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Background
Background
The holy writings of Judaism are called the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible is made up of 24 books. There are lots of different kinds of books in it. Some are about laws and say how rituals should be carried out, some are a collection of songs and poems, others are books of proverbs and advice. Most of the books, though, are a history of the Jewish people - it is basically, a massive family history. It starts with the creation of the world, and then tells the story of Adam and Eve and their descendants.
The oldest books were, according to tradition, written down about 3,500 years ago by Moses. Some think that they were written down a bit later, but whoever is right, the oldest bits are probably at least 3,000 years old.
Jesus, the central person of Christianity, was a Jew, so Christians use the Hebrew Bible but with the bits about Jesus and his followers added to it.
The Creation story is the very first story in the very first Book. In English, the book is called Genesis, which means Origins, or Creation. In Hebrew, the book is known by its first word Bereshit, which translates as ‘in the beginning’.
Summary of the Creation story
Summary of the Creation story
At the beginning of the story, God creates everything and then he spends six days bringing order to it - as if he creates a messy bedroom and then tidies it up. It says that the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Water was often associated with chaos, but don’t think of chaos as necessarily being a bad thing. Chaos was what everything is made out of - like a lump of clay.
God brings order to the universe, separating some things out and grouping other things together - just like we do when we tidy up: we separate out the rubbish from the stuff we need to keep, and then we put everything in its place. Then we have the six days:
On the first day, he created Light
On the second day, he created the vault (sky)
On the third day, he created land and plants (each according to their kind)
On the fourth day, he created lights in the sky (our clock and calendar)
On the fifth day, he created sea creatures and birds (each according to their kind)
On the sixth day, he created people and other animals (according to their kind). (Humans were made in ‘God’s likeness’.)
On the seventh day, God rested.
Genesis 1: New International Version
Genesis 1: New International Version
The Beginning
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep,and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” 7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the vault “sky.”And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.
11 Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times,and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night.He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
20 And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” 21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” 23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.
24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness,so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky,over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
Genesis 2
Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.
2 By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. 3 Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201&version=NIVDiscussion 1: Do science and religion contradict each other?
Discussion 1: Do science and religion contradict each other?
Nowadays, lots of people seem to think that science and religion contradict each other. Some people, known as creationists interpret the creation story literally in the sense that they think that there really were six days in which God created everything as described. This seems to be contradicted by lots of scientific and archaeological discoveries - the bones of dinosaurs, various different ways in which we date objects, the theory of evolution, etc. The appearance of the seas and land and plants, fish, birds, and other animals occurred over billions of years, not six days.
Many Jewish and Christian people, however, don’t take the creation story as being a scientific theory, and instead view it as an expression of the basic belief that there is order in the universe. According to this view, there is no contradiction between science and religion. Both agree that there is some kind of order in the universe, and scientists set out to find and describe it - we only need to learn about the projects of some of our greatest scientists and mathematicians. Newton, for example, did not believe that he was merely describing probabilities with his laws of motion – they were laws – written into the fabric of the universe. Einstein, disgruntled by the probabilism inherent in quantum physics famously proclaimed to Max Born that he believed that God did not ‘throw dice’. For Einstein and Newton and Leibniz, and indeed any physicist who thought or thinks that we will eventually discover a ‘grand unified theory’ the order which they were trying to discover was a metaphysical order, a given order.
In this sense, the basic beliefs expressed in the creation story are not contradictory to it, but the founding assumptions of it.
Discussion 2: Does the order in the world come from God or Humans?
Discussion 2: Does the order in the world come from God or Humans?
Another area of debate is where the order comes from. The story in Genesis clearly describes the order as being God-given. The thrust of the story is the view that there is a God-given order to the world, a logic to creation. It is illuminating to bear in mind that it is thought that the words ‘logic’ or ‘logos’ have their roots in a proto-Indo-European word that means ‘to collect, gather’. This is precisely what God does: he gathers and separates the light and the darkness, the heavens and the earth, the land and the sea. All plants and animals are made ‘according to their kind’, and these various groups are appropriately labelled up. It feels as if this story is describing someone doing an epic cleaning job on their shed – putting up shelves, buying a job lot of Ikea storage boxes and dividing up the screws and bolts and nails.
However, we can compare this story with the creation story described in the Mencius, a Chinese classic in the Confucian tradition.
The account in the Mencius, by contrast, describes creation as fundamentally chaotic. There is no order, flooding waters inundate everything, the animals and plants press upon humankind. It is up to Yao, a human, to bring order to it all. It is Yao that directs the rivers, and organises the growing of the five grains, and who teaches others how to tame creation. In this Chinese tradition, any order, if it exists, is not God-given but human-given. It is not a necessary metaphysical order, but a probabilistic, pragmatic human order based on ‘what appears to work’.
Tasks
Tasks
Draw a simple storyboard showing the seven days of creation.
Do you think that science and religion contradict each other? Explain your answer
Do you think there is order in the world? If so, where do you think that order came from?
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