Everything You Need to Know AboutThe Creation Story & Creationism

There are a lot of details that get left out when people think about the biblical creation stories. There are also fundamentalist groups who use the story as a tool, in their fight against the educational system.

1Adam & Eve were created ignorant of right or wrong.

Adam and Eve gain knowledge

Adam & Eve did not have the ability to know right from wrong until after they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God created them unaware, but he was still angry at them for being unaware that going against his word was wrong.

Adam & Eve were created so ignorant that they weren’t even intelligent enough to know they were naked. It was not until after eating the fruit that “the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked”. Even God knew they couldn’t have been smart enough to know they were naked unless someone told them.

Just let that sink in, God created man unaware then was angry at man for being how he created them.

2God is NOT all-knowing in the creation story.

God is commonly said to be “all-knowing”, but in the creation stories that is not the case. In Genesis 3:9 God himself can’t find Adam and has to call out to him, asking where he is. God was also oblivious to Adam & Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge. It was not until Adam revealed he knew he was naked that God figured out he must have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge to become that smart. And that was God’s second guess, his first guess was that someone told Adam he was naked.

3Adam & Eve were banned from Eden to prevent man from having eternal life.

Adam and Eve were not kicked out of the Eden for eating the forbidden fruit. They were specifically kicked out because God did not want man to have eternal life. After man gained the ability to know of good and evil they become one step closer to being gods themselves. God banned man from Eden because he was now afraid that we would also eat from the Tree of Life and live forever… even though in the New Testament he allows us to live forever.

And the LORD God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.‘ So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of lifeGenesis 3:22-24

4Bible says creation took place during 6 literal days.

Literal 6 days of creation

The idea of a “young earth” that is only around 6,000 years old is pretty ridiculous sounding to most. Because of this many Christians argue that the 6 days of creation in the Bible’s stories are not literal days, but rather centuries. On one hand, there is no reason to think that the author of Genesis 1 meant centuries when he said day. Also, the Bible describes each day of creation as literal days, consisting of an “evening and the morning.”

This means that man invented beer around 5,000 years before the Bible story says God invented Earth.

5The Bible contains two different creation stories.

Book of Genesis

The Bible itself is a collection of various stories from the Mesopotamia area, from various times. The book of Genesis contains two Mesopotamian stories, by different authors, written five centuries apart, and about different gods. Genesis 1 derives from the Hebrew Priesthood and was created by the Deuteronomic School around 500 BCE, after the Jewish Exile. Genesis 2 derives from the much earlier Sumerian story of creation, dating to 1,000 BCE, but was altered to apply the god of Abraham as the creator god.

6The two different creation stories have a different order of creation.

Genesis 1 says man and woman were created at the same time, after the creation of plants and animals. In Genesis 2 man, Adam is created before animals of the land. It is not until after “all-knowing” God realizes that Adam didn’t find a suitable companion in the already-created livestock or birds that he decided to create woman, Eve, for his companionship.

Genesis 1
1: Sky, Earth, light
2: Water above & below Earth
3: Plants
4: Sun, Moon, stars
5: Animals (of the sea & air)
6: Animals (of land) and then Humans (male & female)
7: The gods took a day of rest

Genesis 2
1: Earth & Sky
2: Plants
3: Water
4: Man
5: Animals
6: Women

7Genesis 1 has man created in the image of multiple gods.

Elohim

Genesis 2 refers to the creator as “Yahweh” which is the specific name for the god of Abraham and most of the Bible. Genesis 1 however refers to the creator as “Elohim”, not Yahweh, which has two meanings. Elohim sometimes refers to El, the head god Canaanite religions, but in this case it is used as the plural version of god.

Hence why Genesis 1:26 says, “Let US make mankind in OUR image, in OUR likeness”

8The Bible's creation story is beyond sexist!

creation story is sexist

The Bible claims that woman was specifically created for man’s pleasure, and only because man could not find pleasure in the other animals God created. God also punished all women because Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Their punishment is, in addition to painful childbirth, that they be slaves to their husbands who are to rule over them.

Adam was punished for listening to his wife, and his punishment was simply during his life he would get hungry and have to eat food. Yes, this is the Bible’s explanation for why we eat food.

9The Bible’s creation stories are just that, stories.

Once Upon a Time

It is important to keep in mind that these are just stories. Still, there are some people who treat the stories as absolute truth, despite their contradictions and evidence to the contrary. Many others try to alter what the Bible “meant to say” so it lines up better with what we know to be true about real life. However, these stories were never meant to coincide with real life. They were never based on any actual evidence, and the original authors likely never intended them to be read as anything but stories.

10Teaching creationism in school is illegal, harmful, and religious discrimination.

Creationism in the classrooms

Since history and science go against the Bible’s story of creation, it is obviously not included in a regular school program. However, an unsettling number of publicly funded schools in the US do teach creationism. Not because of scientific or historical evidence, but because religious groups like the Discovery Institute are illegally forcing schools to teach it as if it were true.

This goes against the First Amendment and results in misinformed and miseducated students. Education is extremely important, especially in the areas of biology that creationists are trying to censor from public schools. While some have argued it is only fair to “teach the controversy” but in reality, there is no controversy in any fields of science or history related to this topic. If creationists honestly thought it would be “fair” to each religious creation stories in public schools, they would be advocating all religious creation stories, not just theirs.

11“Intelligent Design” is simply creationism re-marketed.

Intelligent Design

Since the court ruled the obvious, that teaching creationism in public schools goes against the First Amendment, Christian Apologists were left with two options. They could accept they have been proven wrong… or change the name “creationism” to “Intelligent Design” and force that into classrooms. They decided to go with the dishonest option, and they were also quite lazy about it too.

The first publication for ID, that they tried to sneak into classrooms, was “Of Pandas and People.” This was just an old creation book where they replaced the word “creationism” with “intelligent design” and the word “creator” with “agency.” But here is the funny part, they were sloppy in their copy-n-paste cover up. This resulted in the first print saying, “cdesign proponentsists” when they tried replacing “creationists” with “design proponents.”

Recap

The first two chapters of the Bible are contradicting stories, from different authors, mistakenly placed together in a religious book. They describe an imaginative but fictitious story about nature, and describes God as a being who gets angry at others for his own actions. This god then makes a big deal to prevent man from obtaining eternal life… even though the entire basis of the New Testament is about how God sent Jesus because he does want man to have eternal life.

Not a good start to the supposedly “good book.”