(March 23, 2016 at 9:24 pm)The Atheist Wrote: The Adam and Eve story makes sense if you consider it as a literary and theological text. One of the reasons why I respect the previous pope is because he wrote favorably on the subject of textual criticism. Ironically, it was his book A Catholic Understanding of the Creation and the Fall that taught me about the Enuma Elish, which is where the Genesis stories party come from. I was also surprised to learn that a significant number of Christian writers throughout the first millennium didn't view it as history so much as theological "storytelling." Origen went as far as to call the Adam and Eve story a myth.
If more fundamental Christians understood this today, we wouldn't have to deal with their anti-evolution nonsense. I have my torch ready for when it's time to burn down that stupid Creation Museum. Maybe we'll turn it something useful, like a parking lot.
Anyway, here's a very brief summary of modern scholars' understanding of Genesis 1, which is more or less what the pope had advocated in his writings:
Quote:taken from Rational Wiki:
The creation of the sun, moon, and stars on day four is meant to be a theological point, rather than a scientific one. As other cultures worshiped the sun and moon and divined by the stars (astrology), the Hebrew authors are making the point that none of them is the source of the light, but rather merely reflectors of the light (as lamps) whose ultimate origin is in their God. The creation myth also uses poetic parallelism to narrate the story: Day 1 and Day 4 are paired (light; sun, moon, stars), Day 2 and Day 5 (seas and dry land; fish and fowl), Day 3 and Day 6 (plants of the earth; beasts of the earth and humanity). Furthermore, given the similarity of this narrative to the creation myth of the Babylonians, whose god Marduk creates the cosmos by slaying his sea-serpent mother Tiamat, the Hebrew presentation of God creating over the deep (Hebrew: "tehom") by means other than violence and declaring the creation to be "good" is a rebuke to the Babylonian myth. The abundance of literary and theological devices in the narrative make it clear that the text is not attempting to be a scientific account of the origin of the world, but a theological declaration of the goodness of the creation as against competing religious systems (Canaanite, Babylonian, etc.).
LOL, somewhere Drippy's head is exploding.
Nay_Sayer: “Nothing is impossible if you dream big enough, or in this case, nothing is impossible if you use a barrel of KY Jelly and a miniature horse.”
Wiser words were never spoken.
Wiser words were never spoken.
