PaulSacramento wrote:Im not sure I want to pursue this with you further, but it does seem to say with great clarity that all was made in 6 days, A and E were the first people, flood, etc.
I've heard the written for us not to us, but then, I dont get that as the middle east and its writings are not my heritage, at all.
Yes, it does say those things in Genesis, now all you have to do is prove that the writer was making a scientific statement as opposed to a theological one ( or a creation mythos one, or a poetic one, or a cosmological one, etc).
See, a scientific statement, even in those days when science as we know it didn't really exist, would mean that the writer was making a OBSERVABLE statement about nature.
We know that he obviously wasn't, so...
Since you ask so... here is my So...
whoever started the story just made something up, it was told and retold until someone wrote down a version of it.
An acquaintance of my Dad lived in the arctic for a number of years, and this story came up:
In a certain Eskimo village, the land is very flat but there are two hills a fw miles away, a bigger and smaller one. The bigger is flat topped.
The local story is, a giant was carrying a big rock, and dropped it. It broke, and the smaller piece rolled to make the smaller hill.
The lady who told him the story said that she god it from her grandmother. Everyone in the village knows the story, and its what they all tell their kids.
As an adult, she asked her grandmother where she got it, and the grandmother said "Oh, I just made it up when you were little, and asked about those hills."
I suppose after a few hundred years the story would have changed, maybe added a lot of details, and nobody would know where it came from. Eyewitness, maybe.