re: #129 marjoriemoon

I do believe children should know the difference between creationism and evolutionary science

Absolutely. Good biology textbooks have been doing this for several decades without stepping on the landmine this particular book did.

I look at Myth in a lot of ways as the same as Faith…. some people care a great deal obviously.

I would care if my kid’s textbook made unnecessary comments about my/his/anyone’s religion. It’s OK for religious/mythology textbooks to address religion, and OK for history textbooks to address historical facts about religions, but IMO it’s out of bounds for a Biology textbook to make explicit reference to the Bible using emotionally loaded language (even if it’s technically correct.) It would be similarly out of bounds for a Biology textbook to say “creationist beliefs are based on faith, not on science or reason” (this would be a loaded use of the word “faith”.)

re: #133 Liet_Kynes

What is required and important for the creation account is the following:

[snip: nice list]

It is sort of important to remember when studying scripture that it is written by people.

It’s important to remember that it was written by people in a particular time and place. Rabbinic tradition says Genesis 1 was written by Moses; secular tradition says it was written many hundreds of years after. In either case, a key point to understand is that both the author and the audience would have been intimately familiar with Egyptian religious beliefs.

If you read the Egyptian creation story and then the Genesis creation story, you’ll see a lot of parallels. I think those parallels were intentionally used to set apart the Jewish religion from the Egyptian religion, and the Jewish “One True God” apart from the Egyptian pantheon. Consider:

- in the Egyptian story, the void is first, and the top god is born into the void. In Genesis, God is first and the void is a result of “God created”.

- in the Egyptian story, multiple gods are working to create, sometimes together and sometimes against each other. In Genesis, the same specific God creates everything according to His own specific plan.

- in the Egyptian story, the gods are often objects like the sun and moon. In Genesis, all of the key Egyptian gods are explicitly created as mere objects; the sun and moon are not even treated as worthy of naming. the Hebrew God is clearly separate from celestial objects.

- in the Egyptian story, the gods are subject to each other and to natural forces. In Genesis, God speaks and it is so; nothing acts to thwart Him.

I think it’s quite clear from the two stories that the author of Genesis was intentionally responding to, subverting, inverting, or reversing parts of the Egyptian story in order to introduce the concept of an eternal, all-powerful creator-God who is separate from the universe. With that in mind, it no longer makes sense to treat the story as a “timeline” or literal creation process.