Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Do the religious people on here actually believe in Christianity? Like do you actually believe that Christ rose from the dead, Garden of Eden, Jesus is the son of God, the Trinity, virgin birth, etc? Or is more Deism and you like the community from going to church? I have a hard time believing most adult converts i.e. JD Vance actually believe these things, but I'm curious if I'm wrong here.
Yes. "Christ rose from the dead" is a very believable claim, just on the historical evidence - the rest of the core claims of Christianity are not particularly hard to believe if you believe that (e.g. if Christ rose from the dead then He certainly was not an ordinary human; thus believing that He is the Son of God, was born of a virgin, and are coming back again as He claimed aren't very difficult to swallow).
The one exception would be that while I tend to believe in a ~literal Garden of Eden, it's not really skin off of my nose if the Genesis account(s), not being written for 21st century scientists, was not intended to be interpreted as 21st century scientists would prefer to interpret them. (Notwithstanding this I toy with ideas that harmonize the Eden account with what 21st century scientists have deduced about the nature of early man, but that's more because I find it interesting than that I need to understand everything written in Scripture to believe in it.)
Yeah I think if you're willing to interpret the rest of Genesis metaphorically, there's nothing really stopping you from interpreting the Garden of Eden as the pre-agricultural state of Man, and the 'knowledge of Good and Evil' as the spiritual/cultural prerequisite for the creation of agricultural society.
I wish I had a better handle on the current state of archeology (and Biblical studies!) but one of the things that I have found interesting from my understanding of the current state of things is that scientists have found evidence of a somewhat puzzling "intelligence explosion" in primitive man.
Genesis 4 can easily be interpreted as describing the same series of events (and also explains what happened to kick the intelligence explosion off).
My belief is that Genesis was written for its audience in a way that they would understand it, with the main goal being to establish an accurate anthropology and theology - a conception of man's place in the world and their relationship to God - but that this does not mean that it is "mythical" in the sense of being fictitious or made up. I don't think God describing something that happened to premodern tribesmen in a way that they can understand makes it "inaccurate" or "not literal."
The debate at that link is mostly about what may have happened around 100kya, way too early for the Cain/Abel story to work without being full of anachronisms.
Cain vs Abel is a pretty good parable for the conflicts of around 10kya, though, between early agriculturalists and pastoralists. That's a conflict that was still a major issue 5kya (or arguably even 0kya? the Hutu were a farming ethnicity and the Tutsi a pastoralist one...).
I haven't been a Christian for decades now, but when I was (and even still) I always found this to be a pretty easy way to get around the scientific problems with literal readings of Genesis. Jesus regularly talks in parables! Telling a story whose details aren't literally true in order to aid understanding of a deeper truth was like God's entire M.O.! What else would we expect? "Okay, before primordial nucleosyntheis, when the cosmic microwave background hadn't even red-shifted yet, the photons were ... are you following any of this? ... okay, forget it, just write down: 'Let there be light'."
Setting aside the question of whether the archeological timeline is correct, isn't it true that in Genesis you only get to the more recent dates if you interpret ben as "son" and never "descendant"?
A conflict that might be relevant to the Jews at the time Genesis was written.
Yes, I 100% agree with this.
I just think God is sneaky and capable of pulling off multiple levels of truth. In the afterlife we might all be like "oh wow that was all true in ways we didn't even think of evaluating."
Oh, I'm not saying anachronisms based on "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for Cain and Abel", but rather "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for farmed fields existing". IIRC there's some "people in a few places ate oats and seasonal nomads might have helped spread the seeds" evidence around 30kya, and then the real agricultural revolution isn't until tens of thousands of years later still ... and not too surprisingly so. Modern technology is amazing stuff, but I still spare some respect for the cultures who gradually figured out that they could become numerous and well-fed by figuring out how to breed and process and eat massive amounts of grass seeds.
I think that's very much the historical consensus, in part because it sidesteps the "how much of Genesis was directly worded by Moses vs written based on intact oral tradition vs written from the point of view of much later writers" question by having been a cultural dividing line for centuries. The initial "agriculturally developed Canaan looks like a land flowing with milk and honey to pastoral Israelite nomads" vs "but you have to learn some of their practices if you want to keep cultivating and harvesting it all" conflict alone would have been enough to set up legends forever, but would surely have died down as a contemporary cultural division, except that there's a lot of marginal land there that wasn't suitable for irrigation, so there was always a subpopulation of pastoralists living around the farmers. It's kind of reassuring that the canonical tale passed down to us was just "the first horrible person was one of Their Team" and not "Their Team are all horrible people".
Oh, I gotcha. Yeah, I'm never super sure how seriously to take even our best date estimates for [thing], in part because they keep getting shifted around. I have a friend who works in a geology-related field, and he says dating is heavily reliant on assumptions, too. I certainly don't think we have enough geological evidence to rule out "a farm" 100kya, but it does look like you're correct that farming is believed to be much much more recent than, say, stone tools.
But I brought it up more as an example of the sort of thing I find interesting to toy around with, not (obviously) a systematic and well-thought-out theory I have.
Wouldn't the Egyptians also be agriculturalists by the standards of the time? My understanding is that the Creation myth in Genesis is thought by some to be essentially a refutation of the pagan creation myths the Israelites were likely familiar with, and it makes me wonder if the Israelites saw the Egyptians in Cain.
(Although interestingly one could argue that Egypt is portrayed fairly positively in Genesis.)
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