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Comment by elwell | Hacker News Reader

Another 'coincidence' is that the order that plants, water animals, land animals, flying animals, and humans are created seems to match what you might derive from evolution theory. And, that man is created from dust of the earth. Kind of weird to even think that different animals came about within an orderly process. Kind of weird to think that the universe had a beginning; seems to make more sense to assume it just always was and will be, but current science agrees: universe had a beginning and will have an end.

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You write: "the order that plants, water animals, land animals, flying animals, and humans are created seems to match what you might derive from evolution theory"

I don't see that. Genesis 1:21 says "great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind" were created on the 4th day, and "every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind" were on the 5th."

Evolution theory has that whales specifically (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans ), and all marine mammals, evolved first on land then entered the sea. The same for winged creatures.

Additionally, the Bible has two creation stories, with different orderings. Genesis 2 has man created before animals.

Genesis 2:7 - "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

Genesis 2:19 - "And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them"

> "Additionally, the Bible has two creation stories, with different orderings. Genesis 2 has man created before animals."

This is an incredibly important detail that a lot of people ignore. Genesis 2 is a fairly old and classic creation story, whereas Genesis 1 is probably the most recent addition to Genesis, probably written during the Babylonian Exile. It's a poem, structured by the days of the week, that tells that God didn't only create animals and humans, like Genesis 2 tells, but also the very fabric of the universe, light, darkness, the sun and stars, etc. It expands the scope of Creation compared to the more human-level view of Genesis 2. Genesis 2 is the human story of creation, Genesis 1 is the scientist's story of creation (at the time; Babylonians were the scientists of their age and studied the stars).

Thanks for your strong points. I guess I would say that it's still interesting to me how close it is to current details of evolution theory. According to my other reasons for believing in God and the value of the Bible, it seems wiser to assume that the scientific community has yet to observe enough. But, I understand how someone would prefer the current consensus of the senses.

I guess I just don't see how it's all that close.

How are there grasses and herbs and trees (Genesis 1:12) before there's day and night or seasons (Genesis 1:14)? Evolutionary theory says that life was created after the crust cooled down - which means there was already day and night. And seasons too, since that depends on the inclination of the Earth.

Genesis 1:16 says the Moon was created after fruit trees. The earliest seeded trees are from the late Devonian, so no more than about 400 million years ago - well after the Moon started to orbit the Earth.

There are many other creation myths. How do you evaluate them for accuracy if you don't use "the current consensus of the senses"? Perhaps Mbombo really did vomit us up - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbombo , and we just haven't found the evidence?

> I guess I just don't see how it's all that close.

To me, it is interesting that the rough outline is similar. Yes, I agree that some specifics are not in the same order. Also, simply the fact that Genesis 1 describes a process at all, seems like a prescient paradigm. And, that there was actually a Beginning, rather than just everything always existing.

> Mbombo

My best guess is that the creation story was passed down orally for a long time, thus there are variations in different cultures. So why would I accept the Genesis account as more accurate than the account given by the Kuba people? That's predicated on my faith in the Judeo-Christian God. Why do I have faith in Him? Because I was born into a Christian household, and learned about the teachings of the Bible, then opened my mind to seek the truth with relentless intellectual honesty (or at least tried to), and God worked in my life (just a case study here), and I couldn't harden my heart to how meaningful He is. So, I was no longer debating with facts, but with a Person. In addition, every intellectual debate always left room to maintain faith or abandon faith. I haven't found an argument that forces me to disbelieve (nor do I have one that forces someone to believe). It's clear from Scriptures that God allows us the choice; that he doesn't make himself undeniably plain.

The Biblical creation story seems strongly influenced by the older Babylonian creation story, for which we have written records. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C3%BBma_Eli%C5%A1#Influence... points out:

> The Enuma Elis contains numerous parallels with the Old Testament, and has led to a general conclusion amongst some researchers that the paralleled Old Testament stories were based on the Mesopotamian work. Overarching similarities include: reference to a watery chaos before creation; a separation of the chaos into heaven and earth; different types of waters and their separation during the creation process; as well as the indirect textual similarity between the number of tablets and the number of days of creation: seven.

I therefore think it's difficult to say that Genesis 1 "seems like a prescient paradigm" when the roughly similar outline existed before Genesis was written. At the very least, the Enuma Elis should also be considered an equally prescient paradigm, yes?

My current stance on that is that the account in Genesis is older than the Babylonian version, despite not having yet discovered any written record of the former older than the latter. And again, that the Genesis story was passed orally for some time, and many cultures appropriated and molded it to reinforce the divine power of their government. As discussed in the previous post, I'm biased because of personal experience. Though for precedence, consider how the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls brought a written record that was a millennium older than any other known at the time (I don't know much about archaeology, but I think that's accurate).

And another example of archaeological discovery affirming Biblical accounts after a period of doubt (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites#Biblical_background):

> Before the archeological discoveries that revealed the Hittite civilization, the only source of information about the Hittites had been the Old Testament. Francis William Newman expressed the critical view, common in the early 19th century, that, "no Hittite king could have compared in power to the King of Judah...".[10]

From the link you shared, this theory would be interesting to explore:

> Based on an analysis of proper names in the texts A.T. Clay proposed that the Enuma Elish was a combination of a Semitic myth from Amurru and a Sumerian myth from Eridu—this theory is thought to lack solidity, and specifically any historical or archaeological evidence.

It feels like you've shifted the topic.

Earlier you wrote "simply the fact that Genesis 1 describes a process at all, seems like a prescient paradigm."

I commented that it cannot be seen as a prescient paradigm because earlier texts describe a similar paradigm.

You correctly point out that the Genesis story can be older than Genesis 1.

Which I agree with, since I think the Enuma Elish is the same Genesis story. Or rather, the Genesis account "[borrowed] themes from Mesopotamian mythology, but adapt[ed] them to the Israelite people's belief in one God" ( Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_creation_narrative ).

I also agree with the concept since the Biblical flood narrative is believed to have been written nearly 1,000 years after older written Mesopotamian flood myths - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth#Mythologies .

Any argument for older precedence must also consider that Mesopotamian mythology is also almost certainly far older.

However, you still can't argue that the Genesis 1 description seems a prescient paradigm. At best you can say is that you believe there are centuries older accounts which match the Genesis 1 description and which, if found, would be a prescient paradigm.

But the complexity of that statement doesn't fit your "simply the fact" comment.

> And another example of archaeological discovery affirming Biblical accounts after a period of doubt (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites#Biblical_background):

Was all of The Illiad correct because Troy was found?

Note also that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Hittites comments about ongoing "debates about possible identities between the Anatolian Hittite Empire and the biblical Hittites".

And yet God made Sun, 'day' after he made fruit-bearing trees. Wonderful lack of coincidence.

In Genesis 1, light and dark, day and night, were created well before plants and trees. It's just the sun and stars that came later somehow.

Yea... but we know that light comes from fusion happening inside the sun, so the light on day 1 must be some other kind of light. Some spiritual light? Not sure how plants can photosynthesize that.

We know that, but the author of the poem didn't. During the day, light seems to come from everywhere, and not just the sun. Raleigh refraction was not a familiar concept at the time.

Author didn't know what he was talking about and any relation of his writings to actual reality is purely accidental.

I'm fairly certain that having plants before the Sun contradicts most scientific consensus. Though, right now I'm focused on the things that are strikingly similar to our current observable knowledge. I also leave a lot of room for the scientific community to discover reasons to adapt their theories, as has historical happened. It is important to note that 'light' existed on 'day' one, and perhaps in a few hundred years we will discover a more specific description of how that was true, but the story doesn't claim plants grew without light. (Regarding the 'days' of the creation story, I certainly leans towards interpreting that poetically, for a few reasons, not the least of which being the lack of the Sun until 'day' four.)

What do you make of Adam being ashamed of being naked in the presence of God?

To me, that seems to be just something a clothed adult in a pudic society would think, not something the first man would actually feel.

The transition from being unashamed to ashamed is a big part of the Garden story.

First: "Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame."

Then, later: "Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths."

I don't know, or care to focus on, how literal or figurative the story is. Perhaps it's describing a change that occurred during evolution to (or within) homo sapiens, a change that caused us to be more self-aware (in a bad way?), self-reliant, conscious of good and evil. Just speculation here.

Adam fell into the duality of the subject object relationship when he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, this much is implied in the very name of the tree which relates two opposing and irreconcilable terms. After eating from this tree, Adam began to see himself as seperate from God. This led to the absursity of his shame, since putting on clothes is not going to hide what's underneath from the all knowing being. For man, it is absurd that he sees himself as seperate from God, whose existence man depends on for his own being. Seeing his nakedness after having not seen it previously also speaks to man's mode of being shifting from the inward to the outward, with the surface of the body being the limit of outward development and the preoccupation with it being exposed pointing to this shift and fall. The two eyes of the two individuals, again signifying duality, being opened also attests to this shift since the eyes that see the nakedness can only see outwardly. And finally, recall that this shift from the inward to the outward is precisely the fall of man, since the "Kingdom of God is within you."

> Perhaps it's describing a change that occurred during evolution to (or within) homo sapiens, a change that caused us to be more self-aware (in a bad way?), self-reliant, conscious of good and evil. Just speculation here.

This is something I think about sometimes. We now know that anatomically modern humans shared a timeline and even bred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, probably others. So there was a period when anatomically modern humans, probably cognitively modern (thus capable of language) or close to it, were interacting with these other archaic homo sapiens and probably became aware of their cognitive differences. Maybe these ancient stories reflect an early rationalisation of how human-neanderthal or human-denisovan physical and cultural practices differed. Of course the stories would have to be transmitted for thousands of generations...

Bonus armchair biblical hermeneutics: the Nephilim [1] are the biblical reflex of older stories about one or more archaic homo sapiens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim

That could certainly explain how Cain, son of allegedly the first man and woman, was afraid of what other people might do to him when he was exiled. Clearly his family wasn't the only people on Earth.

Though I don't think that's really about Denisovans and Neanderthals. It's just a transition from creation myth to other kinds of myth, and not reflective of any real events. I'm a Christian, and I'm firmly convinced that the first half of Genesis (possibly all of it, but definitely the first part) is just a collection of older mythological stories shaped into a somewhat cohesive whole, with some mention of God shoehorned in, whether it makes sense or not. It's certainly not meant to be taken literally in any way. There might be a kernel of truth to some of them (there probably was a big flood where someone saved a lot of animals), but that kernel is small. From Abraham onward, it starts to look more like it might be based on real events.

You are free to take it as literally as you want, but it seems like it would allude to milestones in evolution:

* As we get closer to the modern human, we lose body hair to better suit our hunting style. The trade off is we're much more vulnerable since our skin is pretty bad compared to almost every animal out there.

* We make up for this by literally taking other animals' skins and putting it on top of our own.

* Hunting societies begin to emerge in parallel to this change, and shame is a key element of the social interaction that allows that. Shame allows reinforcement and communication of expectations, all without violence or even language. Being exposed means that you cannot even take care of yourself, so you have to be able to show you are ashamed otherwise it means you're absolutely clueless and why would the group want you around if you're clueless?

That's not universal. Only some hunter-gathers use animal's skins. Some use, eg, gourds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koteka .

The modern Sentinelese are hunter-gathers and also essentially naked, wearing only "bark strings", says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese .

These observations support my view that the statement "Being exposed means that you cannot even take care of yourself" is not universally correct.

I'm genuinely curious as to why do they even bother with those strings then?

Is it shame?

Is it something else?

I am no anthropologist. A quick search on the topic (not specific to those people) suggests decoration, identity, and "perception of how to live life" are possible reasons.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160919-the-real-origin-of-c... comments that it might be decoration.

> Gilligan points out that humans were probably decorating themselves long before clothes even existed. "When you look at contemporary hunter-gatherers who don't use clothing, they decorate themselves brilliantly with body painting. You don't need clothing in order to do that."

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/lifestyle/debunking-colonial... points to several "contexts and situations where elements of dress [broadly speaking] seem to have been of particular relevance." One example is:

> a hunter, before he tracks his prey, must cut himself and rub the cuts with a root called ssho /oa. And he must rub his body with it and wear ssho /oa in a band around his shoulders. This is to get the game to “run foolishly”, not knowing that it is afraid, and to approach the hunter as an equal. ...

> Far from being naked, or nearly naked, the Bushmen of colonial southern Africa had a complex and meaningful practice of dress. It was intimately related to subsistence, identity and their perception of how to live life in the world as they knew it.

The author's book is at http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/dress-as-social-relations/ .

> "our skin is pretty bad compared to almost every animal out there."

Our skin is awesome compared to almost every animal out there. No other animal can sweat like we do, which is essential to keep our body temperature down during long periods of exertion. Humans can hunt almost any animal to exhaustion. We may not be fast, but we've got way more endurance than any other land-based animal, and our skin is a big part of that.

(Admittedly you alluded to this with "to better suit our hunting style", but I thought I'd make this more explicit. Human skin is fantastic.)