BackInTex wrote:wintergreen48 wrote:
Except that the very next chapter of Genesis specifically says that man (Adam?) was created before the plants and animals, who were created for his benefit. So, which one is true, and which one is false?
No it doesn't. Not 'specifically' or even indirectly.
It does not say 'created' in Genesis 2. It does say formed. And some scholars note that the original word used for 'formed' could also be transcribed as 'had formed', which indicates 'previously'.
Also, it does NOT say 'he formed man
then or
after that formed the animals and brought them to man.
It says he formed man, and he formed the animals, and he brought the animals in front of man.
Heck, my wife delivered my daughter, and I bought my car, and I showed the car to my daughter and she said 'Its gway'. When did I buy the car, before or after? I didn't say. How long after my daughter was born did she talk?. I didn't say. But if you read (had I written it) the chapter before, I gave you the precise timeline.
Come on, now, you are really straining here. It specifically says that there were no plants, then he created the mist to water the land, THEN He formed man, then He planted the garden, and then He moved man to the garden, and then He created all the plants and animals for it. It is a deliberate sequencing of events. If the plants and animals were already there, why did He have to move man to them afterward?
And it is absolutely clear in chapter 2 that He created ALL of the animals after He created man, because He specifically notes that he created them because it was not right for man to be alone and He wanted man to have a helper; when the animals did not work out, He created woman. In chapter 1, on the other hand, it specifically sequences the creations differently, with the animals of the sea and air created the day before man, and he specifically created man AFTER he created the terrestrial animals on the sixth day. That is the plain language of the text.
And anyone who actually reads it carefully recognizes that the reason for this is that chapter 2 (at least, after the first couple verses-- and of course when it was originally set down it was not divided into chapters and verses, that is a 'modern' convention) tells a completely different story from from the version given in the first chapter of Genesis, and it is told by a completely different person, who had a completely different point of view, and was writing at a completely different time: the style of language is entirely different, the word usage is entirely different (to the extent that the writer of the first chapter CONSISTENTLY uses a completely different, Babylonian word for God-- and he uses it in the plural form, although with singular verbs, no doubt reflecting the fact that the story derived from a time when the Hebrews believed that there were multiple gods but that they were special to One, Who was special to them-- while the writer of the second chapter CONSISTENTLY uses a completely different, Hebrew word-- in the singular-- for God).
You are forcing what is plainly two contradictory stories that derive from two different perspectives, and you are missing the plain language and plain meaning that is used.
I frankly do not understand why you are so insistent that the language must be tortured to fit a specific point of view, and why you are so insistent that that point of view is absolutely necessary for 'truth.' Why does it have to be literally true? Just assuming for the sake of argument that it is not, in fact, literally true, what would that actually change about anything? God would not be any more or less than God actually is; the message of the passage (that God is the ultimate creator of everything, and is not Himself created) would not be affected; the fundamental truths would not be affected.
Heck, if you want to be literal I can show you how most of the first chapter of Genesis is consistent with evolutionary theory: on the first day we had the Big Bang, then eventually the earth was formed; then the first living things-- plant-like things-- evolved, then the animals in the sea evolved, and the animals in the air were the first out of the sea (these being insects), and then the terrestrial animals, and then humans. It all fits (except for the bit about the sun and the moon and the stars being created after the earth and the plants).
I really do not see why you believe that it is necessary, for the purposes of faith and salvation, to believe in the literal veracity of every word and every passage of the Bible, especially taking into account the words and passages that directly contradict themselves or that anyone with an ounce of sense has to know MUST be in error, such as the passage in Chronicles that describes a circular basin whose circumference is (impossibly) said to have been three times its diameter, or the passage that identifies a king who is said (impossibly) to have been two years older than his own father, or the passage that mentions (non-existent) four-legged birds and insects, and (non-existent) cud-chewing rabbits, or the passage that describes the sun as moving around the earth.
In each of those 'impossible' instances, the Biblical scribes were describing what they saw, with the viewpoint that they had. I doubt that the writer of Chronicles was an engineer, and I suspect that, for someone who was trying to describe his religious world, rounding off the dimensions of the basin must have seemed to be perfectly reasonable, as figures of speech (just as someone might say that point A is 'a couple miles away' from point B, when in fact it is 2.35 miles away; that distance is not, truly, a 'couple miles' but is .35 miles more than a 'couple,' but it is close enough for the point he chooses to make). Obviously he scribe who wrote that King Ahaziah was two years older than his father didn't mean that, and was not attributing some bizarre miracle to God, it is a typo (or whatever you call it when you do it on parchment); but what difference does it make in the big scheme? When buzzards are on the ground, they sometimes drag their wings and walk: they only have two legs, but it looks almost as though they are 'walking' with their walks; they are not in fact walking on four legs, but it looks enough like it for a scribe (who was not a zoologist) to describe that particular unclean animal as one that walks on four legs. Rabbits do not chew the cud, they do not have a cud pouch type of stomach, but they do chew grass and can hold it in their mouths for a while; for a (non-zoologist) who does not know what a cud actually is, it is close enough to make it look like it is chewing a cud, but it is not in fact 'literally' true. And the Hebrews did believe (as did virtually all of their contemporaries) that the Earth was a stationary flat disk, surmounted by a dome (the Bible actually mentions that dome, even though you can't really enclose a spherical planet with a dome, you know, unless you build it on something even larger), and they believed that the sun actually rose in the east, went overhead, and set in the west, and that is how it is described in Joshua, even though we know (at least, those of us who don't dismiss the heliocentric 'theory' of Copernicus) that in fact the sun does not actually move around the stationary Earth, and that instead, the Earth moves around the sun.
Oh, and your repeated point about stupid scientists whom you dismiss because they think they know things but have to change their 'theories' because they are always wrong: Copernicus' 'theory' of a heliocentric Earth turns out to have been gravely in error-- he was convinced that the planetary orbits were circles-- based upon a belief that a circle was the type of perfection that God would have imposed. Kepler changed the theory when he showed that the planetary orbits are elliptical, not circular, and he was devastated at the thought that God somehow screwed up-- but of course God did not screw up, the problem was that Kepler and Copernicus and others had a preconceived idea about God and what was necessary for them to believe about God, and while Copernicus could not let it go entirely, Kepler did (although he did spend many years in a fruitless effort to try to find a 'perfect'-- Godlike-- geometric that would account for those ellipses).
When you come up with these strained interpretations, it is exactly like the people who refused to believe that the Earth revolves around the sun and insisted that the sun and the stars and all the other planets revolve around the stationary Earth; when they were shown the impossibility of that position (such as the fact that the planets seem to move backwards, which does not make sense if they are moving in spheres around the Earth, but does make sense if they and the Earth are all moving around the sun, so that their relative positions would shift depending upon their distance from the sun), they came up with impossibly complex explanations about 'epicycles' and such. What you are doing-- and what earth-centric folks did-- is needlessly complicate something by trying to make facts fit your pre-conceived ideas about how things should be, rather that accepting the facts for what they are.
As other people have suggested in this and other threads where 'theory' has been discussed, your approach simply does not work because it ignores the reality of existence, dismissing and rejecting anything that does not fit with your desired scheme of things.
God gave us the ability to reason. Reason tells us that if the facts don't fit your theory, then you adjust your theory to fit the facts. You don't dismiss the facts or pretend that they are something other than what they obviously are.
