Genesis and Other Creation Myths

[Manfred Belheim]

I know someone made a comment in a thread recently, I don't think it was this one, about how atheists act "smart" and have a condescending, superior air about them. After reading the bibble in this thread I'd argue that it's literally impossible NOT to feel smart and superior by comparison. You can't ask for the impossible, people!

 

[warpus]

Then again, the mental gymnastics required to make a creation myth not fully contradict reality are a bit impressive. I mean, most of the results are drivel, but you've got to admire someone who puts so much work into so little. Or maybe not.

 

[timtofly]

One would think just claiming reality is wrong or right would be easier than trying to prove it.

 

[warpus]

Unfortunately all that we know about reality so far contradicts every single creation myth in existence to a rather large degree. That's why nobody's been successfully able to reconcile any of the existing creation myths with what we know about the universe. They seem to be legends more than anything - tales of people who lived a long time ago attempting to explain where they came from. It makes sense that once we actually figured out how things work, that they would be quite different than what those ancient people thought. They were just sort of making it up, while we're relying on modern instruments and the scientific method, which back then didn't even exist, so it's not very surprising.

What's a lot more interesting than trying to for some reason prove that one of these myths actually happened word by word is to look at the parts of these myths that actually have some grounding in reality. That can tell us a lot about how these ancient people lived and what sort of things they dealt with. And most myths and legends are based in fact in one way or another, so that's what we should be looking at instead, the kernels of truth in a sea of myth and allegory.

 

[Flying Pig]

Myths don't become useless if they're not true: mythology is an area where almost anything is theoretically plausible, and you don't actually need any grounding in reality. With that in mind, the stories that people choose to pick out of the vast range of options, tell and to keep going over the generations reveal a lot about them and their priorities.

 

[warpus]

I don't think these myths are useless either, but they are rather useless if you expect them to be the literal truth. If you take them as what they are, then they can be quite useful indeed.

 

[timtofly]

Is there a difference in taking them as "the literal truth" and trying understand what they were trying to describe? I still doubt that we today have a clearer grasp on what happened thousands of years ago, than humans who actually may have experienced the reality.

Can you explain to me how claiming to know that modern science has figured out the past, is not an extrodinary claim?

 

[Manfred Belheim]

You'd have to be a bit more specific I think. "Figured out the past" is a rather vague statement.

 

[warpus]

Can you explain to me how claiming to know that modern science has figured out the past, is not an extrodinary claim?

Depends on which part of the past you're talking about. Is it extraordinary that we've figured out that dinosaurs existed? Not really. Is it extraordinary that we've figured out that tectonic plates shift around and we know where they were positioned millions of years ago? It might be exciting, but I wouldn't call it extraordinary.

So which specific thing we've figured out are you talking about? Anything I can think of doesn't warrant the "extraordinary" label, even if most of these discoveries were quite exciting when they first happened.

 

[timtofly]

You'd have to be a bit more specific I think. "Figured out the past" is a rather vague statement.

Depends on which part of the past you're talking about. Is it extraordinary that we've figured out that dinosaurs existed? Not really. Is it extraordinary that we've figured out that tectonic plates shift around and we know where they were positioned millions of years ago? It might be exciting, but I wouldn't call it extraordinary.

So which specific thing we've figured out are you talking about? Anything I can think of doesn't warrant the "extraordinary" label, even if most of these discoveries were quite exciting when they first happened.

As vague as this:

Unfortunately all that we know about reality so far contradicts every single creation myth in existence to a rather large degree. That's why nobody's been successfully able to reconcile any of the existing creation myths with what we know about the universe.

The claim that science "contradicts" to a "rather large degree". Throwing large amounts of numbers into the equation does not necessarily remove extraordinary from the sensible view of reality.

I have already pointed out that science allegedly proves that change happens, but refuses to admit that things can change in a drastic fashion. So for the first example, if something changes and information is introduced into the DNA; what deems it necessary that it takes billions of years as opposed to happening instantly? What is the difference in taking millions of years for the wind to erode soil, and a Flood doing it in hours? Why does change have to happen outside of the human observable experience. There are plenty of observable instances that can produce the same result. In fact Science relies on observable evidence, yet people still refuse to accept that ancient humans were just as capable of doing observations. They may have not been able to catalog and remember like we do today, but can you convince me that they lacked any ability to observe what happened around them and not talk about it. That seems to be very basic human trait. We have some what a clue about what happened last century or two, but there are a lot of people today, who cannot understand why humans used to own slaves. I can see why we question our past. I cannot understand why you think that people nine thousand years ago even had the same questions we do today. I assume an explanation would be that humans have not changed. Yet humans can observe changes in how humans think every few hundred years. The extraordinary claim is to state that we know the exact state of mind the humans had 9000 years ago. It makes sense to me that they were recording what they experienced. It makes sense to you that they were making things up. I grant you that they may not have had as extensive a vocabulary that we do at the moment, but even that is an assumption. My assumption is they left out a lot of detail. Another observable human trait. Humans can only recall so much and each human has their own perspective to deal with.

 

[warpus]

I don't really understand what you're trying to say, to be honest. But let me address the first point you bring up, which appears to be your main point:

The claim that science "contradicts" to a "rather large degree"

Well yes, of course, most creation myths are rather vague, but in the end when you compare details, they tend not to match up to reality. I don't know of one single creation myth that is able to escape this, due to the fact that creation myths tend to make rather extraordinary claims, since they are creation myths and sort of have to deal with matters we don't fully understand yet (the creation of the universe, time-space, etc.)

Genesis for example doesn't come out any further than other creation myths in the "does it match up to reality or not?" department. It seems clear to me that it was written with symbolism in mind, rather than an exact description of how things went down.

 

[timtofly]

I don't really understand what you're trying to say, to be honest. But let me address the first point you bring up, which appears to be your main point:



Well yes, of course, most creation myths are rather vague, but in the end when you compare details, they tend not to match up to reality. I don't know of one single creation myth that is able to escape this, due to the fact that creation myths tend to make rather extraordinary claims, since they are creation myths and sort of have to deal with matters we don't fully understand yet (the creation of the universe, time-space, etc.)

Genesis for example doesn't come out any further than other creation myths in the "does it match up to reality or not?" department. It seems clear to me that it was written with symbolism in mind, rather than an exact description of how things went down.

Are not all descriptions a form of symbolism? A word represents the given definition. Letters represent sounds, that make up words. Unless a human specifically states they are using symbolism, can you definitely state that they are using it in a way that is open to interpretation? The words used at the time meant something, and the way they are written may or may not be open to interpretation. Saying that they are just using symbolism, because you do not agree on their creation interpretation does not mean they were. How descriptive does it have to be? You still do not offer a specific example, but the basis of your argument lies on the fact you disagree with their description of creation. Would you rule out what Darwin wrote as just another descriptive symbolic account of origins, open to interpretation? Or do you trust what was written, because it is modern, uses science, and agrees with your interpretation? Describing the flooded creek in the back yard, could take up volumes of information if fully described. How would any one fully be able to undertake the task, and to what extent would one judge it adequate?

Being concise can still provide enough information to convey what actually happened. In fact being concise in writing goes way further than telling a metaphorical tale that leaves facts to the imagination of the readers.

 

[warpus]

I don't know if all descriptions are symbolic - probably not. Some are pretty factual, so I guess the answer is "definitely not"

I admit that we can learn a lot by studying creation myths - they tell us a lot about what people's ancestors used to believe about their place in the universe.

Would you rule out what Darwin wrote as just another descriptive symbolic account of origins, open to interpretation?

If we didn't know about evolution and some guy wrote out On The Origin of the Species and published it a couple weeks ago, and everybody was like "whoa what the hell, that's crazy", I would wait for peer review and for other people to try to replicate the findings. I wouldn't label it as something that's merely symbolic because it seems obvious that it wasn't written as such, but I might treat it with suspicion at first because it would be a completely new idea and a new way of thinking about species of animals and how they change over time.

Or do you trust what was written, because it is modern, uses science, and agrees with your interpretation?

I definitely do not discount it as a creation myth, because it obviously isn't one.

But I mean, no, I do not accept it blindly, I do a background check and check the peer review, depending on what we're talking about. Most scientific theories are not important enough for me to check the authenticity of. Sometimes you just want to sit back and eat a sandwich, and not understand the math behind sandwiches.

 

[Berzerker]

If the Garden of Eden was destroyed in 6,000 BC, that would make it significantly younger than the city of Jericho, founded by 9,000 BC.

I didn't mean to suggest the Garden - God and Adam - was still in existence 6000 BC, only that its location was flooded then thereby ruling out a flood at 2800 BC as the cause of its disappearance.

God's Garden could be much older, maybe even 75,000 years since we are dealing with a myth of man's origin and a Gulf region exposed by lower sea levels between 75k and 8kya.

God(s) created people and told them to proliferate on the 6th Day. God later took the Adam (earthling) he had created eastward to the Garden. Westward of the Persian Gulf is our ancestral homeland and the migratory routes we used upon leaving NE Africa.

 

[timtofly]

If we didn't know about evolution and some guy wrote out On The Origin of the Species and published it a couple weeks ago, and everybody was like "whoa what the hell, that's crazy", I would wait for peer review and for other people to try to replicate the findings. I wouldn't label it as something that's merely symbolic because it seems obvious that it wasn't written as such, but I might treat it with suspicion at first because it would be a completely new idea and a new way of thinking about species of animals and how they change over time.

I definitely do not discount it as a creation myth, because it obviously isn't one.

But I mean, no, I do not accept it blindly, I do a background check and check the peer review, depending on what we're talking about. Most scientific theories are not important enough for me to check the authenticity of. Sometimes you just want to sit back and eat a sandwich, and not understand the math behind sandwiches.

Do you deny that one day, The Origin of Species, will be relegated to myth status? If one can only accept what they can "fact" check, it would seem that eventually all written documents would have to be rejected using that criteria. They would fall under the category of myth, because the ability to "fact" check would have passed. And what Darwin wrote was on the creation of species, ie a creation myth. Origin, creation, genesis are all synonymous with each other, and open to interpretation as they cover a broad spectrum of phenomenon. Darwin was a respected scientist and did write in terms that were understood at the time of the writing. It was also written before a lot of information we now have, and was an attempt at understanding the natural world and how it works. Darwin may not have fully understood the nature of DNA, but the creation of new DNA is still a creation phenomenon.

It would probably take quite some time to even count the DNA in that sandwich.

 

[Harv]

Well yes, of course, most creation myths are rather vague, but in the end when you compare details, they tend not to match up to reality. I don't know of one single creation myth that is able to escape this, due to the fact that creation myths tend to make rather extraordinary claims, since they are creation myths and sort of have to deal with matters we don't fully understand yet (the creation of the universe, time-space, etc.)

Genesis for example doesn't come out any further than other creation myths in the "does it match up to reality or not?" department. It seems clear to me that it was written with symbolism in mind, rather than an exact description of how things went down.

This is a great post! I like this response!

 

[Berzerker]

It would seem to me that After the Flood, and the continents were moving at a different rate than they do now, water would come in from the Atlantic, evaporate, and then fill up again.

They can measure how fast the plates and continents are moving and how fast they moved in the past. The Hawaiian Islands are part of a chain of volcanoes stretching to Kamchatka for 80 million years as the Pacific floor moves over a magma plume or bubble called a hot spot. I dont think there's any evidence of a recent change in the rates.

Pangaea was the first Land mass that came out of the water. It later was split apart. The water was gathered together in one place. That one place did not mean that land surrounded it, but that the water surrounded the land without any continental separation, the definition of one place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaalbara

They think supercontinents have formed several times, Pangaea is the most recent. What you're saying is possible, the first continent may have been a single landmass and the ocean covered the rest. One place for the water seems to imply one for the land too... Genesis doesn't rule out that interpretation from what I can see.

My theory/hypothesis is that the earth may have been smaller in mass. Two moon size objects (the three worlds colliding in the Veda) hitting the earth would have added more mass, and they could have broken apart and hit in two major spots, but with dozens of impact sights. It would have affected the earth's axis, and perhaps the orbital path as well.

The Enuma Elish describes several "winds" of God carving up Tiamat, multiple impactors. And then God himself dealt the final blow sending Tiamat's carcass to a new orbit.

The problem is that both the Genesis account, and the Veda account, state the water is the makeup of the universe itself. Not a separate area of the universe, or even the solar system. The water is the beginning and end of each cycle of the universe.

On what day was the water created?

There did not have to be any mountains before the Flood. All humanity were all together in one homogenous group. Chapter 1 of Genesis says that God made humans male and female and placed them on the earth. The 2nd chapter told of just one Human that God created and singled out to torment in the Garden of Eden.

We're told the Flood covered the tallest mountains and the ark came to rest on the tallest in the region, but the 6th Day people were told to fill the Earth. If thats what they were doing then they were no longer one group. The Adam was either a member of that first group or he was created later and brought to the Eden.

The Sumerian mythology says the first people were created to ease the burden of the gods, to labor for them. That was Adam's job, there was no man to till the ground and no Adam to maintain the Garden. People were already populating the world before Adam was made... Thats how Cain found a wife and why he was worried about being killed for murdering Abel.

I also said the sun and the whole universe in it's current form (not size, it has been expanding) existed in verse 1. You keep telling me that God did not create it.

God made Heaven and Earth, neither of those are the universe or this planet, much less the water in Gen 1:2

All I said is that the universe was dark until the 4th day, and then the stars including the sun started to send out radiation in the form of light.

How did evening and day exist without the Sun?

 

[Berzerker]

most creation myths are rather vague, but in the end when you compare details, they tend not to match up to reality. I don't know of one single creation myth that is able to escape this, due to the fact that creation myths tend to make rather extraordinary claims, since they are creation myths and sort of have to deal with matters we don't fully understand yet (the creation of the universe, time-space, etc.)

Genesis for example doesn't come out any further than other creation myths in the "does it match up to reality or not?" department. It seems clear to me that it was written with symbolism in mind, rather than an exact description of how things went down.

I believe the symbolism in the Genesis tale stems largely from monotheistic modifications to disguise a creation involving multiple "gods", but the story is anything but vague. A dark, water covered world is transformed into one with seas, land and life spinning closer to or near a star.

The same myth appears around the world and the science supports the theme. Our water came from the asteroid belt where it was much darker and land and life appeared following a series of collisions about 4 bya...

 

[warpus]

Do you deny that one day, The Origin of Species, will be relegated to myth status?

That is near impossible, really, given how well the available data matches up with the theory and its predictions. So yes, I do deny it, because I understand that any sort of theory that replaces the Theory of Evolution is going to contain large chunks of that theory in it, much like Einstein's theory of relativity rests on the shoulders of the work of others, such as Newton.

Newton's theories were "wrong", but to some degree they work. You are able to use them to predict the movements of planets to some degree, and to an extent that is how gravity behaves.

So no, The Theory of Evolution will never be relegated to myth status, for the same reason that isn't going to ever happen and has not happened to Newton's laws of motion. Both of those theories work to some extent - if we ever figure out that The Theory of Evolution is incomplete, much like Newton's theories were, then we'll just replace them with a bigger understanding of evolution, rather than a complete replacement of the theory with something completely different. We're well past that stage, there is just too much data and too much that matches up with the Theory of Evolution perfectly. If it's wrong, it's incomplete, not completely wrong. We are never throwing this thing out, it sits at the core of our understanding of biology and the variety of life we have on this planet, and it's staying there whether we come up with a better theory or not.

I believe the symbolism in the Genesis tale stems largely from monotheistic modifications to disguise a creation involving multiple "gods", but the story is anything but vague. A dark, water covered world is transformed into one with seas, land and life spinning closer to or near a star.

It's not very exact, it's very vague. Prop open a cosmology book about the Big Bang for contrast, and look at all the detail there. Like, I don't know, this random book here maybe [warning: PDF incoming]. Genesis is incredibly vague in comparison.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Hmm, okay. Let's have a go at this.

I have already pointed out that science allegedly proves that change happens

I think we can all agree to accept that this is a self-evident truth and the starting point of pretty any philosophical argument whatsoever. Science isn't really required to prove that change happens.

but refuses to admit that things can change in a drastic fashion.

No it doesn't. This is not even remotely true.

So for the first example, if something changes and information is introduced into the DNA; what deems it necessary that it takes billions of years as opposed to happening instantly?

Everything we know about how biological processes work and how lifeforms breed and evolve tells us this must happen slowly. That's what deems it necessary. It's a deduction drawn from the knowledge gained by actually looking at things, it's not just pulled out of the air. Therefore you can't just pull your counter-argument out of the air either if you want it to be taken seriously.

What is the difference in taking millions of years for the wind to erode soil, and a Flood doing it in hours?

The two processes have measurably different effects and so it is therefore possible to note these effects and infer what caused them. Again, this comes from actually looking at lots of things, over a long period of time, and making logical deductions. It's not just pulled out of the air.

Why does change have to happen outside of the human observable experience. There are plenty of observable instances that can produce the same result.

No idea what this means.

In fact Science relies on observable evidence, yet people still refuse to accept that ancient humans were just as capable of doing observations.

I don't think anyone is refusing to accept this at all. The specific claim that people in ancient Greece weren't using telescopes or particle accelerators is not a claim that they weren't observing anything at all.

We have some what a clue about what happened last century or two, but there are a lot of people today, who cannot understand why humans used to own slaves. I can see why we question our past. I cannot understand why you think that people nine thousand years ago even had the same questions we do today. I assume an explanation would be that humans have not changed. Yet humans can observe changes in how humans think every few hundred years. The extraordinary claim is to state that we know the exact state of mind the humans had 9000 years ago. It makes sense to me that they were recording what they experienced. It makes sense to you that they were making things up. I grant you that they may not have had as extensive a vocabulary that we do at the moment, but even that is an assumption. My assumption is they left out a lot of detail. Another observable human trait. Humans can only recall so much and each human has their own perspective to deal with.

I'm not sure what any of that part means really. It doesn't seem to be making a coherent point, nor does it represent what anyone else seems to be saying very well either.