Originally Posted by: SPLAnd for you Jolly, since you believe in both, how do you reconcile the contradictions between the two?

I'm asking these question out of pure curiosity, not to get anyone riled up.
Just because I'm an atheist doesn't mean i'm not curious about what drives people to believe. :-)

To be honest, I don't find any contradictions. It's all a matter of whether the Bible is literally interpreted or not. I choose to interpret some of the Bible figuratively because logic says I should do so.

My grandfather, the most brilliant man I've ever had the honor of knowing, once said to me, "If you look at something and can't make sense of it logically then it's probably false." He and other members of my religious community have decided that method of thinking should apply to the Bible as well. God said let there be light, could that be a metaphor for the big bang? I see no reason why not. God seperated the land from the waters. Could the waters represent space, as Moses (the author of Genesis) had no equivalent word for "the vacuum of space?" I believe so. The Bible says God created the Earth in seven days. Later it states that a day in God's eye is like a thousand years. The largest actual number in the bible is 180,000 (the number of Assyrians laying seige to Jerusalem. We can infer that perhaps people living that long ago might not have been able to comprehend numbers like 75 billion, because the earth's population was not nearly as large as it is today, and such numbers were unheard of. Perhaps a day in God's eye is like one billion years? I have no qualms with that thought. God created the animals and plants in this world, writes Moses. Moses does NOT say HOW God created these things.