This page is a few notes highlighting the shortcomings of the Genesis account of a seven day creation. It cannot be a literal event, nor is it a useful or logical metaphor or symbolic account. This page is mostly boring for most people including sensible, extreme liberal Christians, but perhaps interesting for those just getting into Biblical criticism.
Contents:
Genesis is the first "Book of Moses" and is part of the Jewish scriptures, later included in the Christian Bible.
"Genesis contains two stories which describe the creation of the world, the rest of the universe, and all of the forms of life, including humans. The first story is found in Genesis 1:1 to 2:3; the second in Genesis 2.4 to 2:25. Elements of an alternative, ancient eastern Mediterranean belief about the creation of the world is found in two passages of Psalms."
Here we are looking at the first creation story, which is separated into days. The second recounting in Genesis contradicts the first on a few chronological details, but we are not looking at that nor at the older Mediterranean links. The following is therefore the most traditional 7 day creation account, the text which opens both the Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible.
"The authors of Genesis seem have picked up part of their story from Hindu legends of the creation and early history of humanity. Stories of Hindu heroes Adimo, Heva, Sherma, Hama and Jiapheta apparently were replicated into legends about Adam, Eve, [...]"
The text was written from between the 10th and 6th century BCE, but some scholars believe it wasn't completely written until as late as 2 centuries BCE1.
Creationists are fundamentalist Christians who believe that the evidence is wrong, and that the Universe was created according to a literal interpretation of Genesis' 7 day creation account. The Liberal Interpretation is normally that the story is a metaphor designed to explain that God is all powerful. The secular belief is that the Genesis account is purely a result of myth and prescientific attempts to understand the Universe. The secular belief is the most sensible one, and, luckily for Christianity, modern Christians are generally accepting of the idea that Genesis is scientifically flawed and written by Human beings, not dictated by God.
 Evolution and the Myths of Creationism |
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"it violently contradicts what the astronomers, geologists, and evolutionists tell us about the order of appearance of things on Earth and the time at which they appeared. [...] The table below highlights some of the more important astronomical and paleontological events pertinent to our current study."
Event Years ago Big Bang 15,000 million Birth of the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon 4600 million Emergence of Life (Pre-cellular Life) 3800 million Inorganic Release of Trace Amount of Oxygen 3700 million Origin of Photo-synthetic Bacteria 3200 million Advent of Oxygen-rich Atmosphere 2000 million Development of Sexual Reproduction 1100 million Spread of Jawless Fishes 505 million First Amphibians 408 million First Reptiles 360 million First Dinosaurs and Mammal-like Reptiles; Origin of Mammals 248 million First Birds 213 million Australopithecus 4 million Homo Habilis 2.2 million Homo Erectus 1.5 million Homo Sapiens 200 thousand Modern Humans 35 thousand "On the other hand, if we now construct a table on the Creation of the Universe and of life on Earth, based on Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 and the Liberal Interpretation thereof, then it would display the following results:"
Creation of Day and Night "Day" 1 Creation of Heaven "Day" 2 Creation of the Earth, the Seas, and the Plants "Day" 3 Creation of the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars "Day" 4 Creation of Fishes and Birds [Beginning of Sexual Reproduction] "Day" 5 Creation of land animals (Cattle, Insects, Reptiles, Man) "Day" 6 No Further Emergence of Life Forms on Earth "Day" 7 "Is a Liberal Interpretation of the Creation Story Compatible with Science?" by Eugene Y. C. Ho.
Several illogical and impossible contradictions occur when trying to fit Genesis' separation of creation into 7 periods. In particular I will examine the problems arising from the time at which the Sun was created.
According to the writers of Genesis, God created the Sun half way through the creation week. They also explain what God did during the first "days". But without a sun, there were no actual days. Without a sun to rotate around there were no "mornings" or changes in the time of day. Likewise, without natural sunlight, plants could not have grown and survived. Plants were created, however, before the Sun. If the length of time is billions of years per day, then it is very much impossible that plants could survive before the Sun was created.
"The Genesis writer(s) didn't understand the nature of darkness either. He said that God created light (somehow before the sun and stars were made) and then "divided the light from the darkness" (1:3-4). Light, however, is not something that can be separated from darkness. Light is an electromagnetic radiation from an energy source like the sun or stars, and darkness is merely the absence of light. Without light, there will automatically be darkness. No god is needed to separate or divide light from darkness. We know that today; the prescientific Genesis writer(s) didn't."
We know, and would assume, that the writer(s) of Genesis clearly did not know that the Earth revolves around the sun, that days and nights are effects of the Earth's spin, that light is electromagnetic radiation, and that darkness is the absence of light. Whoever wrote the text of Genesis were clearly fallible, pre-scientific Human beings. If God had inspired these texts, although it could not have inspired a technical liturgy because the words did not yet exist, it surely would have dictated or inspired text that wasn't out and out erroneous.
The seventh day is a sign of the mythical assumptions of those who wrote the genesis account. God is omnipotent and omniscient. Yet, it took the seventh day resting? And working out if its creation was good? It is not true that an omnipotent (all-powerful) being ever needs to rest. It is also untrue that an omniscient (all-knowing) being ever needs to wonder, ponder or think: It simply knows, and instantly. So, we immediately arrive at the conclusion that the seventh day is allegorical, symbolic and mythical: The reasons stated in the Genesis account are not direct recordings of real events, but stories and reworking of older Hindu myths.
The Holy Day
A common defence of the Genesis account of the seventh day is that the reason for the strange "resting" is that God wanted the seventh day to be holy; therefore it rested on it to make it a day of rest. However. God is the absolute truth, and it would not be necessary for God to rest in order to make the seventh day holy. To make the seventh day holy it could have had Moses inspired to preach "Take one day in 7, the Saturday, to rest" rather than using a non-logical seventh day of rest in Genesis. As a omniscient being it cannot be illogical, and therefore the Genesis 7 day creation must be false, or at least, non-literal.
A long seventh day
Some say that the first 6 days are metaphors for the first 15 billion years of the Universe's history and that the seventh day, where God is resting, is the present era. This would then account for why God is so silent and absent from world affairs - because it is resting. Resting would then be a polite word for 'hiding' or 'concealing' itself. The reasons for this concealment, in my mind, is that God does not exist, and the myth is designed to explain why God isn't around during this long final day of creation, because it is 'resting'.
The seven day creation is not literal, there are illogical and unscientific errors that would not have been apparent to the authors but which are highlighted on this page and by science. The shape of the Earth is not flat. The Sun does not revolve around the Earth. The creation of light and the sun happened independent of each other, and there were 'days' before the sun was created for the Earth to rotate around. The order in which animals, plants and other elements of life appear in Genesis contradict the order that appears in the fossil record and the order of creation of the stars, the sun, etc, also contradict what we know scientifically. The logic is flawed behind the 'day of rest', an all-powerful God does not need rest. In short, the separation of creation into a seven day period is a useless and outdated creation story riddled with errors.
Genesis is written by fallible Human beings, not God, and is proven to be a false record of creation. It also shows many symptoms of being a piecemeal, fragmented myth that has been edited and rewritten over time so that it hardly even makes internal sense. It contains no moral teachings and nothing educational. It is an irredeemable anachronism that we ever teach our children its pointless myths and retain it as part of Christianity. It should be purged.
Some original text written during late 1998, 1999 and 2000 by Vexen, but nearly completely rewritten on 2003 April 06.
By Vexen Crabtree 2003 April 06