Which testament tells the creation story?

Answer 1

Answer 1

The first book of The Bible (Genesis) contains the creation account. This is the only book that describes how the whole world began. Chapter 1 of Genesis shows how God created everything in 6 days. Chapter 2 gives little more information about this creation in relation to the created man.

Answer 2

You will find the story of creation in the first few chapters of Genesis in the Bible.

Answer 3

much better and more likely creation story occurs in Job 38. In the Genesis myth, God says the magic words and the universe poofs into existence out of a rabbit's hat. Or out of nothing. It's called "creation ex nihilo".

In Job 38 God measures out the job, lays the foundation, sets the footings and lays the cornerstone, then he builds, constucts, forms the world. He wrapped it, fixed its limits, and set its doors and bars in place.

There is no escalation of mini-creations occurring in steps day by day, it all happens at the same time. Compared to God's description of a much more likely construction project, the "magic word, poofing into existence" story of Genesis is obviously poetic license.

Answer 2

The Book of Genesis contains two creation stories, in Genesis 1:1-2:4a and 2:4b-20.
Leon R. Kass (The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis) says the second creation story departs from the first not only in content but also in tone, mood and orientation, but that pious readers, believing that the text cannot contain contradictions, ignore the major disjunctions between the two creation stories and tend to treat the second story as the fuller, more detailed account of the creation of man (and woman) that the first story simply reported.

For more information, please visit: http://christianity.answers.com/theology/the-story-of-creation

Answer 3

The Book of Genesis.

According to tradition, there is only one Genesis creation-narrative, with ch.2 serving as an expansion of the brevity of ch.1, not a separate set of events (Rashi commentary, Gen.2:8).

The same literary devices which the Torah employs to enrich its text, have been seized upon by "Bible-critics" in their ongoing attempts to undermine it. The Jewish sages, based on ancient tradition, identified many of these devices, which include:

recapping earlier brief passages to elucidate,

employing different names of God to signify His various attributes,

using apparent changes or redundancies to allude to additional unstated details,

speaking in the vernacular that was current during each era,

and many more. While Judaism has always seen the Torah as an intricate tapestry that nonetheless had one Divine source, some modern authors such as Wellhausen (the father of modern Biblical-criticism, 1844-1918) have suggested attributing the narrative to various authors, despite the Torah's explicit statement as to its provenance (Exodus 24:12, Deuteronomy 31:24). This need not concern believers, since his claims have been debunked one by one, as Archaeology and other disciplines have demonstrated the integrity of the Torah. No fragments have ever been found that would support his Documentary Hypothesis, which remains nothing more than an arbitrary claim, whose falsehood has been pointed out:

Is there evidence against Evolution?

Can you show that God exists?

Archaeology and the Hebrew Bible

Debunking the JEPD Documentary Hypothesis

The creation-narrative in Genesis (a Christian author)

The authorship of the Hebrew Bible

Answer 4

______________________________________Stories of creation______________________________________________
A fundamental tenet of Christian belief is that God created the world, with the primary evidence for this found in the Book of Genesis. However there are new debates that require us to look again at the creation story in Genesis and see just what it really says. We need to know whether to read this account literally and indeed what its literal meaning really is.

Genesis narrative

Genesis 1:1-2 is often translated as "In the beginning God created heaven and earth, and the earth was without form..."Â although many linguists say a translation that is used in some Bibles (such as NAB), "When God began to create heaven and earth, the earth was without form ..." is more literally correct. In the second translation, the earth may have already existed at the time of creation. This is followed by: the creation of daylight and darkness on day 1; a firmament that divides the waters above from the waters below, on day 2; God gathered the waters below, so that dry land appeared and then created grass and every form of plant and tree on the third day; the sun, moon and stars on day 4; fish and birds on the fifth day; land animals and then man, both male and female on the sixth day. Man was made in the image of God and told to multiply and subdue the earth and have dominion over it (1:27-28). The heavens and the earth were finished, so God rested from all his work on the seventh day, and blessed the seventh day (2:1-3). These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created (2:4a).

At the time when the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, every plant was in the ground but not growing, because God had not caused it to rain and there was no man to till the soil. A mist came up and watered the earth. Then God formed a man, Adam, out of dirt and breathe life into him. He planted a garden to the east, and put man there, to perform all the work to keep the garden. God wanted man to have company, so then he formed land animals and birds out of dirt, and brought them to Adam to give them names. God realised that none of these was what Adam really wanted for company, so he put Adam to sleep and took a rib from him, fashioning it into a woman. Later, we learn that Adam called his woman Eve.

Commentary on the Genesis narrative

The above passages are two different accounts of creation, not just two tellings of the same creation account, as we can see when we look closely at the order of creation. In the first, man and woman are the last created, after all the birds and animals. In the second (Genesis 2:4b-25), man was created first, then all the birds and animals, and last of all a woman. In the first account, man was created in God's image and was to have dominion over the earth, but in the second he was to till the ground and serve nature, only becoming god-like after his transgression (see Genesis 3:22: "now the man is become like one of us"). And in the first account, God simply speaks things into existence, while in the second he is unable to make living things out of nothing, so making Adam and the birds and animals out of dirt and Eve out of Adam's rib.

Leon R. Kass says in The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (page 54) that the second creation story departs from the first not only in content but also in tone, mood and orientation, and the two stories, which had two different authors, are entirely unrelated. He says that in spite of this, pious readers, believing that the text cannot contain contradictions, ignore the major disjunctions between the two creation stories and tend to treat the second story as the fuller, more detailed account of the creation of man (and woman) that the first story simply reported. We should therefore look at each account separately, to see whether it rationally explains the creation of the world in the light of modern knowledge.

If we allow the second interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2 ("When God began to create heaven and earth, the earth was without form..."Â), and consequently that the earth might have been pre-existing at the time of creation, then we do not have to try to fit the geological age of the earth - known to science as over 4.5 billion years - into six days. Perhaps the moon is younger than the earth, but the sun and stars are certainly older, in spite of verses 1:14-18. Otherwise, the events of the first creation story could have occurred many thousands of years, even hundreds of thousands of years, ago. So, could they have also taken more than six actual days, making the timeline even more rational in terms of known science? Some evangelists for this position, such as Hugh Ross,look for options in the Hebrew words for day, evening and morning. He incorrectly infers in The Genesis Question at page 65, that ancient Hebrew had a tiny vocabulary and therefore that words were regularly used with a wide variety of unrelated meanings. Experts in the Hebrew language dismiss attempts to revise the meanings of words in the Hebrew text, in order to more closely harmonise the timeline of the creation story with scientific knowledge.

The first account says that God created a firmament between the water above and the waters below, and that he placed the sun, moon and stars in that firmament. It is hard to see what that firmament is physically, but we know that the stars are not merely lights or signs in the firmament (1:14-18) but are objects far larger than our earth and enormously distant. The notion that grasses, plants and trees can survive even for a minute without the sun (1:11-12; 1:14-18) simply betrays a lack of knowledge of elementary science.

The second account begins with a pre-existing earth, with seeds in the ground (2:5) although no plant has ever grown. God makes man first, then the birds and animals, and finally Eve. There is no timeline in this account, which need not take six days, as does the first. However, this account continues with the story of Cain and Abel and genealogies of biblical characters, right down to New Testament times. The problem this causes is that it means the second creation story occurred only a little over six thousand years ago. Because the earth was, once again, pre-existing, we do not have to deny the geological age of the earth in the context of this account, although many 'Young-earth creationists' do. However, we have the contradiction of scientific evidence of life beginning around three billion years ago and of modern humans existing two hundred thousand years ago, when this creation story says this all happened around 4004 BCE. It seems that this can not be resolved.

Evolution

We have seen that it is possible for the Bible and science to agree on the age of the earth, as long as we accept that in both biblical creation stories the earth was pre-existing, but other information regarding timeline of creation seems hopelessly different. Perhaps we should put this aside and examine the concept of evolution, which scientists say is the basis of life on earth. Theologians offer us three choices. There is the traditional theological view that evolution is wrong; a more recent theological view that evolution happened but under the continuous direction of God; and an even more recent suggestion that God created the right conditions for life as we know it, then let evolution take its course. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, but none really answers criticisms of a literal reading of the biblical account.

Charles Darwin did not invent evolution and he was not even the first to suggest an evolutionary process. His contribution was to show, after decades of painstaking research, that evolution would and did occur by natural selection. The position of the Catholic Church is that religion and evolution are not mutually exclusive, Pope Pius XII stated in his encyclical Humani Generis (1950) that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith and that he considered the doctrine of "evolutionism" a serious hypothesis, worthy of investigation and in-depth study equal to that of the opposing hypothesis; Pope John Paul II, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (1996), said that new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis; Pope Benedict has refused to endorse "intelligent design" theories, instead backing "theistic evolution" which considers that God created life through evolution with no clash between religion and science.

The Episcopal Church has said that the theory of evolution does not conflict with Christian faith. In 2006, the General Convention affirmed, via Resolution A129, that God is creator and added that "the theory of evolution provides a fruitful and unifying scientific explanation for the emergence of life on earth, that many theological interpretations of origins can readily embrace an evolutionary outlook, and that an acceptance of evolution is entirely compatible with an authentic and living Christian faith."

Various other denominations, in one way or another, have come to accept the fact of evolution and state that it is entirely consistent with their teachings. The biblical story (or stories) of creation is still there in the Bible, for those who do not wish to believe that evolution has been proven.

Creationism

Creationism comes in two different varieties. Traditional creationism, often known as 'Young-earth Creationism' holds that the world was created in just six days, and only a few thousand years ago. Many Young-earth Creationists do not insist on the earth having been created barely six thousand years ago, but they feel certain it was created within the last ten thousand years. Of course, this means that much of what is taught in science is to be regarded as wrong. Old-earth Creationists accept that science has proven its case, that the world is over four billion years old. They seek to harmonise this with the Bible by looking for innovative ways of interpreting the Book of Genesis, to allow both science and the Bible to be seen as true.

Palaeontologist, Stephen Jay Gould responded with the concept of Nonoverlapping Magisteria (NOMA). He said that the domain or magisterium for science is the empirical realm - what the universe is made from and why it works the way it does. He said that the magisterium of religion includes the ultimate meaning and moral values. These magisteria are nonoverlapping - science does not comment on the ultimate meaning of life, while religion should not comment on the natural world.

A CBS poll in 2006 found 55 per cent of Americans believed that God created humans in their present form, against 27 per cent who believed humans evolved but God guided the process, and 13 per cent who believed evolution needed no help from a god. Gregory S. Paul says the continuing popularity of creationism in the United States indicates that it is in reality a theistic social-political movement partly driven by concerns over the societal consequences of disbelief in a creator. In other words, it is not so important whether creationism is true, but that creationism in one form or another might help maintain belief in God.

Intelligent design

Some proponents of creationism developed the idea of Intelligent Design (ID) as a means of having creationism taught in schools and universities in competition with established science. Whereas creationism is normally Bible-based, the emphasis with ID is that the world seems to show evidence of design, which means there must have been a Designer, which should then lead us to accept the creation story in the Book of Genesis. The intention was to place ID within the science curriculum, which would require converting those who teach science and therefore actually have a sound understanding of science. So far, this ambitious goal has been entirely unsuccessful, as can be seen from achievement against their own benchmarks. An internal memorandum from the Discovery Institute (the leading proponent of Intelligent Design), known as the 'Wedge Document', set out goals for the next 5 years (target 2003) and 20 years (2019). The document was leaked to the internet in 1999.

One of the five-year goals was to see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory. Even fifteen years after publication of the Wedge Document, this has clearly not happened. Another five-year goal was that design theory become the dominant view in two universities. Biola University, a private evangelical college, does teach intelligent design, but with its major emphasis on theology, Biola is not representative of universities in the United States, nor does it indicate a trend towards teaching Intelligent Design as a major subject in mainstream universities. One university allows a fellow of the Discovery Institute to teach a class on Intelligent Design, but publicly disassociates itself from his lectures, so this is not a "dominant view"Â in the university. The Institute and its associates, such as the Centre for Intelligent Design, remain on the margins.

Conclusion

The story of creation no longer seems as simple as it once did. Theological views are more diverse and have been joined by the views of philosophers, who point to inconsistencies in theological accounts of creation, and of scientists, who offer an alternative explanation for life on earth. Many say that the creation of the universe and the emergence of life on earth do not require a creator God.

Answer 5

______________________________________Stories of creation______________________________________________
A fundamental tenet of Christian belief is that God created the world, with the primary evidence for this found in the Book of Genesis. However there are new debates that require us to look again at the creation story in Genesis and see just what it really says. We need to know whether to read this account literally and indeed what its literal meaning really is.

Genesis narrative

Genesis 1:1-2 is often translated as "In the beginning God created heaven and earth, and the earth was without form..." although many linguists say a translation that is used in some Bibles (such as NAB), "When God began to create heaven and earth, the earth was without form ..." is more literally correct. In the second translation, the earth may have already existed at the time of creation. This is followed by: the creation of daylight and darkness on day 1; a firmament that divides the waters above from the waters below, on day 2; God gathered the waters below, so that dry land appeared and then created grass and every form of plant and tree on the third day; the sun, moon and stars on day 4; fish and birds on the fifth day; land animals and then man, both male and female on the sixth day. Man was made in the image of God and told to multiply and subdue the earth and have dominion over it (1:27-28). The heavens and the earth were finished, so God rested from all his work on the seventh day, and blessed the seventh day (2:1-3). These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created (2:4a).

At the time when the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, every plant was in the ground but not growing, because God had not caused it to rain and there was no man to till the soil. A mist came up and watered the earth. Then God formed a man, Adam, out of dirt and breathe life into him. He planted a garden to the east, and put man there, to perform all the work to keep the garden. God wanted man to have company, so then he formed land animals and birds out of dirt, and brought them to Adam to give them names. God realised that none of these was what Adam really wanted for company, so he put Adam to sleep and took a rib from him, fashioning it into a woman. Later, we learn that Adam called his woman Eve.

Commentary on the Genesis narrative

The above passages are two different accounts of creation, not just two tellings of the same creation account, as we can see when we look closely at the order of creation. In the first, man and woman are the last created, after all the birds and animals. In the second (Genesis 2:4b-25), man was created first, then all the birds and animals, and last of all a woman. In the first account, man was created in God's image and was to have dominion over the earth, but in the second he was to till the ground and serve nature, only becoming god-like after his transgression (see Genesis 3:22: "now the man is become like one of us"). And in the first account, God simply speaks things into existence, while in the second he is unable to make living things out of nothing, so making Adam and the birds and animals out of dirt and Eve out of Adam's rib.

Leon R. Kass says in The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (page 54) that the second creation story departs from the first not only in content but also in tone, mood and orientation, and the two stories, which had two different authors, are entirely unrelated. He says that in spite of this, pious readers, believing that the text cannot contain contradictions, ignore the major disjunctions between the two creation stories and tend to treat the second story as the fuller, more detailed account of the creation of man (and woman) that the first story simply reported. We should therefore look at each account separately, to see whether it rationally explains the creation of the world in the light of modern knowledge.

If we allow the second interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2 ("When God began to create heaven and earth, the earth was without form..."ÂÂ), and consequently that the earth might have been pre-existing at the time of creation, then we do not have to try to fit the geological age of the earth - known to science as over 4.5 billion years - into six days. Perhaps the moon is younger than the earth, but the sun and stars are certainly older, in spite of verses 1:14-18. Otherwise, the events of the first creation story could have occurred many thousands of years, even hundreds of thousands of years, ago. So, could they have also taken more than six actual days, making the timeline even more rational in terms of known science? Some evangelists for this position, such as Hugh Ross,look for options in the Hebrew words for day, evening and morning. He incorrectly infers in The Genesis Question at page 65, that ancient Hebrew had a tiny vocabulary and therefore that words were regularly used with a wide variety of unrelated meanings. Experts in the Hebrew language dismiss attempts to revise the meanings of words in the Hebrew text, in order to more closely harmonise the timeline of the creation story with scientific knowledge.

The first account says that God created a firmament between the water above and the waters below, and that he placed the sun, moon and stars in that firmament. It is hard to see what that firmament is physically, but we know that the stars are not merely lights or signs in the firmament (1:14-18) but are objects far larger than our earth and enormously distant. The notion that grasses, plants and trees can survive even for a minute without the sun (1:11-12; 1:14-18) simply betrays a lack of knowledge of elementary science.

The second account begins with a pre-existing earth, with seeds in the ground (2:5) although no plant has ever grown. God makes man first, then the birds and animals, and finally Eve. There is no timeline in this account, which need not take six days, as does the first. However, this account continues with the story of Cain and Abel and genealogies of biblical characters, right down to New Testament times. The problem this causes is that it means the second creation story occurred only a little over six thousand years ago. Because the earth was, once again, pre-existing, we do not have to deny the geological age of the earth in the context of this account, although many 'Young-earth creationists' do. However, we have the contradiction of scientific evidence of life beginning around three billion years ago and of modern humans existing two hundred thousand years ago, when this creation story says this all happened around 4004 BCE. It seems that this can not be resolved.

Evolution

We have seen that it is possible for the Bible and science to agree on the age of the earth, as long as we accept that in both biblical creation stories the earth was pre-existing, but other information regarding timeline of creation seems hopelessly different. Perhaps we should put this aside and examine the concept of evolution, which scientists say is the basis of life on earth. Theologians offer us three choices. There is the traditional theological view that evolution is wrong; a more recent theological view that evolution happened but under the continuous direction of God; and an even more recent suggestion that God created the right conditions for life as we know it, then let evolution take its course. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, but none really answers criticisms of a literal reading of the biblical account.

Charles Darwin did not invent evolution and he was not even the first to suggest an evolutionary process. His contribution was to show, after decades of painstaking research, that evolution would and did occur by natural selection. The position of the Catholic Church is that religion and evolution are not mutually exclusive, Pope Pius XII stated in his encyclical Humani Generis (1950) that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith and that he considered the doctrine of "evolutionism" a serious hypothesis, worthy of investigation and in-depth study equal to that of the opposing hypothesis; Pope John Paul II, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (1996), said that new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis; Pope Benedict has refused to endorse "intelligent design" theories, instead backing "theistic evolution" which considers that God created life through evolution with no clash between religion and science.

The Episcopal Church has said that the theory of evolution does not conflict with Christian faith. In 2006, the General Convention affirmed, via Resolution A129, that God is creator and added that "the theory of evolution provides a fruitful and unifying scientific explanation for the emergence of life on earth, that many theological interpretations of origins can readily embrace an evolutionary outlook, and that an acceptance of evolution is entirely compatible with an authentic and living Christian faith."

Various other denominations, in one way or another, have come to accept the fact of evolution and state that it is entirely consistent with their teachings. The biblical story (or stories) of creation is still there in the Bible, for those who do not wish to believe that evolution has been proven.

Creationism

Creationism comes in two different varieties. Traditional creationism, often known as 'Young-earth Creationism' holds that the world was created in just six days, and only a few thousand years ago. Many Young-earth Creationists do not insist on the earth having been created barely six thousand years ago, but they feel certain it was created within the last ten thousand years. Of course, this means that much of what is taught in science is to be regarded as wrong. Old-earth Creationists accept that science has proven its case, that the world is over four billion years old. They seek to harmonise this with the Bible by looking for innovative ways of interpreting the Book of Genesis, to allow both science and the Bible to be seen as true.

Palaeontologist, Stephen Jay Gould responded with the concept of Nonoverlapping Magisteria (NOMA). He said that the domain or magisterium for science is the empirical realm - what the universe is made from and why it works the way it does. He said that the magisterium of religion includes the ultimate meaning and moral values. These magisteria are nonoverlapping - science does not comment on the ultimate meaning of life, while religion should not comment on the natural world.

A CBS poll in 2006 found 55 per cent of Americans believed that God created humans in their present form, against 27 per cent who believed humans evolved but God guided the process, and 13 per cent who believed evolution needed no help from a god. Gregory S. Paul says the continuing popularity of creationism in the United States indicates that it is in reality a theistic social-political movement partly driven by concerns over the societal consequences of disbelief in a creator. In other words, it is not so important whether creationism is true, but that creationism in one form or another might help maintain belief in God.

Intelligent design

Some proponents of creationism developed the idea of Intelligent Design (ID) as a means of having creationism taught in schools and universities in competition with established science. Whereas creationism is normally Bible-based, the emphasis with ID is that the world seems to show evidence of design, which means there must have been a Designer, which should then lead us to accept the creation story in the Book of Genesis. The intention was to place ID within the science curriculum, which would require converting those who teach science and therefore actually have a sound understanding of science. So far, this ambitious goal has been entirely unsuccessful, as can be seen from achievement against their own benchmarks. An internal memorandum from the Discovery Institute (the leading proponent of Intelligent Design), known as the 'Wedge Document', set out goals for the next 5 years (target 2003) and 20 years (2019). The document was leaked to the internet in 1999.

One of the five-year goals was to see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory. Even fifteen years after publication of the Wedge Document, this has clearly not happened. Another five-year goal was that design theory become the dominant view in two universities. Biola University, a private evangelical college, does teach intelligent design, but with its major emphasis on theology, Biola is not representative of universities in the United States, nor does it indicate a trend towards teaching Intelligent Design as a major subject in mainstream universities. One university allows a fellow of the Discovery Institute to teach a class on Intelligent Design, but publicly disassociates itself from his lectures, so this is not a "dominant view" in the university. The Institute and its associates, such as the Centre for Intelligent Design, remain on the margins.

Conclusion

The story of creation no longer seems as simple as it once did. Theological views are more diverse and have been joined by the views of philosophers, who point to inconsistencies in theological accounts of creation, and of scientists, who offer an alternative explanation for life on earth. Many say that the creation of the universe and the emergence of life on earth do not require a creator God.

Answer 6

The first man, Adam, recorded it prophetically and handed it down in tradition. That is why so many widely-dispersed ancient nations had some version of it. God later dictated the unsullied original to Moses. See also:

Is there evidence for Creation?

Can you show that God exists?

Seeing God's wisdom

Answer 7

The Book of Genesis.

See also:

Is there evidence for Creation?

Can you show that God exists?

Seeing God's wisdom

Answer 8

The creation story is presented in the book of Genesis, which is the first book in the Old Testament of the Bible. It describes how God created the heavens and the earth in six days.

Answer 9

The Old Testament contains an account of Creation in the book of Genesis.

Answer 10

Moses, but it was around for a long time before he wrote it down. Moses wrote it between 1550 and 1450 BC.