Genesis 1-3

 Happy New Year!

Just FYI after January 14th I get bored of saying that. There should be some kind of social etiquette that states you can't wish people happy new year after mid-January.

Ok so I've been procrastinating over starting this Bible in a year thing all day, which has led to me having one of the most procrastinatingly productive New Year's Days of my life . . . .

So far today I've cleaned the house, taken out the recycling, booked flights to somewhere hot for spring, started a new knitting project, painted my nails and pondered some important life questions such as:

 Why are toothpaste adverts so bad? Why do they keep using those fake science experiments where 'members of the public' are totally wowed by the toothpaste's awesome cleaning power and gum protection? We are not duped.

Anyway. 

Today I read chapters 1-3 of Genesis. How do I do a linky thing so that you can read the chapters without me having to copy the whole text? Genesis 1-3
AHA! That was easy.

I'm already on record as saying I struggle with these particular chapters. I've read some articles people have pointed me to at BioLogos and I'm using the HCSB Study Bible (keep accidentally saying HSBC Bible - thou shalt not exceed thy credit limit etc) to read through the notes that accompany the text, but I'm still not altogether settled when it comes to this part of scripture.

The main gist of all the arguments regarding this part of Genesis is that the language is symbolic. It's not written in a totally historical style, but it's not poetry either - it's something in between. So when it talks about God forming man out of the dust of the ground, or woman out of man's rib, then we can take it with a certain amount of artistic license (the problem being we don't know how much). Obviously, there are some Christians who do take this story literally, but I can only speak for myself here.

Even giving the chapters this large scale benefit of the doubt, I still can't understand why some of the orders of creation are wrong. For example, God creating lights in the sky to mark day and night (i.e. the sun and moon) after vegetation was created, when clearly the sun and moon were present before plant life arrived on the earth. These kind of errors cast doubt on it being God who dictated those words. To me, it sounds like a fallible person ignorant of scientific discoveries about the universe that hadn't yet been made at time of writing.

In addition, I always had a problem with the Christian view that death and the brokenness of the world, such as natural disasters, only came into being after the Fall of Man (Adam and Eve sinning by eating the infamous apple, metaphorical or otherwise). Clearly, if evolution is true (which I believe it is) death and survival of the fittest have always been present in nature, and not just since The Fall.

However, reading through the chapters today I realise that some of my problems with this chapter come from church stories I've heard, rather than scripture itself. The Bible doesn't actually describe Eden as a perfect paradisical world without death, pain, sadness or earthquakes. It describes a limited geographical place of 'pleasantness' (the word Eden meaning pleasantness in Hebrew). A place where man walked in fellowship with God in innocence. When it talks about God saying "you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die", it indicates more of a spiritual death than a mere physical one. 

Humans choosing to turn away from God wasn't just about death of the body, but about shattering the harmonious relationship that existed between man and his environment, relationships with others and with God. 

Maybe rather than the world changing after The Fall, it was actually just man's place in it.

These arguments aren't entirely new to me, but sometimes they seem more convincing than at others.  A bit like faith in general really. When I first decided to carry out this project I thought I'd read my Bible verses in the morning, do a bit of research, and by evening I'd have a thoroughly worked out response. I could totally solve The Bible, y'all! Of course, now I'm realising that it's going to be rambling, messy, difficult and imperfect. If thousands of scholars haven't solved the riddle of the Bible yet, I'm unlikely to do so armed only with a half-arsed attitude and a Wikipedia page. But I hope that I can find peace for myself in the process, and draw closer to God on the way. If that happens in 2014 that would be a good result*

*Although if the word 'selfie' was retired from use in 2014 I'd consider that a good result too.