Were the seven days of creation in Genesis seven twenty four hour periods? - Where do these notions originate?
I like to post about new perspectives and finds in the sciences of human origins, paleontology, geomorphology etc.
It is not uncommon for me to have well-meaning Christians and others on steemit express their opinions in the comments sections of these posts. These, mostly well-meaning comments, invariably reflect some aspect of a notion that the biblical creation is perceived by them to be at odds with the consensus views of modern science regarding the age of the planet, how it formed, how life emerged and evolved and our relationship as humans to the animal kingdom and our evolution therefrom.
Some feel that to accept the current scientific perspectives rejects the teachings of the bible regarding “The Creation” and threatens faith in God.
I hold a different opinion, I find that studying the natural sciences does not diminish my faith but instead enriches my understanding of God and His creative processes and leaves me more in awe of Him and what He has done each day.
I used to do a regular Sunday post about these types of topics but there was a patch of not so much activity on steemit and the audience was less engaged.
With all the new users joining steemit daily it may be time to reinstitute my Sunday posts to balance the posts I place on natural sciences and have something to link to in response to comments I get on these posts during the week.
The creation in Genesis
There is a widely prevailing notion that the seven days of creation in Genesis 1 are seven twenty four hour periods. This notion stems from a strictly literal interpretation of the scriptures as they stand in English and stems to an extent from medieval times.
In medieval times the Christian world in Europe consisted of a mostly illiterate populace taught doctrines as they received them from the widespread and universal Catholic Church. Bibles were not in English but Latin and you believed was what you were told to believe.
What you were told to believe were interpretations of doctrines and scripture based on creeds developed and adopted over the centuries by the religious and political elite.
Prior to the universal Catholic Church and its monopoly on doctrine and the interpretation of scripture, dictated by creeds, views and interpretations were far more divers.
One simply needs to go to the writings of the early Christian Fathers and other writers in the first few centuries after Christ to get an indication of the diversity of the interpretations that were held, discussed, entertained and written about. These were stamped out in the council of Nicaea and systematically eradicated, with little challenge in the centuries that followed.
Then along came the renaissance, the reformation and the age of enlightenment, which changed the status quo and broke the monopoly of the Catholic Church and medieval processes and thinking. People could read, religion diversified, science emerged and amongst many other things, people could begin to think for themselves again.
In spite of the reformation however much of religious thinking has remained burdened with medieval notions, interpretations and ideas that were so prevalent, widespread and universally accepted. True the reformers reformed some fundamental doctrines, but many remain unchanged centuries later, literally unscathed.
One of these is that of an ex nihilo creation occurring over the period of seven, twenty four hour days.
The age of enlightenment, modern science and all of its discoveries have vastly enriched or knowledge of the universe, its systems and processes and life in all of its diversity.
I doesn’t take much reading of the natural sciences to quickly detect a discrepancy between what we have learned through these sciences and the medieval notions of planetary and human origins.
Many Christians will probably now be objecting saying “But it says so in the bible”.
To which I reply “Does it? Or are your interpretations of what you read there simply skewed by long held medieval notions and interpretations”
Let me use a very familiar instance to illustrate.
We all know about the three wise men that came bearing gifts to the baby Jesus in a manger.
Actually two aspects of the above statement have no scriptural basis or evidence:
- The number of wise men are never disclosed only that there are three types of gifts.
- The wise men never visited the manger but only appeared in Bethlehem when Jesus was living in a house as a toddler and that is why Herod didn’t order the slaughter of newborns but the slaughter of children below the age of 2
We are so used to nativity scenes and other narratives that this clouds or perspective of what the scriptures actually say, even when we read them for ourselves.
But that is enough for now...
Next time I will delve into what the creation in Genesis is actually about…
i totally agree with your post and believe that "a little knowledge of science makes you an atheist and in-depth knowledge of science makes you firm believer in God"
Now, that is well said.
I totally agree with you, i have found something similar here, it's a good read : http://bit.ly/2sDRKbV
Nice art. Also this is what ive always felt about the genesis story. And as we learn more about evolution it makes more and more sense. Given dinosaurs are early precursors to, and eventually evolved into, birds one could poetically describe the time of dinosaurs, before the rise of mammals, as the day of birds and fish. Then later more advanced creatures evolved and finally man shows up. If you flip the genders around and conceive that Eve was created first and Adam was a product of her the whole rib metaphor makes more sense given we start as female and then later become male. Or consider that each member of Adam and Eve's family wasnt a single individual but a certain breeding or genetic grouping it again makes more sense. The big bang could be described as "let there be light!" The formation of the planets could be "separating the waters from the waters" after all how would you describe such cosmic events to the ancients?
Im no longer Christian but I still feel one has to view scripture with a certain poetic and metaphoric lense.
The dinosaurs birds descend from were land animals. Genesis says land animals came after birds.
Correct, I will be discussing this in more detail in the follow up
I would be more interested to see your answer to my other post, which recounts the first few verses in Genesis where yom is defined. Light is separated from darkness, light is named day (yom) and darkness is named night. This is a literal day, is it not? It is said to have an evening and a morning as well.
and where is the afternoon... but we will get there
I found my study of anthropology to... diminish my view of science.
What I was taught in anthropology was much like the three wise men (magi) visiting the stables / manger.
What I was taught sounded really plausible and had me questioning my beliefs and previous knowledge. (which was good, but an unstable time) So, then I got out of college, and learned about all the hoaxes involved in the field of anthropology. And I learned that all the things taught to me as facts where little more than theories with very little evidence (in some cases, none)
I was very disappointed in science.
The biggest lie in anthropology is that the evidence of micro evolution is proof of macro evolution. (when there is no proof, and some can argue, no evidence.)
There is no distinction between "micro" and "macro" evolution. The latter is just a lot of the former. Those terms are also not used by real biologists. They were invented by creationists specifically so they could concede examples of evolution that can be directly observed (in single celled organisms, because they live, reproduce and die so rapidly) but still deny that it happens to multicellular life, or that it can proceed far enough that speciation occurs.
The problem with this is that evolution does not only happen to small things. It acts on anything capable of self-replicating with occasional copying errors (mutation). There are also no magical boundaries that stop evolution at a certain point, preventing a species from changing until it is unrecognizable.
The concept of "kinds" is another one that only creationists take seriously. It does not exist in biology. Creationists say "Wolves can evolve into dogs but they both still look like dogs, so they are the same kind." To say that they look samey to human beings is not terribly scientific.
There's also the matter of the archaeopteryx. It is a clear example of a proto=bird but with saurid features, such as the dinosaur snout with sharp teeth instead of a beak. Interestingly, the genes for those saurid features have not been lost, just switched off, and still exist in the genome of modern birds.
Because of this, scientists have been able to switch those genes back on in fertilized chicken eggs, and the resulting chicken embryos had dinosaur shaped snouts with teeth instead of a beak.
Birds have those genes because they descended from dinosaurs. Fish don't have those genes. Insects don't have them. Are birds and dinosaur the same "kind"? I would say not, they look(ed) very different. So then how does a creationist explain the archaeopteryx fossil remains, or the dormant saurid genes in modern birds?
Thanks for typing this up saved me the work.
The word kind in the bible(for non-creationists) would better be understood as "inheritance"
Perhaps I can save you even more work:
https://steemit.com/religion/@alexbeyman/to-christians-who-accept-evolution-is-nature-obviously-the-work-of-an-intelligent-designer-the-authors-of-the-bible-apparently
https://steemit.com/scams/@alexbeyman/don-t-get-tricked-bro-how-to-recognize-a-cult
https://steemit.com/religion/@alexbeyman/diagram-of-a-memetic-virus
https://steemit.com/religion/@alexbeyman/jesus-predicted-a-first-century-return-that-did-not-occur
https://steemit.com/science/@alexbeyman/substance-dualism-the-creationism-of-the-21st-century
A lot of us Christians take the 7 days of creation, or 7 periods of organization as seven earth 24 hour periods, not taking into account that John the apostle stated in the book of Revelation that the divine day is composed of 1000 of our earth years. That being said it would make the Earth about 13,000 years old according to a litteral and holistic interpretation of the Biblical times line. That would make the univers about that same age that Edwin Huble estimated it to be, before geologists fudged his calculations to accommodate their millions of years of sedimentation hypothesis This begs the question how was all the sedimentary rock on the continents deposited and creatures so perfectly presserved in those sedaments with no sign of decomposition? Could it be that during a time when the Earth was subjected to emence tidel forces and its temporature drop passed the dew point that these condition combined to caused aquafers to rise and the mist soked atmosphere to condence in a torential rain that lasted 40 days and 40 night covering the earth with boiling water under extreme pressure depositing millions of year of sedement in the course of a single year and stacking life forms in an appearent order of evolution, that actually lived on earth together at the time, through the prosess of centrafugation.
I've read the theory's of centrafugation liquefaction and the like. The have some major difficulties if you actually go out into the field and test them. Fossilized track-ways and other fossilized remains of bio-activity or fossilized geological processes just to name two.
Anthropology, like everything has its quacks, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater...
Oh yes, micro-evolution is completely fascinating. The emergence of new sub-species... I am sure we will see some actual happening in the next couple generations.
Like the new large coyotes (or small wolves) that have taken over the in between lands of north america.
There were lots of different translations (from latin) of the bible in the middle ages, look it up. The objections of the Catholic church was not translations per se, but rather the hugely different versions written by people not fluent in latin or simply that the native language wasn't sufficiently developed to encompass the nuances and full meanings of the latin version (Biblia vulgata).
See for example Cambridge History of the Bible: "the vernacular appeared simply and totally inadequate. Its use, it would seem, could end only in a complete enfeeblement of meaning and a general abasement of values. Not until a vernacular is seen to possess relevance and resources, and, above all, has acquired a significant cultural prestige, can we look for acceptable and successful translation."
Also, the notion of the medieval period as a backward and simpleminded period has been thoroughly revised by historians. It is quite ironic that for example the "burning century" (witchhunts) was between 1550-1650, and that witches and magic was deemed as superstition during most of the middle ages.
I would also point out that the Catholic church interprets Genesis symbolically and not literally. The view that the earth was created in 7 days is held solely by (some) protestants.
Lastly I must mention that the notion of "medieval notions of planetary [...] origins was not developed by the church, but was based on aristotelic theories from the classical period, which ironically, was the period the so-called age of enlightenment defined itself a continuation of a.k.a. the Renaissance.
This is not a Catholicism bash, in case anybody interprets it as that, Catholicism was simply a monopoly for a long time and that has lasting impacts still visible today in various forms.
As you point out Catholicism has move on while other protestants have not:
“God is not a demiurge or a magician, but the Creator who gives being to all entities,” he said. Catholics have long accepted that the creation story as written in the book of Genesis in the Bible can stand along the scientific theory of evolution and that the two are not mutually exclusive.
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/10/28/pope-francis-comments-on-evolution-and-the-catholic-church
FromWikipedia
Well, @gavvet if you argue that interpretation determines the viewpoint of others, it also determines your viewpoint.
The argument about the origin of the world will always be a philosophical point, base on interpretations and the underlying faith which guide that interpretation. Even the scientist who claims facts is only doing it from a point of faith, even if that faith is in a theory of evolution.
Thanks for an interesting article.
yup, views are affected by the perspective we approach things from.
Yes, the Hebrew "yom" can mean an indefinite period of work, but it can also mean a literal day.
To figure out which the authors meant, we should examine the context. In the context of Genesis 1:4-5 where God creates separates day (yom) from night, and the evening and then morning of the first day follows, it's quite clear the authors were referring to literal days which are light out and have evenings/mornings rather than indefinite work periods which don't:
"And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day."
Christians who accept some of what science has to say balk at this and say it must be mistaken, because otherwise the Bible would be wrong, and they presuppose that it can't be. There is a much simpler alternative explanation: Christianity is false, and the authors of scripture made many such errors in their proclamations about the world because they did not actually have any specially revealed information about it.
An article of mine you might benefit from reading
I think perhaps you arrive at your "simpler alternative" a little to quickly, wait for the next one for a further discussion of "yom" etc.
You have not described any out of the box thinking. Everything laid out here still takes place very much within the box, or framework of belief, which presupposes that Christianity is true.
If you actually stepped outside of that box for even a brief moment, you would see it the same way you currently see Islam, Mormonism, Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses and so on.
The laying of the foundation occurs within the box, next time we step outside the box.
I did mention these arguments if you remember early on when we discussed religion. I believe you are at a tipping point right now, questioning whether the church has simply created these stories or borrowed from earlier myths.
I understand that personal revelation is a big thing among believers but as you continue your search towards our origins(like you are currently do), you are going to find out that people from India, see Buddha in the miracles as much as Muslims see Mohammad.
The concept of monotheism was born from the jewish community that was fleeing Egypt. If you read the original Tor'ah the first line reads "At the first day the Gods created....". The Bible made it singular later on. Polytheism was popular in Egypt but the Jewish people created a heresy, wanting to worship only one.
Hence we have today monotheism, with the three major religions. Nonetheless, we still observe the semi-gods like angels and Lucifer, all playing their own role in the pantheon of creation much like before.
At the end one question remains. If God created everything so he can play around, then who created God? If the answer is "nobody, always existed" then why skip the extra step and admit the obvious truth that everything, always existed and just gets recycled over and over again.
What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence, and definitely, there are no evidence whatsoever that a God created all these.
Hold those thought's we will visit them again soon.
looking forward
Thank you @gavvet you got a good point. The way of reading the bible is to inter-connected with the scriptures from books. And everyone reads it differently. So the meaning also comes out different for humans.