Most people who adhere to the Bible and Torah believe the creation story — that God “created” the earth in seven days, and formed man from the dust of the earth and woman from Adam’s rib. This is a nice little story, but I want to know more. How do we explain evolution and creationism?
Especially since we have Dinosaur bones that seem to predate Adam and Eve. Nibley has a nice little explanation on this, called “Before Adam”.
I believe that God “organized” the earth, as a landscape architect might plan and construct a garden. With space available, he plans the garden in detail. Soil, fertilizer, seeds, plants — all are brought together from some other place. The head architect brings in others to execute the plan. Workers show up, with the ability to carry out the details — preparing the ground and planting the seeds.
Then you need water. “But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground” (Genesis 2:6)
And the architect must wait and see if it grows.
I don’t believe that God created the earth out of nothing — with hocus pocus dominocus, and boom it sprang into existence — so not creationism. Instead, He used matter; He knew how to bring matter and energy together and set it up, so that it would go forward on its own. Matter has always existed, and we use it daily to create. My favorite being chocolate chip cookie dough. By the spoonful.
[Create] means to organize—same as man would use to build a ship—hence we infer that God had materials to organize from—chaos—chaotic matter.—element had an existence from the time he had. The pure principles of element are principles that never can be destroyed—they may be organized and re organized=but not destroyed. (Joseph Smith, King Follet Discourse, William Clayton Report)
Adam and Eve were not created out of a bunch of dust, magic style. Adam and Eve each existed as a spiritual entity that probably looked like their physical form. They’ve always existed and always will exist. That goes for us as well. “Intelligence” was not created — we existed before this mortal life. I believe that our “intelligence” is our core entity and was not created. No beginning. Odd to try to think about, but I think this must be so. I think God gave us some sort of spiritual body to house our core intelligence, much like my parents gave me a physical body to house the spirit.
God provides us with opportunities to grow, to make choices, to progress, to fall, to create. And all of us love to create — it’s a God-like quality.
The dinosaurs existed. Either in the matter used to form this earth, or they were here before man. They could have been part of the process of forming an earth.
The nomads that roamed the earth before Adam could have belonged to a different human family. We trace our lineage back to Adam and Eve. The earth can have multiple uses.
Time is relative, and what may have been a day to God, could be 1000’s of years for us as we see time. Einstein has shown us that time is relative.
I don’t believe that we sprang into existence slowly from some primordial swamp, or even an ape. True it is that species mutate, and genes get shuffled, but that is part of the plan, things adapt to keep the world alive for every one of us to be born, to be given a life with a physical nature.
Everything runs downhill, energy is required to move from a state of disorder to one of order. You cannot walk away from a messy room and expect it to be cleaned up on your return. Not unless someone has come in and organized things. That is the second law of thermodynamics.
Matter is neither created nor destroyed. That’s the law of conservation of energy.
And God works with these laws. And other laws that we don’t even know about. From this point of view, that is miraculous. I hope to understand the miraculous.
“The Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah 1. The Almighty. Genesis cap 1 v 16. De Vos” by Phillip Medhurst – Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons –
God sets up the laws in this Kabbalistic view. The shape of the Creator’s throne mirrors that of the macrocosm: the throne cover is a model of the heavens, the back a representation of the planetary spheres.
God Creates by Brueghel
