[Ccecil]

I find it interesting that the story of "Genesis" in the Bible basically goes through the order of operations for how the universe formed (aside from a couple of the days out of order...but it is very close). It does lean towards at least a reasonable assumption of what came first. Makes me think there was some sort of "knowledge" being encoded in the story that was attempting to teach the uneducated of the time.

[Someone]

I don’t see it that way. Genesis doesn’t mention the creation of earth, stars get created after there’s land and water on earth, there’s light with days and nights before stars, the sun and moon are equally old, fruit-bearing plants are created before sea life, and water plants aren’t mentioned at all.

I think it’s about you can expect from randomly picking fragments, and throwing away variants that do not hold up to simple scrutiny such as “but what do these animals eat?” or “if there’s no water yet, where do these fish live?”.

About the only thing it gets truly right is the creation of water life before land life.

[dragonwriter]

> About the only thing it gets truly right is the creation of water life before land life.

Sea animals and birds are created at the same time, after land plants, so it has land life first, and sea and land animals together.

[pvaldes]

>the only thing it gets truly right is the creation of water life before land life

50% of probability of having it right just by chance

[ksaj]

Planaria live right there in the middle - the muck, as it were. You're still probably correct for the most part, but it's not a binary. It had to have been quite a blend to kick things off in the evolving life direction.

[dragonwriter]

> I find it interesting that the story of "Genesis" in the Bible basically goes through the order of operations for how the universe formed (aside from a couple of the days out of order...but it is very close).

As a Christian but decidedly not a biblical literalist, that's...just not true, without a whole lot of strained appeal to metaphor informed by knowing the answer you want it to get to.

Genesis has two mutually incompatible creation stories, and while the reference to "days" means this has to refer to the first one, its not really true of either of them.

I mean the first one has creation in this order of days:

(1) Light, day vs. night

(2) separation of the waters (which, incidentally, appear to preexist creation, as they don't get created anywhere) into waters above and waters below, divided by a "firmament" which is named Heaven.

(3) Gathering of the waters below the firmament into one place (the Seas), producing dry land as side effect. And the creation of grass, herb-yielding seed, and fruit trees on the land.

(4) Creation of the Sun, Moon, and stars.

(5) Creation of sea and avian animals.

(6) Creation of (non-avian) land animals, including man.

That's more than a couple days out of order.

[thefounder]

"Genesis" got it wrong. The knowledge from "genesis" is no different than the knowledge of so many others that got it "close" but not quite right.

Another issue is that many texts are vague and open for interpretation so people can make it "make sense" regardless of how wrong/ridiculous/innacurate it is.

[WealthVsSurvive]

We have too much hubris regarding ancient peoples and their religions. These stories and their kin across the world comprise humanity's first attempts at formalizing ergodic reasoning. They were technically incorrect, but only insomuch that they didn't have as much to work with as we do. I also think most miss the important bits about genesis, the part where our consciousness became a binary machine of good-for-me / bad-for-me projected over time (whereas before the machine merely had some limited scratch memory), how that relates to scarcity in the story of Cain and Abel, and how that really sort of mucked things up for humans as far as war and horrific things go. Genesis is primarily about the birth of human consciousness. Eve gained knowledge first, not because of some sexist nonsense, but because it's a "good" thing for women to project about the well-being of themselves and their offspring. This "good" thing however, was witnessed by men who then killed each other over achieving that "good" status. It's a story concerning the origin of all material conflict, the bridge between beast and man, and the evolutionary impetus for the development of all intelligence.