@CM, to address your specific comment that science agrees that there was ash and stuff in the air at some point early in the Earth's existence... yes - in the Hadean, the geologic eon that ended about 4 billion years ago... photosythesis (plant life) not coincidently near the end of the Hadean, as things calmed down and the sky cleared. ...but not before. Plants need light and would not be able to start existing until there was a steady visible light (the sun) not blotted out by smoke and ash. Events of day 3 would have to happen after the events of day 4, in other words... i.e. not in biblical order.

@Draugnar, well, at least we're not on opposite ends of the belief spectrum. Years ago I pondered long and hard about the separation between us and lower animals... and its implications regarding a soul. Interesting thoughts. I ended up not being able to find a bright line that I could draw. Worth noting that even humans have a version of the hive mind... crowds often exhibit it - especially when emotions run high. Then there is society/civilization in general... like a well oiled machine - mysterious in how it all works together without a single mind controlling it and organizing it in a top-down fashion. I think it is all bottom up... You know that no one is in charge in a hive either? The queen doesn't give orders... the queen is simply the reproductive system. I heard a hole science program about ants and bees and emergence in higher animals recently - it was quite fascinating. Don't get me wrong, there is a huge difference between us and ants... but also interesting to note that ants have the largest brains per body size for any of the insects. There's something going on even if it looks pretty damn limited from our perspective.

Individuals are smart. People are dumb. Learned that from Men In Black. :-)

@CM, one mistake to correct in my post. I said plant life 4 billion years ago... what I meant was photosynthetic life - in the form of single celled organisms. Plants proper did not come onto the scene until about 3 billion years later, give or take. So... sun breaks through the clouds of ash and smoke... and 3 billion years later you have plants and 3.85 billion years later (or 150 million years before the present day) you have plants with fruit. Kind of conflicts with the day 3 and day 4 chronology. According to scientific evidence, events in Day 3 happened 3.85 billion years after the events in day 4.

@ Dexter: "....ants...."

Yes, ants are fascinating. Do you know there are some ants that have developed agriculture?

They beat us to it by quite a long time too. Some species have got analagous livestock too. Ants rule. Don't even get me started about bees. =P

@ jamiet:

That's not what I meant. I'm Christian myself. What I meant is: why try to squeeze scientific theories into the Biblical account? Why still take Genesis 1 mostly literally?

Why indeed!!

Even if it would correspond with current scientific thinking, we can't tear Genesis 1 loose from its historical context. It is written from a certain worldview, with the knowledge of that time. The Bible has no claim like the Koran, as if scientific discoveries were written in it all along.

I have a question maybe someone can answer.

Where in the bible (specifically what passage(s)) says that the Bible is a complete, literal truth and infallible?

Going back to a point at the beginning of the discussion I read a theory that was based upon historical Babylonian stories which predated the Lost paradise one and the discovery of channels in the Arabian Sea which connect with the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that could match the description of paradise from the story.

It's also in this same area that it's believed that man first began cultivation. Therefore, it was theorized as a story to claim that mankind's greatest sin was the cultivation of land and animals and leaving the life that god created to live as that of hunters and gatherers. This eventually led to horrible things such as communal diseases and wars.

I like this idea.

@ Abgemacht

The Bible pretty much says the exact opposite. No book with whole chapters dedicated to poetry can possibly be literal truth throughout. What you should consider when reading the Bible is that it was not written just for your own personal benefit. It is there not only to help you, but also to help the Chinese farmer it happens to end up with, and a European soldier from the Dark Ages, and a philosopher from the enlightenment, and the first colonists of Mars etc etc etc from all times past, present and future. As such you will find aspects of it that will not make any sense to you while you're reading it, but may effect you completely by surprise later in your life, and some aspects that will never apply to you at all. God provides the Bible as an accompaniment to your brain, not a replacement. When you encounter something that you feel is completely incompatible with what you know is they way you should live your life, it is because it is completely incompatible with the way you should live your life. God did not create us to be idiots in His own image.

Keep this in mind and you may well find the Bible stops being an easily mocked relic of a bygone age, and becomes instead a useful tool to help enrich your life. At worst it makes for a lovely bookend.

@Octavious

I'm fully aware of this. But, it seems that a lot of people live their life as if it is, in fact, literal truth. I was wondering if there was anything in the bible that may have claimed as much.

There are vague references, but nothing concrete that I am aware of, abgemacht.

Like I say, by filling it with large chunks of poetry the Bible is pretty much shouting from the rooftops "I am NOT complete literal truth!" I'm not sure how it could have made this more clear without writing it in block capitals on the front page.

@Ebay, I wouldn't be surprised at all if creation stories such as the Garden of Eden deal with some misty communal memory of simpler times... perhaps times before a great drought requiring us to migrate. Africa, already subject to huge seasonal variation of rainfall in many parts has also been repeatedly turned into a desert and back again. In the last ice age, most recently, the region that is now the Sahara was well settled and lush with life... and the sea level was much lower (thanks to the glacial ice taking up a bunch of the water)... low enough to expose much of the flooded channels in the Persian Gulf to which you refer. If the Sahara is an appropriate measure, then I'm sure that the Fertile Crescent was even more so at that time. Subject to sudden changes (perhaps as little over as little as several generations) in their world - harsh changes that would have been hard to adjust to (and require moving from their former paradise) would certainly be good fodder for story. And once the story is told, like all good story tellers, they shape the story subtly over time - to be more memorable, more iconic, more supportive of their world view and view of the order of things (including religion). Of course, in their view, the climate changes and flooding would be God's doing! Dramatic natural events (comets, floods, lightning, earthquakes, etc.) have often been attributed to gods - and more so in pre-scientific societies, of course. Being self-centered beings (like all beings most likely are), we think it all must be punishment for something we did. Etc. etc. The story almost writes itself.

Of course if one of the biblical writers did proclaim somewhere that the whole thing is literal truth and infallible... well, that would hardly hold water for those who don't already believe it to be the case. The most obvious of the fallacies is the circular thinking (and appeal to authority) involved with thinking that just because the writer says that something (including his claim) is true and infallible that they therefore are.

@dexter,

Again, I agree; I'm just curious as to why this notion is so popular. If Jesus was like "Hey, this Bible is 100% correct," although it doesn't hold much water, I could see why people would believe it. If, however, nobody actually associated with the Bible said it was infallible, it makes me wonder why so many people need it to be.

In the case of much of the Christian world it is because tradition dictates it. Many Crhistians are sheep and believe whatever some leader tells them. they may read the good book, but their interpretations are someone else's not their own. Here is a decent wikipedia page on the whole "inerrancy of the Bible" debate. It is pretty much a historical focus and doesn't take side one way or the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_inerrancy

Thanks, Draug, that was very helpful.

@abgemacht - There is a verse in either Timothy or Peter (I can't remember the exact verse offhand, sorry) that says all scripture is inspired by God.

"inspired by"

To me, that seems like a big difference. Just because God is infallible, doesn't mean he can't "inspire" a work that isn't.

one problem:

even if there was a verse in matthew where is says:

Then Jesus said: "Every word in the bible is exactly, literally true."

You would have a few problems. One is that this state is also up to interpretation. Meaning that the Bible's own comments about its own interpretation are not helpful in the debate over how to interpret it. The other problem is that you can never be sure that that was in the "original bible."

And the third problem is all the books. I think what makes the Bible weakest is its nature as a compilation. It puts any specific book up to questioning. So as a result it makes it very hard to talk about how you believe "the Bible" literally. For, what is "the Bible"?

Each book of the Bible should be held to it's own standard and viewed in the context in which it was written. Paul's various letters were written over a period of time, much of which he was in prison for his beliefs. But they were also written by a man who was very much influenced by the times he lived in and are, therefore, mysogynistic to say the least, as well as very intolerant of anything consider outside the norm.

The Torah or Pentateuch is generally believed to have been written by Moses thousands of years before Christ and, as such, not only relayes stories that predates himself, but is affected by his limited knowledge of the world around him.

Of course, the Bible was written in a time period when excruciating minutia weren't as important as they are today (for instance, if the army contained 39,978 men, they would easily say 40,000), but that's not exactly the point of the Bible. The point of the Bible was: "These things were written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God."
Whatever the correct creation theory is, the main point of the passage is that "In the beginning, God created the universe." How long or what means He used are not all that important to the faith.
That's my take on this whole thread.

baumhaeuer +1

And did anyone know there are 5000+ extant manuscripts of the NT? Some of them as far back as the 2nd century? There are thousands of variations, but almost all of them are spelling or word order related (stuff like "I already knew that" as opposed to "I knew that already"), a few have the insertion, changing, or deletion of some words, but nothing changes the meaning of the text and none affect the theology (not even that entire passage in John about Jesus saving the adulteress, or the stuff at the end of Mark affect any doctrine).