Originally Posted By: Joshua
Two quick points.

First, the first creation account was written as a hymn during the Babylonian captivity, as a direct response to the Babylonian creation story. In the Babylonian version, the god Marduk and his friends were evil, and created the world with blood and war. The Jews responded by writing their own version, one where God created the world out of love. It was never meant to be a scientific treatise, and we shouldn't try to stretch it out of shape like that.

We tend to read ancient literature, particularly the literature contained in the Bible, in our western, Greco-Roman philosophical mind. Ancient Greeks taught us to be literal and precise. Jews, on the other hand, were often neither. Thus, to read that an army had 10,000 men simply means "there was a whole lot of them." Like us Southerners, they were good at telling stories and exaggerating.

Second point. God is not constricted to using young earth creationism. God is much bigger than you or I can imagine. God is perfectly capable of setting events in motion and then guiding them along so that A leads to B and then to C. God is perfectly capable of using evolution if he so desires.

Remember, God created time. God's got all the time in the universe, and he can make more whenever he wants. If God wants to take the slow route, he certainly can do so. God very well could have done it all in a week, and he equally well could have done it over several trillion years. We go with the preponderance of evidence, however, and make the best guesses we can.

But like you said, we weren't there, so we don't really know.


So, It's ok to pick and choose what parts of the bible we want to believe is accurate?

I disagree wholeheartedly. I believe that the bible was written by God himself through the use of a utensil called Man.