Dear George,

You are quite right. The statement "God created man ... ; male and female created he them." does not mean that they were created simultaneously. However, the presence of two separate creation stories does suggest that two stories were cobbled together.

george,

>>When I say Shakespeare wrote tragedies, Hamlet and Macbeth wrote he, I am not saying he wrote them simultaneously.

does it matter? is the creation myth more or less mythical depending upon the timing?

>> Yesterday I watched ... Richard Dawkins ... and although I would not necessarily call nonsense what he believes now ...

your bringing up dawkins seems pretty gratuitous, especially given that in the video-meeting you wish to denigrate you don't actually seem to claim that he is promoting nonsense. but, there's nothing much else of interest on this thread. and you're sane (putting you well more than half-way ahead of others here). so, i'll bite.

if there's something of substance dawkins claims with which you disagree then please say so. if there's something from dawkins even as remotely nonsensical or special pleading as sellick's posts (not to mention the majority of christian responses), i'd like to hear it.

PETER SELLECK, it is NOT the creation legends that disturb me about the bible.

It is the flood, the sacrifice of Isaac, all that "putting to death". It is the killing of whole towns as in Dt 13:13-19. It is the idea of eternal hellfire for failure to believe that a first century itinerant Jewish preacher was God incarnate.

You presumably do not believe in collective punishment but that is what the deity depicted in the bible does all the time.

We are not only animals PETER SELLECK. There is a discontinuity between ourselves and even our closest primate cousins, the chimpanzees and bonobos. We do have something that could be described as a SOUL. We crave the NUMINOUS. We need the SPIRITUAL.

The trouble is that the Yahweh of the bible is anything but numinous or spiritual. On the contrary he comes across as a genocidal psychopath with a narcissistic personality. He is barely distinguishable from the foolish gods of the Greeks and the Romans.

I do not have easy answers for these existential problems PETER SELLECK. But the bible is not the answer. It is part of the problem.

I do not know whether there exists some being or entity that could be described as the creator of the universe. If such a creator exists I do not know whether he? she? it? they? is even interested in humanity. Maybe the real action occurs beyond our event horizon.

But this I do know. The Yahweh of the bible is not that creator. We have to go back to the drawing board.

bushbasher,
>>does it matter?<<
No, it does not. My remark was not about creation or the bible, I just wanted to point out that statement A did not imply statement B. As you can see, David f understood.
>>if there's something of substance dawkins claims with which you disagree then please say so<<
In the very talk I watched Dawkins listed twenty books apparently containing many lengthy expositions where people explain where and why they disagree with him. I am sure that there are many more papers and newspaper articles written with the same aim. I certainly do not see any need to add my own list.

Besides, I have written quite a few posts also on this OLO in support of my belief in the compatibility of a contemporary interpretation of science with a contemporary interpretation of religion (notably Christianity), which is probably the main point where I disagree with him (as well as with biblical literalists).

So I will not analyse sentence by sentence Dawkins’ UC Berkeley appearance for the same reason that I will not analyse an evangelical preacher’s statements besides acknowledging, as I did, that - like those preachers - Dawkins knew how to hearten and reassure his congregation.

george,

re the myths, fair enough. if it was simply a little lesson in logic, sure.

re dawkins, what others have written seems to me to be entirely beside the point. you brought up dawkins as an example of nonsense (admittedly not your choice of word), so it seems fair enough for me to ask precisely what you regard of his to be nonsense.

yes, you have written a lot on the compatibility of science and (some) contemporary religion. on this you definitely would be in disagreement with dawkins, but that hardly in itself warrants describing dawkins generally, or even specifically, as a source of nonsense. and that disagreement is the end conclusion: it doesn't identify the purportedly nonsense reasoning by which he got to that conclusion.

for example, i disagree with much of what you write, and certainly i've thought a post or two of yours as predominantly nonsense. but i definitely think there is thought and sense in your posts. i definitely wouldn't dismiss your posts as a whole, or usually, as nonsense. you're no sellick.

so, i'll ask again, hopefully more clearly. let's deal with small claims, so it doesn't look like i'm asking you to analyse dawkins' whole book.

what is a specific argument of dawkins which you would describe as nonsense? this isn't demanding a line-by-line analysis. it's asking for one specific example. should be easy! and believe it or not, i may well agree.

"The insistence that God is the cause of the world creates all sorts of logical problems."

Couldn't have put it better myself.

Peter, get a life.