[Vision2020] Re: Two creation stories

[Scott Dredge]

You had written that "Life on earth began about 4 1/2
billion years ago".  The point of my post in response
was that there is a rather large disagreement as to
when life started on this planet.  When I was in
Junior High School I remember a conversation with one
of my classmates where I made the statement along the
lines of dinosaur fossils being several million years
old.  My classmate said, "You need to remember, Scott,
that God created the Earth only 3000 years ago."  I
just nodded my head in agreeement because I could see,
even at my rather young age back then, that this type
of a discussion could go back-and-forth and
back-and-forth for a very long time until one person
physically battered to death the other person over the
"my religion is right and yours is wrong" debate. 
This phenomenon has been occurring since the beginning
of time somewhere between 3000 years or 4 and a half
billion years ago and will continue until the equally
contentious "end of the world".

-Scott

--- Ralph Nielsen <nielsen@uidaho.edu> wrote:
> I'm sorry, but I fail to see the relevance of your
> post, Scott. But I 
> will discuss it.
> 
> Your reference to Ussher is not quite correct. He
> claimed the date was 
> October 23rd, not the 26th.
> Your creation story is more accurately called Hebrew
> rather than 
> Christian.
> 
> In the first story both male and female were created
> last, at the same 
> time and ex nihilo (out of nothing). There is
> another creation story in 
> Genesis 2, written in a totally different style. In
> Genesis 2, 
> beginning with verse 4b we have Yahweh, God, forming
> a man out of the 
> dust of the ground. He is alone and we read "Now
> YHWH, God, said, It is 
> not good for the human to be alone, I will make a
> helper corresponding 
> to him. So YHWH, God, formed from the soil every
> living-thing of the 
> field and every fowl of the heavens and brought each
> to the human, to 
> see what he would call it... but for the human,
> there could be found no 
> helper corresponding to him" (Genesis 2:18-19
> Everett Fox translation). 
> So Yahweh God made a woman out of the man's rib to
> be his helper. In 
> this creation story the man was was made first and
> the woman last. The 
> two accounts come from two different traditions;
> that is why they are 
> not the same. But they both come from an ancient,
> pre-scientific era, 
> when myths were the only "explanations" possible.
> Today we have much 
> grander and more plausible explanations from secular
> scientific 
> research in recent centuries.
>