RE: Is "being the creator of everything" an essential characteristic of the ...
October 5, 2014 at 7:27 am
(October 5, 2014 at 1:42 am)whateverist Wrote: What if the xtian god thing was only responsible for creating people? Suppose cosmology wasn't his job. Aside from the bible, is there any other reason to assume god's creative function applies to absolutely everything?Genesis claims that god created "the heavens and the earth." The writer probably figured that the flat disc of the Earth and the dome-like covering of the heavens was the extent of existence, so his belief would be that god made everything. It may be possible to imply that he used something that was already there to start building with, which wouldn't be surprising; the writer would have assumed that every builder takes the materials that are already there when he begins to build. Or he simply wasn't concerned with regression-- god built it all, did it matter whether he pooped out the atoms first?
"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
