does differ from the scientific conception?The Globe
A geography teacher is standing with a globe in his hands in front of a classroom.
He tells to his pupils: "Look, this is the earth. The blue is the water - the oceans - and
the brown shows the mountains."
Inquisitive Sara comes forward and tries to put her finger into the water.
She does not succeed. The teacher responds to this with:
"The small globe is not the earth itself, but a strong simplification of the reality."
He shows, that the inside of the globe is empty. He continues: "The real earth is completely filled
with all kinds of rocks and minerals, both solid and liquid.
The circumference of the sphere is only 80 cm, while in reality the circumference of the earth
is 40,000 km at the equator. Also, there is no hook around the real earth by which it
should be able to stay stand and turn around.
The Earth floats in space, nowhere supported."
A scientific model
In general, a scientific model is a strong simplification of a part of the reality.
Each model has well-chosen features, but also, it has its limitations.
The globe is a model of the Earth.
The Creation Story
The fundamentalists take the creation story at the beginning of the bible literally as written.
When they do, it is impossible for them to understand certain details of the story.
We will come back to this.
According to Jewish tradition, creation would have occurred in the year 3760 BC.
In the Jewish era this is the year zero.
In the year 2000, the whole world with all the trimmings should be 5760 years old.
Fossils
We cannot ignore it: scientists are still confronting us with fossils of many species,
extant and extinct animals and even with humanoid remains very much older than about
six thousand years.
There are both fundamentally Jewish and Christian scientific institutions being persistent
trying to establish theories that all "prehistoric" finds are only at most six thousand
years old.
Schizophrenia
If you are a scientist and you want to take the Bible completely seriously at the same time,
your thinking pattern should operate very splitly.
The theory that I am going to develop on this website, can help both the fundamentalists
and even everyone to a solution.
The Creation Model
Most of the people who have ever lived and will still live are simply not scientifically
trained and yet sooner or later everyone comes up with the question:
"How did everything come about?"
The biblical story in the book of Genesis gives an answer to this question
being for the majority of all people understandable and therefore, continues to be satisfactory.
I assume that the creation story is one hundred percent true and too, I assume,
that Genesis chapters 1 and 2 is a strong simplification of reality: a model.
If scientists see the creation story as a model, then there is no contradiction anymore
between the creation story and scientific theories about the genesis of everything.
A first aspect of the model is the change in scale over time:
the biblical account says that G'd created the world in six days;
science speaks of a time of the order of ten billion years.
About the globe, we saw that 80 cm represents 40,000 km.
In the creation story, the natural day, rather 24 hours, is a model for approximately
a billion years.
Yet all credit for creation remains with G'd. I wholeheartedly agree with the creationists,
that the world, and especially life, could never have originated by chance. Statistically,
that is impossible. A discussion about this aspect is beyond the scope of this argument.
Whether creation lasted six days or six billion years or whether creation is still
going on, it does not matter, because in any case, all the credit and respect for it are
in favor of the Creator.
We must be very grateful to the Creator for his masterfully simple model,
because we owe one day off a week to that model!
Cain
Shortly after the creation story, you can read that Cain killed his brother Abel.
As punishment he had to leave Paradise. He was afraid of the people he would meet on the way,
outside of Eden. He went to the land named Nod, where he took up residence and got a wife.
Where did those people come from, while Adam and Eve, the parents of Cain, were the first people?
Were they his unmentioned brothers and sisters?
Giants
In Genesis 6, line 4, giants have been mentioned.
They were not mentioned in the creation story.
Here, the Bible itself testifies, that Adam and Eve and their children were not the only humans.
This reinforces the idea that the creation myth is really a great simplification of reality
Adam and Eve
What about the meaning of Adam and Eve?
According to the model, we must assume that many people already existed
at the time of Adam and Eve. They are models for the first humans to realize,
that they could make a choice between Good and Evil.
Therefore this moral sense is the main difference between humans and animals.
The human-like beings, who must have existed before Adam and Eve, already had all biological
characteristics of humans; you could call them pre-humans. Also, they were intelligent already
and they could talk. They just had no moral sense yet.
With Adam and Eve, the beings were created, we really can call them "humans":
the first beings with conscious, moral choice.
Punishment
In fact Adam and Eve could not blamed for eating the forbidden fruit:
after all, at that time they did not yet know the difference between good and bad.
Consequently, obedience has no meaning yet. Nevertheless, they are punished on that
disobedience, which affected all their progeny.
In this way, a simple explanation has been given for
- difficult pregnancies,
- difficult childbirth,
- the man will rule over the woman
- everyone must work hard to earn a living and
- why you will turn to dust again.
In addition, Adam and Eve had to leave Paradise.
Fall of Man
In Christian tradition it is said that due to this disobedience, the fall of men came into being.
As I have understood it, this means two things.
1. Every child is born in sin.
2. Every person is already sinful at birth.
A paragraph will be devoted to both aspects.
1. Every child is born in sin
An interpretation: for the conception of the woman a man is needed:
the meeting of husband and wife would be sinful.
The origin of this thought is probably that the Bible,
in the book of Leviticus chapter 18,
indicates that in many cases sexual contact is prohibited (incest).
But between couples, having a child is a normal natural course of action.
In fact, most people consider prasegnancy a blessing. (Except after rape)
"Go forth and multiply!"
"Every child is born in sin" is a false statement.
Often this kind of falsification with wrong reasoning is met.
If a child is born due to a forbidden sexual relationship (incest), then the parents have sinned.
They will have to answer for that. The Bible says very emphatically that a child never is
guilty of the sins of the parents. The Almighty makes one clear exception:
the descendants up to and including the fourth generation of someone who hates God,
are cursed!
2. Every person is already sinful at birth
This cannot be found in Genesis, nor anywhere else in the Bible!
Because this statement is not well-founded, it must be declared as invalid, a hoax,
scare tactics.
In the Jewish tradition it is believed that every baby is born with a sin-free soul.
It did not act at all and thus can never be guilty of anything.
On that basis, the Jewish view is at least acceptable.
However, every child has the possibility to sin later.
The Baby Baptism
Before the invention of antibiotics, the infant mortality rate was significantly higher than today.
Therefore, the following used to play a much more intense role than today.
Christian parents were afraid, that the child's soul would not go to heaven,
if the child suddenly died in childbirth or in the crib. In order to prevent the child's soul from being lost to heaven, the child was
baptized as soon as possible. Poor parents, whose baby was not to be buried in consecrated ground,
because it had not yet been baptized!
A far-reaching consequence of the previous two paragraphs is that baby baptism is unnecessary.
It is very well defendable to choose godparent, because, if the parents prematurely
should die, the godfather and godmother can provide permanent care for the little one(s).