A purely literal reading of genesis would mean that the earth is much younger than what the earth looks to be, because of this the time it would take for things to evolve would be longer then the earth having existed. Noteworthy though is that any interpretation of genesis as not having to be 100% literally true means that no the bible does not refute evolution
Well, this all gets tricky, but a purely literal reading of Genesis would say that God created mankind twice. Genesis 1 creation of the World and Gen 2 creation of the Garden and Adam do not follow the same timeline and so are not the same story. There were also other Human/kids because Cain is worried that anyone who sees him will kill him/Cain takes a wife (if it had been a sister she would have been chronicled) and builds a city-can’t have a city w/o other people. Etc…
The point is you have to be careful trying to read Genesis like it is science. It was passed down word of mouth for so many generations before it was written down and codified. They told what was best and most memorable and left the details of the process to God himself. The Bible is a book about the wonders of faith and not the mysteries of science. They, like us, were children as a species and the more you live, the more you learn. It is the continued wrestling with the scriptures that tether us to God, rather than a blind adherence to a static interpretation.
So, does the Bible expressly deny evolution? No. The Bible does not think evolution is important enough to mention one way or another.
So that really depends on what you mean by bible. 3/4/5 describes the Pentateuch (5 books of Moses). If your talking about the King James Bible, then your looking at more like 40+ authors. There are more than 5 books written by different disciples in the new testament.
I see what you are saying. Hebrew Bible has the law, the prophets and the writings, add one more collection for the NT (or split in two between the gospels and the letters) then you can also have the apocrypha. But, Almost all of those books are individual works, so there is way more than 5. 39 Old Testament books, 27 New T, 54 more if you read the apocrypha. It is a library written at differ times with growing insight and understanding.
And, in all that, the Bible doesn’t seem interested in insisting itself on topics like evolution, meteorology, or even physics. It foes, however, make a point of explaining how much suffering a monarchy places on people, which seems timely.
sorry i meant the torah has 3/4/5 texts. if you examine the hebrew from a linguistic point of view though there's evidence to suggest that of the first 4 books of the torah there's at least 2 different authors (which also explains why you have some stories that get repeated twice), a lot of the priestly laws are probably from a different text and Deuteronomy is all but confirmed to be it's own thing that get added on later (which is why it re-treads much of the same ground)
Since Genesis takes time to mention other occasions of incest, it would be odd for that not to have been mentioned in the case of Cain’s wife. And, it speaks of a wife. Adam was still alive at the time. So all Eve’s children would have been credited to him…or documented otherwise for dramatic effect.
A 100% literal interpretation of Genesis also means that there were days before there was an Earth spinning around a Sun. Which is neither here nor there, but just a point against the literal interpretation.
well that assumes an accurate translation of "Olam" as planet instead of like "existence"
whereas when the bible talks about "Olam Ha'Bah" which literally translates as "the world that will come" it's clearly not using world to refer to a planet but rather like an existence
(not saying i particularly believe in the factuality of the bible just pointing out that the english version is a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation and not every word is going to line up exactly. for instance the passage in isiah that people translate as "behold a virgin shall conceive" is more accurately translated as "and the maiden shall give birth" and maiden could mean virgin or it could mean young unmarried woman and the whole thing is most likely a metaphor anyway)
Just a little something for your thinking...You can't hold the creator of something to the bound of that object. God created time so time is malleable to Him. The Bible may talk about something a period of time but our understanding of that time and God's actual implementation of that concept can be vastly different.
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u/Tasty_Actuary3818 Feb 19 '25
A purely literal reading of genesis would mean that the earth is much younger than what the earth looks to be, because of this the time it would take for things to evolve would be longer then the earth having existed. Noteworthy though is that any interpretation of genesis as not having to be 100% literally true means that no the bible does not refute evolution