Well, I'm finally back to a somewhat normal routine. Got my oldest son settled in his apartment in Dallas over the weekend. Though we miss him very much, life continues.
And so does my Bible reading. Yes, I started in Genesis today! Woohoo! The very first verse in the Bible is soooo interesting!
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
Think about it! Nothing existed. No earth. No planets. No sun. No stars. No nothing. Only God, who has always been and will always be. (I know, I know. That's hard to comprehend, until you understand we are not meant to comprehend it. Just accept it and move on.)
The Hebrew word used for "God" in this verse is "Eloim", which is plural. What does that mean? It means God is referring to himself as 'more than one'. In Gen. 1:26 he makes this clear:
"Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness..."
God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit created the earth and everything else.
Notice that after each day and each creation, "God saw that it was good." Everything He created was good. But on the sixth day--the day he created man--"God saw all that he had made, and it was very good." Do you get it? God was wonderfully pleased with his creation called 'man'. He was very pleased to create a man and a woman and he blessed them. That's why marriage between a man and woman is so sacred. It was always God's original plan. It's right there in black and white.
As a kid I often wondered where dinosaurs fit into the whole creation picture. Well, the answer is in Genesis 1:24-25. God made all the wild animals and all the creatures that move along the ground on the sixth day. The same day he made Adam and Eve. So to those who think dinosaurs lived on earth millions of years before people...
You're wrong!
One other interesting tidbit is in 1:30 where God says, "And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground--everything that has the breath of life in it--I give every green plant for food." And it was so.'
Does this mean that ALL animals were herbivores? Did lions and tigers and T-rex's all eat grass and plants before the fall? Kinda looks that way to me!
God has an amazing plan for us! Just read Genesis 1 and you'll see how it all falls in place. In perfect order.
9 comments:
People and dinosaurs at the same time? In "The Flintstones," yes. Here in the real world, no. Why are you committed to such an obtuse reading of "Genesis?"
Why would I take other parts of the Bible at its word but not Genesis? For instance, the Bible tells me that Jesus was born of a virgin, was crucified on a cross for my sins, and rose from the dead on the third day. Do I believe those words? Absolutely!! So, do I believe the Bible when it tells me that God created earth and everything on it--including dinosaurs--in 6 days? You bet! Fred and Wilma know the truth!
~Michelle
C'mon. I know paleontology is no hobby of yours, but you can't seriously prefer folklore to science on questions of fact. It is a fact that humans did not live on earth with dinosaurs. The last dinosaurs died some 65 million years ago while members of the genus Homo appeared on the earth no earlier than about 2 million years ago. These are demonstrable and demonstrated facts. You can't pick and choose facts; you've just got to cope with them as best you can.
Dr. Francis S. Collins is Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He currently leads the Human Genome Project, directed at mapping and sequencing all of human DNA, and determining aspects of its function. His previous research has identified the genes responsible for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington's disease and Hutchison-Gilford progeria syndrome. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. Collins spoke with Bob Abernethy of PBS, posted online at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/transcripts/collins.html, in which he summaries the compatability of fact and faith thusly:
"I think there's a common assumption that you cannot both be a rigorous, show-me-the-data scientist and a person who believes in a personal God. I would like to say that from my perspective that assumption is incorrect; that, in fact, these two areas are entirely compatible and not only can exist within the same person, but can exist in a very synthetic way, and not in a compartmentalized way. I have no reason to see a discordance between what I know as a scientist who spends all day studying the genome of humans and what I believe as somebody who pays a lot of attention to what the Bible has taught me about God and about Jesus Christ. Those are entirely compatible views.
"Science is the way -- a powerful way, indeed -- to study the natural world. Science is not particularly effective -- in fact, it's rather ineffective -- in making commentary about the supernatural world. Both worlds, for me, are quite real and quite important. They are investigated in different ways. They coexist. They illuminate each other. And it is a great joy to be in a position of being able to bring both of those points of view to bear in any given day of the week. The notion that you have to sort of choose one or the other is a terrible myth that has been put forward, and which many people have bought into without really having a chance to examine the evidence. I came to my faith not, actually, in a circumstance where it was drummed into me as a child, which people tend to assume of any scientist who still has a personal faith in God; but actually by a series of compelling, logical arguments, many of them put forward by C. S. Lewis, that got me to the precipice of saying, 'Faith is actually plausible.' You still have to make that step. You will still have to decide for yourself whether to believe. But you can get very close to that by intellect alone."
Michelle says: Amen, Dr. Collins! Science is based on "facts" discovered by humans. Faith is based on a belief that God is higher and bigger and smarter than those facts and the people that came up with them. So, my choice is: Hang with the people who THINK they know it all, or hang with God, who DOES know it all. I'm stickin' with God!
But Francis Collins does not say that faith trumps science when facts about the natural world are under discussion. It is a demonstrated fact that dinosaurs went extinct some 63 million years before anything that could properly be called human walked the earth. So your belief that Genesis accurately implies the co-existence of humans and dinosaurs cannot be a factual belief; it is a belief despite the facts, and consequently cannot be a true belief. So what's the point of asserting a false belief?
Oh, but don't you see? Faith ALWAYS trumps science!!! Science cannot prove God exists. It never will. Science cannot prove Jesus rose from the dead. It never will. Science is not static. It's always changing with different "discoveries" and different "facts" from other people. Faith NEVER changes! That is the very nature of faith! If God says he created everything, including dinosaurs and people, in six days, then FAITH accepts that. Science does not. You have to make your own choice. My choice is FAITH. If I'm wrong, then I'm wrong. If you're wrong, then you will face the consequences we talked about in the Revelation study. Is that really worth taking man's opinion and "facts" at face value over God's?
And I'd have to say that YOU are living on faith as well. Faith in man. Faith that the facts you quote from other scientists are true. Now, I know you are one of the most intelligent people I will ever know, but I assume that you have not personally done any carbon testing and whatnot in order to come to your own conclussions about how old dinosaur bones truly are. You are going on FAITH that these scientific facts are correct. Maybe they aren't. I've read that cardon testing and other aging tests are actually not accurate at all. Climate changes could affect fossils. Water, ice, heat. Everything. No one alive today was alive back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, so no one alive today can say with all FACT that they lived so-and-so many years ago. Your have to accept that on FAITH.
Knowledge is not faith. It is not a matter of faith that I know dinosaurs lived millions of years before humans. I just made the effort to learn about paleontology and geology. You can too. Faith is static; it has no where to go. Learning is dynamic; it has the whole world to investigate. Why settle for faith when you can have fact?
It is certainly NOT a demonstrated and demonstratable fact that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. Science is observable and/or repeatable. Anything other than that is merely the INTERPRETATION of facts, depending on your world view. I suggest that anyone who is serious about finding out the truth, not just arguing about what's science and what's faith, should do some honest, serious, open-minded reading on Creationontheweb.com and AnswersinGenesis.com. There is PLENTY of real science from real scientists on these sites.
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