And God created the pongidids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve, who were anatomically fully modern humans. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, in chapter one He said he created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in chapter two He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused further confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created Bible scholars and theologians to argue the point.Read the whole thing. A tad irreverent but, given the violence the creationists do the scripture, I think it is warranted.And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One he chose as his special creation He named Lucy. And God realized this was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to sort it out. And just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants who lived as farmers and herders would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, population genetics, and evolutionary theory, so He created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the land that God realized this too was confusing, so he created anthropologists, folklorists, and mythologists to settle the issue.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Michael Shermer Rewrites Genesis
Michael Shermer suggests that if creationists have their way and it is taught as an alternative to evolution, the standard Genesis story will have to be, shall we say, redone. Its a howl. Here is a short section:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The best line is most definitely:
ReplyDelete"God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply (but not in those words)."I enjoyed the piece, but I wish Shermer was more careful in his wording. Take the following:
"In the book in which God explained how He did all this, in chapter one He said he created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in chapter two He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs."Genesis 1 doesn't say "at the same time," it just indicates they were created on the same day. And it also doesn't claim man was made out of dust; that comes in chapter 2. So literalists have wiggle room to refute Shermer without refuting the underlying criticism. I don't know how often I've seen that manner of apologetics.
Welllllll, it is a tad goofier than that, even. Genesis 1 only says:
ReplyDelete26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, [b] and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." It isn't until Genesis 2 where you get the expanded creation account:
18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."
19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
But for Adam [h] no suitable helper was found. 21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs [i] and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib [j] he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. So Shermer is guilty of reading only Genesis 1 and not Genesis 2. On the other hand, the literalists have to explain why there are two separate accounts and why they are different.
These things don't format quite the way they say they are going to, do they?
ReplyDelete