[GCFL-discuss] Fundamentals of Science

[Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List]

The two fascinating features of these verses from Genesis are:

1) first God called upon the waters to "bring forth the living thing that
hath life" and then God "made" or "created" every living thing "that the
waters brought forth."

2) AFTER the waters brought forth life, for some reason it is
specifically mentioned that God "made" great whales.

To my reading, that is an unmistakable account that God worked on the
creation of life for some time AFTER the initial command to "bring
forth," and that there was a combination of spontaneous development of
species AND divine shaping of what came forth. Further, great whales are
an exception to all the other life in the waters, in that God created
them distinct from all the life that originated in the waters.

No, it doesn't say that God made great whales from land animals, but
given what we now know about the sequence of whale-related land animals
and increasingly whale-like animals that eventually returned to the sea,
the specific reference to great whales acquires a significance that our
previous knowledge did not give it. Why did God mention whales
specifically to Moses anyway?

I simply think most of the debate on science vs. scripture is really a
debate based on one set of human knowledge, which naturally colored our
perception of what scripture was telling us, with another set of human
knowledge, from which we can look back and say, oh, that was in scripture
all along, but we were too ignorant to recognize it.

That makes a lot more sense to me than either saying "oh, all this
science proves that there is no God" (which it doesn't), or saying "all
this exhaustive compilation of facts and evidence must be false, because
its not the way I understood Genesis." One thing we can count on about
the Bible -- as the Word of God, it contains much more than any human
being could possibly understand, no matter how many times we read it.

Siarlys