Rather than get hung up on the horns of a dilemma...seek truth in the tension of the paradox.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
A youtube argument about creation:
A typical discussion of Cosmology tends to look like this one:
http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=fSqJHMdreEM
OK gentlemen, you may not have been taught this in sunday school... Creation and Evolution need not be so far apart. While some fundamentalists are ridiculed for taking the Bible literally and rightly so, others understand that when reading anything, we automatically consider context, audience, and form (ie prose, poetry, narrative etc). Unfortunately while we do this for most literature automatically, we don't in considering Gen. 1. Science as we know it didn't exist back then.
@wwickeddogg To think of a piece of literature which may be as old as 4,000 years old, and impose a post Renaissance/Enlightenment view of science on it, is to do violence to the text. Even the most rigid literalist would read "The eyes of the lord go to and fro among the earth" and realize that is metaphorical. And was meant to be read as such. God doesn't have anthropomorphic features like "eyes" and they don't have legs that wander to and fro across the face of the earth.
Respond to this video... The thing that everyone should take to reading anything, is the intention one should that take what was meant to be taken literally, literally; and what was meant to be taken figuratively, figuratively. Genesis 1 displays classical, ancient poetic form. They didn't consider rhyming back then, but looked at parallelisms instead. Like for example, the parallels between the first 3 days of creation and the last three. Write them down and see for your self. The form is poetic
Respond to this video... Finally, to what ever extent fundamentalists are criticized for being literalists, The opposing view fails by actually doing the same thing: Taking the scripture literally, when it was *meant to be taken figuratively. When Christians do so, there are no restrictions to creation in the universe. And for agnostics, there is no threat and no reason to fight.
Peace.
OK gentlemen, you may not have been taught this in sunday school... Creation and Evolution need not be so far apart. While some fundamentalists are ridiculed for taking the Bible literally and rightly so, others understand that when reading anything, we automatically consider context, audience, and form (ie prose, poetry, narrative etc). Unfortunately while we do this for most literature automatically, we don't in considering Gen. 1. Science as we know it didn't exist back then.
Peace.