(March 19, 2013 at 5:09 pm)Godschild Wrote: Everything was good until Adam and Eve sinned. Creation worked just as it was designed, it did not work as God desired it to.
I buy a TV, and it stops working after a week. The manufacturer seems unfazed. "It was good until it broke, right? It worked as designed, although we didn't want it to break. Not our fault, blame the TV."
To summarize: God creates Eden, and places Adam and Eve within its borders. He specifically designs them so that they can disobey his commands, then places a tree in Eden whose only purpose is to provide Adam and Eve with an easy way to sin. He designs Eve so that she can be deceived by a talking snake (if you believe Paul) and then... he allows a talking snake into Eden.
I'd conclude that with "you can't make this stuff up," but yeah... someone did. Although in fairness, the author of the Genesis 1:1-2:3 version of the creation story doesn't offer any such nonsense. As it seems that his version was actually written after the Yahwist's version, one can imagine that even back in the 6th and 7th century BC, people realized that the story was just awful. If you'd told them that 2,600 years later people would still be trying to make sense of it, they might have burned the whole mess and set humanity forward by a few centuries.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
