spin

One of the major problems with the creationist position is that it starts with an erroneous biblical translation of the beginning of Genesis.

The text whose first word is "bereshit", which can only mean something like "at the beginning of", thus subordinating the clause which follows, as other Hebrew time phrases such as be-yom do. This meaning necessarily leads to a rendering of the first verse of Genesis as:

"At the beginning of God's creation of the heavens and the earth, (2) the earth was without form and void, darkness over the deep, and the wind of God moving on the face of the waters."

You will see that certain things already existed when God began his creation: the earth was already there, though without form and void, we had darkness, we had the deep/waters and the wind of God.

The first creative act was God saying "let there be light" and naturally the light initiates the first day of creation. He did no creating before that, unless one wants to nullify the significance of the six day structure of the passage, which allows God to rest on the seventh day -- and the day before the first day would have been a sabbath, had the writer intended such a thing.

One therefore cannot rely on any creative acts "prior" to the first day in Gen 1. And one cannot propose creatio ex nihilo.

Literal use of biblical texts to construct a coherent system in opposition to evolution, cannot work if they are based on erroneous translations of the source text.

Oolon Colluphid

If you say so, Spin. <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> Good to see that they don't know what they're talking about. No surprise there.

Not to put your point down, but personally, I'm not too worried about the meaning of 'bereshit' when there's ample hard evidence the bible's description is horseshit.

Oolon

[ March 15, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

spin

Oolon:
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Good to see that they don't know what they're talking about.
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I think it is an integral part of creationism, ie that the proponents use literal interpretations of a translation which does not particularly well represent the original text they believe it does.

Oolon:
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Not to put your point down, but personally, I'm not too worried about the meaning of 'bereshit' when there's ample hard evidence the bible's description is horseshit.
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This is similar to the linguistic style of argument used by early Jewish writers. Words and ideas are related by sound.

What one should realise is that the writers of the bible were honestly attempting to deal with a world they didn't have the tools to analyse, and we're not too much better off, especially when we look at creationist arguments.

bluefugue

Creationists also refer to the "Behemoth" passage in Job as suggesting a dinosaur living in Biblical times (King James version):

It is claimed (by Robert Pennock in Tower of Babel among others) that "tail" is a bowdlerization of "penis." (I can't read Hebrew, but the earlier mention of "loins" and the subsequent reference to "stones" would seem to support this interpretation.) If we remove the "tail" detail there is no reason the Behemoth couldn't be, say, a hippopotamus (unless hippos don't eat grass?). Yet I still hear the "Behemoth" passage mentioned by creationists from time to time. It's another one of those dubious memes that dies hard.

[ March 15, 2002: Message edited by: IesusDomini ]</p>

hezekiah jones

<a href="http://stephenmitchellbooks.com/translations/job.htm" target="_blank">Stephen Mitchell</a>'s translation of Job 40:15-18:

Look now: the Beast that I made:
he eats grass like a bull.
Look: the power in his thighs;
the pulsing sinews of his belly.
His penis stiffens like a pine;
his testicles bulge with vigor.
His ribs are bars of bronze,
his bones iron beams.

Amen-Moses

I'd just like to point out that dinosaurs did not eat grass (Hippo's I believe eat a form of reed which is a grass).

Amen-Moses

cloudyphiz

not to mention the fact that job's behemoth is said to hide amongst the reeds.
somehow i don't think reeds would provide cover for the kind of dinosaurs that the creationists are talking about.

-gary [/B]

Oolon Colluphid

Yup, for the first hundred million years at least. No angiosperms, you see. But I gather that grasses originated in the Cretaceous (as did angiosperms in general), so late dinos may well have eaten them.

Oolon the nit-picker

Oolon Colluphid

I certainly won't argue on with you about Hebrew text or whatever, but I just want to point out that it wasn't a style of argument, it was a statement of fact, with a little phonetic homology thrown in for humorous effect.

Oolon

Kevin Dorner

Biblical literalists/YEC's have an ad hoc apologetic for this that before "the Fall" that tyrannosaurs and velociraptors and so forth with knife-blade teeth were... vegetarians.