Answers about Genesis

How did plants survive before the sun was created?

Detailed question: My question is regarding the creation story. How come plants were created before the sun? Were those nocturnal plants? As we know, plants need the sun to live. I’ve posted this question in other sites and I got answers like: Plants can survive 24 hours; There was already light on the first day; [...]

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Why did God take 6 days to create the universe? Why not do it in 1?

There may have been a time when it could have been considered a reasonable question as to whether the six days of creation in Genesis 1 are literal or figurative. However there is now very strong evidence that the universe is billions of years old, so it cannot be six literal days. There is evidence [...]

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Which modern day countries are in the areas Abraham lived?

You can see Bible places overlaid on modern maps at Bible Geocoding. This adds Bible places names to a Google map. The map for Genesis is shown below, including all the places mentioned in the life of Abraham. View Larger Map

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Why in Romans 5:12 does it say sin entered into the world through one man, when Eve was the first to sin?

In the account in Gen 2-3 both Adam and Eve sin by disobeying God and eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, Eve is not mentioned in Romans 5 (though Paul does mention her elsewhere, e.g. 1 Tim 2:14). This is presumably because Paul is drawing the contrast between Adam [...]

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How do you reconcile the Bible and evolution?

At the most basic level, if the Bible contradicts evolution, logically, one of them must be at least partly false.  On the other hand, if they don’t contradict, they’re compatible and can be brought together.  I’m going to suggest a way of approaching Genesis that I believe is compatible with evolution—but I don’t pretend that [...]

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How could Noah have put every animal on the Ark?

Noah did not take every species of animal on board the Ark. Animals designated using the Hebrew words basar, behema, hayya, nephesh, op, remes, and sippor are used to describe the animals which were taken aboard (the common theme is land based oxygen breathing animals with blood).[1] Animals designated using the Hebrew words sheres and [...]

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Why are numerous major Biblical events so similar to contemporary and historical mythology?

By the end of the 19th century archaeology had discovered many Mesopotamian texts containing creation and flood narratives remarkably similar to those in the Bible. Critical scholars came to believe that the Biblical narratives had simply been copied from earlier Mesopotamian myths.[1][2] The Biblical flood narrative in particular is still considered by some scholars to [...]

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How do you account for human remains that are dated to be at least 50,000 years old?

The difficulty here is that the date of Adam can be calculated from genealogical information in the Bible to be approximately 6000 years ago, or possibly a little longer. So human remains that are much older than that cannot have been descendants of Adam. There are three major views that attempt to account for this [...]

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What light was there before the sun and moon were created? (Genesis 1:3-4,14-19)

There are (at least) two ways to think about this question. The first is to look for a simple, scientific explanation: does science tell us about any lights that were created before the sun? The second is to look for a different interpretation of the passage: is it definitely the case that we should be [...]

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Genesis says that God made man to be “very good”. In that case, why was he able to sin?

In relation to the creation of humans, the phrase ‘very good’ (Gen. 1:31) does not necessarily mean ‘being unable to sin’. When God made the earth, everything was just as he intended it to be. This included making humans with the capacity to be able to make choices, including the choice between obeying or disobeying [...]

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