In Genesis, God is arguing against the powerful deities prevalent in that culture

I can agree with this particular historical premise.

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk via Google Reader

In Genesis, God is alone, and the measured, ordered creation comes into existence by the sheer benevolent power of God. Sun, moon and stars, often seen in ancient cultures as powerful deities, requiring worship and propitiation, are merely among the things that God creates in Genesis, and God decides their proper role and sphere (1.14-19). In Genesis, God creates human beings with the deliberate intention of sharing the ordering of creation with them (1.26). Over and over again, Genesis emphasises the peaceful origins of the world, and its innate goodness. So the story of degeneration that follows does not reflect an eternal dualism in the cosmos between good and evil, and it does not suggest that there is anything more powerful than God at work.

So it reads as though Genesis is a deliberate challenge to the accepted understanding of the origins of the universe. Genesis is looking at what the culture around it believes about the nature and purpose of the material world, and disagreeing with it profoundly. It is not what we might call a "scientific" disagreement, in that it is not so much talking about the mechanics of how the world comes into being. Instead, it is a "theological" disagreement, which leads to a radical rethinking of what human life is for and how the human and divine realm interact. Genesis is arguing that our lives are not accidental and purposeless, that we are not helplessly caught between good and evil, that the world is not morally neutral, and that we have a role to play in it, based on our relationship with the creator. And all of that is as much a critique of the prevailing cultural assumptions of the 21st century as it was of 10th century BCE. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

 

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