Quote:Another way to look at it is that humans evolved normally, and that Adam symbolically represents the first modern humans, the ones who had the intelligence and spiritual capacity to recognize their Creator. If you treat it as allegory about mankind rising to know God, in the perfect garden (earth) that was made for us, and living according to God's laws (laws of nature) as hunter-gatherers for the first ~100,000 years of our existence as modern man, before we decided we didn't want to live by natural laws anymore and instead developed agriculture, which meant that we (not God) decided what plants went where, what animals had to die, and what territories were "ours" to build cities on. From then on, instead of living by the providence of God for what we eat, we had to "live by the sweat of our brows". In other words, we decided for ourselves we had the knowledge of good and evil, and destroyed the garden of God. We're still destroying it. It's a powerful allegory... if you don't treat it as a literal history, it becomes something even more important: a warning from our most ancient ancestors of how their ancestors ruined our created relationship with God by defying the laws of Natural Selection.Why would I want/need to treat this as an allegory when I can easily reconcile both accounts?
The genesis account only need be treated as an allegory if I can't get past the 6000 year begetting cycle some well meaning brother bound the church to by pointing out that his math only pointed to the exodus of the garden.
Quote:I suppose by that definition, both agriculture and penicillin are sins, since they defy the laws of NS.Another reason not to look at creation as an allegory.
Quote:You have a more nuanced understand of science than the average Creationist, so it looks like SofaKing assumed you were an Answers In Genesis-type Creationist incorrectly. Hope you'll forgive us. It's not an unfair assumption-- your kind of theology is more rare, here. Most Christians who debate here tend to either 100% accept evolution or 100% reject it.That's the thing I have a 100% evolution acceptance AND A literal 7 day creation belief. One does not preclude the other. IF one can look past what religion says, and wants to balance what the bible actually says against what we know to be true. Then it all makes perfect sense. The questions in the biblical account get cleared up (where did the spouces of Adam and Eve's children come from. The 'religious belief' was incest of all things.. and where did the city of Nod come from when cain was expelled from his family.) Monkey/man answers a lot of questions from the bible and the fossil record. So again, why would we run from the truth?
