A Creationist Picks A Fight And Loses To A Priest

[Gorp]

20. I disagree. There were three primary authors of Genesis (as far as we know).

The original version is attributed to Enuma Elish (roughly 12th century BC) and subsequently revised by an author commonly known as "P" (for what that stands, I don't know). The 2nd creation myth was added by an author I can't put a name on somewhere in about the 9th century. It starts around 2:4.

But all that does is support my case that religious texts are living documents. They evolve with time, language translation, political influences on translation, inclusions, exclusions, and random commentaries inserted at whatever point in time.

The point has been made (in this thread) that since nobody was there to witness the "In the beginning" part, how could we know? Face it, 96% of the matter in the universe can't be explained, so called "dark matter". It has only been in the last 100 years that we've come to terms with the concept of cellular, molecular, atomic, sub-atomic, and quark theories. Most people don't even know about quarks or string theory. None of them are sufficient to explain the universe.

At the time Genesis was first written, there was the earth, the moon, the sun, and the stars. Other planets didn't even exist for them at the time. The Greeks (primarily) tracked and named the planets. Sailors named the constellations for guidance purposes. Earth was the only planet and everything else, including the sun, revolved around it. The math behind the contortions they used to describe it were astonishing for the time.

Copernicus really threw a monkey wrench into THAT mess, eh?

The reality, as we know it today (subject to change, of course), is that we're a minor planet in a minor solar system with a minor star on the outer tip of a minor galaxie in a universe too large to even consider. There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on our planet. And we just recently discovered a planet smaller than Earth (and hotter than Mercury) in another solar system.

The universe has to have other life somewhere, maybe nothing we would recognize as life, but life of some form. We keep thinking in terms of carbon-based life forms. The original Star Trek series touched on this issue with the mining episode where something was using a form of acid to kill people and drilled huge holes all over the place. It was a silicon-based life form. It was science fiction, but so were the communicators that the original Motorola flip phone mimmicked.

If there is a god who is omniscient, I hope he takes a vacation once in a while. That's a LOT of shit to keep track of! He/she/it needs a break.