The JWs had several ways to rationalize the "on the day you eat from it you will surely die" verse.
1- As soon as they ate of it, they were effectively sentenced to death, so they "died" that day. That one seems like a stretch, since there is nothing that indicates that this is what god meant.
2- The explanation that GC gave, that the reference to "day" was referring to a period of time. That seems awkward for the same reason as 1; the text of Genesis 2:17 seems pretty straightforward as it is.
3- 2 Peter 3:8 says that "one thousand years is like a day" to god, and since Adam and Eve did not live to be 1,000 years old, they died "that day." Again, a very technical and tortured way to interpret god's words.
The issue really is that the warning in Genesis 2:17 is pretty clear: the day you eat from the fruit of that tree, you will die. If the contention is that the verse is mistranslated and really says "if you eat from the fruit, you will die" then I consider that a valid explanation. But if not, there's no way to explain it that doesn't take an otherwise straightforward text and add a heck of a lot of unnecessary twisting to get it to mean something else. If such an otherwise clear text is open to that much interpretation, then why not the rest of the story? How much of it can we twist beyond the apparent meaning so as to support a particular belief or approach?
1- As soon as they ate of it, they were effectively sentenced to death, so they "died" that day. That one seems like a stretch, since there is nothing that indicates that this is what god meant.
2- The explanation that GC gave, that the reference to "day" was referring to a period of time. That seems awkward for the same reason as 1; the text of Genesis 2:17 seems pretty straightforward as it is.
3- 2 Peter 3:8 says that "one thousand years is like a day" to god, and since Adam and Eve did not live to be 1,000 years old, they died "that day." Again, a very technical and tortured way to interpret god's words.
The issue really is that the warning in Genesis 2:17 is pretty clear: the day you eat from the fruit of that tree, you will die. If the contention is that the verse is mistranslated and really says "if you eat from the fruit, you will die" then I consider that a valid explanation. But if not, there's no way to explain it that doesn't take an otherwise straightforward text and add a heck of a lot of unnecessary twisting to get it to mean something else. If such an otherwise clear text is open to that much interpretation, then why not the rest of the story? How much of it can we twist beyond the apparent meaning so as to support a particular belief or approach?
"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
