Unanswered questions

[Drich]

Why in the world would a perfect god show his creation in an imperfect way, that is, having the sun come up after the earth is established?

by who's standard makes God's effort present as imperfect?

Did he actually stop the rotation of the earth for the first three days before making the sun and moon appear (an appeal to which would be special pleading) or did the writer simply not have all the observable information?

again the writer recorded what he saw from a singular perspective. From the pov he had these are the things that happened in the order he saw them happening. It does not mean God formed them as the writer saw them. It just means the writer recorded what he saw when he saw it. Again like John of Patmos in the book of revelation.

If god were to reveal his creation of the cosmos and earth to a prophet, one would expect, based on scientific studies of the way stars and solar systems are formed, that the sequence of events would look much different than what is described in Genesis.

why would one expect that? Is the end of the world presented in this format? Or did God give the writer a glimpse of what was to come and let him to the best he could to describe what he saw?

If god was really showing man the creation account from an earthly perspective, we should expect the sun to at least already be in place, as well as night and day, a necessity with a rotating planet. At night, the only thing visible at first would be the stars, and then eventually the moon would come into the picture.

Again why? This presupposition assumes that the earth as it is today is how it was when it was created. Even your beloved 'science' does not agree with your assessment.

If the people who believed that the world had a very heavy cloud cover above it pre-ark are correct then it may have been a few days before one could make out the sun moon and stars. Have you every been under heavy cloud cover? Even at noon there is just light with no way to pin point the sun. If we can experience these conditions today in bad weather then why is it ok to assume that during the creation of the world would happen under a clear blue sky? Or to put it another way, why wouldn't something like the creation of a planet cause bad weather or at least heavy cloud/dust cover?

Water, a necessity for the eventuality of life, would appear next. He could then claim the spark of primitive life, showing that the first things created were the plants, and then the sea-dwelling creatures. Following this would be the introduction of land-based animals: amphibians and reptiles, followed by mammals and birds.

If you read my thread on evolution, I purpose that God created Eden apart from what naturally was allowed to evolve outside the garden. That Eden was made to resemble earth about 5 or 6 thousand years ago, so it's two inhabitances would not have any trouble adapting to the rest of the planet as they left the garden.

It follows that man would be the latest thing created, even though this should be included in the introduction of mammals. However, since this Bible is anthropomorphised, the writers thinking that man is the greatest achievement of their god, it stands to reason that man would be last on the list i.e. made in the image of god, etc.

See above.

This is not at all how the creation story is told. It's told from an unscientific, geo-centric perspective that has no knowledge about what the cosmos actually look like. The story makes sense from a man-made perspective, and not from the perspective of an all-knowing god.

see above or the link below.

Drich, I want to know how you reconcile this.

http://atheistforums.org/thread-14190.ht...=Evolution

many Christians do not accept the Genesis account as it stands in the Bible because there is no reason to believe it to be accurate at all, based on current knowledge.

Many 'Christians' will not waist their time speaking to atheists because they have a very specific view or understanding of predestination. I am not 'many Christians.' I am a biblically based Christian. One who can easily reconcile the teaching of predestination, as well as the command/example Christ modeled of reaching out to the lost. Like wise it is easy to recosile the two origins accounts if you do not presuppose that either are 100%correct as taught/believed.

They will not apologize for it because they are smart enough to not even touch the story with a ten-foot pole. Many more are coming around to the story of Noah and the ark because of the many absurdities contained within it, and some are even suggesting that the numbers talked about in the Exodus are greatly exaggerated, if not completely made up.

the only time the story of Noah's ark becomes an absurdity is when one assumes that Noah built the ark to save the world from an angry God. When in fact that could be the furthest thing from the truth. God saved the planet through the faith of Noah. The tale of the ark is not about the logistics of saving the world from God. It's about how God use the meger efforts of Noah to miricualiously save the world. Noah nor the ark saved all the life on the planet, God did.

The thing is, if you are ready to believe even the mightily dubious creation account in Genesis, you are ready to believe just about anything else that conflicts with reason.

and I can point out that if you can not reconcile the two accounts of orgins given what both side have to say then you are a sheep simply picking whichshepard to follow. From a Christian perspective, no big deal. But, from yours, that is one of many unforgivable sins your lord science will not tolerate, nor can avoid.

I see that you've had some thoughts about the mindsets of the writers of that time, how their perspective was skewed because of their limited knowledge, but I want to bring it back to how this shouldn't be the case if they were actually getting their information from a perfect being.

So.. You've never heard of the book of revelation? I didn't just pull this theory out of thin air. I see it modeled in the end time accounts of John of Patmos. If God used this method to have the last days of man documented, then why not the first???

So why do it this way and not your way? The answer should be obvious to such a well educated and modern man such as yourself... Give up?

If God had the orgins accounts in genesis written like a text book who would He have been speaking to? Genesis would have been gibberish to everyone up to these last few generations. So the question is, why alienate every generation of man save the last few who live in the end times? Simple logic would dictate that he speak to the first generations first establish a strong foundation, and then teach a few the appearent Midas secret that first 5500 years of man found easy to comprehend. So those lucky few who have the Midas secret can bang their heads against the wall trying to teach people who believe they are descendants from monkeys, who also have surmised that the universe just appeared out of a vacuum.