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narf poit chez BOOM said:
I'll just point out that the order described in the bible fits the order described by the location of fossils, as it was described in my textbooks.
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You're going to be have to be more specific, but generally I'd say that this is not correct.
Roughly the order described in Genesis goes like this, quotes from KJV:
1: "...grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself.."
2: "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years..."
(Note: so God supposedly made plants and trees first, then made the Sun and the Moon etc. Ouch.)
3: "Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good."
4: "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind..."
The above implies that God created fish first (generally correct) but makes the mistake of including whales as fish which as we now know, is not correct. But the writers of Genesis could not know what we know. Generally, evolutionary biology (supported by recent fossil findings) state that whales are descendents of land-based mammals.
It also implies that birds were created before reptiles ("creeping thing"?) and in any case, before land-based animals, and anyone who's watched "Jurassic Park" knows that's not true.
I can supply complete references to anyone who is interested.
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narf poit chez BOOM said:
The arguement that the biblical creation must be false because it is simaliar to many others is a falicy(sp?), if such a congruence exists (I havn't read other religeons religeous texts, yet), it is evidence of some sort of historical congruence or origin point and hardly evidence of falsety(sp?).
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You are correct of course. But the main point is not to say that it is factually false, merely to say that it is unoriginal. If there is true "congruence", then we must reasonably be able to say that the writers of Genesis based their writings on information sources completely independently of the cultures surrounding them.
Given the close cultural contact between them and the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians etc., it is more reasonable to suppose that the writers of Genesis plagiarized, to use an unkind word, from existing creation mythologies that pre-dated the Jewish religion. On the other hand, if we find significant similarities between two cultures who were completely isolated from one another, then we would be able to speculate on the possibility of congruence.