Intelligent Design? In Genesis Account, plants are created BEFORE the Sun

[NAO]

How intelligent of a design of was THAT? How can the proponents of "Intelligent Design" be serious? The Bible account of Creation clearly states that plants were created BEFORE the sun. And the lonely planet earth was created on the first day (1), while all of the rest of the entire universe, all of the stars and galaxies, were not created until the fifth day (5). All of the stars that fill the vast expanse of the known universe were created as a sort of afterthought to the creation of the sun and the moon..."he made the stars also".

SOME MISTAKES OF MOSES by Robert Ingersoll
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/some_mistakes_of_moses.html

excerpt:

We are next informed by the historian of creation, that after
God had finished making the firmament and had succeeded in dividing
the waters by means of an "expanse" he proceeded "to gather the
waters on the earth together in seas, so that the dry land might
appear."

Certainly the writer of this did not have any conception of
the real form of the earth. He could not have known anything of the
attraction of gravitation. He must have regarded the earth as flat
and supposed that it required considerable force and power to
induce the water to leave the mountains and collect in the valleys.
Just as soon as the water was forced to run down hill, the dry land
appeared, and the grass began to grow, and the mantles of green
were thrown over the shoulders of the hills, and the trees laughed
into bud and blossom, and the branches were laden with fruit. And
all this happened before a ray had left the quiver of the sun,
before a glittering beam had thrilled the bosom of a flower, and
before the Dawn with trembling hands had drawn aside the curtains
of the East and welcomed to her arms the eager god of Day.

It does not seem to me that grass and trees could grow and
ripen into seed and fruit without the sun. According to the
account, this all happened on the third day.
The sun, the moon, and 'the stars also' were created on the Fourth Day).
Now, if, as the Christians say, Moses did not mean by the word day a period of
twenty-four hours, but an immense and almost measureless space of
time, and as God did not, according to this view make any animals
until the fifth day, that is, not for millions of years after he
made the grass and trees, for what purpose did he cause the trees
to bear fruit?

Moses says that God said on the third day, "Let the earth
bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree
yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself upon the
earth; and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass and herb
yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit whose
seed was in itself after his kind; and God saw that it was good,
and the evening and the morning were the third day."

*****

The full text of Ingersoll's classic lecture "Some Mistakes of Moses" is at the above link.

[megatherium]

1. The ID proponents are not Biblical literalists.

They're not trying to defend/explain Genesis. They're not young-Earth creationists; they believe in deep geological time and they believe in descent with modification from a common ancestor. They argue that Darwinism can't explain this, however.

[moobu2]

2. Nah, Intelligent designers really don't believe their wild theories

It's meant to cast doubt on science because science pretty much proves the Bible is just a fantasy. The more educated people are, the less power the clerics have over the masses et cetera..

That's all it is.

[NAO]

6. "not Biblical literalists"?...did Jesus literally rise from the dead?

Any deviation from Biblical inerrancy/literality is a quick and lethal blow to Christianity. Once you start explaining away miracles, the Bible just becomes another book and the people in the Bible look stupid for not seeing the "scientific" reasons for the perceived miracles.

Of course it is impossible for plant life to have existed before the Sun was created. It is also impossible for a person to rise from the dead. If someone suggests, "possibly Jesus was not really dead, just stunned, or a zombie or something", the miracle of the resurrection is gone and the apostles were simply fooled by an illusion, and the whole superstructure of Christian dogma collapses.

Similarly, if someone suggests that parts of the Bible are not meant to be taken literally, but rather symbolically, the question arises of which parts ARE literal and which are symbolic. Again, if the resurrection is only symbolic or the afterlife destinations are symbolic, the whole meaning of Christianity as it is understood by millions is totally destroyed.

People who want to maintain ANY belief in the Bible are forced to argue for the inerrancy of the Bible and the reality of the impossible, because any deviance from those things leads to the rapid collapse of their entire belief system.

[Lerkfish]

14. you're too rigid and absolute here....

"People who want to maintain ANY belief in the Bible are forced to argue for the inerrancy of the Bible and the reality of the impossible, because any deviance from those things leads to the rapid collapse of their entire belief system."

I would have to say: nope, at least not as you've stated.
the "inerrancy of the bible" is not an absolute litmus for my belief system.


and when you say:

"Similarly, if someone suggests that parts of the Bible are not meant to be taken literally, but rather symbolically, the question arises of which parts ARE literal and which are symbolic. Again, if the resurrection is only symbolic or the afterlife destinations are symbolic, the whole meaning of Christianity as it is understood by millions is totally destroyed."

you're being a bit convoluted. You're saying that if someone saying not all of the bible is literal, they must therefore believe none of it is, and that the meaning of christianity itself is destroyed. ER...if I find a mistake in a word problem on page 312 of my algebra textbook, does that mean algebra and mathmatics are invalid? Further, allegory is not a "mistake" in the true sense...its a way of representing things so that universal truths become evident. so, for example, if there were never a "good samaritan" as told by Jesus, the point of the story and its meaning are still valid: tolerance and compassion.

[megatherium]

18. My point was merely that the ID people aren't biblical literalists.

Some of them at least, anyway. (E.g. Michael Behe is Roman Catholic; Catholics are not expected to believe Biblical innerancy or the literal truth of Genesis. Indeed, Pope John Paul II stated that evolution is "not just a hypothesis".)

But you sound like a victim of fundamentalism; perhaps you were a fundamentalist believer of some sort early in life? Fundamentalists equate being a Christian with believing in the Bible, the entire Bible. This is called the gasbag theory: one leak and it all goes down. The Bible of course is not a single document, it's several dozen separate books written by a variety of different authors. The fact that Genesis was written in the first millinium BCE by authors who edited earlier Babylonian creation myths to make them monotheistic has little to do with whether any of the four Gospels are veridical.

The primary evidence for the resurrection of Christ is the fact that the immediate followers of Christ strongly believed this to be true. The earliest Christian writings we have are the five letters of Paul in the New Testament that scholars agree were written by him. These include 1 Corinthians, written in the 50s CE. When he wrote that letter, the death of Jesus was closer to him in time than Watergate was to us. Paul was an early convert to Christianity (probably within 10 years of the death of Christ). What he wrote reflected what the earliest Church believed (Paul was in contact with the original disciples in Jerusalem). And in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul gives a direct statement of the reality of the resurrection and who saw Jesus afterwards.

Note some people here claim that Paul invented Christianity, or that the Jesus described by Paul was a supernatural being who never lived on Earth (the legends of his life having arisen much later). These theories have little support in mainstream secular scholarship.

None of this proves the reality of the resurrection, but a common attitude here seems to be that people who believe in it are superstitious or ignorant. Many of them are not.

[aneerkoinos]

22. Thanks for a good post

Just these thoughts to add: perhaps it is not justified to call the pre-Paulian followers of Jesus a "Church". IMHO it is very likely that there were different views and interpretations and rifts on Jesus' teaching and meaning of his life and death starting allready with the inner circle of disciples, Mary and some others (Thomas?) perhaps starting (or continuing!) a Gnostic mystical interpretation, some others giving supportive elements for what became patriarchal misogynist Paulian religion with consequent Pistic and literalist interpretations by "orthodox" Church Fathers, who cleaned the pot in Nicea, and who know's what else...

[Taxloss]

33. Not ancestor, creator.

A separate concept.

And a regularly intervening creator. And yet they have no proof of what form this creator might take, or how we might study it further.

[Tux]

3. God did it

You're making baby Buddha cry. :cry:

[FtWayneBlue]

4. The concept of "days" in and of itself is pretty silly,

since the distinction or division of day from night didn't occur on the first day. The bible is just one of many tribal creation myths, and using it as a literal science book or history book, not to mention law book, is ludicrous.

[Igel]

5. There's a minor strand of Xian hermeneutics which

dwells at length on the verb in Gen. 1:2. The claim is that that verb indicates a change of state, not a continuation of a preexisting state.

This account has the creation in Gen. 1:1 occurring ... sometime. 4 billion years ago? 14 billion years ago? Qui sait?

Gen. 1:2 is then taken to mean "and the earth became void and without form" (or however they decide to translate 'tohu wbohu') at some point, with the following being dubbed the "re-creation".

Various sects put whatever unnamed catastrophe is presumed by Gen. 1:2 at varying points in the past. Some far distant; others much more recent. Chicxulub even made it into some folk's exegesis. Others restrict the re-creation to a specific geographic area. Very messy, trying to generalize over the set of all creationists. Very messy.

FYI.

[NAO]

8. Gen 1:1-5 - from "in the beginning" to "evening and morning were 1st day"

That whole "gap" theory is really a stretch of the text. The natural flow of verses 1-5 and the rest of the chapter, suggest that the author meant that from "in the beginning" thru God naming Day and Night were the "first day".

Now in addition to the "gap" theory, some "a day is a thousand (or a billion) years" theories have been floated. Again, the text suggests that an alternating "evening" and "morning" counts as a day. Either God misnamed "evening" and "morning" in a very sloppy and misleading fashion, or Genesis 1 is talking about 24 hour days.

[shrike]

9. Or a translator screwed up

Biggest problem with scriptures is that they were written in an ancient language.

[NAO]

10. The "bad translation" dodge suffers the same fate as errancy/symbolic

ploys. (see my post #6)

If there are some "errors in translation", how do we know that there have not been critical translation errors that could totally change the basic meanings of the Bible and Christian Doctrine?

If God wanted to reveal Himself to us in the written word, it is certainly within His power to make sure that his revelation is translated correctly.

If the Bible is "God's Word", it must be free of errors. If it has errors - even translation errors - it cannot be "God's Word" since God is perfect and not subject to making errors.

If the Bible is a 2nd or 3rd or nth generation translation/copy of "God's Word", it cannot be depended on and is subject to the "first hand revelation" argument of Thomas Paine.

[shrike]

12. Think you're over-reacting to my post

I'm merely pointing out that translators disagree amongst themselves what a word means. Especially when the language is an ancient one.

My dad read some texts (not many) in their original language, and remarked that some words had so many layers of meaning that the gist of the text could be difficult to discern. One of the problems of dealing with very, very, VERY old text.

[Zhade]

16. "how do we know that there have not been critical translation errors..."

We do know - Mary, the alleged mother of the alleged Jesus, was mistranslated from 'maiden' to 'virgin'.

Sorry, gang. No evidence for a "virgin birth" (no evidence supporting most of the bible, actually).

[NAO]

11. Thomas Paine on Revelations from God reported as second-hand hersay

Thomas Paine's book "The Age of Reason" is in the public domain so I will not in violation of DU guidelines when quoting more than four paragraphs.

In regards to the "only a translation/errors in copying" arguments, this passage from "The Age of Reason" applies:

CHAPTER II - OF MISSIONS AND REVELATIONS.

EVERY national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.

Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all.

As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some observations on the word 'revelation.' Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it.

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication. After this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hand of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so, the commandments carrying no internal evidence of divinity with them. They contain some good moral precepts such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver or a legislator could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention.

When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven, and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes to near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and therefore I have a right not to believe it.

When also I am told that a woman, called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not: such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it: but we have not even this; for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves. It is only reported by others that they said so. It is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not chose to rest my belief upon such evidence.

It is, however, not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the Son of God. He was born when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story. Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing at that time to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds; the story therefore had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God, and no more, and who had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited the story.

It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian Church, sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology. A direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making the reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand. The statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus. The deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything. The church became as crowded with the one, as the pantheon had been with the other; and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.

The Age Of Reason (1795)
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/index.shtml

[shrike]

7. Might want to check out this link

www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050530fa_fact - 71k

Calm, non-hysterical discussion of Intelligent Design. (Apparently, it's got nothing to do with Genesis.) However, it hasn't passed muster with the rest of the scientific community. Probably never will.

The article also notes that in 1996, John Paul II acknowledged that evolution is far more than just a theory. Interesting article; I learned a lot.

[H2O Man]

13. Intelligent design

is not limited to a christian viewpoint. To attempt to say ID is compromised because of the creation story in the bible is shallow. That said, I think it is important that ID be kept out of public schools, unless there are "comparative religion" classes.

[Brentos]

15. Fun!

I'm a Christian who believe in evolution.

I think the mistake the both sides of this argument make is making an ancient, poetic "historical" notion of cosmic origins literally. Ancient history was more concerned with the idea or substance, then the modern history which is more concerned with when and how did events occur.

Look at the creation account, it is a poetic parallel structure, going from macro on the left column, to the inhabitants of, in the right column, which is why you see plants before the sun:

day 7: Rest
Day 1: Light Day 4: lights (sun/moon/stars)
Day 2: water/sky Day 5: fish below/insects above
Day 3: plants (Adam, Eden)Day 6: animals (humans)(Eve)

The second account of creation has Adam created on day 3 (before plants), and Eve on Day 6

The "Truth" the "History" is that God created everything, for everything God created.

As to mechanism, I believe in evolution (although I wouldn't be surprised if Adam and Eve were literal and separate, and intermingled with homo-sapiens, etc.).

But, I and emphasize BUT, I would never teach this in science class! It is religious belief! I would teach evolution in science, and Adam, Eve in comparative religion, in Church, and at home.

Funny, how the ID people say the sex ed should be taught in the home and religious ed taught in the public school, from which they want vouchers to drain money and kids away from, so they can avoid science in the private schools. Weird.

[aneerkoinos]

17. Hume on ID

In "The Natural History of Religion" Hume thoroughly slaughtered the ID argument for existance of God. He said also that if we accept, for arguments sake, that there is some "Divine" teleological aspects in nature and evolution, we must also accept that those aspects are quite chaotic and contradictory. Thus the ID can be at best argument for polytheism, not monotheism. Which I guess would not make creationists happy... :P

[megatherium]

19. Someone should remind Antony Flew, eminent British philosopher

and long-time defender of atheism, what Hume proved. Flew recently disclosed that he now supports ID (he calls himself a deist).

[aneerkoinos]

20. Deism

That is interesting and I would not say Flew's position is untenable, as "Deism has become identified with the classical belief that God created but does not intervene in the world" (Wikipedia quote).

What is interesting that Deism is not contradictory with Neoplatonic, Gnostic, Buddhist or Bohmian cosmology, or with "polytheistic" ID.

The non-intervening Creator God of Deism is basically the same level Deity as Plato's Demiurge in Timaeus (and Gnostic Creator Yaldabaoth/Shaklas/etc), but separate from Supreme undefinable Deity, Plato's hen or agathos, or Bohm's holomovement, from and to which all being/forms unfold and infold. In Timaeus Plato tells that Demiurge created "Younger Gods" to carry on the creative process, so that all the forms (Ideas) of living beings will be born (41a->). This is not so far from Bohms ideas about interacting generative and implicate orders, which are timeless but yet dynamic (fractals is one example of generative order).

I don't probably make much sense, putting too much very cursory info in a short post, just trying to show that it is possible that Flew knows his Plato and Hume and isn't an idiot (don't know nothing about the guy, maybe he is, maybe he isn't), and that all language trying to address such metaphysical issues is by necessity highly metaphoric and/or mythical.

[shrike]

21. Interesting

Many very old cultures were deist.

The interior tribes of Indonesia, for example, believed in a Creator who did not interfere with the world or human existence -- essentially deism. But they believed in life after death and so were more concerned with spirits, whom they believed were concerned with them. They also believed that the entire earth and everything in it was alive -- rocks had spirits, trees had spirits. This is animism.

Unfortunately, it didn't keep them from fighting amongst themselves. People who have no real religion aren't necessarily peaceful. The Asmat of New Guinea fought about everything under the sun. They even built watchtowers so they could keep an eye out for enemies. The Bataks of Java used thorn bushes to build stockades, to discourage enemies from attacking them.

[aneerkoinos]

23. Philosopher's God

To me it seems that, unlike Monotheistic active creator God or Deistic passive creator god, the Philosophers God which is the source and pantheistic presence rather than any active agentive role, cf. Plato's Hen or Agathos, Buddha-nature, Christian Agape (but not the tribal sky God YHWH), Spinoza's God, Bohm's Holomovement etc., which could perhaps be described by universal holistic compassion interconnecting everything from the smallest to the biggest, surpassing all rationality, and the World religions based on that mystical realization, have had pacifying evolutionary effect on many cultures, e.g. Buddhism on Mongolians and others.

[megatherium]

24. interesting -

One of the important things about Judeo-Christian religion is the high emphasis on ethics and morality. The warlike tribal sky god YHWH gradually becomes a universal Creator whose biggest concern is the ethical and moral state of his creation: so by 500 BCE the prophet Isaiah declares that God is not interested in burnt offerings but rather in whether we take care of the defenseless and whether our legal system is just and not corrupt (Isaiah chapter 1).

[aneerkoinos]

25. 1st century AD

Which is the century of spiritual revolution in the West, when lot of the Greek (and non-Greek filosofies culminated in the Hellenistic world) saw one astonishing ethical development: giving up animal sacrifices. Historical Jesus was just part of this process, and later Paul, equally or more important work in renovating ancient cults and forms of worship was that of Apollonius of Tyana.

And I still object on historical, philosophical, ethical and other grounds towards elevating Creator aka Demiurge to the highest position. IMO that is not the essense of of teachings of Greek philosophies, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Jesus of Gospel of Thomas etc. Rather I think the direction that main stream Christianity took later merging together YHWH-Demiurge and Agape-Philosopher God and other influences into quite schitzophrenic Creator-Trinity was a step backwards, having a lot to do with Christianity's dialectical "destiny" to replace worshipping the virility of the Ceasar as uniting element of the post Constantine Empire.

[megatherium]

26. The ending of animal sacrifices

is similar to the ending of human sacrifices that happened a millenium or more earlier; familiar myths from various religions explain the ending of human sacrifice. In the Jewish scriptures, this is represented by the story of God stopping the sacrifice of Isaac by Jacob.

Modern ethics has rejected entirely the notion that evil can be paid for by a third party: if Michael Jackson were to be convicted of child molestation, he would not be able to arrange for someone else to serve his prison sentence, even if that party did so under his own free will because of his love for the pop star. But modern Christianity still has this idea at its core: Jesus as the sacrifice for the sins of the world (if not, as in the case of Catholicism, worship of Jesus at the core of an elaborate system of rituals and practice believed to make this "grace" available to all the faithful). My own conception of what Jesus did through his resurrection was to show humankind that God is with us in love even in our deaths. The Gospel was meant to be truly "good news" not the institution of a new and onerous burden. St. Paul's awkward theology of the substitutionary atonement confuses his affirmation that in Christ all are made new creatures.

[shrike]

27. Violence occurs for reasons other than religion

I would say that in the case of the New Guinea tribes, the scarcity of some resources and the difficulty of jungle life (they were hunter-gatherers, not agriculturalists) contributed to this. They killed to survive. The tribe next door might kill you because you are encroaching on their game. Family and bloodlines were everything, and deaths of family members were expected to be avenged, at all cost. Blood feuds could last generations. The Asmat developed a beautiful art form known as the ancestor pole. They would carve the faces of murdered ancestors onto the pole. The pole was a constant and three-dimensional reminder of lives they had to avenge.

[Chauga]

28. As though the ID idiots would change their minds just because of the truth

[NYdemocrat089]

29. According to my Bible God said

"Let there be light" before he created any organisms.

[madeline_con]

30. They don't really mean...

there's anything intelligent here, it's just a new nam for Creationism to get it past whomever the 'heathens' are that are keeping Christian prayer out of the public schools, kids of other faiths be damned!! :sarcasm:

[onager]

31. Absolutely! And I always love the argument...

...that "many intelligent people" believe in the supernatural nonsense of Xianity: talking snakes, pregnant virgins, dead messiahs walking, etc. etc.

Not too long ago, many Germans apparently believed in Nazism, too. So going by the Numbers Game, I guess that makes it a perfectly useful ethical and moral philosophy.

Or to put it another way, as a famous old saying did: "If millions of people believe a dumb idea, it's STILL a dumb idea!"

[madeline_con]

32. Here's a curious fact...

With all the complaining about prayer being taken out of school, I've yet to see one school (at least in this area of central FL) that does NOT have morning and or afternoon 'fellowship' meetings, "Christ on Campus", or something going on.

It's announced on the p.a. system, so it's not as if it's clandestine catacomb meetings! So, what's with all the bitchin'?

:shrug: