God created the world and everything on it
(Genesis 1 and 2)

He didn't - at least not in the way and order Genesis tells us. The biblical creation story is a mixture of several other, older creation myths.

The bible has a weird beginning full of paradoxes.

In Genesis 1:2, we see “the Spirit of God hovering over the waters”, while the waters are only separated in Genesis 1:6-7. Daylight is created on Day 1, but the sun is created three days later, on Day 4.

And God creates mankind two times. In Genesis 1, He creates Adam and Eve at the same time out of nothing, while in Genesis 2 He creates Adam from soil and, after some time, Eve out of Adam’s rib.

The reason for this is that the biblical creation story is really a mixture of several other, much older creation stories. It is full of elements from (especially) Egyptian, Babylonian and Sumerian mythology.

Most scholars agree that Genesis was only written three or four centuries BC. That makes it one of the most recent ‘ancient’ religious books from the Middle East. Creation stories like ‘Enuma Elish’ or ‘The Instruction for Merikare’ are hundreds, even thousands of years older!

The creation story of Genesis was constructed much as you would make a car: out of off-the-shelf components that were already there.

Don’t worry – there are no Da Vinci Code-style conspiracies involved. Whoever wrote Genesis was simply a product of his (or her) time. The author(s) used symbols, ideas and notions that were already widespread – like the belief that the sky is really a steel ‘expanse’ with the sun, the moon and the stars dangling down from it.

To give you a taste of just how strikingly close the parallels are, we’ll give you two quick examples – about the creation of Adam from clay, and Eve from Adam’s rib:

Genesis (300-400 BC): “the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (2:7)
The Epic of Gilgamesh (Sumeria, 2100-2000 BC): The gods create Gilgamesh from a lump of clay.
The Atrahasis Myth (Sumeria, 1700 BC): The Gods are bored with dirty work. So they take some clay, mix it with blood, and create the first humans
The Instruction for Merikare (Egypt, 2100 BC): The first human is breathed to life through his nose:He [the sun god Ra] gave the breath of life to their noses, for they are likenesses of Him which issued from His flesh”

Genesis: “[The LORD] took one of [Adam’s] ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man” (2:21-22)
Sumerian mythology: The goddess Ninhursag takes out one of the ribs of Enki, another god. Then she makes a woman out of the rib, ‘Ninti’ – literally: ‘lady of the rib’.

Not convinced yet? Let's give you an overview of some of the most well-known biblical creation elements - and their origins:

Genesis:

Origin:

In the beginning there was chaos and wind (Gen 1:1)

Perhaps Greek

Theogony (600-700 BC)

God creates stuff by giving orders: “Let there be…” (Gen 1)

Egyptian, Sumerian

Enuma Elish (1100-1200 BC)

Creation of day and night before the sun and the moon are created (1:3-5)

Egyptian

Creation mythology

The sky is an expanse (1:6-8)

Sumerian

Enuma Elish

Land and sky created by separating waters (1:6-10)

Sumerian

Enuma Elish

Creation of plants before the sun is created (1:11-12)

Egyptian

Creation mythology

Man created from clay (2:7)

Babylonian

Epic of Gilgamesh (2100-2000 BC), Atrahasis Myth (1700 BC)

Man made alive by breathing air into the nostrils (2:7)

Egyptian

The Teaching for Merikare (2100 BC)

Eve created from Adam’s rib (2:21-23)

Sumerian

Creation mythology

Garden of Eden (2:8-9)

Sumerian

Enuma Elish, Epic of Gilgamesh

Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge (2:9)

Egyptian, Babylonian

 

Evil snake in the garden (3:1-15)

Sumerian, Greek

Epic of Gilgamesh; in Greek mythology there’s a story of how a snake steals an immortality herb from humankind

 

Despite all this, many devout Christians claim that we should take Genesis 1 literally.

Well: that makes no sense - not unless you’re willing to accept that the sky above is actually a hammered ‘expanse’ you can touch, as is written in Genesis 1:6-8.

What's more, the bible has got the sequence of events wrong. Birds and fish weren’t ‘created’ simultaneously, but many hundreds of millions of years apart.

And you won’t find any serious astronomer around who believes the earth was here earlier than the stars and the sun were. Nor will you find any biologists who will take for granted that plants arrived before the sun did.

But what did happen? Let’s give you an overview of what science thinks:

“Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3)

The first light particles, ‘photons’, probably radiated out into the Galaxy split seconds after the Big Bang. That was approximately 13,7 billion years ago.

“He separated the light from the darkness” (Gen. 1:4)

The first darkness came about approximately 100,000 years later. At that time, the Universe had cooled enough for hydrogen and other atoms to form. Accordingly, the Universe went black.

“And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day” (Gen. 1:5)

Strictly speaking, the first day in the Universe took place something like 100 or 200 million years after the Big Bang. Earth wasn’t around back then, but in those days, the first stars and (probably) the first planets around them were formed. That would bring about the birth of sunrises and sunsets!

Roughly the same would apply for the first land and the first oceans, described in Genesis 1:6-10.

"Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees” (Genesis 1:11)

On our planet, the first recognizable plants and trees must have evolved 500-400 million years ago. In those days, green algae invaded the land. Very, very slowly, they evolved into mosses, grasses, plants and trees. Earth has been a green planet for only the last 10 percent of its entire history!

“Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night” (Genesis 1:14)

The sun came first: approximately 4,5 billion years ago. Next came the Earth: 4,5-4,4 billion years ago. The Moon was last to show up and made its appearance when the young Earth plummeted into another, Mars-sized protoplanet, 4,4 billion years ago. The collision was so severe that the Earth melted and a chunk of debris flew off – to form the Moon.

“He also made the stars” (Genesis 1:15)

The stars were around long before our own star, the Sun, showed up. The first stars must have flickered approximately 100-200 million years after the Big Bang. Stars were here approximately 13,500,000,000 years before our planet was!

And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." (Gen. 1:20)

The first living creatures arrived on our planet approximately 3,800 million years ago. But you couldn’t see them: they were microbes, invisibly small. The first creatures that consisted of more than one cell showed up a royal 1,300 million years later. And only 408 million years ago, the first fish-like animals swam in the sea. Birds only evolved much, much later – they evolved from the dinosaurs approximately 65-56 million years ago.

"Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds” (Gen. 1:24)

Fossils indicate that the first species of animal to enter the land was a kind of crawling fish called Acanthostega. This animal stumbled about for the first time on its primitive legs approximately 370 million years ago.

“Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness” (Gen  1:26)

Indeed, man came last – that much is true. Modern man (Homo sapiens) is thought to have appeared in Africa something like 200,000 years ago. Homo sapiens’ apemen-like predecessors evolved from apes over the last 4 or 5 million years. That may sound like quite some time, but it’s actually all very, very recent. If you were to squeeze the history of our planet in 24 hours, mankind would appear only 0,16 seconds before midnight!

On this website, we really try to be respectful to religion. But creationism is giving us a hard time. Creationism isn't respectful to any insight science has ever produced!

It just seems soooo stupid to believe that God created the world in six days and in the exact manner described in Genesis. Somewhere down the line, something has to fit in with some of the basic facts we know about the real world.

And the creation story doesn't. Not at all. It is belief at its very blindest.