Can we PROVE that Genesis is inaccurate?

Question

The Bible Thumpers who insist on invading every discussion on the origins of the universe here are basically proposing Genesis as an alternate theory of the beginning of time. I realize that we probably aren't going to be changing anyone's mind, but can't we scientifically PROVE that at least some of Genesis is inaccurate? Please cite your sources and be objective. We're representing science here.

Clearly, if even PART of it is inaccurate, then a literal interpretation of Genesis becomes impossible to trust.

I think would be a very interesting topic of discussion. Welcome, Genesis, to the Scientific Method.

Answer 1

You are probably wasting your time.

Intelligent people need no proof of the obvious. As for the others, no proof will be accepted anyway.

You cannot prove ANYTHING to religious fanatics. No facts, no matter how sound or firmly proven will change their minds.

Genesis has already been proven false for so many hundreds of years it has become an exercise in redundancy.


"Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God."

"There is on earth among all dangers no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed and adroit reason... Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed."

[Martin Luther - Founder of the Lutheran Religion]

Typical mindset.

Religion itself deludes, blinds, and destroys and delights in it.

"Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."
Psalms 137:9


Logic, reason and intelligence does not lead someone away from a belief they arrived at by the lack of logic, reason and intelligence in the first place.

You should read the ravings of the ancient Popes about their hatred of science and true knowledge and how it must be destroyed at all costs to save the church from the truth it hates so much - how people of science should be burned at the stake as heretics and all their written works regarding their discoveries sought out and destroyed.

Look at what they did to Galileo and others.

They despise the truth, as their murderous repression of science throughout the ages proves, and they would rather see you dead than allowed to speak any version of it except whatever twisted version of it meets their approval - this week.

Genesis has two accounts of creation - compare them and see the inconsistencies and obvious scientific flaws for yourself. Then compare them to the known facts of science. A third grader is smart enough to see the errors and have his intelligence insulted.

According to the bible, plant life was flourishing on earth before the sun was created.

Genesis has failed the scientific method with a flat zero grade across the board so many times it has become a pathetic joke.

There are two accounts of Noah and his flood too. Naturally, contradictory and inconsistent with known proven facts.

The numerous proven false prophesies of the bible that have long expired and never happened are more than enough to doubt the rest of it.

Genesis disproves itself within the first ten minutes of honest evaluation. Nothing outside it is necessary to show the monkey level ignorance that went into its writing.

Generally I don't argue with those religious psychos because it's a waste of time. Why argue with a monkey?

Religion is NOT a search for truth. It's a hunt. They are hunting it down like an animal to exterminate it wherever they find it, just as they have done throughout all of recorded history up to the current day.

Look here for some interesting facts regarding Genesis and failed prophesies and other interesting things:

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com
 

Answer 2

Sigh. Religion and science are like grapes and tongue twisters; two things that really do not compare to one another very well. Science is a tool for making predictions about how the universe behaves, and for some people it helps satisfy the big questions, but certainly does not on its own.

Science does not *prove* anything. Underlying all of it are always assumptions. Science is a method of making predictions, testing those predictions, and coming up with a framework for more detailed or future predictions based on the observations of the tests.

Religion is more of a philosophy of how to live ones life. Some people dogmatically cling to literal interpretations of religious texts.

Science does not take on religion, though it does try to describe things that are at odds with dogmatic interpretations of scripture. Some people rely so much on literal interpretations to find their place in the universe these upset them, and they insist on confronting the scientific process with dogma.

When the Bible can explain how to build a telephone, or when science can test what is now understood only metaphysically, perhaps they should be compared. Until then, this is a foolish futile exercise.

Answer 3

Caution: do not attempt to employ logic in discussion with fundies. Your faith in the rationality of the human race may be damaged or destroyed.

OK, Genesis. There's not really much there to disprove, as it's pretty clearly allegorical in nature. Certainly the sequence of events is erroneous - Earth and plants created before the Sun? Not a problem for the fundamentalist, he'll have some explanation about divine grow-lights or something. Also, Genesis 2 gives a different sequence than Genesis 1.

The most obviously wrong stuff that you find is not strictly speaking in Genesis, though the people who believe will tell you it is, and that's young Earth cosmology. In order to believe in this you have to throw out large chunks of science in radiology, chemistry, geology, biology, and astronomy, among others. This is no problem for a fundamentalist. He's been told that he'll burn in hell for eternity if he believes otherwise, and he'd believe the moon is a hot-air balloon guided by flying purple wombats if he thought it would get him into heaven.

Answer 4

Intelligent design isn't being accepted by tens, let alone thousands of scientists, because it cannot provide proof that there in anything "Intelligent" to do the "Design" in the first place. Even if you could prove Darwinism, post-Darwinism or neo-Darwinism wrong, it would still not prove ID, it woul djust leave a blank sheet of paper.

Now, lets actually try and answer the question asked, rather than hide behind faith.

Tricky. Firstly, we have to remember that Genesis is not a scientific text. It is an article of faith, which even the head of the Anglican church does not accept literally.

Start at the very beginning. God created the Earth (with water) before the stars. We know the Earth to be younger than the stars. It is generally thought that the earth was too hot to have water in liquid form for many millions of years.

Gen 1.12 God creates plants. How could they grow? Because
Gen 1.16 God creates the sun

5th Day Gen 1. 20-21
God creates fish (swimming things), Birds and Whales

6th Day Gen 1.24-25
God creates grazing animals (beasts), then cattle, then creeping things (reptiles? - he doesn't go into detail.)

Not even close to the fossil record.

That was Chapter 1 dealt with. Need we continue?

Answer 5

Intelligent design? Doubtful.

I would think the easiest thing to dispute was the creation of the universe in Genesis. Created the earth, then the sky, then animals, etc.

The earth has been proven to be 4.5 billion years old, with a billion years of high heat and volcanic activity. The atmosphere was unbreathable for humans, but after plant life existed for a billion years, and oxygenated the atmosphere, complex carbon life forms could exist on the smallest of scales.

The problem is, its easy to prove Genesis incorrect as it is written. The tough part is, when you say "the universe has been around for 14 billion years", a Bible thumber may say "God did not mean literally created in a day...a day can be any length for him, etc etc". Unscientific and tricky, those thumpers.

Answer 6

You cannot prove the Big Bang, Intelligent Design or any other theory, because we are not able to test these theories, but here is something that I wonder...

Where did all the stuff that makes up the universe and reality come from (originally)? If there was a big bang, why was everything condensed into a small place to begin with? Then, why did galaxies and solar systems develop? Wouldn't the explosion just cause everything to continue to expand away from every other particle?

Answer 7

The creationists have to believe that every word in the Bible is true, otherwise everything in the Bible is questionable. So, I always throw the Noah story at them. Now I believe the Noah story to an extent, but I believe he was a simple farmer who saw a flood was going to happen, and built a simple boat to save at least the breeding pairs of his flock.

Those who believe the Bible is the word of God and is irrefutuable, cannot explain how Noah could have shipped on board every Earthly species. How did he go roaming all over the world collecting kangaroos, emu, jaguars, giant pandas polar bears - need I go on. Yes, my country, New Zealand, was full of ground dwelling flightless birds before we whiteys destroyed most of them by clearing forest and introducing rats, stoats and pussy cats. These birds would have all been destroyed in a global flood. How did Noah go all the way to New Zealand to get a pair of each of these forest birds, that are hard enough to find at the best of times, many being nocturnal.

The Bible punchers say, well God helped out there. Then of course you have God the tricky magician. And the question is, if God could do that, why did he need Noah to build a boat at all.

So, the whole thing falls into ridiculousness, because if God can do anything, then the Bible people have an answer to anything.

He cut U-shaped valleys to make it look like the world was full of ice at one stage, to trick us into believing in an ice age. he buried huge great dinosaur bones to trick us into believing these beast existing long ago. He made layers in the Earth to trick us into beleiving that the rock was laid down over aeons. And he even planted seashells on the high Himalayas and Alps to fool us into thinking those rocks had been overturned by cataclysmic forces. After all, as powerful as water can be, there is no way that flood water could pile up rocky mountains 5 miles high.

But then God can do anything.

Sorry folks we can't win. We have to be content that millions of scientists spending decades of their lives in resaerch, over the last several hundred years cannot possibly be wrong. Also, we believe what we see with our eyes, rather than belive 100% writings from thousands of years ago by people, who through no fault of there own, were totally ignorant of the way the universe works.

Answer 8

I used to be easy to disprove a literal interpretation of Genesis. The first thing that happens is God said "let there be light", but the stars, sun and moon weren't created in the heavens until the third day. Any logical approach says there can't be a "day" without our sun to revolve around, and there can't be light before the stars were created.

Unfortuantely, science has recently shown that the fundamental constituent of nature is the photon of light, which springs from fluctuations in the zero point field. As such, light is the building block of matter, which actually supports the Genesis series of events.

Answer 9

I have a theory that conforms to both Genesis and the Big Bang theory.

In the beginning the universe was a singularity. Then God said, "Let there be a Big Bang," and there was a Big Bang.

Answer 10

Genesis is a story Jews told around the campfire while they wandered the desert for years until someone wrote it down. It is crap and not worth discussing.