Unless you do adhere to a literal reading of the bible, then there's little conflict between it and science really. At worst there are some unverified (and unverifiable) claims. Part of the problem though is that the Bible isn't specific enough in most areas to really justify a comparison with science, so much of the conflict arises from interpretation and assumption rather than actual statement.
To refer to Genesis again, many people believe that God created the world in seven days, and those seven days are the same as ours. There isn't anything in the bible which supports this though (and it would be strange for God to be working to a calendar which wouldn't be established until after Jesus ). From my reading of the text, I think the language used is intended to convey that it is actually God himself who is causing the day/night cycle. In other words, it wouldn't matter if it took five hours for him to part the land and oceans or five million, it's not going to be nightfall till he says it is.

I should think it would occur in most bibles, but if you look for the phrase (or translational equivilent)
"He looked upon his creation, and saw that it was good" combined with the description of the night passing "then it was night, and the morning dawned on the x day".
On Day 6, God creates the animals. We then have the "God saw that it was good", but there is no night. Instead, he creates Adam before calling it a night. If the structure of the verses at this point followed the rest of the book, God would have called it a night after making the animals, then created humanity on Day 7 rather than resting (which is strange in itself. Why would God require a day off?, furthermore, it appears to be the only Holiday the poor bloke gets in the entire Bible.).

Even without assuming that they borrowed from other religions, there are compelling reasons why seven days would have been placed in there. Generally, religions have two days in the local equivilent of the week cycle. One has a holy significance, when the temple would be particularly active. The second was a 'holiday', when the priests would be excused from their duties (even priests need to wash their socks sometimes). Since the actual length of a week changed several times since the bible was written, it would be necessary (in order to maintain the link) to alter the creation story accordingly. It would also likely be strange if God took a week and a couple of days, or half a week, to create the universe (something common to all legends. You never hear of heroes taking a day and a few hours, or a month and a bit to do anything. It's always handily done in the nearest time period. Quite an amazing feat in the days before they invented the watch).

IIRC the initial instruction is two of every animal, then the seven and two, then back to the two. Now it could be God decided that he wanted more of the clean animals, then realised the plans he'd furnished Noah with didn't take this into account. What's more likely however is that it's the result of two seperate flood stories becoming amalgamated. Flooding (even on a global scale) was quite popular in the early period (in many ways they were the classical version of a disaster movie). The basic structure of the story is almost identical to that found in other contemporary or even earlier texts, for example the Sumerian Gilgamesh Epic (circa 2100BC). In it, the God Ea warns one of his followers that he's going to flood the world, and he should build a boat to carry all the living beings to survive. In the epic, the flood lasts for seven days and six nights, the boat comes to rest on a mountain and the disciple releases three birds to check if the flood is over. A similar story exists in both Persian and Roman legend too (right down to the birds. You'd think by now they'd have found a more efficient way of figuring it out).
The most likely explanation is that the original flood myth recorded in the Bible (or the works which were to become the bible) was the same as that which had been 'floating' around the ancient civilisations for some time, giving the two pairs of every animal version. The accout would likely have been revised later, not only to differentiate it from the other versions, but also updated with the list of clean and unclean animals (one thing to remember when discussing the bible is that it was a living book for much of it's early history, and used not only as a holy text but also as the source of law. Not unlike a modern constitution in that respect).

More than two. Not only do you have the divisions within Christianity itself, but you also have the non-Christian Abrahamic religions (would a Christian give the same weight to an Imam or Rabbi 'biblical expert') plus the atheist experts.
Who you'd consider an expert or authority would depend on your faith as much as anything. With regards to the walking on water account, I would quote Archbishop and Theologist [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Bernard]John Henry Bernard[/url] - "“If we only had Jn.’s account of this incident, we should have no reason to suppose that he intended to record any ‘miracle’.”. Whether you consider him an expert or not is up to you.

Hard to do without knowing more about how your current studies are based, and whether you have any background in history or anthropology. I can probably turn up something suitable if you want, or if there's a specific area you're interested in. There's regrettably few books on the subject which approach it from a true neutral point of view however.

I've never seen any reason why natural selection couldn't explain the origin of our species (unless your talking about life itself, the origins of which have nothing to do with evolution).
Mutation in the sense you're using it is also not normally considered as part of natural selection. Spontaneous and random mutation (at least in mammals) is almost always caused by a defective gene or outside source (such as radiation) and in most cases is fatal to the host. With natural selection your looking at a more evolutionary form of mutation (which is the non-random part), i.e. the more an organism makes use of certain traits or abilities, the more they develop and alter over time.

If the universe is actually infinite then that would be true

I fail to see why the time would be convenient. Unless you're a believer in the young Earth theory, which the church itself disproved in the late 19th century.

not u archonsod some other guys.....

think about this.........

One day a 6 year old was sitting in a classroom. The teacher was going to explain evolution to the children. The teacher asked a little boy:

TEACHER: Tommy do you see the tree outside?
TOMMY: Yes.
TEACHER: Tommy, do you see the grass outside?
TOMMY: Yes.
TEACHER: Go outside and look up and see if you can see the sky.
TOMMY: Okay. (He returned a few minutes later) Yes, I saw the sky.
TEACHER: Did you see God?
TOMMY: No.
TEACHER: That's my point. We can't see God because he isn't there. He just doesn't exist.

A little girl spoke up and wanted to ask the boy some questions.

The teacher agreed and the little girl asked the
boy:
LITTLE GIRL: Tommy, do you see the tree outside?
TOMMY: Yes
LITTLE GIRL: Tommy do you see the grass outside?
TOMMY: Yessssss!
LITTLE GIRL: Did you see the sky?
TOMMY: Yessssss!
LITTLE GIRL: Tommy, do you see the teacher?
TOMMY: Yes.
LITTLE GIRL: Do you see her brain?
TOMMY: No.
LITTLE GIRL: Then according to what we were taught today in school, she must not have one!

BURN!

"FOR WE WALK BY FAITH, NOT BY SIGHT" 2 CORINTHIANS 5:7

I'm actually talking about the idea that single cell organisms eventually changed over a long period of time to become the species we know today, including humans - and yes, mutations are required for this.

DNA differs greatly between the organisms we know of today - and it varies all over the place, including different numbers and lengths of chromosomes. When reproduction occurs within a single species, the DNA does takes the half of the information from the mother and half of the information from the father and combines them - the result is that the amount and length of the information is unchanged.


In addition, it is found that the information often follows certain rules, as found in Punnett squares:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punnett_square

In this case, there are certain dominant and recessive alleles that are combined in a finite number of ways, and the only way to go beyond the finite number of combinations possible is to use mutations. In addition, since the number and length of chromosomes generally does not vary within a species, mutations are required to achieve the variety of chromosome structure we see today.

Natural selection is not by itself a form of mutation - it's simply selecting traits from an existing gene pool. Only mutation really allows for creation of new traits, so yes, it's required for the "molecules to man" explanation of life found in most textbooks.



This is called "Lamarckism" and is an old theory that has since been replaced with the "natural selection + mutation" theory I referred to.

The problem is, there is little genetic basis for Lamarckism - it's known that DNA has four bases of A, C, G, and T, and that one base doesn't slowly change into another. As far as we know, DNA does not record events over an organism's lifetime, and the traits the organism received when it began its life are the traits it will pass to its offspring.



OR it could be brevity, as I had mentioned. I don't think it's uncommon for a person to give the big picture, then explain it in detail, then to use a shorter version later to keep things simple. In fact, most of my college essays use that style, with the body having the most detail, and the introduction and conclusions having less detail.

Here's what I see (Genesis):
6:19 - Basic generalized explanation. Establishes the basic idea of bringing a pair of most animals to the ark.

7:2 - More detail. 7 (or 7 pairs) of every clean animal and birds "of the air" (shamayim Strong's H8064) would be bought in. Note that other types of birds (probably flightless or "unclean" birds) would be bought in as a single pair, as indicated by 6:20.

7:8 - refers everything as "pairs," reinforcing the idea of 7 pairs of clean animals entering the ark rather than 7 animals.

Frankly, all I see are differences in detail, not necessarily contradictions. There's a small squabble about the number of birds, but the more detailed verse includes a qualifier not found in other verses - something that was missed in my NIV translation .

http://www.blueletterbible.org/cgi-bin/c.pl?book=Gen&chapter=7&verse=3&version=KJV#3



Odd. The Blueletter Bible claims that both day and night were in the Hebrew:

http://www.blueletterbible.org/cgi-bin/c.pl?book=Gen&chapter=1&verse=31&version=KJV#31



We humans need an occasional rest - and what better way of showing this than by example?

And oh, yeah - later during the Exodus God also gets the passover as a holiday .



If there was in fact a large scale flood, it would only make sense that everybody would be talking about it!



. . . which would make sense if they were based off of the same event . . .



My studies are based primarily off of the education I had at the Christian school, some websites I've found, and some books I've read. Sorry, no background in history or anthropology, just computer science, although logic and information theory can often be applied to other practices.



Interesting assertion. How do you know if this is true?



Lemme put it simply:

Frog -> Prince = fairy tale

Frog + millions of years -> Prince = "science"

In other words, time is a type of "god in the gaps" for naturalists. It's the convenient catch-all explanation given when other explanations fail.



I've heard of a lot of possible disproof from the scientific community, but not much from the church. AFAIK, the Bible never mentions creation as a long period of time, with only anecdotal evidence from passages that don't discuss the creation event. 18th century sounds about right, though: This is the period of time when people started to use their own hypotheses about the workings of the universe to interpret scripture.

some of u guys overthink things waaaaaaaay to much haha


=D

The problem is that we can smash open the teachers skull and find a brain, yet we cannot smash open the sky and find a god. Ask the astronauts, they'll just tell you it's space outside of here.

u r rite, sushistrip

doo u no if their is a bibel that is spelt liek u and i rite? cuz i hav problems wif big intemellectual words like "you" and "are". pls help me 2 bcome smartur, kthxbye.

Astronauts are statistically far more likely to believe in God than the general population.

im sry i cant spend the extra 2 seconds to spell out words for u

cuz i just care soooooooooooooooo much

...........and no matr how many big "intemellectual" (as u so lovely put it) words u sugarcoat a sentence with, the simple meaning can mor easily be explained with a few words..............

You just made the same fallacy with using the word "know" for "believe". I can accept that the world is flat, doesn't mean I know it is.

You accept the things written in the Bible and believe in them. It doesn't mean you know that they are true



What facts does it deny?

You don't need a god to take pleasure and find awe and wonder in the Universe.

Reminds me of stories I heard, not saying they are true because I haven't verified them yet, about the things that happened to Mr. Einstein after his death. A large number of people were quite interested in examining his material legacy.

According to one story, a group of Israeli soldiers/agents appeared and removed all his written materials & etc. they could find, for one thing (wtf were Isreali agents doing flashing badges in the U.S.?).

The next part of the story tells how a certain U.S. professor/biologist/doctor(?) somehow got hold of Mr. Einstein's brain, which had been removed and preserved. After the long legal/political battle to get it, he promptly wrote a paper about the findings of his "important study." Nothing to really point at, nothing so obviously abnormal or godlike was noted in his first paper.

Then he proceeded to slice it into over 200 pieces. The pieces were sent out to various other persons who had also requested to study it. Nobody found anything fantabulous to report from the study of the little pieces he sparingly doled out (in return for what?).

Then he requested all the pieces be returned, and used his legal custody status to enforce it. Then, lo and behold, after reassembling the brain and studying it again, he noticed something different! There was a slight abnormality in a fold of a lobe on one side, or something similar. That, of course, required the writing of another paper, and more attention!

From my sometimes cynical view, I think Einstein "knew what the monkeys were going to do with him" after he died, and he would be helpless to prevent it ... but he still gave permission before he passed away (to get them to stop bothering him?). He made some subtle remark about what they would find and how he wished them well.

Maybe we could smash open people's heads to see what's inside, but unfortunately, anyone stupid enough to resort to such desperate tactics wouldn't be capable of understanding what they found anyway; or else they wouldn't resort to violence in the first place. Monkey-magic does not work.   

Horse patties! Where is this study?

BEAUTIFUL