Are Darwin and Genesis that far apart?

Question

Everyone re-read Genesis. This time disregard "mans" idea of what a "day" in the life cycle of the world AT THAT TIME means. This world, in the context of what is/was written, and in the context of the author\s at that time, given they don't have our current knowledge, may actually have meant something entirely different to what we read in our current context.

Is a day 24 hours? Is it 24 million years? Think about the second part, then read Genesis again.

Ok, now re-read the bit about Adam and Eve. Does the author (remember, this is not God himself speaking, but through a worldy author reiterating events of the known world via a publication) know or even comprehend timescales of which may actually be happening? If that is, of course, what transpired.

Now put Darwin and Genesis together. Are they that far apart??

Answer 1

A day truly isn't 24 hours its roughly 23 hours and 57 minutes i think or something thats why every 4 years we have a leap year o we don't end up having messed up times

Answer 2

Darwin offers a more specific definition of what generally happened as is written in the Genesis language. It is up to us to fill in the blanks. If you use one at the exclusion of the other perhaps you are just excluding the conflicting parts and looking for some confluence between the two definitions of reality. One less scientific than the other but all things that come down to us from the past must suffer some sort of curious inquiry into just how and why of its existence. Science is a tool to help us understand what would otherwise stay in illogical and chaotic disorder and lord knows that isn't good enough anymore.

Answer 3

If you look at Darwin's work as a scientific inquirey and the book of Genesis as a metaphor, you can determine that there is not enough difference to make a difference. Darwin was the son of a minister. Also, if you read into the Genesis creation story, you will find some differences between the first story (Gen 1 to Gen 2.4(a) and the second story that starts at 2.4(b). The order of creation is different, quite different and also the name of God is different. But these are minor things.

Answer 4

If you let a day be any amount of time that you want, and let “God” be the physical universe, and “created” be occurred spontaneously, and “because it pleased him” to “because it was better adapted to survive”, and substitute australopithecus on the African savanna for Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, then yes, the two accounts are practically indistinguishable. I wonder why I never noticed that before?

Is a hungry dragon devouring the sun really any different from astronomy's account of a solar eclipse? Not if you let the dragon be the moon and "eating" be the moon interposing itself.

We just need to tweak the meanings of the language in ever so subtle ways, like letting one day mean an unfathomable eon, to demonstrate their equivalence.

Answer 5

I've thought for a long time that the creation story in Genesis is allegorical rather than literal--that the days were ages or phases, and that when we're told that God made Adam from dust, it was a way of describing the development (you know what word I'm avoiding) of life from a blob of animated mud to the image of God. Yes, the author (Moses or whoever) was expressing his narrative within his own frame of reference, but it often seems that--in the order in which he says thing were created, for instance-- he knew more than he knew that he knew.

Answer 6

Yes, they are still that far apart. Nothing in Darwin mentions a snake tempter, original sin, or expulsion from a blissful garden into a life of hardship and pain as punishment. Nothing in Darwin mentions males coming into existence first and then having females created from them by divine hand.

Most importantly, the point of Darwinism is that natural selection causes complexity to arise without the need for preordained design. If you inject God back into the equation, it's not science any more; it's rationalization to avoid giving up a cherished belief. Because, again, the point of Darwin's theory is that design is NOT NECESSARY.

Darwin and Genesis are incompatible. You're going to have to choose between science and mythology.

Answer 7

If people have a problem with Darwin, their biggest objection is the one about the ascent of man as a specie. In Genesis, God says, "Let us make man in our image." He doesn't say, ...in an ape's image, or a monkey's image. The fundamentalists hate Darwin's idea that man's ancestors were animals. They insist that man was made directly by God in God's own image.

Answer 8

I would say the bible open and closed any argument or recourse for speculation. prior to Daddy Adam receiving mate, he looked upon the fornicating and copulating animals in his Eden, decided to fornicate and copulate with them. Feeling discontent he approached The creator who refuses to have any association with Adams half breed animals resultant of his cavorting with the aforesaid, then duly supplied him with a mate of his own kind.

This explains why there humans have partial and varying amounts of animal nature. Offspring of Godsfirst created mans sowing of oats, or the innocents sins of youth.

The above more or less closes the open argument. If you were to experiment on a group from Alchoholics Anonymous on how many popel have a drinking problem, the results would be far removed from the actuality.

Answer 9

If God said 1 day, then why should that be any different from the 24 hours now? And another thing, God might not have physically wrote the Bible, but He spoke through men, so they could write down what He said.

Answer 10

Genesis, like all creation stories, was man's way of trying to make sense of the universe before the days of empirical science. So we can view it as an allegory - of humans trying to understand their world before they had the tools to do so.

Answer 11

My theory about Darwin is that he's adopted !!!!! ;)

I think that God could possible made man in a another form (in the begging), not ape though but in a Strong fiscal shape to survive in the harsh environment the early times !

Good luck !