I really wanted to respond to this thread yesterday, but was so damn tired. FYI, I'm in Jerusalem at present, working at the Israel Museum for ten days on a fascinating ancient scroll that I believe preserves source material for the famous so-called "War Scroll" from Qumran Cave 1. It might also be of interest to some that the Israel Antiquities Authority performed a massive upgrade to their online photographic database this past week, and
added 10,000 new images of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Anyhow...
Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
...I'm sure there are other creation myths that don't involve creation "ex nihilo" by a preexisting deity though, maybe Greeks?...
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It constantly bugs me, but this point requires significant and regular correction. While official Christian doctrine almost universally endorses a position of creation
ex nihilo—which means basically a creation from out of nothing—this idea was not arrived at by way of a straightforward reading of the biblical creation texts. The idea of creation
ex nihilo receives support from most English translations of Genesis 1:1 by translating the first word as an adjective, and not an adverb: "
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." In actual fact, this is a very strange translation of this word, ברשאית, which where elsewhere used almost universally functions as a temporal qualifier of the verbal clause. My (much better) translation is "
When God began creating the sky and the ground, the ground was a chaotic soup and darkness encroached upon the surface of that chaos." You can see that in this alternative rendering, there is no suggestion that there was nothing prior to God's first creative act. Rather to the contrary, the Genesis 1 creation story makes much better sense in its depiction of God fashioning the cosmos from functionless
raw materials.
Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
Ultimately I guess you are right that for a believer God would always be part of creationism, but the discussions don't have to be framed that way.
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They absolutely don't! And I think this is more clearly revealed by way of a more natural translation and interpretation of the biblical creation myth in Genesis 1. The story is not about origins, it is about order and harmony. In the ancient mind, the ultimate reality was believed to be synonymous with stability, function, and uniformity. The Hebrew word ברא, which is used exclusively throughout this story to describe God's activity is believed to have emerged from an Ugaritic root meaning "to cut", and was essentially understood to convey a sense of
organisation. This is completely in tune with the action taking place in Genesis 1, in which we see God
assigning function, and compartmentalising the universe. The "moral" of this story—if one were to call it such—is that EVERY element of reality has a God-given function. Every part of the cosmos conforms to its divinely mandated designation.