So, during the service meeting this week, they were showing a few pages on the web site that we could share with an interested one (using the projection screen in the Hall), and I sat up a little in my seat when I read this part of the page "Do Science and the Bible Agree?" (or "Does Science Agree with the Bible?", depending on which place you look for the title):
The universe had a beginning. (Genesis 1:1) In contrast, many ancient myths describe the universe, not as being created, but as being organized from existing chaos. The Babylonians believed that the gods that gave birth to the universe came from two oceans. Other legends say that the universe came from a giant egg.
Someone could run down the whole page and rebut the other points too, but I don't have that kind of time, and I wanted to share a lesser-known fact (among non-scholars) about the creation account that starts in chapter 1. I don't see that Leolaia ever covered this subject, which is surprising, but perhaps I missed it. She did cover a related subject in depth, which I will be linking to below. My goal here is just to briefly sum up the scholarly opinion on this account.
First, here's the Cliff's Notes version of what I'm going to talk about: Contrary to the Society's claim that Genesis is unlike those dirty heathen myths about the world coming from a chaos without any beginning, in fact that is exactly what Genesis chapter 1 describes. It does not describe a "universe with a beginning", as they say it does, but instead shows us God setting a pre-existing chaos in order.
The huge mistake that a modern reader makes, aided and abetted by his Bible, is thinking that Genesis 1:1 refers to the creation of the universe and the planet Earth. This concept is what's called creatio ex nihilo, "creation from nothing". But if 1:1 were really referring to the creation of outer space and the planet Earth, then light could not just be getting started in 1:3 -- because clearly the stars, such as our Sun, would have been made in 1:1.
But if we interpret "the earth" to literally just mean "the solid ground we stand on", and "the heavens" as "the sky", things begin to make more sense, in terms of both the chronological order of the account and what we would expect to read if this story was simply a product of ancient man, and not of a divine revelation.
It's important to know that Genesis 1:1 doesn't actually say "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth", as Bibles traditionally render it. The word for "beginning" here is not a noun intended to stand alone, but rather to modify a verb, like "create". A better translation is found in Young's Literal: "In the beginning of God’s preparing the heavens and the earth --". This verse is describing the beginning of an act, not the beginning of the universe. This is crucial to understanding what the ancient writer really meant.
(Before I continue, I want to point out that our NWT used to read this way: "In [the] beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The use of brackets was the Society's way of acknowledging the fact that the Hebrew didn't seem to be talking about a Beginning Of The Universe, but simply the beginning of God's actions upon the watery deep. The revised NWT has removed the brackets, leaving the traditional inaccurate rendering "In the beginning...".)
So, why does this matter? Because Genesis 1:1 does not have God creating anything. Rather it is saying, loosely, "This is the beginning of the story of creation", which begins in 1:2. And verse 2 clarifies that the "earth" at this time is actually still a formless waste; it is only named "earth" after it is separated from the waters and dried out, in verse 10. Anyway, in verse 3, God creates light, and in verse 6, he creates a division in the watery deep, but notice that he didn't make the waters -- they were already there. He just parted them in order to reveal dry land*. The God depicted here is one who conquers chaos, not one who can make matter from nothing, which is a concept that would simply not have made sense to ancient man.
The story of Genesis 1 in fact closely parallels other stories from the Ancient Near East, including the Babylonian Enuma Elish. If you really want the proof for the assertions in this post, Leolaia details the scholarly evidence here. Once you realize how close this story is to the stories of the neighboring cultures, you can see why I was surprised that the Society would directly mention the Babylonian creation account as something that supposedly differs from the Jewish account in Genesis 1. In fact it's more likely that the Hebrew people inherited the myth from Babylon or maybe Egypt.
*If this sounds familiar, it's because the Crossing of the Red Sea was intended to harken back to this account.