A little question for those who would interpret genesis literally... Beetles?

If God was so keen on humans that he gave them a sixth of the time that he spent creating all to themselves, why is it that a quarter of the living organisms (not even just animals, but out of plants, bacteria - everything we know of) he put together in his divine laboratory were beetles? Surely, considering that they are every bit (in some cases more) as separate from one another as we are from apes, why did he not just make a couple of general purpose type beetles and leave it at that, why did he make (according to wikipedia) 400, 000 types of beetle (by species) and just 1 type of human?


NB - I am assuming that people taking a literal interpretation of genesis do not count the other species of homonid that have been dug up and studied. Count them if you will as those "made in God's image", but the number of human spp, homonid spp, simian, primate, mammalian, even vertebrate spp pales into insigificance next to the number of beetles.

PS - if this post has already been made, sorry, I couldn't see it when I scrolled down.

reply to post by TheWill


As an atheist, I will pretend to be a christian and give a proper answer.
Possible answers:

(a) God moves in mysterious ways
(b) Because that's what he wanted - they all have a purpose in his divine plan
(c) You really shouldn't question god's actions
(d) Only god knows the answer to that. Now stop asking questions, go to church, pay your tithes, and just HAVE FAITH.
(e) All of the above

reply to post by sykickvision


Should I laugh or cry???

Seriously, though, I may have to star that more than once.

I don't personally see how Genesis could be taken literally - scientifically impossible, but one could interpret the creation story as an allusion to the stages to evolution.

I read once that the word "day" was misinterpreted and mistranslated. It should have been "eons" and that would make more sense, as the progress does accurately describe the stages of evolution, as it would have been understood by people writing in that time period.
While there were no textbooks at that time, the oral tradition was strong and this story was probably passed down before someone decided to write it in a book.

Regarding beetles; insects and the like are an earlier version of us, some probably didn't evolve to other species.

"God" is energy without human emotion and fallacies, so the idea of God "allowing" or sitting down to plan the creation is physically and metaphysically impossible.

These are my views only - I am not a Christian, but I studied Religion, Philosophy and Ethics at university so have some awareness of the nature of religion

I'm an atheist, but I find this question pretty simple to answer: Beetles are easy. They're crazy simpler than humans, so he could just dash one off in a few seconds. "Give this one the power to push poo around. Make this one explosive. Man, these are easy. More interesting than snakes, though. Just have to roll the clay around for those guys."

I'll give it a shot from what I've heard from various Christian media.
There is a major contradiction between Genesis 1 and 2. In 1 God makes the world, the fishes and crawling things (beetles) and then the people. In chapter 2 he makes Adam first and then the animals in the Garden of Eden.
So, some say chapter 1 is creation on earth, and the first humans were the "pre-Adamic" races.
They were not spiritual like Adam and Eve, who were evicted from the garden onto this earth, and mixed with them.

The crawiling things like beetles were necessary because they ate all the crap of the higher creations, and made everything habitable.

However, what is worse is that God wiped everything out during the flood.
Noah's Ark must have been overrun with beetles and insects. In fact, even if two of every species was taken, it probably would have sunk like a beetle mountain.

But some creationists do believe in post-flood "super-evolution", so a few species of beetles from the Ark miraculously evolved into our current species.

Voila - makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

reply to post by TheWill


BEETELS ARE bugs basically... from roaches to lady bugs

reply to post by Ophiuchus 13


That is very much akin to saying that humans are rats, basically. Basically, that is true - the euarchonta (primates and relatives) groups with Glires, which contains the rabbits, hares (and relatives) and the rodents. ladybugs (Coccinelidae) are beetles, not bugs. True bugs are Hemiptera, which includes aphids, water scorpions, water-boatmen, and a bunch of other animals (mostly with piercing mouthparts). Cockroaches are not bugs or beetles, although I can't just now remember where they belong - they group with termites and possibly crickets, though.

reply to post by quantumgirl11

you seem to suggest that they precede us in evolutionary terms - they don't. They, with other insects are among the ecdysozoa, which are protostomes - sharing a common ancestor with the deuterostomes (mostly vertebrates, echinoderms and arrow worms) that should roughly resemble a comb jelly. A very different branch of the evolutionary tree. (Also, beetles, like snakes, are quite young in evolutionary terms).

reply to post by Solasis


I'd have to agree that literal creationists probably see them as simpler than humans, and therefore easy to make. Which is a cop-out, really, because they're wonderfully complicated little b*****ds.

reply to post by halfoldman


Haha, I love the idea of Noah having all the different beetles on the ark... "And on day fifteen, yea, Noah did go down to the bilges to collect grain to feed the animals, and there he did find that not only had the weevils spoiled every last morsel, but that the Scotylids had been fruitful, and in their multiplication had created a hole in the ark. And Noah did celebrate, for this allowed passage of the overlooked fishes onto the ark. And Noah did lament, for the ark did sink and with it died the last of God's People."

Having followed Carl Baugh's Creation in the 21st Century programs on TBN, in this case the creationists do answer the question.
They do believe in a wondrous ecosystem, with immaculate creatures.
In fact they believe these creatures are so intricate and magnificent that they couldn't have evolved by "accident", but require a perfect designer.
Beetles break down waste, which is in turn broken down by even smaller organisms in "God's perfect balance".
Without this balance God's highest creation - man - would not have survived.
So hence the beetles.

Not to be funny, but it makes me wonder: why did God put millions of people on earth during the 1960s, but only 4 Beatles? Now that's unfair!

reply to post by halfoldman


Especially as one of them was Ringo.

Of course, the fact that many beetle species specialise in doing things which are not, as a general rule, good for us (case in point Chaga's beetle, feeds on our blood and, as a by-product of not being toilet trained, spreads the South American Trypanosoma cruzi) should have pointed out from early on that they are not limited to ecosystem services. But never mind.

There have been some great replies on this thread so far! My thought is that we can guess about the purpose for why beetles were designed as they are, and why they produce so many offspring to get to the numbers there are, but those will be hypotheses/educated guesses, We won't know for sure, but maybe that's the fun in this or other intellectual exercises. Ok, so for beetles, people have pointed to keeping things clean and spreading diseases. There could be many purposes for the latter part, including natural population control and creating conditions of adversity that prompt us to help each other and inspire us to learn more about medicine. And that's just a few thoughts to start with.

From an artistic/creative perspective, I would think people, being complex beings, might have been much more interesting and fun to spend time on during the process of creating than a beetle.

Originally posted by sykickvision
reply to post by TheWill

 

As an atheist, I will pretend to be a christian and give a proper answer.
Possible answers:

(a) God moves in mysterious ways
(b) Because that's what he wanted - they all have a purpose in his divine plan
(c) You really shouldn't question god's actions
(d) Only god knows the answer to that. Now stop asking questions, go to church, pay your tithes, and just HAVE FAITH.
(e) All of the above

As a Christian (though not one who necessarily takes the Genesis stories literally), I thought I'd respond to these points.

a) Ok, but that sort of reply really wouldn't offer any thought, insight, or reasoning to address the questions raised in the OP.
b) Again, OK. But again, this doesn't go on to give some thought to what the thought process behind it might have been (e.g., pleasure in creating a multiverse teeming with a dazzling diversity of life, intelligent or otherwise, for the sheer fun of designing ecosystems in which different forms of life are intricately interdependent), or how we as humans and how beetles fit into the plan (e.g., beetles keep things clean, we as humans have great intellectual and other capacities and can create amazing innovations/art/culture/etc.).
c) We as humans have brains and tremendous intellectual capacity. Of course people are going to question and wonder, and there's nothing wrong with that. We won't have all the answers, but we can certainly come up with the questions! And I'm sure we can do a pretty darn good job of analyzing the fossil record to see what we can come up with based on it, but then we have to take on faith that the record and human interpretation of it is accurate based on the information we currently have.
d) Having faith is a separate matter from intellectual curiosity. God gave us brains, and yes, we're meant to use them. Sure, there are the people of 'stop asking questions' mentality, but that doesn't mean it is/should be a Christian thing to have that mentality. I think it's just an individual rigid-mindset sort of thing.

reply to post by TheWill


I think the human race has been made over and over again. That does not mean all animals, it means humans.

Originally posted by Ariel

And from an artistic/creative perspective, I would think people, being complex beings, might have been much more interesting and fun to spend time on during the process of creating than a beetle.

this statement returns me to my natural state of confusion - are you implying that it's odd that, in a "creation model" he spent so much time on beetles because he should have found them uninteresting, or are you implying that he didn't spend much time on them?

reply to post by andy1033


Again I am confused... is the implication that the human race had to be re-made every time it is broken, and so he hasn't had time to really go to town on the vertebrates the same way he did with the insects? Please explain (As if you were talking to a really thick person = me) how this answers my original question.

reply to post by TheWill


Great point on blood-sucking beetles, and I suppose many other harmful things in creation.
I guess here the Biblical creationists would argue that this creation (Genesis 1) was meant for the pre-Adamic races.
Adam and Eve in the garden lived in harmony with all things (until Eve ate the apple).
They were cursed with pain and death upon eviction.
So the ecosystem here gives the basic environment to breed, work and die, but no perfection yet.
They also have a theory that the creation becomes more corrupt and full of pestilence from creation to eventual intervention at Armageddon. Both nature (including the beetles) and human society are therefore becoming more wicked and pesky.

reply to post by TheWill


Sorry for the confusion! Maybe I misinterpreted the OP, but it seemed to imply that much more time was spent on humans and yet there are so many varying types of beetles around. So I was just putting forth a thought as to why more time might have been spent on humans. Hope that clears things up

reply to post by Ariel


Now it makes sense to me! Yes, sorry, the Q. was why (if he was so yay, humans!) he made so many species of beetle but only (insert limited number of closely related species here) humans. I have issues with words - they never do what I want them to.

"general purpose type beetles" HeeHee! Love it!
Maybe men or the 'angels" looked like beetles at first and thats why the egyptians worshiped them.

reply to post by halfoldman


I had a christian tell me that on one occasion, that all of the animals lived in complete harmony until the humans ate of the forbidden fruit.
According to them, the lions ate straw & grass like the cattle - and wolves & lambs would lie down & sleep beside each other. If this is true, then "sin" is really an incredible component of intelligent design. SIN did more for diversifying the animal kingdom than god did.
Let's look at the lion eating grass theory.
BEFORE the sin happened, the lions would have needed a completely different set of teeth, and a different digestive tract. It takes a lot more to squeeze nourishment out of a pound of grass versus a pound of meat.
What use would canines have been when grazing? What use would night-vision have been?
So sin, when applied to the world, reworked the skeletal structure of the lion, changed it's digestive tract from a plant based diet to a meat based diet, and ALSO gave it the inherent skills to hunt wild game instead of plucking turnips.
Sin would have also given spiders their venom, and gave them the equipment and knowledge to weave webs & catch insects.
This was years ago that I asked these questions, I had written an entire paper on it - what I've written here is just part of the main gist since I believe that most readers of this will "get the point"

If figurative "bulls**t" had the same fertilizing potential as literal bulls**t, I would stand at the edge of my garden and read creation stories and later would harvest watermelons the size of volkswagens.