Genesis 1:14 - what does it indicate?

Faith & Science Conversation
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“Hindsight” “informed” by what Joel? I’ll have to research (not just Google!) where that forcing of Gen. 3:15 comes from. If pre-Enlightenment, that’s more forgivable.

(It is: St. Irenaeus (2nd Century) , “For this end did He put enmity between the serpent and the woman and her seed, they keeping it up mutually… until the seed did come appointed to tread down his head—which was born of Mary” ( Against Heresies , book 3, chapter 23).)

Isa. 52:14. No. It would have to have been smashed in and ripped off to not be recognized as human. Nose ripped up, but not broken; flat, eyes sealed, flesh in strips, ear hanging off. You’d have to use spiked knuckle dusters. The crown of thorns being beaten in to his scalp would have just covered him in blood. So no.

The way they all reasoned was nothing like we do professionally, technically. But then we try and make it work. And it can’t. I tried. For 50 years. Until I realised that it can’t be done, and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t invalidate the core claim at all. If Jesus was God incarnate, fully divine in full humanity, then He had the fully human, fully enculturated epistemology of a Classical Age Jewish country carpenter.

Furthermore in trying to fit the ugly sister’s shoe on Cinderella’s foot, making Isaiah 53 a prophecy of Christ in hindsight creates evil theology, as do other Isaian references.

Even if Jesus was God incarnate, how could He have believed otherwise? Even in the Resurrection He went with it when He knew otherwise.

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It’s written in context of the ancient social focus, we (people today) are obsessed with the mechanism behind the material, what is the material, why is the material? Ancient Hebrew society focused on the purpose of the material, the material, let’s use the sun as an example, is for light to see.

Therefore none of Genesis is a scientific account of the world.

There are scenarios in the bible that were miraculous. Jesus miracles being the most obvious.

But just because Genesis isn’t a scientific account of the universes birth, I don’t know why people think it’s less miraculous somehow? Because god had a scientific process and set up a system of ordering he’s less wonderful and to believe in his scientific ordering makes the believer more doubtful of his wonder?

7 days is just a representation of a cycle, it could be applied to many things… our individual life cycle for instance. It’s relevant because it gives us a template to follow for work tending to gods creation and resting in gods creation.

To believe in the literal is a dumbing down of gods power and paints a vision of the creation story of a magic man on a cloud.

Adam and Eve were not the first people on earth, but they were the first people god tasked with creating sacred space on earth to continue his ordering.

To deny the evidence of science in creation is to deny everything that’s in our physical world. Like we’re not made of cells, we’re clay given special, magic powers of mobility and consciousness by god, we don’t have organs and blood, we are ceramic objects. Everything isn’t made up of particles, atoms, molecules and compounds it’s all gods magic. God isn’t magic, he’s not Harry Potter, he’s all powerful and designed, created and ordered and set a corse of ordering for his universe and his people in it.

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This I like, but only for its humour.

Just because we dispute the science of early Genesis does not negate its presence or relevence.

God is placed as creator and sovereign of all He created. It shows intent and design Humanity is a specific creation. The seven day week is directly biblical. The establishment of the Sabbath. It also suggests that God finished his creating which implies letting go of control.(Watchmaker?). Genesis 4 suggests that man stole his intelligence. I would suggest that this did not come direct from God. The so-called punishments or consequences of eating the forbidden fruit can all be explained by science other than the existence of sin which is far too complex to be summarised here. The morality or no of nakedness,and homicide can be taken (or left). The existence of Adam is theologically significnt but scientifically doubtful (Genetics)
The division of language would seem to be unlikely in the form given. The flood is a common story throughout early history so probably has a certian amount of validation but maybe not with all the commentary about God and all creation.

It is almost certain that actual history starts with Abraham. Everything preceding is a mixture of myth, legend, (Oral tradition), and story. How much actual theology you can take is subject to debate and personal belief. But even after Abraham science is still dubious. I would like to see someone breed speckled sheep by getting them to drink water under a tree.

The whole point is that the bible is not a history book par se. Job, Jonah are almost certainly not meant as journalistic reporting. even the Gospels are a specific form of writing, not journalism. Trying to impose any sort of scientific reality is to misunderstand what the Bible is.

Richard

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Honestly, I do no think you really know what you are talking about.
No one reads or claims the flood event was as you describe.please show me a well known cedible scholar who agrees with your claim here.

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Are those the words of a Christians, or an atheist? It seems like the latter.

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Perhaps you should think again. What has scientific applications got to do with the Bible or Christianity for that matter?
Most of science was not identified until long after the Bible was written.
Perhaps you should look at my posts before accusing me of not being a Christian. You will find that I take offence for that.

Richard

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I don’t understand. Where is this coming from? Some picture somebody drew?

That is not the Bible but interpretations of the Bible.

I mean, I go for a rather theological understanding of Genesis 1 myself. But I see a big flaw in the treatment of words in the Bible according to the very specific modern meanings in the context of scientific terminology.

Take the word “dust” as used in Genesis 2:7. Do we have any substantial reason for distinguishing this from the general concept of particulate matter when these people had no words for such things?

Likewise… do we have substantial reason from distinguishing the use of the word “waters” in the Genesis 1 from the general concept of fluids (which includes both liquids and gases) when these people had no words for those things either?

So… It seems to me quite reasonable to understand Genesis 2:7 to mean that God formed man from matter… the stuff of the earth. And to understand Genesis 1:7 as saying God created a separation between the fluids of the earth from the fluids of the heavens. And I don’t see why placing the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament has to mean putting them in some nonexistent barrier. It can just be the way of saying they are above the earth (and all its fluids LOL).

It’s not that I am trying to read Genesis as a scientific text. I am not. The Bible is certainly no such thing. I just don’t see the justification for going overboard in forcing some primitive cosmology on the Bible either. It looks to me like someone looking for excuses to dismiss these parts of the Bible as something to ignore.

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" That is not the Bible but interpretations of the Bible. " Is it word for word from Day Two and Day Four? When reading Genesis as fact, there is nothing to interpret. The point was that Genesis has never meant fact; it dramatizes Creation in simple ways that communicate profound theology to ordinary minds.
Genesis is all theology all the time, certainly as far as chapter 11 verse 10. The thematic elements in the Creation narrative are theology in the raw; honor them as themes.
“Waters” in the time of the earliest Hebrews and the Creation narrative grandfathered in the mechanical aspects of Creation. You and I know that Creation began 13.78 billion years ago. But the notion of God spending a thousand-odd pages in Genesis for the purpose of delivering the factual side of Creation, e.g. telescopes and red shift to deduce the age of the universe, DNA to help understand how the kinds of animals arose??
Genesis 1-3, paraphrase: "1In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2The spirit of God hovered over the [featureless, void] waters. 3Then God said, “Let there be light.” Note how well vv 1 and 3 work as a breadcrumb to the age of science: God produced the Big Bang by inventing time, space, matter, and light.
Verse 2 grandfathers in the mechanical details, “perception is reality” in the Mesopotamia of that era. Should Genesis instead correct all of that detail, to provide what it has taken the modern world 250 years, a quarter of a millennium, to tease out of Creation? What crass idea is that?
Genesis is God’s great SELF reveal, the Who and Why without belaboring the ancients with dull details too dim to understand.
Genesis Days Two and Four require the sun moon and stars to cross the expanse of the sky (firmament) thus below the waters put above the firmament on Day Two. Yet Planet Earth orbits the nearest star at a distance of ~93 million miles.
Why cavil at “science?” Science has unfolded from the New Testament, learning about God by adoring and studying Creation, up through twenty centuries of devoted study of What God Made. Most science, prior to the 18th Century, was the province of monks and seminaries. Universities founded more than 250 years ago WERE seminaries. Yes, the same ones that continued to
Ahem.
The mechanical details - water first, then earth raised up from the depths, firmament, waters above the firmament, and the Flood are mechanical. They are stage dressing, props and costumes. What belongs in Genesis, and is there richly provided, is God’s great self-reveal. Prior pagan beliefs included a raft of deities exhibiting, each to their own, the whole cloth of human vices and failings.
Genesis shows one God, creator of existence itself, who was intentional that humankind would have this place, Planet Earth, to live on and fill. The Pagan Flood (surely a memory of a devastating flood tentatively dated at 2906 BCE which inundated all of Mesopotamia) was a genocide against the slaves they had made to feed them. Irrigation was drudgery and raising both grain and livestock were needed to present burnt offerings of meat and grain: too much work for the gods themselves, the poor second-class set whose burden it was to feed all the gods.
Alas they bred like flies and their noise deafened the gods. One crafty deity harangued some poor wealthy slave to build an ark, load it with grain and some breeding stock. to restart slaves and agriculture. That man’s burnt offering, once he could alight on solid ground, reminded the gods that they had nearly committed suicide by starvation. So to forestall any future such calamity, they gave humans disease and pestilence, so their numbers would remain stable.
God’s Flood was utterly obligatory in keeping with the mechanical side of FactsOnTheGround for those ancient Mesopotamians. God killed only pagans, then chose to endure paganism rather than produce an endless series of cleansing Floods. God experienced the deaths of all those misguided children as worse than their behaviors while alive.
In short, Genesis contrasts holy, all Creating, intentional God making a place for humankind, vs. the sleaze and toe-jam equivalent that had arisen from the Mesopotamian versions of deified human id.
Genesis? It is theology delivered in story form.
Now to the seamier side. Humankind arose from a 3.5+ billion year series of forbears, all of which survived and reproduced. Species evolved upward, bit by tiny bit. At all times, every forbear survived and reproduced. In the 3,500+ series of million year periods, the final 3 saw Lucy, then Homo (various) and finally Homo Sapiens sapiens, which appears to have stabilized about 0.3 million years ago.
We therefore are primed, honed, and hard wired to survive and reproduce. In short, we are born in sin. We can dramatize that as empty-headed Eve and besotted Adam; well and good. Story makes the point in a striking and dramatic manner; the scientific fact is just dull.
Place that in context with “Greater love has no one than to lay life down for a fellow being.” Or in other words, Jesus.
Please forgive such verbosity.

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This is a half-step toward reality, toward Creation Itself. No pair of humans were Adam and Eve. There is one female line as of many tens of thousands if years ago; we dub the first female to have that original mitochondrial DNA as “Mitochondrial Eve.” “In the same manner also” we dub the first male to have the original Y chromosome, many tens of thousands of years ago, as “Y Chromosome Adam.” All of humanity when traced back via their mothers descends from that one maternal line. We don’t even know which holder of that specific DNA pattern was the single female who is the ur-mother in fact. Ditto which single holder of that Y chromosome is the ur-father in fact.
But the likelihood that they had children together is vanishingly small. Earth and time are both too vast for that coincidence.
We evolved. Every Single Forbear All The Way Back survived and reproduce; thus we are wired, honed, and ready to do the same. For this reason we are born in a sinful state.
God’s “task to create sacred space” is a divine image; that much is certain. But just as we had our beginning 3.5+ billion years ago via the first cell (no parent), so does that task. It probably has no parent.

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The gospels pass muster, in the minds of the current set of premier scholars of First Century writings. They compare well with interviews taken by modern police when they separate witnesses and interview them separately - mostly the same, but with a spectrum of details and slight parallax in their points of view.
Moreover even scholars who dispute Jesus’ divinity concede that the tomb was used, that no one had both the means and the motive to disturb it, yet it was empty on the morning of the third day.
Finishing Creation happened as of the zeroth quantum time unit, i.e. as of the Big Bang. God is outside time etc… - He created all that. Thus God knows all of time and space, and interferes at critical points such as the Virgin Birth and the miracles of Jesus. The rest is beyond our ability to observe or recognize. One thing is certain: God did not make a watch then observe it from afar.
Science knows that Eden and the forbidden fruit dramatize the reality of evolution. Every forbear, from the first parentless cell 3.5+ billion years ago, survived and reproduced. Long LONG before this far twig of the Tree of Life reached a stable form, i.e. roughly 0.0003 billion years ago, Homo sapiens sapiens’ entire line of forbears had been hard wired to survive and breed. This is the reality of being born in sin, and inheriting sin from our fathers.
The existence of exactly one male, from whom all current human males are descended, is as close to fact as anyone can get; it is a simple process of elimination. The Y chromosome mutates at a known rate. It is simple arithmetic to sum the cumulative differences found by examining all known Y chromosomes, then work backward to the most recent single male, progenitor of all males today. It goes back many tens of thousands of years. Ditto Mary - all known differences between the known mitochondrial DNA patterns seen today, plus the known rate at which that changes, enables geneticists to put a date on when (but not where) the original mother of all future mothers was alive
History begins with writing. History was oral for thousands of years. Abraham as the original subject of oral history is possible – but even more likely is that Abraham is legend not fact. Everything about him appeared in ink for the first time about 2,500 years ago, while Genesis as an oral document goes back at least a thousand years before that. We have the legend of King Arthur from perhaps 1,500 years ago, first set down on in ink on paper maybe a thousand years ago. God’s intent is broad; assessing something that far back as “retained hard fact” tends to miss the point.
Yes, Richard, the Bible is a means of teaching, not a platinum record sent into the cosmos aboard a Voyager Space Probe.

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You were doing so well. I was just about to like it, but…

Sin is not as simple as instinctive or even bred selfishness. Sin involves conscious thought. In that respect the Garden is correct. We cannot sin without the knowledge of good and evil.
Add into that the idea that we have freedom of choice and Original Sin is no longer an option. Original sin would suggest that we have no choice.

Richard

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Adam and Eve I’m aware are a “syntax”, Adam I think means man and the Hebrew meaning of Eve escapes me… but I’m aware the names are given in an “object function”, context… whatever the meaning of them it’s relevant to the text, not as nice character names for historical documentation.

Trees were mystical in ancient Hebrew and had relevance to the text, again not as a historical depiction of reality.

What is relevant is, god tasked two people to create sacred space, they broke a rule… which could have been anything. “No smoking in this area”, “Do not feed the ducks”, “Keep exit clear”. The rule was about obedience and allowing for choice, free will, which is in the interest of showing love, not control.

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Good for you. A lot of people don’t get that, that rules and obedience in general are about expressing love.

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Sin simply exists. “The love of money is the root of all evil” is no more precise that my own version of “bred to survive and reproduce.” They are the tip of an ‘iceberg’ of sin. The knowledge of good and evil arrives early in childhood. Original sin does not rob us of choice - it distorts our choices in that it distorts our point of view. I think it was Isaiah who said, “My most righteous acts are like used menstrual bandages, next to the glory of God.”

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It is, but that’s what young-Earth folks specialize in.

Toss in the fact that the first Creation account follows the order of events of the Egyptian creation stories, it just changes the status of every Egyptian god there was.

It’s very unlikely given what we know about the text, which manages to be two different literary genres at once and convey three different messages – and all that meaning is thrown out by treating it as literal.

In terms of general revelation, if you include history in that then a literal reading is suspect because the modern literalist movement with its insistence that every detail in the scripture must be 100% scientifically correct arose by taking that principle not from scripture itself but from scientific materialism, which is an inherently atheistic view – ironic, that the most vocal portion of Christendom on the subject of Creation has their foundation in an atheistic philosophy!

I’ve wondered that myself, and for practical reasons: seven days is a rather short limitation especially since a lot of people can only join such discussions once a week (don’t know how much that’s true here), but ten years strikes me as silly. I’d like to see some intermediate periods, like fourteen days, thirty days, and three years.
For that matter I’d like to see changes in how posts are handled, starting with the “no more than three in a row” restriction; it forces posts to be long and to include more than one topic in a post instead of each post being focused.

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I agree.

It has no shape, or form. It cannot be transmitted or inherited.

It can no more affect our choices than God Himself does.

It has no influence. It has no presence.

Sin is making the wrong choice, specifically against God or Goodness.

Making a valid choice is not a sin. Being explicitly selfish is not (always) a sin. Ignoring God is not a sin. Going against God is a sin, in fact it is the definition of sin.

Richard

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Ignoring God is replacing him with an idol of your own making, idolizing something else, maybe yourself. That’s not sin?

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How odd. Sometime around the 15th / 16thh Centuries C E (forgive the fuzziness, reference not handy) a famous Rabbi developed an apologetic for Isaiah 53 in which the entire tribe of Judah played the suffering saint, not Jesus. From here he employed logic which made broad presumptions; they reduced the result to strained rationalizations.
Please explain “evil theology” to me; I lack comprehension.

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Interestingly, sin “khata”, actually translates as as missing the goal or to fail.

In talking about original sin, we could then say it was simply missing the set goal or failing to reach the goal.

It’s failing to carry out gods order or ordering which is a continuation of his creation and creating chaos.

Order vs chaos is good vs evil.

The word sin has been used to really berate, belittle and insult. And also pull “holiness rank”, on who is “better”, With the, “let him who is without sin, cast the first stone”, note, not being lived out in truth.

But anyway, sin existed prior to the fall, what didn’t exist was our accountability to god.

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“The fall” if seen as a specific event where two humans, one male the other female, fell prey to the huckster serpent, pulls us too far away from Creation. Creation is fact. Discounting fact because it lacks a way to harness it to theological value doesn’t work well. Consider:
FACT needs no validation; a fact IS. Did a meteor fall from the sky? Did it rain? Was there an earthquake? We are in the realm of fact. Evolution is fully fact. We lack the capability but presume that, granted complete awareness of all chemical events on Earth after enough of it cooled, we would be able to answer “How did life form?” and “What mutation made [fill in a trillion blanks] happen?”
Those questions lead us to try simpler approaches. “How could life have formed?” is valid and at least one researcher I’ve located has unraveled some of that Gordian knot.
[[Jack Szostak, many posts of his lectures show up on YouTube. (a) fire hose; come prepared to stop and take many notes. (b) 2009 Nobelist in a life science.]]
Taken from the mythical “I can see everything at the level of atoms and molecules, over the entire biome span of Earth, beginning 3.5+ billion years ago until today” - there would be no way to pinpoint where God accepts actions as innocent vs. aware thus sinful. Mitochondrial Mary almost certainly never met Y-Chromosome Adam; simple deduction from evidence on hand leads to the conclusion that some point in the past saw one woman, from whom have descended all women alive today. Ditto Y Chromosome Adam; one man existed, from whom descend all males alive today.
Those details are fuzzy; we can’t to tell within a window of at least ten thousand years’ width, when each of them lived, or where. Did they ever have a single common child? The odds-against have too many zeroes to the left off the decimal to make it worthy of thought.
Shutting off the keyboard here :smile: - Be well, and may God’s grace enfold you.
Joel