There is scientific evidence of things claimed in the Bible. You have never heard of these things due to the bias in the scientific community:
The bible taught the creation event in Genesis 1 as out of nothing. The scientific community commonly taught the “steady state” universe going into eternity past. This was the common belief until Hawking following many others taught the big bang. Science was wrong until then. Even Einstein made that mistake. The first thing created was an energy cloud, called “Tohu-wa-Bohu in Genesis. Then light erupted out of it, “let there be light”. This aligns exactly with what astrophysicists teach about the big bang. Hmm, the bible was right all along & was there first.
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The word “day” gives the most trouble in interpretation in Genesis 1 & 2. If taken to mean an epoch, age, or period, the contradictions between the bible and what the biologists are teaching goes away. This is the “long day” interpretation of Hugh Ross and the intelligent design group. This allows for a universe that is 13.8 billion years old. The order of creation from forms, heaven & earth, dry land and the oceans follows what the scientists are saying about how the earth appeared.
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The mantle of the clouds obscured the perspective of the heavenly bodies (sun, moon, & stars). Eventually the clouds cleared away enough for an observer to see them. To understand Genesis, you need to understand the perspective of the author, who is a person above the earth or on the earth looking up. Everything is from the perspective of a divine vision given to the author, Moses.
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The order of creation of living forms follows or predicts the order of the appearance of life on earth: green plants; sea life; birds; land animals; insects; and finally humans. This list follows the fossil record very closely. Any contradiction is due to the perspective of the author in his vision.
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There is no “Tree of Life” as proposed by Darwin. This implies a long growth of gradual changes like a tall oak tree growing from a seedling with many side branches. The fossil record is abrupt and discontinuous in its changes. The bigger the change, the more complete the absence of preceding intermediate forms. Steven Gould tried to explain this away as “punctuated equilibrium”. The simple explanation is that the Creator jumped ahead frequently. Compare creation to the evolution of the automobile. There were annual changes from first invention to arrive finally at the modern versions. This metaphor is a lot closer to what is shown in the fossil records. The fossil record is not a gradually growing “tree”. A better metaphor is the fossil “slide show”. Like a slide show, there are individual snapshots that show up. They can be ordered from simple forms to more complest forms through time. Sometimes there are long gaps. So scientists should stop referring to the “Tree of Life” as a metaphor for evolution from single celled life to modern advanced forms. The record is simply too discontinuous and erratic to defend that metaphor.
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The bible story is the story of Adam to Christ to eternity. This is about Adam’s family. The bible leaves out the other families. There may have been as many as 60 different earlier design efforts to build man before God finally ended up with Adam & Eve. There is no mention for or against these preceding forms in the Bible. There were people on earth before Adam and Eve. This explains well where Cain & Seth found their wives. They did not marry unnamed sisters as some bible scholars suggest. There is no contradiction here. Genetics clearly demonstrate that there was an original Adam and Eve. To say that there was a family, tribe, or community that migrated out of Africa to give us mitochondrial Eve is baseless speculation. The scientific community has no evidence of this. They are just posing convenient guesses as factual, empirical “science”. This is not science when you do this, evolutionary biologists. This has more to do with faith on your part than science. Genetics & DNA clearly demonstrate a singular male ancestor and a singular female ancestor.
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Blue eyes are a recent appearance in human DNA. Only lemurs and humans have blue eyes. African peoples, oriental peoples, and Neanderthals do not have blue eyes. The DNA segment that defines blue eyes is at the same place in the human genome as it is in lemurs. God gave Adam and Eve blue eyes. This is confirmed by the fact that blue eyes are most prevalent in the peoples of eastern Anatolia and lands surrounding the Black Sea. This gene spread from there into eastern Europe, Poland, Scandinavia, and Germany. Blue eyes can’t be found prior to 14,000 b.c. in fossil DNA. This means Adam and Eve were created around 14,000 b.c.
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The Garden of Eden was in eastern Anatolia. Genesis describe a land with four rivers coming out of it. That valley can be found in Azerbaijan with another valley in Armenia. The Kur, Aras, Qvirila, Rioni, and many others drain the areas around Lake Sevan in Armenia. This follows the description of the location of Eden. The Aras river was incorrectly called “Cush” in the KJV, which translates as “south”. There is no mention of the Nile in Genesis 1-2.
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There was an ecological catastrophe around 12,000 b.c. Over 40 species of mega-fauna died out world-wide. This was the biblical flood of Gen. 6-9. Paleontologists can give no explanation as to why the large land animals of Europe, Asia, and Africa survived while the large fauna of the Americas and Australia died out. And no, the natives did not eat them all. Simply stated, the big animals missed the boat. There was no way for Noah & sons to collect animals from the Americas & Australia. The animals could not swim their way to Mesopotamia. Once again, this agrees exactly with the rather minimal Genesis account.
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The science community needs to take a second look at their rejection of the truths found in Genesis. Time to take a second look at these ideas, scientists. As science makes greater and greater discoveries such as DNA, the truth of the matter keeps coming closer and closer to the inspired Word as found in Genesis.
What source(s) have you read that claims the fossil record and the timeline of life on earth follows a biblical sequence? I’ve never encountered anything of the sort outside of YEC sources.
I appreciate systematic presentations of this sort. Several thoughts come to mind as I read through the list:
Where in Genesis 1 does one find ex nihilo creation? As a Christ-follower I do believe that God created the universe ex nihilo (“out of nothing.”) Nevertheless, I cannot find any such explicit claim in Genesis 1, even though one can certainly argue that it is implied. In any case, Bible scholars have been debating for centuries as to whether ex nihilo creation is stated anywhere in the Bible. I used to think that once I became more familiar with the Hebrew text of the scriptures, I would clearly see the explicit mention of ex nihilo creation. I was wrong in that because I’ve yet to find any such clear statement. (The argument that the verb choice in Genesis 1:1 requires ex nihilo creation has never impressed me.)
Putting aside for the moment the question of whether Genesis 1 and 2 were meant to describe a chronological order of events (after all, order of presentation and order of occurrence are not at all the same thing in every genre of literature), “the contradictions between the bible and what the biologists are teaching goes away” is not at all true. For example, the Genesis 1 account describes flowering plants (in the form of fruit trees) before fish, birds, and mammals—but biologists and the paleontologists who are familiar with the fossil record teach that flowering plants came after those animals.
Some readers will assume that this is an admission that the author’s perspective was wrong—or, at least, that the author was mislead by what he happened to observe in his area. To me this sounds like an acknowledgment that order of presentation and order of chronological events are not the same thing in the literary genre illustrated by Genesis 1 and 2. In any case, “Any contradiction is due to the perspective of the author” surely sounds like an all too easy hand-wave to casually dismiss a problem.
You listed many other interesting ideas but I’m especially curious about the aforementioned topics.
I certainly hope that @jknbt will continue to participate here—but in these situations I also reply for the benefit of our “silent” but actively curious PS readers and for those who may discover this thread after a Google search. Many of @jknbt’s claims are regularly promoted by various origins ministries and popular apologists. So I’m happy to revisit them.
As @AllenWitmerMiller already pointed out, this phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting for you. Why even bother trying to claim that the order of creation is consistent with the fossil record if you’re just doing to hand-wave away the contradictions?
green plants; sea life; birds; land animals; insects; and finally humans.
Genesis 1 doesn’t talk about “green plants”, it specifically mentions grass, herbs that produce seeds, and trees that produce fruits.
Birds and sea life were created on the same day.
Then came the land animals, for example cattle and “creeping things”, generally thought to mean insects, and finally humans.
So the order in Genesis is:
Grass and trees, sea life and birds, land animals and insects, humans.
According to science, the order of appearance of these specific groups would be:
Sea life, insects, grass, land animals, trees, birds, humans.
1234567 became 3615247. Not a great match.
This is even without considering that several large clades of sea life appeared long after the evolution of the first land animals, cetaceans being an obvious one.
The Hebrew word in question can indeed be translated “green plants” or “vegetation” or “green plants”. In fact, while the KJV Bible translates the word as “grass”, most modern English Bible translation render it as “vegetation” in Genesis 1:11. “Green plants” may not be the most popular translation of the word but I can’t think of a reason to object to it.
@evograd, have your studies in evolutionary biology brought you any insights which might address the question I posed about accessory muscles and atavisms in this post on Patrick’s thread?
Not quite true. Grass would be second to last, after birds. And whether insects or land animals come first would depend on what you mean by “insect” and “land animal”; insects are land animals, right? They’re animals, and they (well, most of them) live on land. If, on the other hand, you mean tetrapods when you say “land animals”, that part would be right.
Doesn’t matter. Green plants, depending on the group would come at various times, all of them after sea life. The only way to put any green plants before sea life would be to redefine the term “plant” to include cyanobacteria.
First, it’s not so simple as saying all the large fauna of the Americas and Australia died out while those from Europe, Asia, and Africa survived. All continents lost a significant number of megafaunal species at the end of Pleistocene - Europe, Asia, and Africa weren’t spared. To quote wikipedia:
In Subsaharan Africa, 8 of 50 (16%) genera of mammalian megafauna were driven to extinction.
In Asia, 24 of 46 (52%)
In Europe, 23 of 39 (59%)
In Australasia, 19 of 27 (71%)
In North America, 45 of 61 (74%)
In South America, 58 of 71 (82%)
Second, despite what you claim palaeontologists certainly can give explanations for all this - it boils down to a complex combination of climatic and human factors.