Jim Eisele wrote:
> In response to my request for specific instances where Genesis One does not
> match science, George Murphy writes
>
> > then there's the fact
> that there's the 2d Genesis account, which tells the story of creation in a
> quite different way.
>
> That may not be a specific criticism of Genesis One, but it's a whole lot
> closer than the other posts that have been placed. So, I guess, I thank you
> for that George. At least we can have a discussion. I can more or less
> agree with you about that being a 2d Genesis account. To me, it is telling
> a completely different story than Genesis One. I know that Genesis 2:4 uses
> a different Hebrew word for God - much more personal than Gen 1:1-2:3. And
> in Genesis 5:1 we see another instance of a "break" - "This is the book of
> the generations of Adam."
> My "fight" is Genesis One. I have not seen a fully adequate explanation for
> it anywhere. And when people criticize my posts without specifics, I become
> suspicious, not persuaded.
>
> In a nutshell, I think Genesis One is "creation of the world." Genesis Two
> and on is much more personal - dealing with Adam, Eve and other real people.
> I see no conflict, just stories about different things.
There's no conflict if they are read as theological accounts with
different emphases. But they don't match up if you try to read them as both
chronologically accurate descriptions.
......................
> You also mentioned
>
> >To do that one has to do all kinds of interpretive gymnastics to explain
> how land
> >plants could have been created before the sun,
>
> I ask you, do you think Moses knew that light came from the sun? If so,
> Moses has mentioned the sun long before day 4 - "in the beginning."
>
You've omitted my "&c" after "sun". This is just one problem, which
is not resolved by the creation of "light": Photosynthetic plants on earth are
adapted to the solar spectrum. But more broadly, the order of creation events
in Gen.1 doesn't match the geological record in which - among other things -
there were sea creatures before land plants. & even more broadly, the earth
didn't exist before the first stars.
Let me re-emphasize that I am not (nor, I think, is anyone on this list)
trying to debunk Genesis 1, except in the sense that (to revert to my earlier
analogy) one would debunk a reading of Whitman's poem as an historical account
of Lincoln's death.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Feb 15 2002 - 10:52:23 EST