Genesis: Chapter One (The Beginning)

Wherein the Christian creation story is outlined, and thirty-one verses raise unending debate, even after thousands of years.

The fourth word of the Bible is “God”, but there is no definition of what God is anywhere in the first chapter. Certainly, that will come later. My point is that there's a presupposition in place that we're already aware of what “God” is.

In Chapter 1, God creates the universe over the course of six days:

• Day 1 – Creation of light, day, and night
• Day 2 – Separation of water on ground from water in sky
• Day 3 – Gathering together of waters to form ocean and land, creation of vegetation on land
• Day 4 – Creation of light sources
• Day 5 – Creation of sea creatures and flighted animals
• Day 6 – Creation of land creatures, “livestock,” and “wild animals.” Man is created.

In 1:7, “sky” is defined as a separation between “the water under the expanse [God's separation] and the water above it.” This tends toward a belief that beyond our sky, there is a giant bubble of water. The Internet tells me that people kinda just wash over this, paying no attention to the actual verbiage. All I could find was stuff that related 1:7 to 1:14, where the stars and everything beyond our atmosphere are created, which suggests that Christians accept that celestial bodies exist beyond our world. To extrapolate, the bubble of water is really more like a bubble containing the earth. Perhaps the Bible is referring to clouds with this verse. If so, it's not a very good definition of a cloud.

During the segment where vegetation is created, there is tons of mention of land vegetation, but no mention of underwater vegetation, which we know to exist. Interestingly, though I've heard the argument made that if the Bible doesn't mention something, it doesn't exist, I've never heard anyone ever doubt the existence of seaweed.

1:16 explains how, on the fourth day, God creates light sources, presumably the sun and moon. Those terms are not used. The Bible calls them “a greater light to govern the day and a lesser light to govern the night.” Two things should be noted here. First, science shows that only one of these is really a light source, and that's the sun. The light we receive from the moon is really a reflection of the sun's output. Second, this suggests that God created light before creating its source. By extension, should the sun ever run out of juice (a long-distant eventuality), we'd still have light on earth. I wonder how much of this stuff creationists really believe.

By 1:22, God has created sea creatures and birds and now says, “Be fruitful and increase in number.” I've always heard this as “Be fruitful and multiply.” This is just one blatant example of the frailty of words. Here they mean the same thing. I can't imagine this being the case for every translated difference, especially considering that original copies of these texts simply do not exist, and therefore, we have no way of translating the original source material. Furthermore, if these words are the closest thing we have to an accurate description of God and Christianity, I wonder why we pay any attention to them, knowing that they are fundamentally inadequate. For an example of how translations can go wrong, see Translation Party or Funny Engrish.

EDIT: "Be fruitful and multiply is mentioned elsewhere in the Bible. My point still stands.

In 1:26, God says, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness,” but then the text goes on to say in 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” This is expounded on in Chapter 2, which is the “woman from man's rib” story, but what I find particularly interesting about this passage is that God speaks of himself as if he is more than one being. Does this support the Catholic tradition of the Holy Trinity? Hard to say, because the text then goes on to use the pronoun “his” instead of the pronoun “their,” to suggest that God is indeed a single entity. Besides, this is the Old Testament, long before the alleged birth of Christ. The Holy Trinity doesn't exist yet. Perhaps I'm nitpicking, but it seems that a decent translator could at least get his subjects straight. If not the translator, then certainly the editor. Certainly I can't be the only person to have read the Bible at this level of detail. If I am, what does that say about Christianity? Does it perhaps say what I believe to be true of religion in general? That once a person is stuck in a particular mindset, it matters not where that mindset came from as long as nobody questions its current status?

Finally, God says in 1:28-31 that man should “subdue” all of the creatures of the earth and that all creatures of the earth, man included, are to eat of the plants of the earth. God doesn't explicity say that we should eat the animals, but I guess it's implied. At the very least, he grants man his first privilege of violence, an act that God takes particular glee in committing himself later on. I'm not suggesting that we should not eat animals, only that this is the first sign that God intended for things on earth to die.

Chapter Two