This is not to suggest creation is “proof” of God or that it’s intent was to prove itself legitimate. That was not it’s purpose. It’s accuracy is just consistent with its claim, as it continually turns out to be it would seem.
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You are a fine master of Apologia… but not much for making Genesis into literary perfection.
There have been wars fought on distinctions more subtle than yours.
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There’s no doubt there’s inconsistencies with the Hebrew text I’m unaware of. That’s one of the many aspects of this I hope to delve into more fully here. For centuries arguments and disagreements have been had over these texts based solely on the text alone. Now we have context to ground that text in. Now some clarity can be found that could not have been known before.
If simplified to evaluating the text, what creations are given in what order, and comparing that next to what one from that POV would see throughout the Earth’s history, without really knowing any of the Hebrew specifics, it can be seen that it doesn’t take much massaging to see a correlation. Specifically named creations in a specific order doesn’t take much to “apologize”.
George won’t tell you this directly, but he does not hold out much hope that the texts can be coherently illuminated against a careful scientific backdrop.
The whole notion of “concordism,” whether soft or not, is not much in vogue here; a sentiment I, like you, completely disagree with.
To each his own.
BTW, flying things would also include insects.
Cheers!
It would have been incorrect if it had said it any other way. Birds belong with that grouping. Sauropsid.
Besides, it doesn’t say “tetrapods”, which includes “cattle”, “beast”, AND “reptile”. It specifies the mammalian types.
Well said. But it is not concordism that i dislike. It is attempting to turn incoherent fictions into modern poetic interpretations of the Bible.
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What are the incoherent fictions of which you speak? And what makes concordist efforts the same thing as inventing poetic interpretations? Isn’t there poetry and metaphor, along with accurate phenomenology, in the early Genesis accounts?
Point [B] isnt my assertion.
Point A is demonstrated by @Jeremy_Christian when he tries to turn a dead-wrong sentence about birds into a whimsical way of indicating some evolutionary truth - - “birds are dinosaurs which is just about like amphibians”.
I take it you don’t find my argument compelling.
Dead wrong? Whimsical? Tries? It’s not wrong. There are two major groups of animals, sauropsid and synapsid. The groupings in Genesis are accurate, which does indicate evolutionary truth.
Gen1:20 - And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.”
Water animals and birds are sauropsids. Birds came from this line, and not from the second group. So it’s right for them to be included here.
Gen1:24 - And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so.
“Livestock” is speaking of Synapsids.
In this case, my client would be fine. What makes you so certain the sentence is “dead-wrong”?
You cant have flying reptiles before you have creeping things or beasts. In fact, worms and crawling things certainly predated even the non-avian flying reptiles!
And since there were various reptilian forms that flew long before there were even birds points to tge Biblical scribe being wrong in multiple ways.
The words selected are wrong.
The sequences of events are wrong.
The logic of how these creatures would relate to each other is wrong.
I disagree. These creations didn’t immediately “poof” into existence. It was an evolving process. Animals in each group were ‘blessed’ to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the seas/earth’. Obviously this isn’t going to be accomplished in a single day.
But that first wave, that’s the wave that resulted in birds. That doesn’t mean birds were there before that second wave began. As the first wave was playing out the second wave began. They overlap.
It’s a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
I get what you’re saying as far as sequence of events.
But I don’t get what you mean by words selected being wrong or logic of how these creatures would relate to each other being wrong.
The scribes knew what were birds and what wasnt a bird… or will you admit that the Hebrew scribes thought bats were birds?
Because of the intentional use of “days” creatures cannot just hover around in an incomplete form … waiting for another day or even another oartial day.
The text for land creatures is required to be exhaustive. So either birds are not equivalent to dinosaurs (and the scribes did not imagine anything like a world dominated by dinos and
dino-like creatures) - -
Or the scribes had no way of knowing about the creatures between the K-T horizon and the emergence of higher mammals.
I think you’re right to consider the knowledge level of the scribes, as well as the intended audience. Much of Earth’s history they’d have no idea what was being described beyond what’s here. So that should definitely be taken into consideration.
Like bats. Are bats something they’d be familiar with? Are there bats in Mesopotamia?
However, considering individual species and what order they appeared in is only going to lead to arguments like this. What’s significant here is the two phase description of life. First sea life, with its inclusion of birds signifying this isn’t limited to only life in the sea, then mammals.
It is indeed life from the sea that eventually became amphibeans > reptiles > dinosaurs > birds. Then a second phase of land animal that first branched off of reptiles (group 1) and became proto-mammals > mammals (group 2).
The entirety of the account should be considered, with this bit about the first wave of animals being considered in that line…
Oceans first - correct
Then light - correct
Then the oxygenated atmosphere - correct
Then land - correct
Then plant life - correct
Then visible sun/moon - correct
Then Sauropsids - correct
Then Synapsids - correct
Then humans - correct
This is a lot to get right just for them to fumble on that one step. Especially considering their limited knowledge level.
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss this as “dead-wrong”.
Although yom is commonly rendered as day in English translations, the word yom has several literal definitions:[1]
Period of light (as contrasted with the period of darkness),
General term for time
Point of time
Sunrise to sunset
Sunset to next sunset
A year (in the plural; I Sam 27:7; Ex 13:10, etc.)
Time period of unspecified length.
A long, but finite span of time - age - epoch - season.
This is a story-telling device, separating each age by this term. It’s not meant to mean a single day.
One wave of creation is initiated on one “day”, then continues on as the next creation is initiated the next “day”.
Is it wrong?
First off, they’d likely not be familiar with these types of animals. Scribes or readers. Certainly they knew there were insects, but not aware of the major wave of life they represented. Creation is simply someone scanning the land, waving their hand across, saying all of this didn’t used to be here. Then came those and those and these things. Not covering these things doesn’t make it “wrong”.
But I find it interesting, if not totally off-base, the flying animals that did come about. This wave of life was instructed to fill the seas and the air. It seems flight was something life was working towards all throughout.
Think what you will. If you were more interested in @swamidass’ goals, id be more interested in your goals.