Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven (John 14)

John chapter 14 continues Jesus's parting message to the Apostles. He talks a lot about Heaven and the Holy Ghost. Speaking of Heaven, When was heaven created? The verses on this page are talking about different things. "In the beginning" and "when the earth was created" are the same time. As I'm pretty sure I mentioned in Genesis somewhere, the Jews believed in three "heavens": the atmosphere, outer space, and the dwelling place of God (in 2Corinthians 12:2 Paul talks about being "caught up to the third heaven"). Now here in John 14, Jesus is not talking about creating Heaven, but essentially preparing it for guests in some way. Theologically, up until now, nobody has been in Heaven but God and his angels.

I just talked about the disciples asking where Jesus was going in the previous chapter. The SAB marks Jesus's claim to be the only way to Heaven as intolerant, and while I suppose it may be, if it's the truth, it's the truth. Now of course there are Christians who believe in universal salvation, and they would say everyone gets to Heaven because Jesus died for the sin of the world, which is certainly possible, but seems unlikely given other things Jesus says. Jesus says, "if you have seen me you have seen the Father," prompting the SAB to ask, "Can God be seen?" (which I answered in John chapter one) and "Is Jesus God?" (which I answered in another post in John one).

Jesus says, "whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do." This the SAB calls, "The greatest lie ever told." Now I understand why someone would think that, because on the straightforward fully literal sense, it's not true. Once again, I don't think it's saying what the SAB thinks it's saying. The phrase "in my name" doesn't mean, "If you tack the name Jesus onto the end of any prayer, your wish will be magically granted." Rather, as I've discussed before, a person's "name" is like their reputation, and in Jesus's case--and here in this verse--it means the essence of who Jesus is. The point here, and I know skeptics are going to call it a cop-out, is that if you ask for something that aligns with God's will, you will see your prayer answered.

Will Jesus's second coming be visible to all? I don't think this is really a contradiction. Once again, this is a matter of taking "no more" to be a more absolute statement than Jesus is meaning it to be. I think it suffices to say that nobody living at the time Jesus spoke those words would see Jesus again on earth after his ascension. Who sent the Holy Ghost? Again, not a contradiction; both Jesus and the Father sent him.

Is Jesus peaceful? I'm sure I covered this somewhere in one of the other gospels, but yes, these verses can be confusing. Let me clear up a handful that don't really belong here. The Matthew 26 and Luke 22 passages are not about peace or war, but are simply about self-defense; in the Luke passage, Jesus suggests the Apostles should arm themselves, because they will likely find themselves in danger after Jesus is gone, and in Matthew, Jesus is just telling Peter to let things unfold as peacefully as possible rather than starting a fight he can't win. As for the rest, the peace that Jesus brought to earth was peace between man and God by taking away the sin of the world. However people who accept this peace will often find themselves in struggle against those who do not accept it. And of course, in the Revelation passage, there is a literal war, with Jesus as the commander-in-chief of one side.

"Is Jesus God?" and "Who is the Lord of the earth?" are questions I answered in John chapter one and John chapter 12 respectively.

And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night (John 3:1-15)

John chapter three is mostly the story of Jesus having a conversation with Nicodemus. This conversation and Nicodemus himself are noteworthy, because in much of the Gospels, Jesus is seen in situations being in opposition to the Pharisees, but Nicodemus is "a man of the Pharisees". It's not commonly noted, but not all of the Pharisees were against Jesus, and at least two of them (Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea) performed actions indicating that they believed in him to some extent.

Did Jesus perform many signs and wonders? Yes, Jesus performed a lot of signs and wonders, he just refused to do any just for the sake of showing off. All of Jesus's miracles were performed because there was a need for them, but there were a few times when the Pharisees demanded that he do something on the spot to prove himself, and he refused. Of course, it's understood that the "sign of Jonas" was a reference to the prophet Jonah being three days in the belly of a whale; similarly Jesus would be three days in the grave. (Yes the latter "three days" is questionable, but I don't think this is the place for that subject.)

Must someone be born again to be saved? These discussions are always convoluted because there's a lot the Bible says on this subject, and a lot of subjects that are closely related. The specific issue of being "born again" is a particularly sticky point because John 3:3 is the only place in the Bible where the term appears, at which point it's not very well explained, and yet you'll find a lot of Christians who are very hung up on it. (Ask a Christian like that what it means, and they'll probably say something like, "If you are, you just know!") Nonetheless, how I would respond to what is touched on on the contradiction page is that being born again is believing in Jesus, and the SAB seems to understand that the point here is belief, as they group it together. The thing that seems like a sticking point is when the Bible talks about salvation through words and deeds; the solution to the confusion is understanding that if you have the right beliefs, you will speak the right words and perform the right deeds. A pastor friend of mine told me he teaches this subject with an illustration of a coin, where faith and beliefs are on one side, and good words and deeds are on the other; while they are two different things, they are just two aspects of the same state of being. This does open up a whole can of worms theologically with the question of which may be more important, and there are scriptures that seem to support either side, but I'm not going to get that deep here.

The SAB makes an interesting note on verse 8 about Jesus's statement "The wind bloeth where it listeth, and thou ... canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth." I suppose in a scientific note, the SAB points out that it is quite possible to measure the wind. This is true, but I think what Jesus is saying still stands, even without the fact that methods of measuring the wind didn't exist in first century Palestine. Yes, you can tell what the wind is doing at a specific point in space and time, but just because that's possible, can you really tell where it's coming from or where it's going? Wind is very chaotic, and it's not visible, so you can't really have full knowledge of what the wind is doing in general. This article, which I just Googled and is very recent, talks about the technology used to measure wind, and how difficult it is.

"It's a demonstration of the feasibility for our future satellite mission we are pursuing where we hope to provide the 10-kilometer resolution," Zeng said.

The SAB has a lot to say about verse 12 in the footnote. it's a lot of science stuff linked to on other pages. Let's gather it up:

Jesus believed that Adam and Eve were created "from the beginning." But the universe is 13.8 billion years old, the earth 4.6 billion, and humans (depending on how you define "human") for a couple million years.

This comment is on a passage where Jesus is making a point about divorce by essentially quoting from Genesis 1. So, I'm guessing that the SAB is implying that Jesus is a young-earth creationist, which goes against modern science. Maybe, but just because Jesus is quoting Genesis doesn't mean you know what his view on creation is; Christians all accept Genesis as part of the Bible, but views on what it means vary greatly. Some believe in a literal seven-day creation that happened about 6,000 years ago; some believe that the seven days represent indefinite amounts of time that may be billions of years; some believe that Adam and Eve were not the first human beings, but the first ones to have a special relationship with God. I have a particular view that may not be widespread, but didn't originate with me, that I went over in Genesis 2. The point here is that I think the SAB is reading too much into Jesus quoting Genesis, and nonetheless, the first human beings in fact were male and female, which is what Jesus actually said in that passage.

Jesus believed the story of Noah's ark. He thought it really happened and had no problem with the idea of God drowning everything and everybody.

This is actually a pet peeve of mine. I hear a lot of Christians say, "Jesus says Jonah really happened!" just because Jesus mentioned Jonah being swallowed by a fish. Jesus knows his audience is familiar with the Old Testament, so it makes sense to use it as a common cultural reference; this doesn't mean that Jesus is necessarily saying it's all true. The SAB is doing the same thing here: if Jesus mentions Noah, he has to be signing off on the complete veracity of every single aspect of the complete story of Noah's flood! Again, this is a leap of logic that I don't think is warranted; at most, I'd say you can probably say that Jesus recognizes that Noah was a real historical person. It was my view going through that part of Genesis that the story is problematic scientifically and narratively; does that mean that Jesus, when making a point illustrated by the person of Noah, needs to pause to untangle all the problems of that story? Why would he? Jesus is making a point about urgency and danger, and illustrating it with the story of the flood; discussion of physics and meteorology would be a distraction.

Jesus is incorrect when he says that the mustard seed is the smallest seed. (Orchids have the smallest seeds.) And there are no trees in the mustard family (Brassicaceae).

The SAB is completely missing the point on two levels. Jesus's parable of the mustard seed is trying to make a point about something spiritual. His use of the mustard seed as "the smallest seed" is not intended as a scientific statement of fact, but simply that the mustard seed was likely the smallest seed any of his audience would have been familiar with. And it's important that his audience is familiar with the mustard seed, because they would have known that the idea of a mustard seed growing into a huge tree was absolutely ridiculous! Jesus doesn't think this is normal, he's implying that the kingdom of heaven defies expectations! So to sum up the footnote on verse 12, Jesus is only wrong about those things if you make entirely unwarranted leaps of logic based on things he said in passing in various places in the Gospels.

Has anyone ever ascended into heaven? You know, I'm inclined to give this one to the SAB. I mean, I could be nitpicky about the stories of Enoch and Elijah (the Bible doesn't actually say Enoch went to heaven, but if he didn't, then what the heck is the Bible trying to say?) and try to weasel out of this, but honestly, I'm at a bit of a loss as to why Jesus overlooked these two men. I guess I can say that Jesus is making a generalized statement that he failed to mention the odd exceptions to, but it feels like the wording should be different; it just feels so absolute. It's probable that his point is that no man has ascended into heaven and come back to talk about it, because that's certainly true, but his wording is technically a contradiction with other parts of scripture as the SAB notes.

This is getting long, so I'll break it at the famous verse 16, and finish this post with the footnote on verse 14. I'll say once again that just because Jesus uses an illustration out of the Old Testament, it doesn't necessarily follow that he takes the referenced story literally, however in this case, I don't see a reason why he shouldn't. The SAB marks the story in Numbers 21 as both absurd and having scientific issues, but we're talking about two miracles, so to a nonbeliever, any miracle is going to seem absurd and nonscientific. I suppose there is the issue of God making a miracle that hurts people and following it by a second miracle to fix the first; yes, that seems absurd, but I think the reason for what happened was to teach the Israelites something about faith. The snakes came because of lack of faith, and they needed to have faith in God's strange cure to deal with it. (The story has more issues, but I'll save them for whenever I get around to blogging Numbers.) The important thing here is that Jesus is comparing himself to the bronze serpent of Numbers 21, because like the issue of faith I described above, people of the world are subject to the effects of Original Sin because of the lack of faith of Adam, and need to be cured by faith in looking to Jesus lifted up on the cross to pay the price for sin. More on this in verse 16 next post.

Male and female created he them (Mark 10)

Mark 10 has a lot of repetition, but it looks like there are one or two new things here. For instance, the first note here on verse 6, which I think is a bit of an odd interpretation. Whether you think that the universe is billions of years old or you're a young-earth creationist and you think it's just a few thousand years old or anywhere in between, I think you can still say with certainty that humans have always been male and female as long as they have existed, which I'm pretty sure is Jesus' point. Even if you're in the YEC crowd you probably believe that humans were created six days after the earth, so from the literal beginning can't be the point.

So, repeated points: Divorce answered here. Polygamy (although I'm not sure why it comes up in this chapter) answered here. Childishness answered here.

I already answered the question of whether anyone is good here, and whether Jesus is God here, but the verse that brought up both of those questions was addressed in Matthew 19. In fact, that chapter was largely parallel to this one and also has answers for the questions on verses 19, 25, 27, and 29.

Once again, as I've said before, Jesus did tell his disciples about his death and resurrection, and the fact that they failed to understand doesn't invalidate that. Asking Jesus for the best seats was covered Matthew 20 which also has a lot of parallels including addressing the "ransom" questions from verse 45 and the blind man questions from verse 46. (I don't know why verse 42 brings up a question about slavery, nor am I sure what to say about it.)

Lest ye corrupt yourselves (Exod. 22:20 et al, idolatry, apostasy, blasphemy)

There is a lot to be said actually for this one verse, which encapsulates a number of issues. Some of them I have addressed at length previously, such as the matter of polytheism. Most of the issues were at least touched on in this post, but as I mentioned there that there ought to be a future post that would delve more deeply into it, I think this is finally the time for it. While Exodus 22:20 is really referring to a specific aspect of improper worship, I'm going to try and cover all major aspects here.

First and foremost, serving as a foundation for all the other issues here, is the issue of why one should worship God at all. Many people have given suggestions over the years, and it's hard to say which might be convincing to any individual. A common theory is that as creations of God, we should worship the creator. I haven't read any philosophical works of Christian existentialism, but since this line of reasoning is reminding me in many ways of Sartre, I wonder if this is what is meant? When an individual creates a thing, the thing has as its very reason for being service to its creator. There is an assumption that since God created us, He has a right to dictate our purpose in life. The idea that that purpose is worship of God is a secondary assumption that is built on a more complicated religious framework; a deist might agree that the Creator has a purpose in mind for us, but not necessarily agree that the purpose is known. As a person who believes in the Bible, though, one can read the Bible to get glimpses of what the purpose might be.

While many theists believe the fact that God is our creator is enough reason for Him to deserve worship, they will be quick to point out that that is not the only reason, nor even the primary one. While God will from time to time point out the fact that He is the creator of everything that exists, He is far more interested in reminding people of things he has done since creation. In the Ten Commandments, He doesn't mention creation, but instead points out that He is "...the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." God's primary reason that He gives for worshiping Him is His acts of salvation. He saved the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, He brought them out of their exile in Babylon/Persia, and in the end, He sends a Messiah to save them and the whole world from their sins. Why give allegiance and worship to God? Because He's constantly looking out for the well-being of the people He created. As Jesus said in John 10:10,

"The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

The "thief" is, in this context, anyone who claims to have a person's best interests in mind, but really means to take away every good thing that God has given them or promised them in the future. (And no, this does not mean the O.T. prophets, as is implied in the note on verse 8.) It's a very common theme throughout the Bible that following anyone other than the one true God will lead to a loss of prosperity, happiness, life and salvation.

So, once one accepts the idea that following the God of Israel is a good thing, then come the guidelines.

Avoiding idolatry? This is not actually a specific matter of worshiping a false God; there is an idea involved here that as pagan nations surrounding Israel filled their temples with statues that represented their gods, the Israelites might be tempted to do the same thing. Actually, they did. In Exodus 32, there is the famous story of the golden calf. In the story, note that Aaron does not give the calf a funny name and make up a god, they're all taking this statue as being a representation of the deity that brought them out of Egypt! The problem with idolatry is that once God is represented by a hunk of metal, He gets mentally reduced to a hunk of metal, and who has respect for a hunk of metal? This is actually a common theme in many religions, including Hinduism* in some ways, surprisingly: the idea that the deity is so vast and powerful that He/She/It cannot be reduced to a mere representation, but must be left abstract. The Israelites quickly lose their moral focus once God is brought down to a finite representation before them. It should be noted that despite the SAB note in the beginning of that chapter, the only thing Aaron told them to do was give up their earrings. (Not that Aaron is at all faultless here; Moses and God put a lot of the responsibility on him. I'm sure I'll need to address that chapter in specific later on.)

What of apostasy? God puts out a lot of warnings against the Israelites ever turning to other Gods, setting penalties on people who do so or encourage others to do so. Later on, when they take the Promised Land, they drive out all the occupants for numerous reasons, the main one probably being that they are pagans. Well, that's more of a straightforward matter of what I was talking about above; while the true God gives "life, and...more abundantly," other so-called "gods" have either nothing to offer or they have destruction. I'm not completely certain, but it may certainly be the case that God is more likely to punish apostates than infidels. It's one thing to simply not know that the God of Israel is the one true God, and another to know this and willingly turn away. I think that this may be what Paul is talking about in Romans 2, and Jesus hints at a few times. If you know the right thing to do with regards to God, and refuse to do it, how can you stand in comparison to those who were essentially ignorant of the truth, but did the right thing anyway?

The topic of blasphemy is a tough one, because it has many different layers to it, perhaps more so in Judaism than in most other religions. As demonstrated with a humorous effect in the movie Life of Brian, even saying God's name out loud was considered blasphemy, and to this day, observant Jews will not say "the Name" as they refer to it. Why? Because God is considered so great, so majestic and so holy that it simply is not possible to utter His Name with enough reverence to measure up. Now the more modern Christian notion of taking the Lord's name in vain meaning referring to God in a flippant matter, or worse, using "God" or "Jesus" as a curse word, seems downright tame in comparison to the Jewish approach. But indeed if God is so very Holy that even angels are hesitant to look at Him, His Name ought to be treated with a great deal of respect, far more than even those who consider themselves His followers give it. I talked a bit about how especially in the Bible, a person's "name" was synonymous with their reputation, and who could have a higher reputation than the Creator of the universe and Saviour of humanity?

Anyway, as I have suggested in other places on a handful of other issues, it may be in a large part the case that by God's very nature and His Holiness that what in our original verse sounds like a threat is merely a statement of fact. "Have respect for the law of God or face dire consequences!" may be in a theological sense equivalent to "Have respect for the law of gravity or face dire consequences!" It simply naturally follows.

(*Contrary to outside appearances, Hinduism is, at its root, a monotheistic religion. All of the different deities worshiped in South Asia are in some sense considered to be in actuality manifestations of a singular higher power known as "Brahman".)

An help meet for him (Gen 2:18-25)

After creating man, God decides there needs to be someone to give him special companionship and be a team with him. Don't get the Bible wrong, all the stuff about parading animals in front of man to check them out and name them at this point in the middle of the creation of woman isn't meant as a tangent, or even as some might like to suggest humorously a hint of bestiality (oh wait, the SAB does that, too, just farther down the page). Being omniscient, God is already intending to do everything that He eventually does from the moment the universe is created. Some people have suspected that God is showing man that animals all come in male and female varieties so that man will realize that a human female is missing. It's an interesting conjecture, but I think it lacks something, especially since some animals like bees have something more complex going on than simply male/female varieties among the species. I think the purpose is similar, though; man is seeing that there are a lot of different animals in the world, and yet none of them are quite like him.

The SAB notes that in the N.T., the Apostle Paul writes that it's better to be single. I don't think that it's a contradiction at all, though. To a large extent, this is Paul's personal opinion; although I don't think it's outright stated, I think most scholars believe that Paul was probably married early in life, and at the time he writes 1Corinthians, he's divorced. (Perhaps because his wife couldn't stand him once he became a Christian?) Paul is pointing out that one can give oneself wholeheartedly to ministry if one does not have to worry about supporting a family. Notice in verse 7:6, Paul in fact says that nothing in this chapter before verse 10 is a command. Most of what he says here is about sexual relations, and that people who are married should be having a healthy, active sex life to keep their marriage functioning properly. The reason Paul says not to marry is in verse 26 of that same chapter, where he says that there is a "present crisis" during which people should do their best to refrain from forming or breaking relationships. In other words, it's largely a temporary thing, whatever is bothering Paul about marriage here.

When man does spend time naming all the animals, a person who knows a bit about biology and puts two and two together would of course point out (as the SAB does), "There are millions of different species of animals in the world. Assuming man was to name one species per second without stopping to take a break even to sleep, it would take weeks to get through them all." This is actually an interesting point I'd not thought of before I read it in the SAB. The first thing to note is that this is not technically a problem. I believe theologians hold that man was essentially immortal while he was in the garden, and had nothing better to do but whatever God had for him to do, so even if this took years, it's pretty much okay. However, I'm inclined to say that man did not actually have to name each and every single species on the planet. Sure, there are lions, tigers, cheetahs, pumas, etc., but it might have sufficed for man to simply name them all "cat". For one thing, as I pointed out before, the ancient taxonomic systems weren't much like our modern one, and while yes, God knows more about science (biology in this case) than the ancients did, that doesn't mean that even He classifies animals the way that we do. For another thing, something that virtually no one seems to ever note about this story is that man is naming the animals in a language that we cannot identify. A large portion of the millions of species that we have classified today have only a Latin name, but it seems fairly safe to assume that Latin had not yet been invented. Realistically, the naming process here is unfathomable to us because whatever it was, it was a very foreign process to us.

On a side note, (this being a side note, those readers who complain about these tangents can skip this paragraph) some people have suggested that some limited evolutionary processes has caused there to be more species today than there were at the time of the creation. Well, the thought usually comes up in the context of discussing Noah's ark, actually, but wherever you bring it up, it has some problems that are a bit beyond my knowledge of biology. The short version is that theists seem to be arguing against evolution when it's not convenient, but then when it becomes convenient, they suddenly choose to imagine it being a much swifter process than any sane biologist would ever suggest. My personal thought on this particular story is that if God is bringing animals as potential companions to man, there's a lot of animals that simply aren't worth considering, including most if not all animals that live in the sea, and insects. "Okay, Adam, you don't like the 'dragonfly' as you called it? How about this little guy future generations will call pulex irritans? He might make a good companion...oops, looks like you don't get a choice, so what do you want to call him?"

In any case, when this parade is all done, man finds nothing suitable ("meet"). So God makes man fall asleep and fashions him a wife out of his rib. There are a number of interesting poetic things about this concept. I've heard in many sermons that the lesson we should take about God using a piece of the man's body rather than starting over is that a man's wife should truly be like a part of him (v. 23). Also, the fact that it was a part from the middle of his body rather than the top or the bottom indicates an essential equality between man and woman. Lastly, the fact that she was made from bone rather than clay (as man was) might say something about the nature of a woman. Bone is more delicate and lighter than clay, but when clay breaks, it shatters, while bones merely chip, so women therefore have a sort of delicate strength to them that is absent in men.

The last point that the SAB makes about this chapter is a question about the nature of polygamy in the Bible. (Note that if properly understood, the last three verses in the "Yes" column are really in the wrong place. The last two are clearly anti-polygamy, and the third to last is a misunderstanding of cultural context: these women are not brides, but bridesmaids.) Here, God apparently institutes marriage as being a monogamous thing (Jesus says so, at least), yet polygamy is found pretty commonly throughout the scriptures. There is an important distinction between what the Bible shows and what the Bible teaches. Yes, many of these men were polygamists, but God never says that it's okay; in fact, quite a few of them were personally told by God that they'd done a bad thing. The fact is, polygamy is never said to be a sin in the Bible, and frankly, I don't think it is, but it definitely is a problem. I was told by a pastor once that you will find no example of a polygamist in the Bible that didn't have trouble come about from his polygamy, and from what I have read, it's true. Also note that aside from requiring church leaders to be monogamous, God also required kings to be monogamous along with a lot of other rules about kings in Deuteronomy 17:14-20 that apparently David and Solomon never read. The SAB ought to have some notes on that passage, it's a doozy.

God formed man (Gen 2:4-14)

A lot of the objections that are raised in the SAB in chapter two are repeats of the ones raised in chapter one, this is because they're largely concerning the supposed discrepancies between the two accounts of the creation of mankind. My progress has been slow enough already; I trust that nobody bothering to read this will mind if I don't bother with a second response, but rather move on to new material.

So, from 2:5 until the end of the chapter, the story is about the creation of mankind. I don't know which part 2:4 goes with; it could be the epilogue of the previous account, or the introduction of this account. I think it doesn't really matter. One thing that should be noted however is that 2:4 says, "in the day". This phrase is one of a handful that's poetic/figurative/whatever that I hope people won't misconstrue, and I'm glad to see that the SAB doesn't make that mistake here, at least. (Oops, it did, it's just in chapter one for some reason!) Often, "day" refers not to a specific 24 hour period, but a general timeframe, like when someone says, "You'll rue the day you crossed me!" They're not saying that there's a specific date on the calendar that you'll mark down and say, "Wow, that was a bad one!" but rather you'll remember the time that you did whatever you did, whether it be a single moment, or even a series of events that stretched across several years. Other words that have a common figurative meaning are "name" which often means character or reputation, and "world" which can mean humanity as a whole, the social system you are a part of, or even perhaps an era of time. Context will often tell you, but I won't pretend it isn't confusing at times.

In verse five, it says there is no "plant of the field" because there is rain and (essentially) agriculture missing from the picture. Aside from the thoughts I gave on this before, it might be noteworthy to think about the implications of there needing to be "a man to till the ground" and that this is referring to plants "of the field". Perhaps what this is saying is that there are specifically no plants like wheat and barley and other grains growing in a useful fashion. I don't know, but it seems like a possibility.

Note also in verse six that it still doesn't "rain", but instead a "mist from the earth" waters the ground. That's interesting. If you remember my goofiness about water canopy theory, I think it's interesting to ponder that perhaps it never had rained before Noah's day. That's pure speculation on my part, I admit however. That might make no sense in other ways I'm not even thinking of.

God makes the first man out of the dust. I've heard it pointed out by some theologians that everything that makes up a human body can be found in dirt. Interesting, but not really conclusive from a creation/evolution standpoint, since one would expect a creature evolving naturally by chance from its environment to take on characteristics that were consistent with its environment, if you follow me. In other words, if the earth were completely free from silicon, you'd hardly expect creatures made largely from silicon to have evolved, would you? That's another tangent, though.

After creating man, God breathes into him, making him a "living soul". I think there's meant to be a special implication here, that more than breathing air, we're somehow figuratively breathing the spirit of God. It's interesting that in Hebrew, Greek and English, the words for these concepts are closely related. ("spirit" vs. "respiration")

Then God plants a garden with everything the man needs to physically survive, including two special trees: "the tree of life" and "the tree of knowledge of good and evil." We don't hear much about either of these trees, although the "tree of life" pops up again in the Book of Revelation, chapter 22, where it grows on both sides of a river in New Jerusalem. This is interesting to me, because it shows once again the problem with taking things too literal. I once read a Christian commentary on the book of Revelation that mused, "What sort of strange tree will this be? Will it have a trunk that splits in two so it's on both sides of the river at once?" It seems obvious to me that in that passage, the "tree of life" is not a singular tree, but a kind of tree, and there will be several of that kind of tree along both banks. Does that mean that the "tree of life" in this chapter is not a specific tree, but a species, which may have had several instances in the garden? I don't know, but it's entirely a possibility.

Of course the tree we're really interested in so often is the other special tree (trees?), the one that causes all the trouble in the next chapter. Why would God put such a dangerous tree right next to his special beloved children and let them eat from it if it was so dangerous? It's a very good question, perhaps one of the best. I'm going to give it an entire post tomorrow.

The only thing left to comment on here is all the geographical information in verses 10-14. Strangely, this is a mix of places and names that are known today and not known today. What are we supposed to make of them? I think most likely, these geographical names are of very little consequence to us today. I suspect strongly that whatever they referred to no longer exists. The fact that some of the names are still used today is simply either a holdover from those times (Noah and his family named some places after the places that used to be there before the flood), or modern people labeling places with names they got out of the Bible. Either way, it doesn't matter much.

This beginning of miracles (Gen 2:1-3)

The SAB has no notes on these verses, but I wonder if we can pause for a moment and relax as God did after all of this and contemplate it over a nice glass of wine. I don't think it was ever stated in chapter one of the SAB outright, but it was implied that there is a big scientific problem with this whole week. Certainly everyone who is a skeptic knows it without having to be told. Here is the seventh "day", and we have to wonder as I hinted at previously what exactly does a "day" comprise of? Modern science teaches us that several billion years elapsed between the creation of the universe and the time the first man walked on earth. So is each "day" 24 hours, or is it some larger span of time?

Let's jump ahead about 4,000 years to a moment that is recorded in the Gospel of John, chapter two. Jesus is at a wedding feast, and a terrible faux pas has happened: the groom's family has run out of wine. Well, most of you probably know this one. Jesus takes six huge waterpots full of water and turns them into wine. A man at the party who was the first-century equivalent of a wedding planner compliments the hosts on the quality of this fine wine, not knowing that Jesus had just made it out of water.

The SAB has pretty much no comment on Jesus turning water into wine in this story. The fact is that, in a sense, it's not so very remarkable that he did it. I have a cousin who has the ability to turn water into wine actually, and he does it all the time. Of course, he's not as fast as Jesus; it takes him a little over a year to make a good wine out of water.

When the man tasted the wine and complimented its quality, do you think he pondered to himself, "This wine is good; it tastes like it was made in an instant from water a couple minutes ago!" Probably not. In fact, I'd venture that if you put Jesus' wine next to a regular wine, it would for all intents and purposes be impossible to tell which was the supernatural wine.

If God can create something in a second that usually takes a year or more to make, do you suppose He can create something in six days that "usually" would take ten million years to make?

Skeptics point to modern science and say, "We can see that there are stars more than 6,000 light years away, therefore the universe must be more than 6,000 years old. Therefore the Bible is incorrect." Sounds good, but remember this: God created light first.

Have you ever heard people ponder whether or not Adam had a belly button? Some say no, he didn't, because he had no mother. But if we consider Adam to be a normal man, he had DNA, and in his DNA, he had an X-chromosome; where do those come from? In every other man throughout history, it came from their mother. On this day, day seven, Adam was less than 48 hours old; ever seen a depiction of Adam with a bald head? It takes more than 48 hours to grow a full head of hair, so logically, he should be bald, right?

No, if you had cut down a tree in the Garden of Eden, it would have rings indicative of years it had not grown. Adam had characteristics of a normal man who had lived for twenty, thirty years or more because God made him complete. The night sky shone with light from stars thousands of light years away that had only come into existence two days before Adam himself did because God made the sky complete. What I'm saying is, can you think of any good reason why God wouldn't make a universe that had the perfect appearance of being over ten billion years old?

A lot of you have probably heard a form of this argument in people saying that the world was created with fossils already in place, or something like that. The standard response is, why would God want to trick people? Now, I'm not necessarily saying anything about fossils, but I'm definitely not saying God is tricking us. I'm talking about God creating a universe that is a work of art! If a painter uses their paints to make a picture of a landscape that doesn't actually exist anywhere but in their mind, do we say that they have intended to trick us, since the trees and the flowers didn't actually grow from seeds, but only appeared to do so? When an author creates an interesting main character, do we complain that that person appears to be a real human, but does not have an actual mother and father? God's making a work of art with intricate detail and fine craftsmanship, and if He doesn't have to skimp on the details, why should He? Indeed, why would He?

And why take ten billion years when He can do it in six days and have the same exact results? In the end, I don't think we really can know for sure, but given the fact that God is omnipotent, I see no good reason for a Bible-believer not to believe the world was created in exactly six literal days.

Be fruitful (Gen 1:28-31)

Apparently the next thing that God does after creating humans is give them a command to take over the world He has given them. Frankly, it occurs to me that in naming the "discrepancies" between the first two chapters, this speech is a bit of an oversight. It not only seems important enough, but quite fitting with the theme to have repeated it in the next chapter, at least as a paraphrase. The closest the Bible comes is verse 2:16, which really doesn't sound much like it at all. I guess it shows how these things are personal that the SAB has no problem with this omission. I haven't noticed one yet, but I'm sure that the SAB has noted parallel passages that feature omission of important information; it's the frosting on the skeptic's cake, really.

This speech is repeated in the story of Noah, but there, it's different, and much speculation has gone into what the differences mean, one interpretation of which the SAB notes on the following verse. The SAB does note that many Christians use this commandment to justify destroying the environment and being cruel to animals. I already commented on that in yesterday's post, but the SAB also brings up the issue of birth control.

Does "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth," mean that people are not to use birth control, but rather to breed like rabbits? There may be various views on the matter of which I'm not aware. I know the Catholic Church, the most famous for being anti-birth control is of the opinion that trying to disassociate sex from procreation is inherently wrong; that's not to say that the RCC is against sex as being recreational as well within the bounds of marriage, but that it has both facets to it, and neither should be shut out. (I'm oversimplifying here since I'm not a Catholic. If you're a Catholic reading this, please don't blast me, rather post a comment to clarify the Church's position as you understand it.) Most Protestants seem to be of the opinion that birth control is okay. While marriage and sex are concepts that are to a great extent designed with procreation in mind, that doesn't mean that having children is a requirement. A lot of it has to do with personal attitudes about child rearing, resources and other issues. If you can't afford to feed a child (or aren't willing to), it's irresponsible to not use birth control. If you think the earth is already "replenished" enough, you might choose not to have children. My opinion is that the earth could handle a higher population if we learned to use our resources better, but I don't think we have.

So, God gives us plants to eat in the next verse. This is the point that's different from the speech in Noah, where God notes that He is giving them an order/permission to eat meat. Many people have speculated that God intended man, and perhaps even all animals (from verse 30) to be vegetarians at the start. That doesn't mean that God intended us to be vegetarians for all time, however. I think at this time, the real sentiment is that eating is something that can be done without killing. That will eventually change when sin enters the picture.

It's noted that God says "every tree" is for mankind to eat, but in the following chapter, God forbids the eating of one tree in particular. Is this a contradiction? Yes and no. If you look at it from a purely grammatical standpoint, it is confusing, but I don't think it's at all intractable. I have a number of speculations on what might explain this, but I think what's really going on is this: In chapter one, when God is saying that all trees that have fruit are okay to eat, He's talking about kinds of trees. In chapter two, He's pointing out a particular tree as an exception. It's like if my wife had a rose garden, and you asked me for a rose from it, and I said, "All the roses in the garden are beautiful, and you can pick any kind of rose that you want. But the dark red rose with the yellow spots in the back corner is special to my wife, and I'd rather you don't touch that specific one." I talk more about the nature of this tree in the next chapter, or maybe chapter three, we'll see.

So God is now finished, and He notes that it's "very good". In response to this, the SAB notes, "He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey." I guess the idea here is that it's hard to see how this is "very good". First of all, it's really a matter of opinion as to what's good or not. Many atheists feel that the world would be better off without human beings on it, and then nature could be left to itself. If leaving nature to itself is a good thing, then the very thing which the SAB seems to be noting as a counter to the world being "very good" seems good to some atheists. I think imposing labels of "good" and "bad" on animals is sometimes a sketchy thing; I'd be hesitant to label animals' actions with human moral labels.

More importantly, I think we've forgotten the previous verse. There was no "parasite and host, predator and prey" at this time. It was really a sort of hippyish paradise with mankind and all the animals just hanging out, having a good time, eating fresh veggies and fruits. There was no death, no war, no hate, and when you think about it, no religion. Straight out of "Imagine" by John Lennon, really. At the time, it was indeed "very good". Of course, this ends chapter one, and it won't last for long...

Let us make man (Gen 1:26-27)

"Us"? Who the heck is God talking to? I always thought this was a weird one when I was a kid, but I never thought it meant that there were multiple gods. I guess I could see how someone could think that, though. My assumption as a child had been that God was talking to the angels, since most appearances of angels (if not all) in the Bible have angels looking pretty much just like humans. This could be correct, but it's not the standard Christian explanation, nor is the explanation that this is a "majestic plural". Of course, one of the interesting things about this whole passage in the original Hebrew is that the word translated "God" is actually plural in form, although treated grammatically as a singular noun throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.

The standard Christian explanation, which I am highly inclined towards, is that this verse is one among many that shows the members of the Trinity discussing something amongst themselves. Christian doctrine doesn't teach that God decided to divide Himself into parts in order to become human in the person of Jesus, but rather that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit existed from before time. Thus it's not entirely bizarre for God to call Himself "us", since He has a certain plurality of identity wrapped up within His unity. I suppose I should eventually try and explain the Trinity, but it's one of the harder things to explain, and I don't think this is the time for it.

Moving on, the SAB claims that it's impossible that God gave humans dominion over the other creatures of the earth, since animals came before humans. Nonsense. A young couple that has some money to spare could easily set aside a savings account to pay for the college tuition of a child that they do not yet have. Local governments build roads that are intended to reach residential areas that presently have not yet any houses built in them. My office breakroom has stores of sugar and cream for coffee that won't be brewed for months to come. But there is another very good point brought up by Wells with this point. Many Christians do use this verse to justify cruelty to animals and ravaging of the environment, and I agree that it's wrong. Jesus taught that God is like a landowner that gave some farmland to some people to look after it, and when he returns, he expects it to be in good shape, or he'll punish the people he left in charge. While I think the main purpose of this allegory is in regards to spiritual matters, it seems reasonable to guess that the physical aspects of this world are important as well.

Speaking of physical aspects, what about the physical aspects of humanity, and being "in the image of God"? The SAB asks, "Is God both male and female?" Yes and no. God is exclusively referred to as being male throughout the Scriptures, so He is male; but it's not entirely clear in what sense. I think even the most conservative of Christians would agree that God has female attributes: He's the creator of life, He's nurturing, He's sensitive and caring about the emotions of others, etc. But He doesn't have a physical body (at least, He didn't at this time, the Incarnation aside), so calling Him male or female is in a certain sense misleading. So what does "the image of God" mean?

If God has no physical form, He doesn't look like anything in particular, so being "in the image of God" can't logically mean that we look like Him. In this case, "image" is figurative language, one of a handful of words that meant something different in Biblical times than it does today, like "name". In Biblical times, a person's "name" often meant their character. Note that in the many instances that God gives someone a new name, it usually has symbolic meaning. But that's a tangent for another time; I know it'll come up later. "Image" means really something more akin to God putting His royal seal on something. He's setting up humanity as having a special place in the cosmos, and He's saying, "Yeah, I created everything in the world, but this is special. Cause harm to one of My children and you'll pay for it." Really there's a great deal of discussion among Christian theologians about what this means in full, such as whether it's what makes us uniquely spiritual beings among God's creation; animals don't practice religion even though they, too, were created by God.

Not mentioned here for some reason, but saved until the next chapter is the matter of whether male and female were created simultaneously. Although I addressed this previously, I wanted to say more about the grammar involved. If I were to say, "I did A and B," in absence of further information, you'd be quite reasonable to assume that A and B either happened simultaneously, or in close succession. But if you have evidence that's not the case, then you'd be unreasonable to continue to assume that. In the case of the Bible, the further evidence comes from chapter two that "male and female" weren't created at once. If I said, "In the '90s, I earned my high school diploma and my bachelor's degree," your understanding of how long it takes to earn a bachelor's degree should cause you to realize that the span of time covered by "and" is most likely somewhere from three to six years. That doesn't mean there's something wrong with the sentence, nor that it's a contradiction to a full telling of my life stories from the '90s which revealed that indeed, many years passed between these events.

The living creature after his kind (Gen 1:24-25)

A quick note to give people something to chew on since I'm taking a day off tomorrow. Subject? Evolution. Once again, this is my own opinion; in fact, just about everything in this post will be opinion rather than dealing with what I would consider key issues of Biblical interpretation, so some readers who have criticised me for taking off on flights of fancy or "comic book stories" can just skip this and come back on Wednesday.

Most Christians, particularly those who are towards the more literal side of Biblical interpretation, see this chapter of the Bible as being anti-evolution. Generally, the idea is that since God created everything that ever was, there's no random biological processes that cause evolution to occur, whatever the term "evolution" happens to mean. I note that in my experience, when evolutionists and creationists are debating, one of the big problems is a lack of definition of terms.

More specifically, literalists lean on the repeated phrase "after his kind", as it is rendered in the KJV. Surely, the reasoning goes, this is an indication that every animal will give birth to an animal that is just like it, and not another animal unlike it. (Particularly, of course, that a monkey did not give birth to a human.) I think this sort of over-emphasis on a particular interpretation of the meaning of these words is a far worse offense than most atheists are prone to make in criticism. Most of all because evolution in its simplest terms--which has nothing to do with whether or not man has any particular ape-like ancestors--is something that you'd have to be very foolish to miss out on.

What exactly does "kind" mean here? A cat's going to give birth to a cat, that's clear and obvious. Does that mean that a cat will only give birth to a cat that's identical to its parents? That's also obvious: obviously false. Aside from everyday traits like color and fur texture, there are a host of other aspects of a cat that may widely differ from its parents. Most cats have 18 toes, five on each front paw, and four on each back one. When I was a kid, I had a pet cat that had 20 toes, five on each paw, and the front paws actually had thumbs! Somewhere in this cat's ancestry, there probably was a regular 18-toed cat, but this cat was different. It also had kittens that had extra toes. One kitten had 28 toes, seven at the end of each leg! I say each leg, because three of the four legs seemingly ended in two separate paws. (Look up "polydactyl" if you're curious. It happens in many animals including humans, but is very common in cats.)

There was an interesting belief among locals that the marshy conditions that existed in the area where I lived favored cats with oversized paws, and so such oddities were more common in that area. This may or may not have been true, but this sort of variation, along with classically-known stories like the peppered moth are simple examples of evolution in action. Before the creationists reading this deluge me with refutations of the peppered moth story (believe me, I've heard quite a few of them, including that the whole thing may have been a hoax), understand my point. Variation in colors of moths and variations in numbers of toes of cats are really no more shocking in many ways than variations in skin tone among people of the world, whom Christians believe to be descended from just two people. My point is that I don't think Christians should be afraid of evolution just because the party line is that it doesn't happen. Some of it, maybe a lot of it, actually makes sense, and in no way contradicts anything in the Bible.

Is the idea that humans evolved from monkeys somewhat offensive and anti-Biblical? Yes. But there are no real evolution-understanding biologists out there who actually believe that to be true. Really. You should check it out. Atheists reading this who think I'm full of crap should check it out with reputable sources, too. I'll probably catch a lot of crap for this post because I somehow wasn't completely precise in wording something, but hopefully some of you will know what I'm saying and not misinterpret it. I guess I'll see when I get back in a couple days.

Let thy words be few (Gen 1:20-23)

This should be a short one today, which is good for a Monday. I hope you all had a good weekend. I did; I spent a lot of time with my kids, which aside from being fun in itself also sometimes yields situations that I see as apt allegories for our relationship with God. For instance, does God live by the same rules as us, and if not, is that hypocritical? I was at the park with my two-year-old twin daughters, and there was some broken glass near the playground. Not wanting them to get hurt, I started picking up the pieces and putting them in the garbage. Then I noticed that they were watching me, and had started picking up pieces of broken glass, too. What I had done to protect them had ended up being a danger, due to them misunderstanding me and thinking they could do whatever Daddy does. Luckily they weren't hurt, but there was a lesson in there, I'm sure. But back to the subject at hand...

Today's passage illustrates a point that was brought up about verse 11. The SAB muses there on whether "let the earth bring forth" suggests evolution, which I admitted was thought-provoking. Here, however, a similar phrase is used. God said, "Let the waters bring forth..." which sounds a lot like what we heard before. So are these creatures evolving from the sea? Well, the very next verse says, "And God created..." Oh well. It appears that Genesis, despite what can be seen as an odd turn of phrase, is still essentially saying that this is all the work of God.

Lastly, the reason today's post will be particularly short even with my weekend story tacked on, the SAB points out that the Genesis 1 story has birds created from water, while Genesis 2 appears to say that they were created from dirt. Odd. I don't have any good ideas as to what this is about. Likely it's a thematic grouping in chapter 2, but then that leaves some other questions, like "Why bother to specify what anything was made from in chapter 2?" and, "Hey, I never noticed, but Adam never names any of the fish!" Oh, wait, that's not a question. Well, you know what I mean. There's probably a good answer at some other website out there, but I'm not currently looking for such a thing, since my aim isn't to duplicate other people's work here for the most part, but rather give my personal view.

Strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel (Gen 1:9-13)

(I notice in my traffic logs that a lot of people land on this post while Googling the title of this post. The point made in the post is an example of the concept, not an explanation. Just in case there are people looking for an explanation of the meaning of the phrase, I'm going to post a brief one in the comments below.)

There's not much to say about this particular section, at least certainly the first part. So the waters flowed together to form the seas, and left behind the dry land. There's nothing spectacular here; that's essentially the same thing that happens every time it rains. But then the plants arrive.

The problem here that is addressed by the SAB is that of photosynthesis. More or less immediately upon the formation of dry land, plants appear. (Something not addressed by the SAB that I personally find curious is the fact that of course plants also grow in the sea, and supposedly wouldn't have needed to wait for this process of drying out. Not that it's earth-shattering, but it is interesting.)

There is also a note that the Bible says in this passage (and others in this chapter) "let the earth bring forth", which may hint at the possibility of evolution. Sure, it's possible, but I think the more literal interpretation, and certainly the theologically conservative one is that when God says, "Let such-and-such happen," He's really giving a command. The fact that this one is worded slightly different from the ones we've heard before I think is simply a reflection of making something from something, rather than something from nothing. After the first day, it seems that God largely shapes everything out of existing materials that He created in verse 1.

But seeing as it's apparently the question on everyone's mind, what of photosynthesis? How do plants exist without sunlight? I have two thoughts on this.

First, why such an insistence on plants needing light? I understand there is well-established science that says this in essence, and in fact it was probably well-known to be a fact long before modern science. However, if God can make something out of nothing, why not make plants without sunlight? Or better yet, if there is no need to appeal to the supernatural, why go there, right? So forget this idea of plants miraculously needing no light for photosynthesis, and let's talk about the bare facts.

Once, I got my wife some tulips in a pot. You know, they were alive, and all that? Okay, so I brought these live plants home, and intended to give them to her for her birthday, but her birthday was a couple days away. So what did I do? Like I would do with any other present, I hid it. I stuck it in an unused cupboard in the kitchen, where it stayed in darkness for over 24 hours. Guess what? It was still alive when I pulled it out! It hadn't shriveled up and died from lack of sunlight for over 24 hours. Maybe I'm weird but I don't believe it was a supernatural miracle. Nor do I believe there was anything odd about plants needing to wait 24 hours for God to make the sun, so long as He made sure they stayed warm enough.

This leads to my second thought, which I lean on a bit more, especially since my line of reasoning in the last paragraph unwittingly led me here in the end. (I reason these out as I go along, so sometimes I surprise myself, actually.) Going back to day one, we ask the question once again; where is the light (and heat!) coming from if there's no sun?

Coming from a bit of a spotty background, I can tell you from personal experience that I have known people to grow certain plants indoors, completely away from the sun's light until the time that they wish to harvest their, um, crop away from the prying eyes that might come if their plants were left outdoors. Not just 24 hours, but a plant living its entire life without seeing a single ray of sunshine (and perhaps destroyed before being ever taken outdoors). This of course is achieved with artificial light sources. If God can make a plant grow out of nothing, why can't he make light out of nothing?

I find it interesting that some comments I have received elsewhere regarding my posts here have complained about my earlier request that people accept the Bible on its own terms and suspend disbelief regarding the nature of God, yet nobody brings up the point about how absurd it is that plants would be created where no plants had ever existed before. I mean, the Bible doesn't say, "God planted some seeds and they sprung up." No, God just told the ground to make plants, and it obeyed. And the skeptics swallow this camel-sized absurdity whole and say, "All the different species of plants in the world created in one day out of barren ground? Yeah whatever, let's talk about photosynthesis!" I guess sometimes it's the little things that bother you, you know?

Let there be a firmament (Gen 1:6-8)

Okay, those skeptical readers that believe that all Christians are wing nuts are in for a treat today, because day two of creation is where my personal beliefs are, I realize, more than a bit out there. Of course, my personal beliefs do not reflect the whole of Christendom, but I didn't come up with this stuff on my own, and when you get to an odd passage like this, you have to develop some sort of understanding.

The SAB lists this passage as an "absurdity", and I'll be the first to agree, but once again, we're talking about the miraculous, and the stuff that happens during the first few chapters here is largely outside of the norm for the whole of natural history. Many translations find different ways to fit an English term to this "firmament", but the essence of the idea apparently is that the Hebrew word raqiya in this context denotes the idea of a large solid object that's holding up a sky full of water. Yes, the world as described by these three verses is a big underwater dome. The atmosphere is made by creating an air bubble in an endless sea, held open by this undescribed structure.

My belief? There's a theory about the antediluvian age among many Bible believers known as the "water canopy" theory. The idea here is that God originally created the world with the ocean waters suspended in the air, holding in a warm, moist atmosphere. Supposedly, this accounts for a number of things which come to their end in the flood of Noah's day. People living long, healthy lives due to a clean, oxygen-rich atmosphere and lack of cosmic radiation; largely unchanging weather conditions (it may have never rained before Noah's day!); and, some believe, the coexistence of dinosaurs with humanity. While a lot of this sounds pretty bizarre and silly, suspending your disbelief regarding this suspension of water you can see solves many other Biblical dilemmas, thus its appeal.

For probably most people, however, this passage is taken to be poetic in nature. While the sky is most certainly not a solid object as far as we know (and given that we have traveled into space in modern times, it seems we can rest pretty sure about that) the concept of haraqiya as a "bowl" shape still has some appeal. After all, even after the flood the term is still used to describe the sky numerous times; and really, isn't the sky shaped like a bowl wherever you look at it from the ground? There's a reason observatories and planetariums are domed: it's the essential shape of the sky.

And what of the "waters above the firmament"? Well, those would just be clouds. If this explanation doesn't suffice to fit your concept of "above", then I would say wait for the fourth day, I'm going to take some time to talk about translation and prepositions. It should either clear things up immensely or convince you more than ever that I'm a crackpot. Either should be entertaining.

Remember also that when God calls the firmament "Heaven", that there is some vagueness to that word. In the NT, the Apostle Paul refers to the "third heaven", and is clearly talking about what we tend to think of in reference to the word "Heaven". However, this concept of "third" is important, as there were three heavens. The first heaven is the atmosphere, the second heaven is outer space, and the third heaven is beyond space, the place where God lives. Many translations render "Heaven" in verse eight as "sky", because the Bible seems to clearly be talking about the atmosphere.

The SAB makes an interesting note that God doesn't call the second day "good." No explanation is given. I don't find this troubling, only thought-provoking. One possibility that I like, being a believer in the "water canopy" theory, is that when God creates the world with this form, He's looking ahead to the day when all this water He has put in reserve will be used to wipe clean the face of the earth. He's not happy about it, but He foresees it coming, so He makes this water canopy with a heavy heart, so to speak. Who knows?

Let there be light! (Gen. 1:1-5)

Now it's time to dive in with some specifics, right? I'm tiring myself, and I don't know if anyone's bothering to read this anymore, if indeed anyone ever was. Well, one last semi-generalized note, actually.

Not everyone agrees on this, but it's my own personal opinion that chapter one is intended to be poetic. In many ways it's very poetic in form and feeling, and as such, I don't think it's necessarily intended to be taken as literal. The real point behind this chapter is the creative power of God, not the specific fine detail regarding what He does with it. That said, I do think one can take this chapter in a fairly straightforward way nonetheless, and a rule of thumb for Bible understanding is that if you can find a way to interpret it non-symbolically that makes sense, you should probably go with that.

The main thing that is taken as poetic by many is the concept of seven "days". Is a day 24 literal hours? Well, who knows? In a sense, a "day" is the period of time it takes for the earth to rotate 360 degrees relative to the sun's position, but of course the sun wasn't created until day four, so what does "day" mean in a more practical sense for those first three "days"? Who knows, indeed. I reiterate that the Bible is not a science textbook, and the technical specifics of the creation are not the real point of the story anyway.

On day one, God creates light. The skeptic says, "But if there's no sun, how can there be light? This doesn't follow our scientific understanding of the order things were created!" Point one: the sun is hardly the only possible light source in the universe. Point two: I'm not a physicist, but I believe that in fact this does follow the current scientific understanding.

What does science say presently about how the universe began? In the beginning, there was nothing; and by "nothing" we mean that not even time or space existed. You could say that it was "without form, and void". Then, all at once, there was something! What was that something? Essentially, it was a tiny little ball of energy, which exploded and made everything in the universe over the course of an extended period of time, supposedly over 10 billion years. At first, this ball of energy was so hot and charged up with power that it was unable to condense into matter of any recognizable form, but it surely radiated off one thing: light, and plenty of it. To say that light was the first thing created in the universe is, I would say, the one thing in this chapter that precisely matches up with modern scientific understanding. But I don't want to lose sight of my repeated warning that we're not really talking science here. The Bible doesn't say where this light is coming from, so we either speculate, or we let scientists figure it out.

On the poetic side again, the "light" may be a very symbolic thing. While I could speculate on how "God divided the light from the darkness" is flowery talk about how eventually that proto-plasma (Is that a word? I don't know what to call it.) at the beginning of the universe eventually cooled enough to settle into clumps of gas separated by empty space, I think it's much more worthwhile to talk about the imagery of light vs. darkness that pervades the Bible from beginning to end.

There's a fairly common belief known as "gap theory" that speculates on why God would create the heavens and the earth "without form, and void". (Once again, I think this shows a misunderstanding of the sequence of events; verse one is not an event so much as a "thesis statement," if you will, of the story that follows.) That theory is concerned with a pre-history that supposedly occurs in a gap between verses one and two. I don't know it well, but I believe the idea is that God made the universe in verse one, something went wrong that was somehow related to an angelic rebellion led by Satan, and the upshot is that God had to wipe everything out and start over: verse two.

Whether you choose to interpret things that way (and it's quite a bit of a stretch, clearly) or not, it's compelling to think of God creating a world which he infuses with "light" (goodness) so that he can separate and drive away "darkness" (evil). Really, that's what the Bible as a whole is about, so putting it right there at the beginning is interesting. As I have heard many a pastor say, while we tend to see the "day" starting with light and ending in darkness, the Jewish reckoning is that the "day" begins at sundown, thus starting with darkness and leading to light.

These are the generations... (Genesis overview)

The first contradiction listed in the SAB is "The two contradictory creation stories." No surprise; this is usually the first point any list like this will bring up, because it's the first thing evident in a casual reading. In verse 1:1, God starts creating the world, in verse 2:1, He finishes, and after a breather, He seems to start over again in verse 2:4. What the heck?

First of all, it's quite right to notice this. A person who reads the book of Genesis and fails to notice two separate accounts of creation wasn't reading closely enough. It doesn't take a genius; I think I first noticed this when I was about 9 years old. Even at that age I noticed a lot of the repetitiveness between chapters 1 & 2. Didn't God already do all this?

On the other hand, if you think there's a real problem with this, I don't think you're reading as closely as you could. Yes, there are two stories, but I don't think they contradict, and having two stories serves a very specific purpose for the original writer/editor of the Bible.

The book of Genesis is odd for various reasons, and this particular oddity of the book shows up early: it's not a single story, but a collection of stories put together. Among skeptics of a more scholarly bent, there is a prevailing idea that the Torah (first 5 books of the Bible) was not written my Moses as is claimed by Bible believers, but rather "redacted" or edited together from several sources hundreds of years later. I'm not sure what that has to do with the validity of the content (and maybe they don't intend to impugn its validity anyway), but the concept doesn't bother me much, especially in the case of the book of Genesis. I seem to recall as a child (and as I was raised Jewish, it may be a belief among some Jewish sects) being told that the book of Genesis was not so much written by Moses but edited by him and committed to paper from oral history. This makes sense, since Moses wasn't there when all the events took place, nor were any of Moses' contemporaries.

So, the phrase "These are the generations" that appears in 2:4 is a key to the structure of the book as a whole. Every time you see those words, the indication is, "And now, another story." most of the time, these stories overlap time periods they represent:

Gen 2:4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth
Gen 6:9 These are the generations of Noah (cf. Gen 10:1)
Gen 11:10 These are the generations of Shem
Gen 11:27 Now these are the generations of Terah
Gen 25:12 Now these are the generations of Ishmael
Gen 25:19 And these are the generations of Isaac
Gen 36:1 Now these are the generations of Esau (cf. Gen 36:9)
Gen 37:2 These are the generations of Jacob

So, including chapter 1, there are nine main stories. The problem that one encounters with these stories is trying to make sense of them as a sequential whole when that key phrase is telling you, "Now I'm going to go back and tell you this other story." If you doubt that's what it means, sit down and read Genesis 25 and tell me that it makes any sense to read it as a single, continuous story. (V.1, Abraham gets married, has some children. V.5, Abraham gives everything he has to Isaac, a child from a previous marriage. Vv.8-9, Abraham dies, and "his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him". V.12 Abraham sires Ishmael. V.18 Ishmael dies after having many children and grandchildren. V.19 Abraham sires Isaac. And so on... remember as you reconcile all of this that the Bible states plainly that Ishmael is only 13 years older than Isaac.)

If you want a more contemporary example of non-linear storytelling, check out the movie "Pulp Fiction". (Spoilers ahead: for those who haven't seen the movie but intend to, skip this paragraph.) One of the main characters in the movie is Vincent Vega. In the course of the movie, we see these things happen to Vincent, in order: 1) He enters apartment A, and we do not see him leave it. 2) He takes his boss' wife to dinner, same day, after dark. 3) He is shot to death in the early afternoon of day two. 4) He leaves apartment A, and it's still day one somehow. 5) He and his partner go get breakfast, same day, midmorning. Which do we conclude about Director and screenwriter Quentin Tarantino? A) He doesn't understand concepts like the linear flow of time, the order of meals in the day, and the finality of death. OR B) He's decided the story would be told better in three parts, each of which overlaps in time. I vote for B.

The story that we see in vv. 1:1-2:3 is concerned with the physical origins of the world. The following story, vv. 2:4-6:8 (roughly) is concerned with the spiritual origins of mankind. The time scale is different, the stories overlap, and the details are focused on in another manner. I'm going to focus on only the supposed differences in the order of events, and leave problems with the details in themselves for later.

The easiest one to refute is the assertion that Genesis 1:27 says both sexes of human being were created simultaneously. It doesn't. It says God created humans male and female, but the word "simultaneously" doesn't appear, nor am I aware of anything in the Hebrew grammar that points definitively to this interpretation of events. Nonetheless, on a genetic level, He did anyway, since in creating a man first, one might be fair to assume the presence of both an X and Y chromosome in the first human being. But that's another matter.

A little more involved is the problem of what order mankind, plants, and beasts were made (plants are for some reason omitted from the list on the page linked above, probably an oversight). I see mankind as being created last, definitively. Why does chapter two seem to contradict? In the case of plants, vv.2:5-9 do not say that God created them at this time, but rather that they were lying dormant in the ground, waiting for water. Whether this was upon all the earth, or perhaps only in the area of the garden He proceeded to plant is not clear.

Verse 19, where God seems to create animals all over again is trickier, but involves a translation subtlety. In the NIV, this passage is translated, "Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air." The question becomes whether God is creating animals all over again, if the stories contradict, or if we've translated in a way that makes it sound wrong. I believe that God had already done the process of creation at this time, and He's only taking a moment to bring the animals to Adam to let him give them names. Sure, it's not 100% clear, but that's not the same as outright contradiction and as a believer I'm certainly willing to give the Bible the benefit of the doubt.