LogFAQs > #884903055

Kungfu Kenobi posted...

It's not IN the Bible either though, and a straight forward reading of Genesis gives the impression that God just went *poof* there's a doggy. God spending millions of years pushing DNA around doesn't get a mention, and would probably be worth noting.

To be fair, it's not as if the people writing the stories would have any capacity to understand that as a concept, and the people they wanted to read it certainly wouldn't.

Imagine yourself traveling back in time and trying to explain what a cel phone is and how it was made to a caveman, without resorting to "ehh, umm... okay, it's sort of like magic" to explain away some concept that they're thousands of years away from ever understanding.

That's actually one the arguments in favor of at least the Old Testament having more roots in reality than most people are willing to admit. Most of the Leviticus-flavored prohibitions people always love to whip out when they're trying to attack religion had relatively rational reasoning behind them ("Don't eat pork because there's no refrigeration and trichinosis is a thing"), but you'd literally never be able to EXPLAIN the logic behind it to people who only just finished inventing the concept of cities and irrigation in their Civilization tech trees. So "Don't do it because it makes God mad" is as useful an explanation as anything else, and probably helped save quite a few lives over the years.

It's really only later, after Paul had a seizure and bolted Jewish history and backstory onto insanely metaphorical Greek mystery cult logic that things start to get a bit more esoteric, but even then he (and other early Church leaders) didn't necessarily see the world the way you think they did (because all we really know about his views comes from the Bible, but the prevailing theory is half the books in the Bible he supposedly wrote weren't written by him anyway, just like none of the Gospels were written by any of the Disciples, in spite of you clearly being meant to think they were).


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