Grad student seeking atheist to interview

[possibletarian]

HappySkeptic - I don't believe in a "young Earth" either. I believe the scientific record on age of the earth, universe, etc. Do you think Genesis teaches a literal 6 day creation? I am curious if any of you have found Genesis to be a cause for unbelief because the scientific record seems to contradict what is taught in Genesis?

Welcome back, Brooke! I think it's odd for the six days of creation to be described as having mornings if they weren't meant to be taken as literal days. The only reason not to take it literally is overwhelming evidence that the events described took millions of years altogether. I certainly understand making the compromise of saying they were 'symbolic days' though, it's the only way to keep the book without denying the evidence from the one thing a capital c Creator must be the author of: the world we find ourselves in.

When I first read Genesis I believed it and took it literally. It was the barbarity of the Bible sanctioned by the God it describes that convinced me it wasn't an authentic representation of a perfect and omniscient being. Reading the Bible cover-to-cover didn't make me an atheist, but it did make me an agnostic theist. I believed in a Creator, but not that one, so I was in the position of still believing and being aware I couldn't know. I think it took me about 20 more years to get to atheist.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

*Bold and italics mine

That's how every day ends, and starts it is almost impossible for any reader to come away with anything BUT literal days. Clearly the stretching of the creation days to millions of years is an afterthought, forced upon the religious by evidence. No plain reading of the text can possibly give you anything but 24hour periods, Or a earth made at the centre with the stars to serve it, which knowing what we do about the universe is ridiculous.

The Christian ability to decide at whim what is literal and what is not always amazes me, truth is it's not decided by biblical or so called spiritual wisdom but by science knocking down its doors. There is a theological answer for almost everything, but is sounding stretched at best, downright delusional at worse.

That is what you get when you define a god as none material, timeless, space less etc. The to add to the confusion you make anything we can't understand as this creatures 'wisdom and knowledge which our puny minds cannot understand... In other words a magical being. The fact that the Christian god can't be distinguished from stuff we can make up says it all.