Man sprouting from the ground...science or myth?

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gnostic said:

And yet, you readily accept the inorganic origin of oil:

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I only regurgitate what theories I believe I read in the past. I have little knowledge of chemistry.

I also did say that what we have could be a combination. In some bottles I have from bygone years, I have what is called mineral oil! What is that then?

gnostic said:

Faith is about accepting what we want to believe to be true.

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This is the way unbelievers view the definition of faith. It is not what the Bible gives us as definition:

About any oil that perhaps doesn't have decomposing matter for origin:
I mentioned it only because I had read about it as one of those uncertainties being discussed by scientists a long time ago. Since my knowledge of chemistry is poor, whether this possibility exist or not, I cannot say. Besides, my world view is such that I believe God prepared this earth for human habitation providing all things for us to find and use. If he should desire there to be oil apart from animal decomposition, it would be made for us.

Please don't read too much into my mention of that. If scientists say that oil only comes from animal remains, I can live with that. A lot of animals, even human ones, died in the flood.

What an asinine question. If you're supposing belief in an omnipotent God, that God can shape whatever matter into whatever form he wants.

Confucian Mormon Buddhist said:

If you're supposing belief in an omnipotent God, that God can shape whatever matter into whatever form he wants.

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If that were true, then why cannot we find any compound of clay or soil in our bodies.

We are not plant that seedlings would sprout out of the ground.

We are not shaped out of clay or dust, then given life.

Most biologists don’t work on primitive animals or plants, that have been extinct hundreds of thousands or tens of millions of years, they don’t study fossils. Most biologists only work with modern living animals and plants.

Only fewer biologists venture into the fields of palaeontology. And they don’t see any evidences that any human ever coming to life from clay or dust.

It is clear that many authors, named and unnamed, don’t really have great understanding of nature, so often they make up stories about how man was made.

Muhammad was the last to write of such thing in the Qur’an, that man was created from clay.

And whoever wrote the Genesis in the middle of the Iron Age, that was certainly not written by Moses, clearly weren’t the first to write about man being made from the earth.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the companion to king of Uruk, Enkidu, was made out of clay by the goddess Aruru. Enkidu wasn’t the first man, but the story of Gilgamesh is so old and popular that fragments of clay tablets containing certain parts of the story can be found in the west as far as Amarna (Egypt), Hattusa (the Hittite capital), Ugarit (northwest Syria) and even in Megiddo (Canaan/Israel), in the Bronze Age of the 2nd millennium BCE.

Story of humans been created from clay can also be found in the Epic of Atrahasis, where the hero Atrahasis was an earlier form from whom Utnapishtim of Gilgamesh epic was derived from. In a different Babylonian myth, in the Epic of Creation (Enuma Elish), Ea (Sumerian Enki) also created man from clay.

And there are numbers of different versions of creation of man can be found in older stories still, from 3rd millennium BCE in Sumer, eg Eridu Genesis, Enki and Ninhursag, the Song Of The Hoe, etc, all have different myths explaining how man were created from the Earth.

A closer neighbor than Mesopotamia, there are many different myths, but perhaps the most fascinating one is where the ram-headed god, Khnum, created humans from clay, on the potter wheel. Several iconography have been foun in paintings and bas relief of tomb or temple walls.





The thing is, people will always make up stories, but these stories are not based on nature, but on imagination and superstitions. And claiming that any god is omnipotent can do everything, is simply just lazy, refusing to understand how nature work, since today there are no evidences that any god doing anything.

Jumi said:

So you're equating science and a study from 1977 with atheism. Not all of the folks who do these studies are even atheists.

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Milton Platt said:

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Not all theists are creationist. Where I live, it's not even a majority.

Jumi said:

Not all theists are creationist. Where I live, it's not even a majority.

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I’m happy for you......I live in Texas.

Milton Platt said:

I’m happy for you......I live in Texas.

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Here in Scandinavia theistic evolution has been the alternative most Christians subscribed to. The growth of creationism has been bad news for "theism" here, as most people here have more grasp of scientific theory and start to associate anti-science attitudes with theism.

Jumi said:

Here in Scandinavia theistic evolution has been the alternative most Christians subscribed to. The growth of creationism has been bad news for "theism" here, as most people here have more grasp of scientific theory and start to associate anti-science attitudes with theism.

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It’s been getting tougher all the time to be a theist, especially a Christian in many places. You either have to deny scientifically established facts, or you have to either ignore or turn into a metaphor huge chunks of scripture which were taken literally for thousands of years. I see both happening here.

There are some problems with the way scripture is handled. Part of the reason in my opinion is that the scripture was fought over and those who favored knowledge got the short end of the stick, having their scripture destroyed and those who favored belief got to decide what text is canon. If you've read about the Nag Hammadi library, you know what started the problem with scripture. I think that's also part of the reason why regular people weren't given access to the Bible during much of Christianity's history. Those in power realized that if scripture was widely available, it would also be widely criticized, people would form their opinions and beliefs that can't stand to criticism either become rigid or hidden. The texts were kept in Latin, mass held in Latin... it was kept for the elite only.

Milton Platt said:

It’s been getting tougher all the time to be a theist, especially a Christian in many places. You either have to deny scientifically established facts, or you have to either ignore or turn into a metaphor huge chunks of scripture which were taken literally for thousands of years. I see both happening here.

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What is weird is that Judaism isn't quite taking the scripts as literal as modern Christians do so makes me wonder if we aren't going backwards in our beliefs. Taking mythology as a metaphor isn't necessarily a bad thing, what I won't do is discount what ancients are trying to say just cause they are ancient.

idav said:

What is weird is that Judaism isn't quite taking the scripts as literal as modern Christians do so makes me wonder if we aren't going backwards in our beliefs. Taking mythology as a metaphor isn't necessarily a bad thing, what I won't do is discount what ancients are trying to say just cause they are ancient.

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Ancient people are never wrong BECAUSE they are ancient. They tend to be wrong because what they have written runs contrary to what science has found out about the world.

It doesn't bother me if Christians take the entire Bible from start to finish as metaphor. It's the why and when that is an issue with me. Things that were taken literally for millennia suddenly become a metaphor when it becomes uncomfortable or impossible to support the claims.

Milton Platt said:

Ancient people are never wrong BECAUSE they are ancient. They tend to be wrong because what they have written runs contrary to what science has found out about the world.

It doesn't bother me if Christians take the entire Bible from start to finish as metaphor. It's the why and when that is an issue with me. Things that were taken literally for millennia suddenly become a metaphor when it becomes uncomfortable or impossible to support the claims.

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You misunderstand me. 2000 years ago the Torah was not being taken literally by Jesus and the followers that came much later after Catholics built a canon and reading became more of a thing, that's when people started taking it literal and sola scriptura became a thing.

idav said:

You misunderstand me. 2000 years ago the Torah was not being taken literally by Jesus and the followers that came much later after Catholics built a canon and reading became more of a thing, that's when people started taking it literal and sola scriptura became a thing.

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Okay, thanks. I have no knowledge of what ancient people thought about such things, but I can accept your take on it.
Still, I am speaking of current "interpretations" of the Bible. They tend to be made to try and shoe-horn passages into current understandings about reality when they don't actually fit.

Sanzbir said:

Not that my religion even has a literal interpretation of this, but I wanted to see what some quick Google searches can reveal.

Humans are made of the following elements:
Oxygen
Carbon
Hydrogen
Nitrogen
Calcium
Phosphorus
Potassium
Sulfur
Sodium
Chlorine
Magnesium
Then there's a few trace elements (Boron, Chromium, Cobalt, Copper, Flourine, Iodine, Iron, Manganese, Molybdenum, Selenium, Silicon, Tin, Vanadium, and Zinc)

Of that, the following can be found in clay:
Oxygen
Carbon
Hydrogen
Nitrogen
Calcium
Phosphorus
Potassium
Sulfur
Sodium
Magnesium
Then again the trace elements (Boron, Chromium, Cobalt, Copper, Flourine, Iodine, Iron, Manganese, Molybdenum, Selenium, Silicon, Tin, Vanadium, and Zinc)

The only thing I can't find something online mentioning as an element present in some clays that the human body needs is Chlorine.

So... almost?? You can make 99.8% of a human being with clay I guess. Presuming you have enough clays and something that can break them down and rearrange all the atoms.

Though that was just with a quick Google search. So maybe there is some sort of clay that contains Chlorine somewhere out there.

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Is skin blood a d bone found in clay too?