The Genesis account of creation is not mythical

Thanks Pro. ‘Consistent with Science’ Note that the resolution of the debate is: ‘The Genesis Creation account is not mythical’ NOT ‘The Genesis Creation Account might not be mythical’ This is important because virtually all of Pro’s argumentation given in the previous round can only ever hope to support the second wording of the resolution. The default position is not to assume Genesis is true and then try to justify it, but rather to decide whether or not Genesis is true based on the available evidence. That’s how rational investigation is concocted. Virtually anything can be made ‘consistent’ with science given enough ad hoc reasoning, but we are no longer objectively seeking to see whether or not the original statement is true. Take the following statement: “Life was seeded by Venusian space dogs” It’s a patently absurd statement prima facie, but this can be made perfectly consistent with science by appealing to for example the extinction of these space dogs which is why they are no longer extant, that they arose before Venus became a greenhouse, and that they are motivated to do so because Venus was becoming hotter and hotter. The space dogs could not themselves populate the Earth because they were not adapted to the atmosphere, so they has to seed earth with single-celled life. Etc etc.[1] As we can see here, the absurd statement can be made perfectly consistent with observations made today by cooking up various explanations. However it is clear we have now stepped outside of the investigation of whether or not the statement is true. Just what did God do? As I alluded to last round, all these processes that we talk about regarding the origin of species, of star accretion, galaxy accretion, the formation of Earth’s water and the evolution of planets, trees and humans all have compelling physical explanations. Natural selection and mutations coupled with a changing environment are compelling enough to explain the life that exists enough without introducing a God, and hence would have regardless of whether God was there or not. The same applies to the accretion of dust and gas clouds etc, as well as inflation. Gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and the electromagnetic force and the standard model are known to explain most of everything depicted within Genesis from first-principles.[2] So one must ask, what on Earth was God doing? God clearly didn’t create anything, or most of everything that was depicted in Genesis, the natural processes within the universe did. God at best was a spectator of these events, which undermines the biggest point of the Genesis creation story, which was that God did it. Handing Factual Contradictions in Genesis Pro makes the remarkable assertion: “It is then very unlikely for contradictions to be found in Genesis as it is so ancient. It's then plausible for it to be consistent with science.” Is Pro seriously asserting that because something is ancient it is more likely to not contain contradictions?! I beg Pro to clarify his logical progression here, as this just seems absurd, since if anything the older the text, the more likely it is to contain contradictions. If we accept my statement that it’s going to be more likely to contain contradictions because it’s ancient, that in no way means it will become more plausible that it will be consistent with science either, since we just do not know the author’s original meaning of the words he wrote. It’s for this same reason why eye-witness testimony is not made more acceptable because it is inherently more likely to be unreliable, that is just absurd reasoning. Bad evidence is bad evidence, it’s that simple. If the source or text contains contradictions and errors, then it contains contradictions and errors, period. It means that the source that we know of is just a bad source, it may or may not have had accurate original meaning but there is no way to know what it originally said outside of external reasoning. Length of a ‘Day’ Pro makes the point that the Genesis is not explicit on the time periods involved, which even if true doesn’t circumvent the issues in the order of events to which there has been no rebuttal of from pro so far. Moreover there are comparable reasons for accepting that the breaks between days was indeed intended to be interpreted as a literal six day event. Since for example in the Hebrew text the word ‘yom’ is used to denote the day period, but it could also be used as Pro asserts for ‘period’, however in well over 95% of instances in the Old Testament where Yom is used it is used to denote a 24 hour period, or an end of a day. Many of the remaining 5% are expressions of a ‘day’ such as “The day of the Lord”.[3-5] Moreover the text reads evening-morning, rather morning-evening, which indicates a literal end of day-beginning of day interpretation, as would instead be expected of morning-evening order which would be much more easily interpreted as a ‘start-finish’.[3] In either case it really doesn’t matter, the interpretation of the text is not explicit in either case, and Pro simply cannot justifiably assert it means a ‘period of time’ without appealing to the facts of science first. As such he cannot state what the author(s) actually originally intended when they wrote the text, and hence cannot affirm the resolution. First Man & Woman I noted in my opening round the problems of having a ‘first man & women’ and reconciling it with evolution, which only takes place between populations. There never was a first man or woman, nor was there ever just two homo sapiens at any point in Earth’s history. Pro attempts to reconcile this by the ‘mankind’ interpretation leading to I am guessing the assertion that it refers to all humans as a group (at the time). However Pro goes back on himself by now asserting that there really was a biological ‘Adam and Eve’. This is plainly false, a misunderstanding of what the genetics states about the ‘genetic Adam & Eve’. It is a fact there is a man & woman 60,000 years ago who was the ancestor of all modern humans, however there wasn’t just 1 man and 1 woman, there were many man & women, since the gene pool mixes as the generations progress. So a portion of DNA from 1 male may be extant in all males today, and a portion of DNA will also be extant in all females today, but this in no way affirms an ‘Adam & Eve’ as depicted in Genesis.[6,7] Either the author of the text refers to a first human, or it does not. If it does refer to a first man/woman, then it cannot be referring to Y-Chromosome ‘Adam’ or ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ given that the gene pool is significantly mixed over that number of generations, and as such Genesis is false. Given the creation story in Chapter 2 of Genesis, it seems the former interpretation is correct. ‘First Light’ To justify Genesis 1:2 Pro gives four different interpretations that are consistent with science, and while I could argue against all of these it would miss the point. If the Genesis account is not explicit, then how on Earth can Pro possibly claim to know what the original intent of the text was? 4 completely different interpretations, of a much larger subset of possible interpretations. Pro is making the sharpshooter fallacy by looking at what fits best with the data, and declaring the aim was true all along. However Pro simply cannot know what the original aim, or point was, as he himself implicitly admits. As such he cannot affirm the resolution. Unaddressed Arguments Pro has yet to address any of my arguments regarding the ordering of events, which is patently false as I have shown, which goes beyond my BoP for this debate. References 1. http://tinyurl.com... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org... 3. http://www.icr.org... 4. http://www.icr.org... 5. http://www.accuracyingenesis.com... 6. http://www-bac.esi.umontreal.ca... 7. http://www.isogg.org...