or on google. We know the age of the earth and the moon, we know when fish evolved, when life in the sea evolved from tiny organisms, when plants appeared on the earth and when the first trees evolved and the first fruit trees. We know when the first modern humans appeared and how long ago they diverged from our cousins the chimps. It is possible to reconcile this with a Day Age or intermittent day, but not six literal consecutive days.
I'm not sure I would go so far as to say that mankind evolved. That sort of eliminates the "created in God's image" thing.
No it just eliminated God taking a lump of mud and molding it with his fingers, but as we have seen, God the potter is a very common metaphor in the bible.
I would say that God took the hominid form, made some adjustments and then gave life to it and gave it an immortal soul that was in the image of Himself.....But I don't think we are truly descendants of apes...
If God did it that way, we are descended from apes. But you can see how there is no contradiction between God creating us in his image and evolution, It is also possible that the whole process of God creating us this way, the entire history of our evolution is God making us in his image.
I never said that Genesis 2 is focusing on Genesis 1. I said that Genesis 2 takes a narrower focus than Genesis 1, its focus is different...
Each creation account has its own focus.
Except that the text itself is a natural progression from general to specific.....again, the point of the story changes, not the story itself...
Where is the progression from general to specific? Genesis 2 is the story of God and Adam and Adam being lonely, it doesn't get more specific as it goes along.
Genesis 2 does not say that this is how earth began....it simply is where the story picks up...of course earth was a barren wasteland before there were plants, what other option is there?
A damp wasteland that had been deep underwater the day before?
The Genesis 2 account does not say that the earth began as a barren wasteland, it simply says that it was.....Genesis 1 says that earth began as a watery chaos...
Genesis 2 says the earth was a barren wasteland when God created Adam, according to Genesis 1 it should have been filled with grass and herbs and fruit trees.
I think too much is being read into this by now, because technically the first appearance of rain was at the time of Noah's flood; before that plants were nourished by dew...
Actually the bible doesn't say the flood was the first rain, but that is beside the point. If Genesis 2 tells us the reason there were no plants was because these wasn't any rain, and we have to assume this really was the reason, that means if there was rain, then plants would have grown, and would have had time to grow.
Then my question is simply, if the rest of the creation account has no problems (given our knowledge of science), why is the 6 days the only part that cannot be accurate?
Because it is contradicted by science.
That would certainly help to overcome the incredible odds against life forming by chance...
Personally, I think God overcame those odd when he created the first carbon atom in the heart of a supernova.
This is interesting, can you give me some links to the translations that say this? Or to the literature that gives this explanation, I am interested to read more about this....
The NASB ASV and JPS translates it this way.
Young's says 'day one' and 'day second'
The RSV and WEB say one day, a second day, but also translate the sixth day as a sixth day
The Message says day one, day two but also day six
Not sure where you could read about this, I got it from searching through the Hebrew and comparing Genesis with other numbered lists in the bible.
You could check some of it out in the Hebrew section of
Genesis 1:31 Hebrew Texts and Analysis which can show you where the definite articles are in the text
הַשִּׁשִּֽׁי׃ ha·shi·shi.
It's not physically possible, the first organism was supposed to be very simple, there is no mechanism in existence that can explain how a simple organism would be able to increase its complexity and acquire new genes that it did not previously possess..... The original kinds had to have all of the genetic information already at their disposal....
As I have mentioned gene duplication is the quickest way.
There exist hypotheses and theories, but not much more concrete than that.....No one can know exactly how any of these formative events occurred, that is outside the realm of science since none of them are observable or repeatable...
Science is about finding ways to test hypotheses and these have been tested and confirmed again and again.
I think a lot of creationists operate with a limited knowledge of creation then.......
I think there is a lot of anti evolution rhetoric out there, that people buy into without really thinking it though.
No, because the synthesis of ATP is more basic than any metabolic function. Humans and yeast digest different things for food; but ATP is the molecule that is the "fuel" of every single living cell.
It is, but why should it be?
God shows His ingenuity by creating a molecule that gives such great return for its consumption, there is no surprise that He would design all living organisms to utilize this molecule for energy.
He couldn't think of a better one to suit yeast? I would have thought that tailor made metabolisms would be much more the mark of a designer catering for everything from athlete's foot to elephants.
ATP is simply the molecule that releases energy, every organism needs energy to function....So there is no surprise that humans and yeast use ATP and have similar genes for such usage. This does not mean that they have a common ancestor.
As I said there is no reason for yeast to use the same chemical we have, and no reason for them to produce it the same way unless we evolved from a common ancestor and could not get off the ATP thread mill.
How do you know?
There are no organisms at all that do not use ATP to release energy. This argument is somewhat of a straw man because it assumes that common descent is only invalidated by finding an organism that does not utilize ATP, that is not possible....
You're not limiting the creator here are you? Not possible to create another metabolism that would suit single celled organisms better? Or rather a metabolism better suited for large organisms like us. I am sure ATP suits yeast down to the ground.
Again, no living organism cannot use ATP... How is my question any different? The first organism that was supposedly the ancestor to all subsequent organism was supposed to be very simple, and the data do not support this idea...
That does not mean the first organisms had ATP, APT is very efficient, and an organism that evolved ATP would have a massive advantage over all the competition and very rapidly displace them. That does not mean simpler organisms could not have existed before ATP.
what makes the mutated gene the one that is expressed? The organism will be programed to express the normal gene...
Not sure the biochemistry, but you body is full of genes that are slightly different versions of other genes. I think the body plays around with gene expression all the time, for a pregnant mum, going through a famine will have an epigenetic effect on the children and grandchildren .
direct copies, and only one set is actually used to produce the phenotype...
So why are wheat and corn so different from the grasses they evolved from?
how do those get passed on? The organism is not programmed to pass on foreign DNA or RNA, so how do we ensure that the foreign genetic material gets passed on?
The retrovirus inserts it in our chromosomes.
Two problems: a) this sequence seems so complex that it is highly unlikely,
Genes are read in groups of three, a random mutation that inserts or deletes a single nucleotide shifts everything across by one.
All you need is for the new arrangement to have the letters ATG which is a start codon and it will start reading it in threes as a gene until it hits the stop codon TAG.
and b) your statement would imply that evolution has some goal or direction, this is not true
Forgive the anthropomorphism, we are talking about adaptation. The organism is continually undergoing random mutations, when it hits one that works well with the previous change, this gives it an advantage and it is selected for.
Please show me how all of the data support a common ancestor, because not even the atheists on the open threads can do that....
Is there anything that doesn't? All of life fits beautifully on a nested hierarchy you would expect from common ancestry, our studies comparing genomes, proteins, endogenous retroviral insertions all fit the nested hierarchy. Pseudogenes fit. The fossil record fits too, even if we can quite work out where along the line birds diverged from other reptiles.
granted, my understand of Genesis and the age of the earth is "evolving" lol, but i'm still not sure that even if millions of years were proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there would be a problem with the creation account....
Doubt always casts a long shadow, but the age of the earth has been well established. What you need to do is work out how your six day would fit with geological history as it is rather than how you would like it to be. The geologists are not going to change, you need an interpretation that fits what we actually know.
Data please, support your argument, because all the fossil record tells us is where and how certain organisms died...Humans and plants and animals could have been created at any time, all the fossil record tells you is that some of them died and were buried at different points in time....Anything beyond that is a conclusion that is drawn from the data, and is thus open to refutation...
The record of where they died is a pretty good indication of where they lived too. We can trace the evolution of the mammalian jaw from early mammal like reptiles, you are not going to get modern mammals wandering around before their jaws evolved. We know when plants first colonised the land, so you are not going to have many land animals with out food to eat. As I mentioned before we can tell how much oxygen was in the atmosphere from the geology too and you could not have land animals, or large aquatic ones either without enough oxygen.
I thought you wanted to place the six days of creation billions of years ago?
How do we know the age of the moon? What is the frame of reference? And where are the data?
We went there and brought rocks home, we have also been dating a wide selection of rocks from around the solar system which very kindly drop on us every now and again which lets us know the maximum age of the solar system.
Well, this is what Christians are supposed to do, take our knowledge and work out how it compares and complements God's knowledge (which has only been revealed in small ways). We cannot take the conclusions that secular scientists reach and hold them in higher esteem than God's word (regardless of literal or less-literal interpretation), we have a responsibility to see scientific knowledge and faith work in tandem.
We just hold science's conclusion in higher esteem than our interpretation of scripture. Remember, secular or not, they are studying God's creation and rigorously testing everything they find out.