By Jesus’ definition. He is the truth as well as the creator. His word is truth
John 17:17
Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.
To be more exact, Scripture is true in Genesis Psalms 119:160
Thy word is true from the beginning ..
Why are you here @dad ?
It can’t be to discuss because you are not interested in any view other than your own.
You seem to be on a crusade to wipe out false views of Scripture, yet you perpetually impose your own fixed view of it.
You have no flexibility (nothing new around here) but also no real apologetic skill either. You just assert a simplistic and literal view of Scripture.
Perhaps you are on the wrong forum
Richard
Yet again, another reminder that you are not any member of the godhead, you do not uniquely speak on heaven’s behalf, and your interpretations are not superior by virtue of your sanctimony.
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Except you don’t – you pretend you can figure it out without having to learn anything, you just read it like it was newspaper reports. In the opening Creation account you throw most of what it says in the trash.
What has that got to do with anything?
Now you’ve got me wondering if you even finished high school.
That’s a bad translation; “record” does not mean now what it did then, and it wasn’t even a very good choice when it was rendered that way.
“Testified” is probably the best rendition these days.
You don’t even look for the truth – the first step to that would be to ask, “What was the worldview shared by the writer and his audience?” and “What kind of literature was this intended to be?”
There is no definition of truth given there – you’re inserting a modern definition that doesn’t fit to anything in the Bible.
Discussing why the theory of evolution cannot be synced with Genesis. We see here that some want to wave away the record of Scripture and still lay a claim to having both. So this is a good expose. They cannot have both
Anyone can read how Jesus confirmed people and events in Genesis. He is God. He knows. Period. Better to get on board than kick against the priccs
Except I do. Obviously. The example of God putting Adam to sleep and taking a bone from which He created woman shows this. It actually says it. Clearly. Confirmed elsewhere in the bible. It is absolute.
Except you do not discuss it. You just refute it as being possible.
As it happens I agree they cannot be synced, but not because Evolution is false, but because Genesis 1 is not meant as history (or science), but that is not a valid response for you.
Your view of Scripture. Your insistence on how to read and understand it. Why do you think you must be right.
Discussion does not mean “You must believe what I do”
Perhaps you do not see who or what is being expoosed here.
You appear to be a laughing stock. I do not agree with that either, but there we go.
They can, and do. You are beating against the wind or trying to turn back the tide. Your view is no longer “popular” and appears to be as invalid as you think Evolution is.
I have no problem with your view, and understand why you have it, but that does not mean I agree. It is a shame that you cannot try and understand my (et al) view and give me (us) the same curtesy.
Richard
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The topic is science and Genesis not being able to be reconciled. A big reason is the dream date/ages. So it has everything to do with it obviously
The idea here is not delving into the depths of Satan and evilution. The point of the thread is asking if they can be reconciled or not. No. Hell no 
But you have made it so.
By dismissing Evolution you have set a precedent that leaves no alternative.
And I said no, but not because Evolution is evil, but because Scripture does not need it and neither does science need Genesis. They do not live in the same space or need to interact at all. But
You insist that Genesis is science.
Itis not.
Genesis says God created the heavens and the earth.
So does Theistic Evolution
But that is something you will not consider or accept.
So it remains.
You are not discussing.
Leaves no room for discussion
Richard
The topic is that Genesis cannot jive with evolution. Not the intricacies of the theory of evolution. I know that religion well. I have my own, thank you very much
No it wasn’t.
That verse is about some-one who saw what happened when Jesus was stabbed after being crucified:
31 Since it was the day of Preparation, and so that the bodies would not remain on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken and that they might be taken away. 32 So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who had been crucified with him. 33 But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. 34 But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. 35 He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth—that you also may believe. 36 For these things took place that the Scripture might be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones will be broken.” 37 And again another Scripture says, “They will look on him whom they have pierced.”
Yet another example of citing a verse without bothering to read it first.
(Also, ‘bare record’ is gibberish).
No that is not the topic.
Rectify is trying to marry the two. “jive” implies dancng together.
There is no marriage between Genesis and Evolution if you are talking about the purely Scientific version.
However Genesis 1 does not have to be historically accurate to mean anything or, IOW removing the historic setting does not negate the message of Genesis 1. You are insisting on a specific view of Genesis 1 that is no longer accepted by many and making it critical to Christianity. It is not.
I doubt that very much. You do not even seem to know Christianity any more.
Richard
Jesus bare record of many things. Genesis included
Yes it is the topic.
@knor, I would like to return to something you said in another discussion, because I think it leads to a broader question directly related to the subject of this thread.
You wrote:
I agree with this. In fact, I consider such an approach to scientific research entirely justified.
Science is not required to investigate the ultimate ontological foundations of existence in every study. It can examine particular relationships, identify causal mechanisms, construct mathematical models, test their predictions, and obtain reliable knowledge about the real world.
A scientific model represents certain aspects of the reality under investigation, but it does not, by itself, establish that reality’s ultimate ontological foundation. It selects relationships relevant to a particular task, employs appropriate approximations, and operates within a defined range of applicability. Yet this selectivity does not make the causal relationships it identifies imaginary. A model can be incomplete while still providing a genuine explanation of an actual natural process.
And the success of such research is no less significant because it does not answer every possible question about the nature of reality itself.
You also wrote:
Here, however, I think an important distinction arises. A question may not be necessary for a particular scientific calculation, medical investigation, or engineering problem, yet still be of fundamental importance to our understanding of the world as a whole.
This is the direction in which I would like to develop the discussion.
If science investigates certain aspects of reality, while the Book of Genesis speaks about the creation of the world, should we even attempt to relate these two ways of understanding existence?
My answer is yes, we should.
Let me explain why.
If, as Christians, we recognize the world as created, we are not speaking merely of some initial event after which the world continues to exist independently of its Creator. The Creator is the ontological ground of the world and the cause of its continuing existence at every moment.
The world we recognize as created is precisely the world that exists before us, has its own real history, and is investigated by science.
Stars and galaxies formed. Planets emerged and changed. Earth underwent a long geological history. Life arose and developed, living organisms acquired new properties, and species appeared and disappeared. Human beings have their own biological evolutionary history.
And none of this is the history of some second reality, separate from Creation.
It is the history of the created world itself.
This raises what seems to me a fairly straightforward theological question.
If cosmic evolution does not belong to the history of Creation, then to what does it belong?
If biological evolution took place within the created world, why should we regard the process itself as something foreign to God’s creative relationship with that world?
Of course, I am not suggesting that the existence of evolution proves divine design. I do not find the arguments of the Intelligent Design movement convincing, and I am not a supporter of that movement. Nor am I claiming that every particular evolutionary outcome must be understood as a predetermined biological goal.
My point is different.
Recognizing natural causation does not require us to exclude it from the history of Creation or to regard it as foreign to the Creator’s purpose for the world.
If a particular structure arose through natural processes, that tells us how it arose within the existing order. But such an explanation does not, by itself, settle the question of the ontological foundation of that order, its possibilities, or its regularities.
A natural mechanism and the created nature of the world need not be competing explanations.
And here I would like to recall another observation you made in our earlier discussions.
You wrote:
You then drew attention to Genesis 1:11, “Let the land produce vegetation,” and Genesis 1:24, “Let the land produce living creatures.”
I find this observation both interesting and important.
Notice that in these verses, the land is not merely a passive stage upon which the finished results of divine action appear.
The very wording expresses a relationship between the Creator’s command and the activity of the created world.
“Let the land produce.”
The command comes from God, yet the land is described as producing.
I am not suggesting that the ancient author was describing evolutionary biology or had in mind the specific mechanisms investigated by modern science.
But why should we rule out in advance the possibility that this structure of the text has a meaningful relationship to the actual capacity of the created world to generate new natural forms through its own causal processes?
In the biblical text, the divine command is expressed through the activity of the land. Scientific reconstruction, meanwhile, investigates the natural mechanisms through which living forms emerge and develop in Earth’s history.
Is it not worth asking whether these two descriptions might refer to the same reality, even though they speak about it in entirely different conceptual languages?
It seems to me that this is one of the grounds for a meaningful dialogue between Genesis and modern science.
And this brings me to a second question.
Can we discover a genuine substantive correspondence between Genesis and the modern scientific reconstruction of the world’s history?
I believe that such a correspondence is possible.
But an important distinction must be made here.
It is one thing to recognize that Genesis speaks about the created world and that science investigates the real history of that world.
It is another thing to establish that a particular biblical image or structural transition genuinely corresponds to a particular transition in cosmic, geological, or biological history.
The second does not automatically follow from the first.
This is why such a comparison must be an investigation, rather than a ready-made system of identifications.
We cannot simply take a contemporary cosmological model and declare that the ancient biblical text contains it in some hidden form.
On the other hand, why should we consider it meaningless to investigate possible correspondences between the structure of the text and the actual history of the created world simply because the authors and first recipients of Revelation did not possess modern scientific terminology?
The question is not whether ancient people knew about the structure of galaxies, the origin of chemical elements, or the molecular mechanisms of evolution.
The question is whether divine Revelation, expressed through language and images accessible to human beings, can preserve a meaningful relationship to reality that is not exhausted by the scientific understanding available at the time of its transmission.
The status of the text itself matters here.
If we approach Genesis exclusively as a document of ancient religious culture, studying its language, genres, and historical circumstances may be sufficient for the purposes of that particular investigation.
But if we approach it as divine Revelation about real Creation, the question becomes broader.
The literary organization of a text helps us understand how its meanings are expressed. Yet distinguishing its literary forms does not, by itself, determine how those meanings relate to the actual created order.
Figurative language does not turn Revelation into a scientific textbook.
But neither does figurative language, by itself, eliminate the possibility of genuine ontological content.
There is another consideration I find important.
If we really believe that we are dealing with one and the same created world, then reliable knowledge about that world cannot be entirely irrelevant to our evaluation of interpretations of the biblical text.
For example, if a particular reading of Genesis presupposes a specific sequence of physical events, while scientific investigation establishes a different sequence with sufficiently strong evidence, that creates a genuine question for that reading.
It does not mean that science has thereby disproved divine Revelation. But it does mean that we need to examine whether we have attributed to the text something that it does not actually require.
And here the relationship becomes reciprocal.
Science is not required to accept our theological interpretation in advance. But neither should our interpretation be declared immune to examination wherever it actually makes claims about the observable world.
Scientific knowledge can therefore play a positive role in theological inquiry: not by dictating the meaning of the text, but by helping us determine which proposed readings remain defensible when compared with the actual history of the world.
This, in my view, is why investigating possible correspondences between Genesis and the scientific history of the world is worthwhile.
It is also one of the main reasons I began developing Evolutionary-Phase Theism.
Its purpose is not to offer an alternative cosmology or biology, nor to place the Creator’s action wherever natural history has not yet been scientifically explained.
What interests me is whether it is possible to develop a coherent philosophical and theological reading of the structure of Genesis that preserves its meaningful relationship to Creation while accepting the scientifically reconstructed history of the world as the actual history of created reality.
I will not repeat the content of the hypothesis here; it has already been presented at the beginning of this thread.
For our present discussion, however, one principle matters: any proposed correspondence between the structure of the biblical text and the history of the world must have definite content and remain open to substantive examination—textual, logical, and, wherever applicable, scientific. If a particular correspondence fails that examination, it is that correspondence which fails, not automatically the scientific understanding of the world or Revelation itself.
And here I would like to return to your observation about the aims of scientific research.
You are quite right that a substantial part of scientific work is directed toward explanations and predictions that are useful for practical purposes.
But there is another important aspect.
What science actually establishes and the philosophical conclusions sometimes drawn from its findings are not always the same thing.
Scientific research can provide highly convincing explanations of how stars form under particular physical conditions, how planetary systems arise, how natural selection operates, or why a particular organism possesses certain characteristics.
These are genuine explanations.
However, if someone then claims that the existence of such mechanisms definitively excludes a Creator, they are making a different claim.
The mechanism itself does not contain that conclusion.
To move from “we have established how a particular natural process develops” to
“all reality is exhausted by such processes and has no further ontological foundation” requires additional philosophical premises.
And those premises should be discussed as philosophical premises, rather than presented as the direct result of an experiment or calculation.
You yourself made precisely this distinction when responding to the claim that humanity is a cosmic accident:
I think that is a very precise observation.
Evolutionary biology investigates the actual history of the origin and transformation of living forms. But the fact that human beings emerged within natural evolution does not, by itself, establish either that human existence is ultimately meaningless or that it was the goal of a divine plan.
These are different questions requiring different kinds of justification.
And here I see a problem that extends beyond the professional scientific community.
Many people encounter modern scientific findings not by reading specialized research papers directly, but through popular-science videos, books, interviews, public lectures, and presentations by prominent scientists.
In such presentations, there can sometimes be an unnoticed transition from explaining a natural mechanism to making a much broader claim about the nature of reality as a whole.
Such a transition is not necessarily illegitimate. A scientist has every right to engage in philosophy and offer a worldview interpretation of scientific findings.
But then it matters that the audience can distinguish between a conclusion established by scientific investigation and an additional philosophical argument.
Otherwise, someone unfamiliar with the methodological distinctions of professional research may mistake a prominent scientist’s worldview position for a result demonstrated by science itself.
In that case, the problem is not with the scientific method, but with the evidential status of the public claim.
And the important issue is not who is speaking—whether a professional researcher, science communicator, philosopher, or theologian.
What matters is the claim being made and the grounds offered in support of it.
I am not suggesting that scientific journals should include theological disclaimers or that researchers should constantly explain everything their discipline does not investigate.
A scientific publication has its own task.
But when scientific findings are used to make claims about the existence or nonexistence of a Creator, the ultimate nature of reality, human freedom, morality, or the meaning of existence, we have entered a broader philosophical discussion.
It would be helpful to mark that transition as clearly as we mark the limits of applicability of physical and biological models.
Here I think it is essential to preserve symmetry.
Just as a natural mechanism does not prove the absence of a Creator, a successful philosophical or theological correspondence between a biblical image and a scientific discovery does not, by itself, prove the divine origin of the text.
We need to justify not only the conclusions we disagree with, but also our own interpretations.
To me, this is one of the most important conditions for meaningful dialogue.
That is why I do not think we should either set the natural history of the world against divine Creation or declare the investigation of their possible correspondence unnecessary from the outset.
Genesis does not have to use the language of modern physics in order to speak about created reality.
Science does not have to investigate the Creator in order to discover genuine regularities in the created world.
And the differences between their languages and investigative purposes do not require us to assume in advance that they cannot have a meaningful relationship to one another.
That relationship is precisely what I believe deserves investigation.
So, returning to the central question of this thread, my answer is affirmative.
I believe that we must take the modern scientific reconstruction of the world’s history seriously and investigate the possibility of relating it meaningfully to the text of Genesis, rather than dismissing that possibility in advance.
Perhaps some of our assumptions will turn out to be mistaken in the course of that work. Perhaps certain images in the text will require interpretations quite different from those originally proposed.
But those would be results of the investigation, not reasons to refuse to undertake it.
Ultimately, I am interested in two fairly simple questions.
If we believe that the Creator is the ground of the real world’s existence, why should we assume that scientific knowledge of that world’s actual history has nothing to contribute to a deeper understanding of Creation?
And the reverse question seems no less important:
If Genesis truly is Revelation about Creation, why should we exclude in advance the possibility that its structure preserves a meaningful relationship to the history of the world that science is gradually reconstructing?
It seems to me that the space between these two questions is where a genuinely interesting conversation can take place.
You’re completely right to note the multiple meanings of “hour” in Gethsemane. The specific rule that establishes one hour as our absolute baseline comes from a spiritual principle found across Scripture: God fills our lack and expands our focus to fill a complete measure.
When Jesus asks, “What! Could you not watch with Me one hour?” (Matthew 26:40), He establishes that one hour is the fundamental block of human watchfulness in the Lord’s presence. In our time equation, the hour provides our absolute constant—there are always 8,766 hours in a year—whereas the day is the variable that can shift.
You can actually work this model both ways: starting at the beginning with the most distant light and working forward, or starting from the end when “it is finished” (John 19:30) and working back to the beginning. I worked back to the beginning from the time of Christ (the conclusion of the 6th Day) to when the Earth began 4.53 billion years ago. I had the scientific estimates for the hours in a day, which expanded the variable number of days in the year. But with no Earth before that point to spin, I was left with that baseline constant of one hour.
Because we give Him that one hour of focus, He expands it and fills our entire “day” with light. Jesus explicitly details this principle in the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard:
- “And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing idle… He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard’… So when evening came… those came who were hired about the eleventh hour, they each received a denarius [a full day’s wage].” (Matthew 20:6-7, 9)
In the economy of the Kingdom, a single hour of aligned focus is credited with a full day’s value. Jesus backs this up by showing how single-minded attention floods our entire perspective:
- “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy [single, focused], your whole body will be full of light.” (Matthew 6:22)
So, when the physical planetary day modifier is absent in The Beginning, the formula naturally drops back to this default constant state: 1 hour of spiritual focus represents 1 full day.
In other words, when there is no Earth to rotate (there is only the heavenly bodies), 1 day equals 1 hour. Mathematically, if a day is compressed to just 1 hour, a single solar year of 8,766 hours suddenly holds 8,766 days. When you plug that number into our core conversion factor (1,000 years × 8,766 days × 1,000), you get a massive cosmic day length of 8.766 billion years for the primary era of The Beginning. Gethsemane provides the spiritual key showing that human focus, resting on an unvarying hourly constant, is the ultimate baseline of the clock.
Yes, that is what provides the variability to days. God designed using a measure of experiential days—the actual cycles of light and darkness experienced on the ground.
Now, it is true that the number of days in a year varies over the course of each Creation epoch due to steady, ongoing planetary deceleration. However, the way my model works is that the specific number of days is identified at the beginning of each Creation Day to establish the length of that entire Day.
So, when the Earth spins faster at the start of an epoch, it packs a higher density of cycles into the year—such as 2,192 individual daily cycles at the opening of Day 1. Because we are counting cycles rather than hours, using that initial day density as our foundational multiplier expands the total literal duration of that entire Creation Day to 2.192 billion years.
This is the exact junction where physics and theology meet. God calibrated the language of Genesis to the physical behavior of the Earth at the start of each era. The faster the planet spun at the opening boundary, the wider the biblical timeline naturally expanded to perfectly match the deep-time history modern science has uncovered!
You’re right that hours are a human convention. If God had designed us to grow spiritually by watching movies instead of spending time with Him, we could use standard movie lengths instead of hours. It doesn’t change the underlying math at all! The annual constant of 8,766 hours would simply become a constant of 4,383 two-hour movies.
Because Scripture was written for humans, God uses our constant time-tracking units to anchor His structural timeline. In a standard solar year, we always have a fixed constant of 8,766 hours. As we looked at with Gethsemane, the hour represents the fundamental, standard block of human watchfulness and focus in the Lord’s presence. When the physical Earth isn’t on the scene yet to spin and create a changing day length, the formula naturally drops back to its basic baseline unit.
I had missed making this point before: The rule of the model is that the day length is identified at the very beginning of each Creation Day to establish the static duration of that epoch. Identifying the duration right at the opening boundary line keeps the math much simpler than trying to calculate a rolling average over the course of the entire era. Attempting to use an average would also leave the model open to endlessly manipulating the lengths based on arbitrary durations, which ruins the precision. Instead, it uses the initial boundary condition as an objective calibration benchmark.
Think of it like setting a timer at the starting line. You don’t want to run a race with a timer that is slowing down because of a dying battery. You need a fixed, unyielding calibration standard right at the starting line. By using the rapid 4-hour rotation rate right at the opening boundary of Day 1, it packs 2,192 experiential day cycles into that year’s hourly constant. Using that opening day density as our structural multiplier is exactly what expands that first Day to its true deep-time historical scope of 2.19 billion years.