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Author Topic:   Moses predicting Creation?
caffeine
Member (Idle past 1050 days)
Posts: 1800
From: Prague, Czech Republic
Joined: 10-22-2008


Message 7 of 7 (516938)
07-28-2009 10:55 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Ragged
07-28-2009 2:38 AM


Plenty of others posted basically the same while I was writing this, but I've written it now so it's appearing anyway.
I've never understood why the claim that the order of creation in genesis matches scientific understanding of the way things happen is so widespread. It's easily refuted by opening any book on the natural history of earth, including the book your first link cites as supporting evidence.
The creation of the sun and moon are probably the most glaringly out of place parts, but I'll just deal with the order of lifeforms appearing here. Firsty we have plants (before the sun). I don't read in Genesis the progression suggested in your link (grasses -> herbs -> trees), as they all just seem to appear together. But let's assume for a moment that's what's meant.
The early fossil record of grasses is sparse, but they're generally considered to have arisen some time in the late Cretaceous, less than 100 million years ago.
'Herb' is just a term for plants humans make use of due to their flavour. As a result, it's not really possible to say when they first evolved. Who knows what mesozoic plants tasted like? Using their mention as evidence for things appearing in the right order seems odd.*
'Tree' is also quite a wide category, though it's one based on morphology rather than flavour, so we can say with more confidence when they first appeared. The earliest trees we have evidence of are the ferns and horsetails that made up the great forests of the Carboniferous period. Note that this means trees appeared something like 300 million years before grasses. The order of plants in Genesis categorically does not match that uncovered by scientific inquiry.
Next, we move on to the creation of animal life. The Bible lists
things slightly differently than your link:
First comes fish and other creatures of the sea - sometimes whales
depending on your translation. We'll be generous and ignore the
whales. The fossil record of the earliest fishes are sparse, but they've been around since at least the ordovician period (488-444 million years ago). This is before the trees and grasses discussed above; in fact before any plants settled on land at all.
Next come birds. Birds are more recent than fish, and trees, appearing somewhere 150 million years ago or a bit later, depending on your definition of 'bird'. They're probably older than grasses, but this is difficult to verify.
Next come the beasts of the earth. Bit of a vague one, but we'll take it to mean land vetebrates. The earliest of these crawled on to the land something like 350 million years ago, long before there were any birds or grasses.
After this cattle arrive. 'Cattle' usually only refers to domesticated animals, which obviously needed humans to domesticate them first. We'll take a broader definition, probably that meant by the authors, and just looked at hoofed mammals instead. These animals are believed to have evolved only after the extinction of the dinosaurs - possibly somewhere between 55 and 60 million years ago. This makes them the youngest of everything considered so far, so we finally have something that fits in the right place.
But wait! Next, God goes on to create every 'creeping thing'. Assuming creeping thing refers to bugs and insects, then we're back to buggering up natural history as we know it. There are fossils that appear to be the tracks of arthropods on land dating back as far as 510 million years ago. Pneumodesmus newmani is the first land bug we have a body fossil of, and this little thing was creeping around Scotland around 428 million years ago, before cattle, before the beasts of the land, and before the birds.
The Genesis creation story doesn't eerily match what science has uncovered. It was written by men who didn't know what we know now, and their guesses don't even appear to be close.
*ABE - I've noticed your link wrote 'shrubs', not 'herbs'. Sorry, I was reading from the King Jame's Version.
Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

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 Message 1 by Ragged, posted 07-28-2009 2:38 AM Ragged has not replied

  
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