[michaeldhopkins]

The waters are figurative; they basically represent chaotic universal essence which God separates and shapes. If Plato wrote Genesis he would have said aether. We would probably refer to a singularity or strings or something else we think everything is made of.

[jacques_chester]

Or the waters are literal; and it represents that the Bible was written by a pre-modern people with nothing more than their imagination to guide them. I think Plato would have been embarrassed to be caught anywhere near Genesis.

[michaeldhopkins]

I assume you are saying that we should just believe whatever we like about old documents. I don't think that is a good idea. It's better to determine what the writers meant by conducting a careful linguistic study based on other texts, archeology and historical accounts written by people who seem to have had access to evidence that is now lost.

"Plato meets Moses" speculation is just fun, though. Since Plato was a monotheist I think he would have found enough common ground to debate with Moses. I expect the two would have disagreed on whether the forms were in God or residing elsewhere. The creation account in Genesis and in Timaeus are both geocentric accounts of an initially perfect creation, etc. They also would have agreed that the homogenous mixture of the elements was the same as the homogenous "formless and void," "surface of the waters" etc., but they definitely would have disagreed about the demiurge vs God/Satan, and also disagreed about quite a lot of what happened after creation. That's my speculation, anyway.

[jacques_chester]

> I assume you are saying that we should just believe whatever we like about old documents.

I'm assuming that we apply Ockham's Razor. That it's a collection of myths predating science is easier to uphold than the idea that every single Biblical author was steeped in magical realism.

Most of the genius in the Bible comes from outside of it: from the critics and commentators. In a way it's a triumph of brilliant minds over mediocre source material. But now we don't need to apply genius to myths, we can apply them to the real world. I rather prefer that.