Are there theists who don't accept creation?

[thatkidakayoungguy]

Like that God has a book for people yet nature is eternal. Does this idea exist?

[bippy123]

Not sure about that but Kenneth Miller believes in God yet is a Darwinian evolutionist

[thatkidakayoungguy]

Not sure about that but Kenneth Miller believes in God yet is a Darwinian evolutionist

Many Christians and theists in general are like that. It is argued that God created the world and spoke life into existence with evolution being a driving mechanism.

[Ecclesiastes12]

I think it's a totally defensible position to say that evolution was a medium by which creation was played out. Genesis gives us a creation narrative that understandably doesn't delve too far into the mechanism by which God created the world. I think there are good reasons for that: how do you explain DNA to someone from 4000BC? The Bible is primarily a work of morality, so we get the salient points.

Anyway, the Bible does describe creation in a sequence. That's a pretty unique narrative. Many creation stories usually involve some diety or other force in a different world creating or revealing our world, or Gods emerging out of Chaos who stomped around for a while before creating mankind. (E.G. the Greek creation story.) Genesis is fairly unique in that the Universe comes into being, followed by the heavenly bodies like stars and planets, ultimately followed by plant life, animal life, and human life in stages. Although Genesis is by no means a science textbook, that pretty much tracks how science believes it went.

I'm of the opinion that the "days" mentioned in Genesis are not 24 hour days. The word used for "Day" can mean a period of time, and it's also nonsensical that there would be a "Day" before there was light, since the ancient people reckoned their days by the moving of the Sun. There's no way they would have used day in that sense, at least in my opinion. So we got a sort of truncated version of that history, simplified for the people of the time, which is fair in my opinion.

[thatkidakayoungguy]

I'm of the opinion that the "days" mentioned in Genesis are not 24 hour days. The word used for "Day" can mean a period of time, and it's also nonsensical that there would be a "Day" before there was light, since the ancient people reckoned their days by the moving of the Sun. There's no way they would have used day in that sense, at least in my opinion. So we got a sort of truncated version of that history, simplified for the people of the time, which is fair in my opinion.

To some of your more primitive persons out there, the day and night is the base unit for time measurement. If the days here were billions, millions, or heck even hundreds of years, then instead of God writing it was that length of time He might've said it was a day to simplify things.

[Ecclesiastes12]

I'm of the opinion that the "days" mentioned in Genesis are not 24 hour days. The word used for "Day" can mean a period of time, and it's also nonsensical that there would be a "Day" before there was light, since the ancient people reckoned their days by the moving of the Sun. There's no way they would have used day in that sense, at least in my opinion. So we got a sort of truncated version of that history, simplified for the people of the time, which is fair in my opinion.

To some of your more primitive persons out there, the day and night is the base unit for time measurement. If the days here were billions, millions, or heck even hundreds of years, then instead of God writing it was that length of time He might've said it was a day to simplify things.

Hebrew has far fewer words than English, so one word may have many different meanings. In this case, the Hebrew word "Yom" could mean a day (as in a 24 hour period), a day (as in sunrise to sunset), a general term for time, an age, a year, or an undefined time period. The meaning is derived from context.

We do this in English too, by the way. If I said "Back in my day", I don't mean a specific day some years ago.

It should also be noted that numbers held great significance to the ancient Hebrews, and they were sometimes used for that purpose rather than an attempt at serious historical accuracy. One example is the number 40, which appears many times in the Bible. The rains in Genesis persisted for 40 days and 40 nights... Moses fasted for 40 days... Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights... the Hebrews wandered the desert for 40 years... under Mosaic law, the most corporal punishment allowed was 40 lashes... David and Solomon reigned for 40 years... the Holy place of the Temple was 40 cubits long. And there are many more mentions than that! But in many cases, 40 is symbolic of trials and testing. Maybe Solomon reigned for 35 years rather than 40. The point was the meaning of the number.

The Hebrews had a different perspective than we did when it came to their literature. They weren't writing for extreme accuracy, rather they were writing to convey a message. There are many, many symbolic elements to the Bible.