"In the Beginning God Created Heaven and Earth"

Are Claims Evidence? · Why Wouldn't Every Claim be Sufficient Evidence? · Visual Experience is Prima Facie Evidence · Relevant Expert? · "In the Beginning God Created Heaven and Earth"

What is the evidence? Dillahunty asked this. Well, I'll answer.

Moses had God tell or show him this on Mount Sinai.

Moses had good reasons to believe it was God he was speaking to.

After all, He had helped a whole people out of Egypt.

So, the evidence is a vision, like the Apocalypse. This is different from evidence for some verses of chapter 1, for much of chapter 2, for all of subsequent chapters, where people were involved and could observe what happened.

In chapter 3, chapter 4, chapters 6 / 7 and also 8 / 9, again chapter 11 verses 5—7, we have God speaking, we need to assume theophanies or prophetic views of what happened.

But surrounding that, we have normal human observation of material factors, like a tree of knowledge, identified in advance, a tree of life, also so, an angel with a burning sword, a city, a genealogy, a wooden vessel, a lot of water, relatively sudden reappearance of dry land, mountains in identifiable geography, more genealogy, and two ill boding societies with human projects. Things that could be observed.

None of these chapters are simply what Moses saw in a vision on Sinai. But chapter 1 is.

Again, what evidence do we have for Moses?

The people saw him divide the waters of the Red Sea, before walking through. They saw him walk up to Sinai.

It is not credible that a people who had a very different origin should have forgotten it and started attributing its existence to a story it had never heard of.

Just as with Acts not credibly being an innovation of the second century.

Again, miracles for both founders and successors.

Now, I will grant, for Moses the moment we see a manuscript comes later in relation to the fact, and the miracles are darker.

But for Jesus, the manuscripts come earlier and the miracles heal.

But in fact, Dillahunty isn't just asking for the specifics of why Theists believe God created rather than keeps an eternally created universe, he isn't asking just whether God created Earth at the same time as the whole expanse of space around it, he's asking about Creation as opposed to other kinds of grounds for being.

Here, philosophy can help. More specifically, refuting Evolution. Let me illustrate once again the difference between human and ape communications, this time with a song:

Narnia: Isle of Hope
narniagirl11 | 12 Jan. 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpC3kPfJpTo

In the refrain, the subtitles give:

I love hope I love tears

But from the title, we know it should be:

isle of hope, isle of tears

What we have witnessed is a pun.

Phrase a:
(A) ail (B) ov ho:p
Phrase b:
(A) ai (B) lov ho:p

I hope you love both hope and tears too, but the song actually is about an isle that offers both hope and tears. Statten Island.

Now, a beast could never make such a pun. Because each sound directly means something, and usually means something on the semantic spectrum of a smiley or a traffic sign. Human speech however, usually has meanings like phrases, one concept being about another. [ov ho:p] qualifies [ail] and [ai] is qualified by [lov ho:p] wherein [lov] also qualifies [ho:p] as the opposite end of the action that unites [ai] and [ho:p], namely [lov]. And crucially, [ail] + [ov ho:p] has the exact same sounds, but not in the same groupings as [ai] + [lov ho:p]. That's why the computer misanalysed. [ho:p] is actually the same word, but [ai] | [lov] and [ail] | [ov] very much aren't. This is only possible, because [ai] [l] [o] [v] each sound doesn't mean anything by itself (except [ai] in the context as subject pronoun "I"). To a beast, each sound would mean something specific. And it would mean an emotion or injunction (ranging from request to command) so worth insisting on, that it wouldn't rapidly be followed by another sound, since that other sound would mean something different.

Man developing this while developing from ancestors that communicated like apes, no. Doesn't work. But God having it from eternity (or something to which it is closely analogous, at least), and then giving it, by act of omnipotence, to the very first man, so he could speak within minutes after being created, well, that does work.

This doesn't settle whether Earth was created the same time as the surrounding space to its limits or billions of years later, but it does settle man was created rather than developed. There are other reasons (which Dillahunty would partly agree on) against man always being around.

Again, there is another authority too.

Another way of knowing from testimony.

Man was around his marriage to Eve, and was around his fall, coming after Eve's. From chapter 2 on, Genesis continuously relies on the participants, who can be counted on as having recorded it, presumably in a form suitable for oral transmission. Here is what Haydock has to say about Genesis 3:

Concerning the transactions of these early times, parents would no doubt be careful to instruct their children, by word of mouth, before any of the Scriptures were written; and Moses might derive much information from the same source, as a very few persons formed the chain of tradition, when they lived so many hundred years. Adam would converse with Mathusalem, who knew Sem, as the latter lived in the days of Abram. Isaac, Joseph, and Amram, the father of Moses, were contemporaries: so that seven persons might keep up the memory of things which had happened 2500 years before. But to entitle these accounts to absolute authority, the inspiration of God intervenes; and thus we are convinced, that no word of sacred writers can be questioned. (Haydock)

I differ in detail, but agree in principle. I call this "minimally overlapping generations" ... what my grandmother told me, I need not take my mothers word for, as I have grandmother's (for instance about a couple they met abroad and mother didn't go along). This means, not just mother and I, but also grandmother and I are overlapping generations. Minimally so, I haven't directly accessed by great-grand-parents. Back in this day, the overlaps spanned more generations, so fewer ones are minimally overlapping.

And while we are at patriarchs with long lifespans, let me answer. We agree there are conditions that will end human life earlier than normal, and some of them are even hereditary. This means, in principle, the current humanity could well have descended from a bottleneck having conditions we see as normal, but which weren't so before, and which taken together have shortened our lifespan.

The experience of Adam and Eve, Cainites, Sethites like Henoch and Noah, of Heber seing Babel, was accessible to Moses too, and involved, at various points, a God who does judge sin, and who does work miracles, making the line quoted above very credible. That helped Moses know what God he was dealing with and helped him confide in the vision he was granted of creation.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Martyrs of Troyes
7.IX.2026

Trecis, in Gallia, sancti Nemorii Diaconi, et Sociorum Martyrum, quos Attila, Rex Hunnorum, interfecit. (Nemorius is called Mesmin or Mémiers in French, and he was a deacon).