Genesis is foundational to the Bible (Talk.Origins)

Claim CH050:


 * True science and true religion are founded on Genesis. All Biblical doctrines have their foundations laid there, and the book of Genesis itself is founded on the events of its first chapter.

Source: Morris, Henry M. 1983. Creation is the foundation. Impact 126 (Dec.).

CreationWiki response:

The claim is correct.

It is not bigotry to claim that the Bible is right.

One is not saying that God's revelation must coincide with one's own opinion, but rather is saying what God Himself has said, when He said "You shall have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20:3, NIV).

Certainly God can reveal himself in different ways to different people, but this claim deals with one specific mode of revelation: Genesis. It remains the same no matter who reads it. By refuting a claim that is not even made, Talk.Origins is setting up a straw man.

This is a blatant misrepresentation of creationists. Not agreeing with the Documentary Hypothesis is not the same as "rejecting serious study" of Genesis. In fact, the claim might be turned around and restated: why do skeptics not give serious consideration to Wiseman's theory of Genesis authorship?

The existence of doublets in the Flood account reveal it cannot be the work of multiple authors but has a poetic framework running throughout, and that a more probable theory is the Tablet Theory or Wiseman Hypothesis suggesting Genesis is a collection of Mesopotamian family tablets combined into a single book by Moses himself.


 * Even if it is true that "ideas in other parts of the Bible stand on their own", it does not follow that this applies to all the Bible, so is not a refutation of the claim.
 * The claim that creationists frequently quote out of context is (a) irrelevant, and (b) unsubstantiated. CreationWiki rejects the claim.
 * That the Old Testament refers to other documents that no longer exist is not disputed, but is irrelevant.
 * Jesus rejected the attitude of the religious leaders that saw them more concerned with the letter of the law than the spirit of the law, but Jesus did not actually reject any of the Old Testament law. Talk.Origins provides no substantiation to this claim.  In fact Jesus often quoted from the Old Testament in support of what He was saying, indicating how important it was, contrary to Talk.Origins' claim.  The same applies to other Bible authors.  Exodus 20:9–11, for example, explicitly bases one of the Ten Commandments on the events recorded in Genesis.

The Heavens and the Earth, God's creation, is known as God's General Revelation. His Word, the Bible, is known as His Special Revelation. Both are equally God's work, but His Special Revelation is less open to interpretation and has suffered less corruption than His General Revelation. Therefore His Special Revelation takes precedence over His General Revelation.

Prior to the rise in popularity of uniformitarianism and evolution, most of science was based on the Bible. And, at the time, it was "accepted science". Johannes Kepler is famous for his line that his science was thinking God's thoughts after him.

Young earth creationism didn't fail, it was replaced by the assumption of uniformitarianism.

"Gap creationism", day-age creationism, and other attempted "reconciliations" were attempts to reconcile the Bible with the new uniformitarian paradigm, not with the evidence itself.

Talk Origins' claim that true science is based on reality has the unspoken assumption that reality and the Bible don't agree, but without providing support for that assumption.