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Myths?

Is Evolution based upon the “scientific method” of observation, recording and reproducible, verifiable experiments done under laboratory conditions? Or are these ideas originally based upon ancient pagan religious beliefs?

Although it is customary to credit the inception of this theory to Charles Darwin and his immediate predecessors, a rudimentary form of this notion can be traced back to the beginnings of written history itself. In fact, the belief that life had its origins in a single basic substance is so wide-spread among the various peoples of the world, primitive or civilized, that it can be considered one of the few universal themes in the history of ideas.
(Ernest L. Abel, Ancient Views on the Origin of Life, Farleigh; Dickinson University Press, 1973, p. 15.)

The study of comparative religion shows that a large number of superstitious religions have been influenced by one another, and many similarities can be detected in their beliefs and doctrines. The ancient pagan religions of Greece and Mesopotamia formed the basis of many modern religions which adopted their beliefs and doctrines. One superstitious religion that grew out of them is the religion of Darwinism.
There are many similarities between Darwinism and other superstitious religions regarding their understanding of the formation of the universe and of living things and in their general beliefs and doctrines., contrary to what a large number of people believe.
Darwinism did not begin with the theory established by the amateur observations and investigations of Charles Darwin and other scientists in the 19th century. Its origins go back to much earlier materialist philosophies. Darwinist beliefs were first encountered a few thousand years ago in the polytheistic and materialistic religions of Greece and Sumeria. Therefore, Charles Darwin was not the first person to put forward the idea of evolution; he was an amateur researcher who traced the main outlines of this basic belief, gave form to its doctrines, and later established a theory.
The inscriptions of pagan Sumeria, which deny Allah and assert that living things came to be through an evolutionary process, form the backbone of the religion of Darwinism. When Sumerian inscriptions were examined, they revealed a legend stating that first there was a watery chaos and out of that two gods emerged: Lahmu and Lahamu. According to this belief, the two gods first created themselves, and later as they evolved, brought other material and living things into existence. In other words, life appeared all at once from the lifeless, watery chaos. The evolutionists' belief that living things first formed from lifeless matter has much in common with the Sumerian belief that the universe developed through an evolutionary process.
When ancient Egyptian religion is examined, the same beliefs are found; "snakes, frogs, worms and mice were said to be created from the mud deposited by the flooding of the Nile."18 In other words, denying the existence of a Creator, the Egyptians also believed that living things came out of mud at random. The creation myths of both the Egyptians and Babylonians include the concept of a "primordial sea from which the earth and life arose."
It is erroneous to think that this concept has now disappeared into the mists of history and perished along with ancient civilizations. Today evolutionists maintain the same idea; they would have the scientific world believe that first there was the sea, the watery chaos, or as they call it, "primeval soup." According to the theory of evolution, four billion years ago some inanimate chemical elements in the primal earth's atmosphere necessary for the development of life, such as carbon and phosphorus, by an operation of chance factors came together in water under the right conditions and in the right proportions. In the meantime there were lightening storms and quakes, and the first building block of life, amino acids, came into being. By the same operation these amino acids became proteins, the proteins formed cells, and through the continuation of this chain of random occurrences, human beings finally came to be...
Hinduism, which has found masses of adherents for itself in southern Asia with its complex rituals and pagan doctrines, is also founded on the belief that all living things emerged from the oceans. This belief is expounded in detail in the Rig Veda and the Atharva Veda scriptures which illustrate Hindu doctrines with stories of legendary characters. Hinduism rejects the idea of a Creator; according to its philosophy, the whole of the universe evolved out of a huge, glob like mass of material substance, "prakriti." Everything, animate and inanimate, evolved from this primordial substance. At the end of each cosmic period all things are dissolved into their original elements, into prakriti, after which the whole evolutionary process begins again. That is, the universe is reformed from this primal lifeless matter.

So, does this invalidate the evolutionary hypothesis, even as Freethinker has tried to use this concept to invalidate the Genesis account? No.

It should also be noted that great similarities in religious stories from a variety of ancient religions of the Genesis account of creation, by people and civilizations not only geographically separated from each other, of other languages and cultures, but also separated by great spans of time…does not necessarily prove a sharing of myth….but of a common historical event. (Timothy A. Wellington, PhD: Threads of Religion and Time)

Are there two different, contradictory accounts of creation in the Bible?

No. Only for those you have either not read it or don’t understand this common literary device. Alan Dundee needs to stay in the area of Oral Traditions instead of written literary styles.

Answer: Genesis 1:1 says “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…” Later, in Genesis 2:4, it seems that a second, different story of Creation begins. The idea of two creation accounts is a common misinterpretation of these two passages which describe the same creation event. They do not disagree as to the order in which things were created and thereby do not contradict one another. According to the erroneous view, Genesis 1 claims that God created land, then vegetation, then animals, then man, while Genesis 2 claims that God created land, then man, then plants, then animals. In actual fact, while Genesis 1 describes the “Six Days of Creation” (and a seventh day of rest), Genesis 2 covers only one day of that Creation week—the sixth day—and there is no contradiction.

We will begin with a verse-by-verse examination of the first five verses of the Genesis 2 account (italicized) and finish with a broad overview of the rest of the chapter. As the Genesis 1 passage actually ends in the third verse of the second chapter, we will begin the Genesis 2 account in the fourth verse. We use the New American Standard Bible (NASB) throughout as it is generally recognized as the best formal equivalent (i.e. literal) translationofthetext

This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and heaven (v.4). The Hebrew word here translated “account” is toledot. It occurs a dozen more times throughout Genesis (5:1, 6:9, 10:1, 32, 11:10, 11:27, 25:12, 13, 19, 36:1, 9 and 37:2) and dozens more times throughout the Old Testament, always in reference to human lineage (without exception). The word “day” here refers to an unspecified length of time (e.g. “back in my great-grandfather’s day”), rather than to a 24-hour period (e.g. “it will take three days to finish”) or to the daylight hours (e.g. “it gets hot during the day”). So, a straightforward reading of the fourth verse would be: “what follows is the human lineage of the heavens and earth in the era that God created them.” It does not specify a first day or a second or an eighth day.

Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground (v.5). The Hebrew word here translated “field” is sadeh. It refers to a smaller piece of land or to a cultivated field. The word “earth” is erets. It refers to a larger piece of land or to the planet as a whole. This is an important distinction, one which we see not only here but elsewhere in Genesis (23:13, for example) and throughout the Old Testament (Leviticus 25:2-3, for example). While the vegetation of Genesis 1:11-12 was of the general sort, the vegetation of Genesis 2:5, 8-9 is of a very specific kind. The “shrubs of the sadeh” and the “plants of the sadeh,” refer to agriculture, sadeh meaning a cultivatedfield.

Notice that there was no agriculture yet because God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground. In view here are two of the four things necessary for agriculture (man to cultivate the ground and rain, the other two being nutritious soil and sunlight). Not only does the text refer specifically to the agricultural plants of a cultivated field; it is further implied that two of the things necessary for agriculture were at that point still lacking. Moreover, it is obvious this doesn’t mean plants in general as that would be the same as saying that there were no jungles or forests or prairies anywhere because man had not cultivated the ground, which is a ridiculous thought. No, the vegetation described here is that of horticulture. It is husbandry.

But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground (v.6). Notice that land and water (in the form of mist) already existed at this point. It just hadn’t rained yet. Genesis 2 is not an account of the creation of land and water; that had already happenedinGenesis 1.

Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being (v.7). Here in presenting the human lineage of the heavens and earth in the era that they were created, the author steps back in the temporal sequence to the sixth day, when God first made man, an appropriate place to start. We see this same literary device—this stepping back in a temporal sequence for the purpose of greater detail—elsewhere in the Bible as well. Consider 1 Kings 6-7. In chapter six we read about the construction of Solomon’s temple. It is completed by the last verse of the chapter, verse 38: “In the eleventh year, in the month of Bul, which is the eighth month, the house was finished throughout all its parts and according to all its plans. So he was seven years in building it.” Then, in the first verse of the next chapter the author moves on to describe the construction of Solomon’s palace: “Now Solomon was building his own house thirteen years, and he finished all his house.” In the 12th verse, the author finishes with the palace. Then, in the 13th verse of the 7th chapter, he goes back to the beginning of the construction of the temple, thereby stepping back into the temporal sequence which he had completed in the 6th chapter before ever going on to describetheconstructionofthepalaceinthe7th.

In the same way, the author of Genesis presents the creation of man on the sixth day in the first chapter, because man is the culmination or high point of the Creation. Then, in the second chapter, he goes back to the sixth day to present greater detail of the account which starts in 2:4 (and which lasts all the way up ‘til 5:1, where the next account begins).

The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed (v.8). Here we have the creation of agriculture with the very first garden, created by God for man. This is where man gets his start in husbandry, and we’ve been tending fields ever since (except of course during that brief stint in the ark). For the sake of brevity we will not expound each of the remaining verses individually. We will paint the rest of the chapter in broad strokes.

Verses 9-14 describe the Garden of Eden and a river which ran through it. The river split into four smaller rivers, each of which ran through a different pre-diluvial (pre-Flood) territory. Apparently the post-diluvians named some of their rivers and lands after these pre-diluvian ones, similar to how the early American colonists named their cities and states after the ones they left behind (New York, named after the English city of York; New Jersey, named after the Island of Jersey in the English Channel; New Orleans, named after the French city of Orleans,etc).

Verse 15-17 return to the Garden and include the warning against eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In verse 18 we read of God’s decision to create a woman for His man, a decision which He no doubt made long before He ever created the first man. The decision is here presented as a lead in to what happens next.

In verses 19-20, God sits Adam down and creates all of the “beasts of the field” and the “birds of the air” out of the dirt in front of him for him to name. First let’s note that, according to the ancient mindset, by naming something you take ownership of it. So this was a sort of ceremony whereby Adam received these creatures (and by extension, the rest of creation) from God as his own. Second, notice that God didn’t recreate every kind of animal for Adam to name, just a select few: the “beasts of the field,” (what we would call the beasts of burden – those who would help man in his agricultural activities) and the “birds of the air” (no doubt for their stunning majesty… as if God was saying to Adam, “You think those beasts of burden are impressive, check these out!”). So Adam wasn’t sitting there for weeks naming thousands of animals. Third, consider the fact that God had initially created all of these creatures before He ever made Adam, so Adam didn’t get to see God create them. By creating a garden and recreating a few representatives of the animal kingdom right in front of Adam, God was thereby able to show him that He was the Creator of everything (lest some usurper – i.e. the Devil – come along later and try to make that claim for himself). Fourth and finally, this exercise was not doubt didactic. Perhaps by it God was able to teach Adam some an important lesson about the uniqueness, beauty and peculiar worth of the gift which he was about to receive—his wife. Finally, in verses 21-25 God places the priceless jewel in the crown of his creation: He creates woman out of man. And the rest, as they say, is history.

By considering the two creation accounts individually and then reconciling them, we see in this description the sequence of Creation in Genesis 1, then fleshes out its most important aspects and details, especially of the sixth day, in Genesis 2. There is no contradiction here, merely a common literary device describing an event from the general to the specific.

Is there any scientific or archaeological evidence that the Garden of Eden was a real place, and not just a fairytale ?

Eden is described in Genesis 2:10–14:
‘A river watering the garden flowed from Eden;
from there it was separated into four headwaters.
The name of the first is the Pishon;
it winds through the entire land of Havilah,
where there is gold.
The gold of that land is good;
aromatic resin and onyx are also there.
The name of the second river is the Gihon;
it winds through the entire land of Cush.
The name of the third river is the Tigris;
it runs along the east side of Asshur.
And the fourth river is the Euphrates.’

"The Garden of Eden has been dismissed by Bible critics as imaginary or allegorical. However, Gen. 2:8-13 indicates that Eden had a specific geographic location, especially since two of its rivers, the Euphrates and the Hiddekel (Tigris) are two of the best-known rivers in the ancient world. Eden did indeed have an actual
location, and science is just beginning to unravel its mystery. "
--The Bible Encounters Modern Science by Stephen Caesar; Harvard University Masters Degree in Anthropology and Archaeology
"The search began in the 1980’s, when Juris Zarins, a professor from Southwest Missouri State University, discovered that the northern tip of the Persian Gulf (where the Tigris and Euphrates end) had once been a lush, fertile region. "
"The area investigated was located at the junction of four rivers: the Tigris (Hiddekel); the Euphrates; the Karun River in southwestern Iran, which Dr. Zarins postulates is the Biblical Gihon; and the now-dry riverbed Rimah-Batin, which Zarins believes is the Pison. Zarins’ hypothesis was prompted by advances in satellite technology, "
"Scrutinizing satellite images of the Middle East, he spotted a "fossil river" that seems to be the lost Pison river. Therefore Eden, Zarins concludes, lies under the mouth of the present Persian Gulf between Iraq and Iran."
-"The Hunt for a Lost Holy Past," Newsweek, 22 June 1987, pg. 56
"Satellite photos show two fossil river beds, one across N. Saudi Arabia and one across S. Persia (Iran) which join the Tigris-Euphrates. This reconfirms, with new photos, the feasibility of the existence of a river named Pison or Gihon
(as recorded in the Bible)." --Smithsonian May 1987 pp 127-135.

"He detected a fossil river running diagonally through Arabia that ended in Kuwait, at the northern tip of the Persian Gulf — exactly where Zarins had located the Garden of Eden."
"In support of locating the Garden of Eden in the present day Iran/Iraq area - "Thousands of animal remains found in the Persian Gulf (Iran/Iraq) area suggest that game was abundant. Furthermore, the presence of stone tools provides evidence of early human habitation."
-Reader’s Digest Mysteries of the Bible (Pleasantville (NY)/Montreal:
The Reader’s Digest Association, 1988), 24-25.

It is interesting to note that the Biblical Archaeology Review, a magazine which, despite its name, does NOT support a literal belief in the Bible, Yet despite
this fact, this magazine has printed scientific proof to support the exact location of the Biblical, Garden of Eden. The Magazine writes :"Dr. Zarins is no longer alone in his discovery." "Boston University geologist Farouk El-Baz emulated Prof. Zarins by closely examining satellite photographs of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf area." "He detected a fossil river running diagonally through Arabia that ended in Kuwait, at the northern tip of the Persian Gulf — exactly where Zarins had located the Garden of Eden."
-"How to Find a River — No Divining Rod Needed,"
Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August (1996): 55.

This magazine goes on to say :
"The Kuwait River [the Batin] also has a probable Biblical connection. It may well be the Pishon River,one of the four rivers, according to the Bible, associated with Eden.""The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there." (Genesis 2:11-12) "This passage describe a river flowing into the head of the Persian Gulf from the low mountains of western Arabia, the path followed by the recently discovered
Kuwait River. An important key is the Biblical phrase "the gold of that land is good." Only one place in Arabia has such a deposit — the famous site of Mahd edh-Dhahab, the "Cradle of Gold." This ancient and modern gold mining site is located about 125miles south of Medina, near the headwatersof the Kuwait River." "In any event, no other river would seem to fit the Biblical description. I am therefore inclined to think that the Kuwait River could well be the Pishon of the Bible. If so, it implies extraordinary memory on the part of the Biblical authors, since the river dried upsometime between about 3500 and 2000 B.C. I speak as a former skeptic....Now I am recanting." -James Sauer; Harvard Archaeologist"The River Runs Dry: Creation Story Preserves Historical Memory," pgs. 52,64
"Satellite photos show two fossil river beds, one across N. Saudi Arabia and one across S. Persia (Iran) which join the Tigris-Euphrates. This reconfirms, with new photos, the feasibility ofthe existence of a river named Pison or Gihon (as recorded in the Bible).--Smithsonian May 1987 pp 127-135. "Has the Garden of Eden been located at last?"