Foundations, Genesis: Part One-The Genesis Creation Stories

In the beginning...

Genesis: Chapters 1 & 2 contains two very well known creation stories which are so much the foundation of all the Biblical religions. These stories show Gods power, and his status as the supreme being. They lay the foundations for why we are to worship him as the giver of all life, and why we should fear his judgment.

Most Christians unknowingly combine these two stories in to one single story. Since most Christians have been told the story before they can read, and already know what the stories say, if they ever actually read the stories for themselves, they tend to read what they already believe instead of actually reading the words written, and don’t notice any problems. This practice of reading what you believe instead of reading what is written is very common. Ignorance is a very powerful tool which has been used by the Christian church from its beginning. As a result, it can be a laborious project even showing many people that there are two stories.

The fact that there are two stories is, in and of itself, not a problem. So, long as both stories agree on any shared details then they could simply be differing views of the same event. One popular, though unfounded belief is that both stories were written by Moses. This notion is rejected by Bible scholars who say that the two stories were written by different authors more than a century apart, and base the stories on other stories written by other people hundreds of years earlier. The scholars’ explanation of the stories is largely ignored by literal intepretationists.

The literal interpretationists who do accept that there are two separate stories will often say something along the lines of: ‘Genesis chapter 2 is a detailed description of the creation of man contained in chapter one, which is why it may seem like a different story.’ Or, as it was once put to me: the differences are the same as my telling you one day that I went to the mall on Saturday, and then my later giving you a list of stores that I went to while at the mall on Saturday. Either way, I went to the mall on Saturday.

The problem is that the Genesis version of this story would be closer to your telling me that you went to the mall every day for a week and giving me a list of stores that you went to while at the mall in a specific order, and then later saying that you went to the mall last week and giving me a list of the same stores in a different order. You have given me two different lists only one of which can be correct. With normal person to person contact, this wouldn’t be a big deal as people make mistakes. But, if the lists you give me are to be taken as the infallible divinely inspired word of God which I am to believe every single word of, then the two lists must match perfectly.

Genesis’ lists don’t even come close to matching.

Genesis Chapters 1 & 2: A Summary

(Since most literal interpretationists use the King James version of the Bible, that is the version I will use here, but the details for the stories are universal across all accepted versions. The problems with differing versions and why they even exist will be discussed in future posts)

Genesis Chapter 1 (Gen 1) contains the well-known day by day order of creation:

• Day One-the earth is already there and God creates light.
• Day Two-God creates the sky
• Day Three-God separates the waters on the Earth and the land that is there ‘appears’. He then creates grass, trees, and other plants.
• Day Four-God creates the Sun, the Moon, and the stars. These creations, according to the Bible, give us our 24 hr day and 365 day year and our four seasons.
• Day Five-God creates “every” animal that lives in the water, and “every” bird that has wings (no wingless birds).
• Day Six-God creates “every” land animal, then one of the Gods creates man and woman in his image. He tells his newly created people that they are vegetarians, that they should have sex and make babies, and that they are in charge of every animal on the planet.

Genesis Chapter 2 (Gen 2) starts by telling about the seventh day of creation when God has to rest from all of his creation work. Then, starting in verse four, the story of creation is retold and the chapter ends with Adam and Eve blissfully naked in the Garden of Eden.

Genesis Chapter 1 & 2: Detailed Comparison


Chapter one creation starts with God floating over a dark, empty blob which is to become the Earth then goes on to explain in a detailed ordered list how everything else was created over a span of six days.

Chapter two creation, which says it is “...the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created,” talks about how all creation, including the Earth-blob which was there when chapter one starts, was done in one day.

If you ignore either Gen 2:4 , or Gen 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, and 31, as wrong, then there is no contradiction. Or, you could say that the term day does not necessarily mean the 24 hour rotation of the Earth on its axis as we understand it to be, but instead could be 24 hrs, six days, or even a millennia, and that these definitions are different in different chapters and in different parts of chapters. To do this you must first ignore Gen 1: 14-18 as wrong. Either way you have to say that one part or another is wrong, but this can’t be possible if the whole thing is right, so you could do as most believers do and ignore this problem all together.

So, lets do as most believers do: accept that a day is sometimes not a day, pretend that Gen 2:4 doesn’t even exist, and continue on blissfully ignorant of this problem and accept the creation story in chapter two as a detailed description of day(?) 6 from chapter 1.

Since the first part of the chapter 2 story uses the word and instead of then it can be argued (albeit weakly) that there is no conflict between it and chapter 1 which liberally uses then to give it order. There is no conflict since and doesn’t explicitly imply a definitive order. However, the first word of Gen 2:15 is then, so now we have an order of creation. Everything in chapter 2 before this word happens before everything after this word.

In Gen 2: 4-14--The “heavens and earth”, a man, the Garden of Eden, and every tree are created. THEN in Gen 2 15-21 God puts the man in the Garden, makes him a vegetarian, creates the land animals and birds (we have to assume that fish and other sea creatures were created at a different time), and creates a woman.

Genesis Chapters 1 & 2: Conclusion

So lets compare:

Gen 1-

• God creates everything in the universe
• THEN creates men and women at the same time.

Gen 2-

• God creates “the heavens and the earth”, every tree, and a man.
• THEN God creates, land animals, birds, and a woman.

There are two distinctly different orders of creation in obviously different stories. How can this be so if the two stories are both about the same event and infallible truth?

But, the contradictions are obvious:

• Gen 1 men and women are created at the same time--Gen 2 man and woman are created at different times.
• Gen 1 men and women are created after the trees--Gen 2 man is created before the trees, and woman is created after, or at the same time as the trees.
• Gen 1 birds are created before men and women--Gen 2 birds are created after man is created, and before or at the same time as woman is created.
• Gen 1 land animals are created at the same time as men and women--Gen 2 land animals are created after man is created but before woman is created.

And, I am being generous with these contradictions by allowing that the word and as it is used in chapter 2 does not imply order, which it clearly does.

Having opened the Bible and just read the first few pages we already have a problem. The first two chapters of the Bible are in direct conflict with each other. If the Bible is to be believed then there can be only one true order of creation: either things were created in one order or they were created in another order. It cannot be both. There can be no conflicting order in the Bible because it simply can’t happen if it is the divine work of God.

Of course there is the obvious answer to this problem: the Bible is a piece of fiction written by ancient men, pieced together, by men, from documents or parts of documents spanning hundreds of years and different geographical locales and cultures in order to fill in parts of their mythology, and give their god power.  In short, they are not the infallible work of divine inspiration from a perfect higher being.

Disagree? Why? Prove it?

After all, you are commanded by the Bible to spread God’s word...right?

　

Foundations: Genesis-Intro.

In a discussion about the Bible as the foundation of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, there is no better place to start than Genesis.

Genesis is not only the first book of the Bible, it contains some of the core elements which provide the foundation on which other Biblical stories and tenants are based--a Biblical cornerstone if you will. The concept of God’s being the creator of all things gives God the credibility to be a law giver as well as judge, jury, and executioner. Or, as the old parental threat goes: I brought you into this world--I can take you out.

As a divinely inspired statement of fact, Genesis, especially the first two chapters, fails miserably on two substantial fronts: it doesn’t match scientific observation, and it contradicts itself.

As for science, we all know the problems: chemistry, physics, cosmology, biology, geology, paleontology, archeology, and numerous other ‘ologies’ have shown that events in the Genesis could not have happened the way they are portrayed.

Some of the older Christian sects, such as Catholicism, have come to terms with this and teach Genesis as a series of fables or morality plays. The problem with this is the obvious question of who decides what is reality and what is fable: if Adam and Eve weren’t real people, then how can we accept that Moses, Abraham, Judas, or even Jesus were real since the only primary source of material about these people is the same source of material that says Adam and Eve were real?

While the division of the Bible into fable and fact poses a set of problems concerning circular logic, it is the belief in the Bible as an infallible statement of fact that poses the greatest problem. The basic premise of this belief is simply that if it says it happened in the Bible then it happened. If the Bible says the Sun moves around the Earth (which it does) then the Sun moves around the Earth, and to say otherwise is wrong despite any evidence to the contrary e.g. If the Bible doesn’t say it, then it can’t be true.

So, if we are to accept the Bible as infallible fact then there can be no contradictions in the stories given. If a man in a bar tells a woman that he is an astronaut then later in the evening says that he is an architect she will then begin to wonder if anything else he told her about himself can be trusted. The same idea applies to the Bible.

As Genesis contains so may errors of conflict and contradiction, I will divide my discussion of it into several posts beginning with Genesis Part One: The Genesis Creation Stories.  From there I will cover other issues such the fall of man, and man's move from a vegan to the current diet in subsequent posts.

Feet of Clay--Crumbling Foundations

The strength of any system lies at its foundation.  If a building has weak foundations it will fail and come crumbling down due to its own failed construction.  This applies to philosophical and scholarly ideas as well.  Take any intro-level philosophy course and you will quickly learn that there are many systems of thought which have gone out of favor through the centuries due to their being challenged and found wanting by successive generations of philosophers.

Religions too have fallen over time due to inherently poor construction.  People start out believing a religion's explanations about the physical universe, or that their god or gods are the only sensible explanation.  Over time these people discover that these explanations don't match up to competing ideas or hold up to new evidence, so they move on to another way of thinking and the religion dies.

The Biblical religions are no different, with Christianity being the best example.  Christianity started as a small cult within Judaism.  Small groups of early Jews branching off on their own were common occurrences, but usually died off, were killed off, or were re-assimilated back into the fold.  Christianity, and later, Islam, are glaring exceptions to this.

Due in no small part to the Roman occupation of Judaism's birthplace, Christianity not only survived, but grew, eventually becoming stronger than its parent philosophy.  But, soon after its formation Christianity began suffering schisms as well.  This early fracturing can be seen in Paul's letters in the Bible. 

The early infighting eventually led to a cohesive system of thought based around the beliefs of the strongest group, whom we today know as the Catholic Church.  It is this church who chose what was eventually included in the Bible and what beliefs were accepted as true.

As flaws appeared in the Catholic Church's teachings the church began to fracture.  Like cracks in any foundation these fractures spread exponentially.  What was once a cohesive centralized system of belief has transformed over the last 500 years into a system of at least 41,000 different sects.  The last numbers I saw would put this number at 35,000+ in the United States alone.

Though all of these Churches have differing beliefs about which is the one true belief, they, as well as Judaism and Islam,  all have the Bible as a foundation.  Despite the Bible's being a fractured and crumbling foundation people still build their entire lives upon it.  Many people much more literate than I have explained why this is, so I won't go into that here.  Instead I will show where these cracks are and how they show the inherent failure of the Bible as a source of anything other than fables and fairy tales.

In order to separate them from other subjects on this blog, I will group this series of posts on the Bible's flaws under the label and heading "Foundations...."

As always I challenge anyone with a differing view to show me the way.

Disagree?  Why?  Prove it?