Why don't some people understand that the Bible and Evolution are completely compatible?

Question

This is a true honest question. Please don't post propaganda, I just want honest answers.

In Genesis, it says that God said let there be light. And there WAS light. Just like that. (Gen 1:3)

Then God says, let the earth produce vegetation. And THE EARTH PROUDCED vegetation. (Gen 1:11)

Then both are tied together when God says, let the earth bring forth creatures. And God creates them. It seems to me that it is implied he used the earth to create these creatures. (Gen 1:20)

Unlike the light, it does not say "And plants appeared." It says "the land produced vegetation."

I'm a writer so I believe that all words are chosen carefully and mean what they mean. This is what I think is the literal meaning of Genesis. There is nothing to read into. I'm not twisting the words to get my meaning. I"m pointing out that there clearly is a difference btwn the way God creates light and the earth and how he creates life.

(We are ignoring Adam and Eve for the time being.)

Answer 1

You are correct to say that Genesis should be interpreted literallly... but that literal interpretation is telling us something different than what you think.

In biblical times, people thought that the earth and heaven were all that there was... and that the earth was essentially a 'terrarium' (you might want to look that up). They thought that the sky was a solid object, called the 'firmament', and that the sun, moon, and stars were affixed to it. So, essentially, heaven is 'on the other side of the sky'.

The story of Genesis is comprised of the myths, superstitions, fairy tales and fantastical delusions of an ignorant bunch of Bronze Age fishermen and wandering goat herders, lifted from the oral traditions of other cultures, and crafted into a tale that incorporated some of their own folk tales and pseudo-history. This collection of ignorance provides the basis for the Abrahamic cults of desert monotheism... Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The cosmological aspects of Genesis are perfectly understandable, if you contemplate it in the proper context. At the time the bible stories were concocted, the perception was that the earth was the object and the center of creation. Why? Because they had no reason to think otherwise. Today, as we advance science, we stand upon the shoulders of all the scientists that came before. Back then there were no shoulders to stand upon... so they did the best they could with what they had... their senses.

* They had no concept of 'outer space', and so they conceived that in the beginning all there was were dark waters.

* They had no concept of 'nothingness'. Remember, the concept of 'zero' wasn't invented (discovered?) until thousands of years later. With that in mind, the term 'void', as it is employed in Genesis, can not refer to 'nothingness'... it can only be applied in its alternative definition, which is 'empty'. So, the waters were dark, formless and empty (devoid of content).

* They thought that all of creation consisted of the earth and an unseen 'heaven', and they thought that the sky was a 'thing'... a substantive 'firmament' that was created by god to separate the waters and differentiate earth from heaven, when both were created.

# They had no idea that Earth was a planet, orbiting the sun.

# They had no idea that there is no firmament... that the sky is not a 'thing'.

(If you don't believe that they thought the sky was an object, consider the Tower of Babel, that they were building to reach heaven. Apparently, God ALSO thought that the sky was an object, since it concerned him so much that he confounded their speech, so as to disrupt their project and keep them from reaching his domain. God must be pretty much of a dumbass, if he doesn't even know the actual configuration of the universe that he created. So much for the 'inerrant' bible.)

* They thought that the sun was a light that god had placed upon the 'firmament' to differentiate night from day.

# They had no idea that the sun is a star... the center of our solar system.

# They had no concept of 'stars' in the same sense that we understand them today.

* They had no idea that night and day were a consequence of the earth's rotation.

* They thought that the moon was a light that god had caused to travel across the firmament to enable man to differentiate the seasons.

# They had no concept of the moon as a satellite.

* They thought that the stars were tiny lights that god had placed upon the firmament to provide for omens. (Some thought that the stars were 'holes' in the firmament that allowed the 'light of heaven' to shine through.)

# They had no idea that the stars were suns, just like our own sun.

# They thought the eyeball-visible planets (Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn) were 'wandering stars'.

# They had no idea that the planets were actually sun-orbiting bodies, just like earth.

* They had no idea that the earth, itself, is a planet.

# They had no clue as to the actual nature of the earth, our solar system, the place of our solar system in the galaxy... or even of the existence of our galaxy. (Up until very recently, we didn't even know that there were other galaxies. Our galaxy, when it was first known that there actually WAS a galaxy, was thought to be the whole universe.) From their perspective, the 'earth' and 'heaven' (i.e., whatever existed on the other side of the sky) represented all that there was.

I do not say this things to disparage what they thought back then. They were trying to do what science is trying to do today... trying to understand reality. Today, we have technology and disciplined meta-procedures (scientific method) to help us extract answers from nature.

Back then, they did not.

Today, we have 'theories' to provide consistent explanations for what we are able to observe in nature, supplemented and validated by the additional information that we are able to extract from nature by means of our technology, our disciplined methods and our intellectual tools (mathematics, logic). Most of our theories are incomplete, so we continue to work on them... because we know that they are incomplete.

Back then, they did not have disciplined methods, and they did not have the technology to extract answers from nature. The only information they had access to was what they could see with their own eyeballs. There was no technological knowledge base or scientific context in which to interpret their observations, so they had to appeal to their imaginations... and the 'supernatural'... in order to make sense out of what they saw. Actually, what they really achieved was deluding themselves into thinking that they knew the truth. Amazingly, over time, this delusion has become codified, institutionalized, and incorporated... complete with franchises.

Basically, Genesis can be thought of as a 'theory', concocted by people who were constrained by lack of technology, methodology and intellectual tools... but they sure weren't constrained by lack of imagination.

Today, we try to interpret Genesis in the context of what we know to be true of the universe... galaxies, stars, planets, moons, gravity, orbits, inclination of the earth's axis, planetary rotation, etc. They problem is that Genesis can't be interpreted in terms of those things, because Genesis was written by men, based on oral traditions, and those men did not know about those things. They could only write about what they could see and what they could guess about the reasons that lay behind what they saw. In any event, it provided them with a mechanism to quell the innate anxiety that comes with fretting about how and why they came to be here.

They guessed wrong.

So... I think that the cosmological aspects of Genesis require a literal interpretation... no metaphors... no allegory... no hidden meaning. The key, though, is in understanding that the literal interpretation does not lead to a description of the way things ARE... it leads to a description of the way they THOUGHT things are. It leads to a naive description of reality, concocted by people who were doing the best they could with what they had.

It is absolutely appalling, though, to realize that hundreds of millions of people, TODAY, including participants in this forum, BELIEVE that this ignorant bovine excrement is actually TRUE.

Answer 2

I think you are missing the point of creation entirely. The most important part of creation is the fact that God, a super being, more powerful and knowledgeable than anyone of us could ever aspire to be, created, made happen from the very act of saying "BE", our world as we know it. It takes a person who can give up to the fact that there is something better than they are, smarter than they are, and immortal, and not let their ego get in the way, to believe in the words written down in a book.

I am a Christian. I believe the Bible to be God's Word, or His communications to us. It has been interpreted by so many different times and languages, it has been given the possibility of not being correct, by people who are out to make a buck most of the time. This is a Pharisaical position to take. You are so worried about the placing and definition of the words, you miss the meaning entirely. Trust God, He will never let this happen. He is the one who told us His Word was sharper than a two edged sword. Now that is sharp. And it is pretty powerful too.
Okay now then do you have a visual picture of electricity when it is powering up a battery or making a stove top hot. No I don't anyway. Now compare that to the being of God. He tells us He is everywhere. What is the one thing that can me made or generated on every surface of the earth by some mechanical means. Voltage, electricity, power. God. Your own body creates an electrical charge to continue living. If you get you current messed up you got problems and bad ones as far as your health is concerned.
Well that is my theory anyway and what is religion and evolution but theories anyway. I believe we have a misguided notion as to the direction we need to take to be able to have awareness as to the being of God. He is everywhere, including inside you and me.'
This is God's breath.
I believe I can get behind the big bang theory best of all of the theories of evolution and the theory that Christians teach about creation. They fit together. Our scientists have developed carbon dating as the absolute in dating rocks and fossils. This is the way they are derriving the age of the earth and the fossils of pre-historic man they proclaim that are anyway, are just bones folks, and rocks, and preserved animals and insects. Things on this earth are not the same everywhere. In the rainforests things that die deteriorate at a rapid rate and become dust soon. But things that die at the North Pole are never going to deteriorate, they freeze solid and stay that way. Now how are you going to carbon date and be accurate about it with those two extreme variables to deal with. I know they have developed something or another to back up their science. Still doesn't make the circumstances any different does it
If we are evolving over the eons, why have we stopped evolving, I do not see anything to indicate the human being has changed at all since we picked up a stick and drew on cave walls. We still look, talk, eat, and reproduce the same. The only evolution I see is a de- evolving of every plant, animal, and gas, in the world. And we do not get any more of these things, we just recycle what was always here from the beginning. So maybe we should put some thought to that one for a minute, and stop wrecking a making a mess out of what we have to use to live on. He gave us what we needed to survive and we are not doing real well with it.
The end.

Answer 3

Sorry, evolution and bible stories just don't mix. You can't have exceptions, honey..... and all DNA is exactly alike -- from sea squids, to oak trees, to humans, to monkeys to horses, back to fish and lizards, it is all alike. It is the ARRANGEMENT that is different, but we are all, everything on this planet made of DNA and we are all related, and come from a common ancestor -- that first clump of cells that were able to replicate. And why are we here??? accident. If some things did not happen, we would not have been here, at this time, in this place.
People, honey, are not the center of the universe,
they just aren't, and no book anywhere will convince any thinking human mind that people are the center of the universe. humanity is just a group of little blobs here on this planet for just the shortest of times measured in cosmic time.
and nothing gives a damn of the life on this planet, which is merely a blink of an eyelash in the scheme of the eons. There can't be any literal meaning of Genesis -- so do some historical bible study insomeplace other than a church!!!!!! Things were added to the bible, and omitted from it for political reasons, and the last big one (King James) was done sometime after the death of Elizabeth I of England, about 1615. Too long to discuss here.

Nope, you have to take it all: all the DNA or all the bible, but you can't be a cafeteria style religious person, sorry. Frankly, the DNA makes more sense, but suit yourself ..... but as we say "whatever makes you happy....."

Answer 4

Okay, here we go. Gear up. I'm going to try to stay calm.

I am a person who maintains - and will always maintain - that God and science, or in this case, evolution and the bible, are incompatible at their very core.

Let me start by saying that I do *NOT DOUBT* that you can, through all sorts of liberal interpretations, pretty much be able to suggest that the bible says just about anything.

People have been doing that for years. It's led to different religions. It's led to different subsets of different religions. It's led to gay-friendly churches, and anti-gay churches, and creationists, and religious evolutionists who say, as I believe you might suggest, that while science is part of the truth, *God* created *science*, and is in fact "above" even it.

The point is, the bible has created scores of people who believe all of these things, very strongly, not to mention COUNTLESS other varying viewpoints of the world...and the reason its believers are not more unified is simply a matter of how strictly or loosely one interprets it. So. On this level, of course the bible is compatible with evolution. It's also compatible with creationism. It's also compatible with turning the other cheek. It's also compatible with an eye for an eye.

The problem I, and many others have (well, not that many) - is that what we're REALLY, TRULY talking about here, is two entirely different modes of thinking... that is, logic, versus faith. Could evolution be true, AND God exist? We say no, because we hope that a person who understands science and the world around him enough - if he thinks logically, if he rationally figures out things for himself - to the point that evolution makes complete and perfect sense - will no longer have a NEED to look to a two-thousand year old text written by primitive desert dwellers who claimed it was inspired by the creator of the universe. Do we worship ancient greek documents about the Olympian Gods? Why not? Because christianity had better PR. Historically, economically, politically, influentially - it was a very well-designed religion. And, like Islam, it sealed a long-term place for itself by its implied tenets that nonbelievers should be persecuted.

The point is - sure, it's easy to say "well, the bible supports the claims of evolution - or at least it doesnt deny them" - but why are you trying to use logic to backup a religion based in blind faith, lack of empirical evidence, and a "God" that defies perception? Doesn't it make more sense that it was merely a creation of man's overactive imagination? His need for an understand of the world around him and a purpose for his existence? It seems that way to me. And that is why I discourage the blending of science and religion - I think that all we do should be RATIONAL.

Answer 5

As much as its diciples wish it did, the fact remains that Science just doesn't have all the answers, folks.

There is still absolutely no plausible scientific answer to the big question of how life (living, breathing, eating, pooping living matter) emerged out of a galactic bang that spilled out billions and billions of gigantic and dead space rocks.

I believe that what we now call "evolution" is the process by which God created Man as we know ourselves today (and all of the other critters in the world while He was at it).

God started by CREATING the universe (note the reference to the word CREATE) with a bang. From that flowed the sun and the earth (along with LOTS of other solar systems). Then He created the most simple building blocks of life (DNA) and guided them through millenia after millenia to get us to where we would be "evolved" enough to at least try to understand Him and why we are here.

As for the book of Genesis, it's not a science book. It's not a history text. It's what one guy wrote down when he was given the gift of a vision by God.

So ask yourself this...if you're a guy who has NEVER even thought about the concept of evolution and have no idea of how to conceptualize a span of time longer than your own life. You consider wheels and fire to be as cutting edge high tech as what we consider an iPod now.

You as a human of the distant past are presented with this extraordinary vision covering thousands and thousands of years of time. As you see Man emerge from the ocean (i.e. references to sand) and grow into something else completely, how would you describe it?

Answer 6

You have a good point and I agree with you completely...

But I figure I'll play a little devil's advocate here. What about different versions of the Bible? It's hard to nitpick over wordings and such when there's so many different versions that all have different wordings.

For instance, the New Living Translation says this instead:
Then God said, "Let the land burst forth with every sort of grass and seed-bearing plant. And let there be trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. (Gen 1:11)

That's a different wording that goes opposite to your point. It does say, "let there be trees".

Answer 7

The Bible says that there is a god who directly created human beings. That's not compatible with the fact that Homo sapiens came from earlier forms of life. Therefore the two are not compatible, and the Bible is simply wrong about it, if taken literally.

If not taken literally, then of course you can interpret the Bible however you want to make it fit the facts, but if you're willing to do that then there's really no such thing as "compatible" and "incompatible".

Answer 8

for my area, i do not see why no longer. i ought to larger come sparkling even if and say that even if delivered up in a great non secular custom, i'm an atheist. in case you could ask your self on the miracles of nature, i do not see why you need to no longer trust that a god or gods made all of it. the placement takes position at the same time as human beings choose to take the bible actually. that is a decision of historic texts, a number of which contain very profound and functional messages, which develop into written over 1000 years in the past with suggestions from those who did no longer have the great thing about at present's medical understanding or preparation. i develop into continually taught, at church and at sunday college ( I attended many, many years), that for sure evoluation is reality. we've each and each and every of the evidence. conception in God, Jesus, Allah, is a controversy of religion merely. we haven't any evidence for his or her existence. in case you choose or choose to have non secular beliefs, is on no account incompatible with a conception in the findings of technological understanding. Many properly conventional and respected (I do pressure respected, i do not recommend this variety of creationist/ evolution denying form without perfect medical credentials) scientists are deeply non secular and religious human beings. Others aren't any further. To my ideas, the bible is a decision of exciting memories. yet you could't take it actually, to finish that is absurd.

Answer 9

dont think that they are complitly compatible but another way of looking at this is can spirituality and logic be compatible, for me it is just another perspective on the the same event.
We are all made up of mind,body and spirity and cannot have one without the others there is a spiritual aspect to every event , i believe.
take for example a kiss logically you could describe the touching of two pairs of fleshy parts, swapping molecules of syliva (you gt the idea) but that is just part of the kiss and doesnt describe the whole of the experience(and i feel sorry for those of you that it does) would you say that the feeling of a kiss was completely explained by chemical reactions?
what about all the poetry , music etc inspired from kisses love etc? all down to chemical reactions??
, to me that idea is as blinkered than the supposed blinkers of
faith

the truth is truth and no ammount of 'logic' can change that to me logic and rationality are just humans fumbled attempts to offer an explanation
. To neglect the spirit is to neglect the heart and ultimately a whole dimension of the human experience.

therefore they are compatible -

Answer 10

Finding literal interpretations of especially the Genesis Chapter sort of misses the point.

"Let there be light."

This means, let there be a set of opposites.

Metaphorically, before Genesis, there was Unconscious Being.

Then, there was Knower and Known.
God and Creature (created)

Heaven and Earth.

Male and Female.

I suppose you could arbitrarily bring the story along into Materialism and say, "Then the amoebas screwed each other and here we are."

Answer 11

As a matter of fact, I just read Genesis 1 this morning. I agree with you that they are quite compatable. I am a born again Christian and believe that all of creation in the Bible are in the same order as science declares. After all, God created science. God is science.