Do you think the bible is just another piece of literature like the Chronicles or Rings books? If so, would we have all the politics (on my side of the pond) pushing for "intelligent design" to be taught in classrooms?
Hi BB, thanks for your well-grounded answer. I like your "how": ask a scientist; "why": read the Torah/bible. I am reading some Mortimer Adler and he suggests approaching science/religion/philosophy with that sort of mentality; each discipline answers a different kind of question.
I think BB answered that in ways I couldn't.
But I wonder, if you think the age of the earth is irrelevant to what it means to be a human, would you say the same about evolution?
Do you think that whether life started as a single-cell organism and we ultimately evolved from a monkey-like creature; or OTOH whether Adam was created from dirt and Eve from his rib (and both in "god's" image); is the answer to that question relevant to what it means to be human?
Because the age of the earth is very relevant to the issue of evolution, and many folks use the Inerrant Bible as evidence that evolution didn't/doesn't occur...
While I was reading your post here, I just had an idea. We must accept that the science is right and that the scripture cannot be false. There must therefore be a way of reconciling the two.
Here's my theory........
99 per cent of people assume that Adam is the first human. That may be true in a sense, but not in the way we may think. Evolution theory and science describe the origins of humans in a way that is scientifically observable/measurable. They describe our
physical origins, not our
spiritual origins.
The story described in Genesis is not our physical origins, but our spiritual origins. Physically, we evolved from "apes," but spiritually, we came from somewhere else. We are actually divine.
Adam is not actually the first human. He is the first divine human, the first incarnation of divine humans into this world. The descendants of Adam and Eve had sexual relations with purely biological humans and as a result, the Divine began to spread among the purely biological. There is no way of knowing how many people have a "divine soul" in them and how much "divinity" has spread among the human population.
Consider that the opening passage of the Gospel of Matthew, Luke 3 and parts of 1 Chronicles lists the genealogy of Adam, Abraham, Jacob, David. We could well consider the Genesis story to be partly metaphorical, but I do not think the genealogy is metaphorical. I think we must take the genealogy literally. What is the point of listing a genealogy if we don't take it literally? The earth may be much older than 6,000-7,000 years, but quite obviously the lineage from Adam to the present generation is not much older than 6,000-7,000 years -- give or take a few hundred or thousand years.
I am not talking here about the ancestor of the entire human race (including the biological members), but the ancestor of divine humans. Adam isn't everybody's ancestor. However, we can be sure and certain that Adam is definitely the ancestor of the Jewish people!!!!
Maybe that's the real point and this is where things may start to shock people. I hope you don't take this the wrong way.
We know from the accounts in Genesis and other places in the Bible that of all the "races" in the world, Adam is definitely the ancestor of the Jewish people. The Jewish people are therefore divine. So that's one group. Because Abraham was a descendant of Adam, all descendants of Abraham are also "divine." The Arabs, the descendants of Ishmael were descendants of Abraham, so therefore Arabs are also divine (and it doesn't really matter if they're Muslim or not -- it isn't about faith).
The story of Genesis isn't really about the origins of the human race, but about the lineage of the Divine. If this is one possible and legitimate interpretation, then science doesn't really force us to concede that the Genesis story is wrong, but rather it forces us to realise the truth about what Genesis is really talking about -- that some, or all of us are divine -- and that Genesis calls us to rediscover our divine origins.
This is where it may start to shock people -- because it is probably starting to sound a bit "racist" or "racialist" now. If we started talking about who was "divine" and who was not, we'd be talking about two races here.
I don't know if this is a coincidence or not, but I've read how some Hasidic groups see all non-Jews as "subhuman" and Hasidic groups take a mystical approach to Judaism. I think we can all agree with the idea that any part of the human race is "subhuman" is wrong, but it's the weirdness of the mysticism and kabbalah that leads to that concept. What gets me interested in what these Hasidic groups are thinking is whether the mysticism gets them close to a point Genesis might be making, even if they get the crucial aspect wrong -- the status of non-Jews.
I just wonder if it is really a distorted version of what the Genesis story is really trying to say. The reason why we can't regard one segment of the human race as "lower life-forms" (apart from the wrongness of considering some people subhuman) is because now that the Divine and Biological Humans have mingled and intermarried over so many generations, we're all more or less in the same boat now. Most of us now have a divine soul.
Many Hasidic groups have been tempted to say "let us differentiate" but I don't think differentiation is possible any-more.
