Boudica,

That was an excellent summary of a simple truth. I was never able to explain it that well.

The point about the chicken wings is very good.

You are right about the Bible. Adam and Eve is the creation story of the Jews. It is not more or less correct than other creation stories (and it is in fact the same creation story shared by Sumerians and most Semitic tribes including Israelites).

The Bible is a collection of myths, legends, and stories. Some parts are myths (and were never meant to be understood literally), other parts are legends (and have a true core), wile other parts are true stories (or possibly true stories).

For example Adam and Eve is a myth. That's why their names, Hebrew for "human" and "living", are so generic. A legend or true story would be able to mention a name or title.

The stories of Noah and Abraham are legends. I am convinced they have a true core. That's why the characters have titles (but not names).

But later stories, like Salomon's story, are probably very close to historic truth. That's why the characters are mentioned by name.

Precisely!

Have a good week.

Gah, this subject has been done to death on JU!

well, I'm doing it again - lol.  Sorry to bore you. 

Thanks.  I'm glad someone gets me. 

I have read through Genesis, and all throughout it, people, places, and things are given names.  Most of these names are generic and have generic meanings, or specific meanings.  But they're all words that mean things.  Like, if they came across a really big mountain, it would be named some Hewbrew word that means "Really big mountain."  So I don't see how the first man having a name that then came to mean the whole of the human race, and the first woman having an equally generic name, proves or disproves anything.

We still give names today that have generic meanings.  Does that mean all those people are made up too?

That is because you are not aware of the linguistics involved.

"Adam" is not a name, it really is a word. Mankind wasn't named after him but vice versa. The Semitic word "adam" precedes Genesis.

Yes, the words mean things. And in this case the word meant "man".

I am talking about millenia-old legends, not current events. Today we know who, say, "Vladimir Putin" is. But in an ancient legend, we can safely deduce that the more specific a legend is, the more likely it is that we can find evidence for the legend's factuality.

We will never find evidence for the (literal) Adam and Eve story, simply because we have little to go by. "Eden" is simply the name of a region in Mesopotamia. The word is Sumerian and means "steppe". It presumably designated the land outside the marshlands.

That word is the only "fact" we have in the story. Other than that we only heard that "man" (as in mankind) and "living" (as in alive) lived there.

Believing in the literal truth of all of Genesis is denying what the Torah is.

Torah means "law" and the history and myths contained within it merely serves as a help in interpreting the law.

For example, all law has to be applied AS IF all humanity have a recent common ancestor. It's the law. And Jews must treat slaves well because Jews were once slaves in Egypt. Even if Exodus turned out to be wrong as well, the story would still fullfill its purpose for the legal work that is Torah.

We know today that Adam and Eve didn't happen. I doubt that many people in the deep past believed that it was literally true. But the reason Torah contains the Adam and Eve story is not and has never been because humanity was created a few days after the world was created, but so that we can understand the law contained within Torah.

Christianity sees the Bible as a religious work that explains the universe. But that was not its purpose. Torah was and is foremost a Jewish legal tradition.

It was never meant to explain the world.

Domesticated turkeys cannot fly - it has been bread out of them.  Wild Turkeys can fly very well.

Find a wild chicken.

hey!  I SAW a Chupacabra!  With my own eyes! (Ok, it was a video).

Here's one:

Wild chickens were/are native to Asia.   Red and gray jungle fowl are thought to be the ancestors of modern chickens.

Oh, and chickens can fly...clumsily and not very far(a few feet), but they can fly.  At least well enough to escape their enclosure and get up on roosts.

Modified appendages are present a lot.  They are vestigial, which means they lose most or all of their original function.  A great example is a penguin's wings that have become flippers.

As for our heavy domestic birds...they're just too big and fat to really fly.  They've been selectively bred that way for thousands of years.  Some domestic turkeys today don't even reach maturity (they still chirp like chicks) before they grow into monsters fit for the Thanksgiving table.

Anywho, evolution works...it's really easy to see.

~Zoo

The Zoo is back!

I raised my share of chickens for over a decade.  I know what they're capable of.

Hell, I can even recognize some of their calls.  Like "Here's food!" or  "I'm sitting on these eggs and I'm going to peck you."

~Zoo

BOUDICA WRITES:

It depends on what you mean by "God could have made life that evolved". If you mean evolution of an acorn into a tree then there should be no objection for it's an unfoldment of a design. However, if by evolution you mean the development of a human man from a lower and different structural kind, as an ape for example, then, imo, it's very difficult to impossible to accept that God could have been involved.

Here's why....

LEAUKI POSTS:

I disagree that Genesis is not more correct....Genesis is 100% correct becasue it's writers were inspired of God...to date while we do not fully understand the meaning of those divinely revealed realities which are contained and presented in Genesis, not one thing written in SS has been proven wrong or incorrect. 

That's becasue the Old and New Testaments in their entirety are sacred and canonical becasue they were written under inspiration of the HS, they have ALmighty God as their Author.

Genesis teaches as does Catholicism that man is something more than a physical body, he is a living rational soul, a direct creation of God. That's why it's impossible to accept the naturalist theory that human soul is from an evoluted animal-type. As for the body of a man, I find it impossible to believe that a perfect spriritual entity, a soul made directly by God, could have the body of a brute origin.

As a Catholic, I cannot consistently accept any evolutionary theory that denies belief in God as the direct Creator of three things set forth in Genesis 1...

"In the beginning God created heaven and earth" 1:1

"And God created the great whales, and every living and moving creature,..." 1:21

"And God Created man in His own image..." 1:27.

Leauki, it's interesting to note that the word "created" only appears 3 times in Genesis 1. This tri-unity of direct creation by Almighty God forms the basic belief of Jews and Christians. It utterly contradicts mechanistic or naturalistic evolution which denies special creation.    

I really don't see why christians think that Evolution could not be compatible with a creation story.  It's incompatible with the idea that God said "behold" and every creature that exists today existed then.  We all know creatures die out, share DNA, follow specific paths.  Natural Selection can, for the faith-minded, be taken to mean "God-directed Selection" and work out the same way, with divine influence.

I don't even believe in any sort of intelligent design yet I can see how it could easily work.  I don't see why Christians are so intent on sticking to old, insane, or science-contradictory ideas (T-Rex ate leaves and lived alongside Adam before the Fall!!! Cracked me right up.) when their faith can still fit inside science quite nicely in a lot of cases.

The problem with Christian extremists is that they can't conceive of a God that creates the RULES of a universe and the potential for it to occur, and then what arises from those rules and potential in some natural way is "The Creation."  It's a very narrow viewpoint.

It is quite feasible that some God did exactly what I stated:  Created rules and potential by which life would arise from nothing.  (Probably on billions of worlds.)  It wouldn't arise at all without a God to make it possible, in this hypothesis, but that isn't good enough for the extremists.  It has to arise THEIR way because a book says so.

I understand.  They have a vested interest - namely they become rich when they die.  Are there actually clear thinking people that don't see right through that? 

Sigh.

Exactly~ Thank you, finally I find someone who believes similarly.