I know this is the smallest of points, but here goes.
So when Jesus, who is God, says the mustard seed is " smaller than all other seeds" is He lying? Is He perhaps using what his listeners thought to be true?
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[quote=âpevaquark, post:98, topic:42032â]
The stars arenât in the solar system.[/quote]
Brother, I was referring to the sun and moon which is also in that verse and the structure of our solar system is one near star, one unusual moon and stars far away. I find this nit to have come from body lice. lol
That can be a good theological way to see Godâs handiwork though I think one could be hard pressed to see the theory of evolution there. It could be equally compatible with spontaneous generation that Augustine also held to.
Are your telling me that the Earth, our earth didnât bring forth life??? Wow, and this is a science site. lol How about abiogenesis? Isnât that also part of the evolutionary story we teach? Or has the concept of abiogenesis been dumped?
Sorry I didnât qualify what I imagined the probability distribution to be. I mean it in the sense of randomly chosen from a list of various phenomena that occurred throughout the history of the universe as learned through the natural sciences
.No, it wasnât randomly chosen from what happened. I was constrained by what the Bible says. I didnât grab the creation of the gerbil when the Bible was speaking of the origin of plants, nor did I talk about supernova or supervolcanoes when speaking of the creation of the earth. I really donât quite get how you think it was ârandomlyâ chosen even with this revised probability distribution. It is simple. I was trying to concord what Genesis 1 said with actual consensus earth history. That isnât hard to fathom.
gbob:
I firmly believe that it is stupid to believe theology from a book that is observationally false. I think the atheists with whom I discussed these issues for years are correct in that regard
But many Christians here would hold that Genesis can only be observationally false if it claims to be teaching what we think of as modern science. But since itâs not doing that there cannot be a problem.
So, are you saying that it isnât scientific that light is fundamental to the structure of our universe? And given that the existence of light implies also the existence of space time into which the electromagnetic waves propagate, it means relativity was thought of at that time in the planning stage, as well as my worst subject in physics, but my sonâs best subject, Electricity and Magnetism.
gbob:
When you use the word âcherry pickâ it raises the obvious point that you have never ever built an original theory
Yeah, I just try to use theories made by others to write scientific papers. I do know I canât do a few things though. I donât get to go into old papers and claim they secretly wrote about modern science, maybe even describing general relativity, the expansion of space or some quantum mechanical effect thousands of years before we discovered these things. No, those old papers engage with the best scientific ideas of their time, which is what the Bible appears to be doing.
Then please stop acting like you donât know how theory building is done! You know darn good and well that one doesnât grab things randomly! sheesh.
We do have one thing in common, my last 15 years in the oil industry were spent building models of oil reservoirs to model fluid flow through the pore space. I see you like pore space as well (from a quick glance at your page)
Definitely not true. Data points for accommodationalism= knowledge of ancient science from other similarly dated texts in similar languages or other graphical depictions of the world.
You miss the point, the essence of accommodationalism is that the Bible has no concordance with observational reality. Thus, accommodationalism says NOTHING about other sciences in other ancient cultures. It says something about the nature of the Bible. It says nothing about Sumerian math, or Sumerian time keeping which we still use in part,
Usually when you are the only one and you arenât winning over others, there could be other reasons for that.
I laugh at this one. Do you know how lonely Alfred Wegner was when he proposed continental drift? The American Association of Petroleum Geologists had a seminar, invited Wegner, and questioned his intelligence, his parentage, whether it was of the canine variety, questioned his integrity, questioned everything with him there. They are embarrassed now that AAPG memoir #1 was critiques and articles against Wegnerâs continental drift. It was 50 years before science came around to agree with Wegner. Being alone doesnât mean one is wrong.
Since you are a physicist, I am sure you know of Feigenbaum, who spent years having his articles rejected. From James Gleick, Chaos, (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 180
> But what made universality useful also made it hard for physicists to believe. Universality meant that different systems would behave identically. Of course, Feigenbaum was only studying simple numerical functions. But he believed that his theory expressed a natural law about systems at the point of transition between orderly and turbulent. Everyone knew that turbulence meant a continuous spectrum of different frequencies, and everyone had wondered where the different frequencies came from. "Suddenly you could see the frequencies coming in sequentially. The physical implications was that real-world systems would behave in the same, recognizable way, and that furthermore it would be measurably the same. Feigenbaumâs universality was not just qualitative, it was quantitative; not just structural, but metrical. It extended not just to patterns, but to precise numbers. To a physicist that strained credibility.
*> *
> âYears later Feigenbaum still kept in a desk drawer, where he could get at them quickly, his rejection letters. By then he had all the recognition he needed. His Los Alamos work had won him prizes and awards that brought prestige and money. But it still rankled that editors of the top academic journals had deemed his work unfit for publication for two years after he began submitting it. The notion of a scientific breakthrough so original and unexpected that it cannot be published seems a slightly tarnished myth. Modern science, with its vast flow of information and its impartial system of peer review is not supposed to be a matter of taste. One editor who sent back a Feigenbaum manuscript recognized years later that he had rejected a paper that was a turning point for the field; yet he still argued that the paper had been unsuited to his journalâs audience of applied mathematiciansâ[/cite]
> But importance doesnât matter, when the consensus credibility is strained, you get no publications through the process.
Or how about the reception of the Belousov-Zhabontinsky reaction?
âSirâIn the obituary of Anatol Zhabotinsky, Irving Epsteind ment ions Boris Belousov, with whom Zhabotinsky shared the Lenin Prize in 1980 for their contributions to the Belousov-Zhabotinsky oscillatory chemical reaction system
âEpstein says âBelousov tried to publish his results in peer-reviewed journals, but eventually gave up after referees and editors insisted that such behaviour contradicted the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He instead published a one-page description of his observations in an obscure conference proceedings on radiation medicine.â That paper, âA periodic reaction and its mechanismâ, gained little attention at the time.â Min-Liang Wong, âWhat Other Treasures Could Be Hidden in Conference papers?â Nature 456(2008), p. 443.
so donât feed me this line about how open scientists are to new ideas. They are definitely NOT open to new ideas. Letâs see, H. Pylori? Took about 10 years before the guy got people to accept his idea.
Oh yeah, how about a Nobel prize winner, who had one heck of an idea:
Frank Tipler, âRefereed Journals,â in William Dembski editor, Uncommon Dissent, (Wilmington Delaware: ISI Books, 2004), p. 118]âOne example is Rosalyn Yalow, who described how her Nobel-prize-winning paper was received by the journals as follow: âIn 1955 we submitted the paper to ScienceâŚthe paper was held there for eight months before it was reviewed. It was finally rejected. We submitted it to the Journal of Clinical Investigations, which also rejected it.â Another example is Gunter Blobel, who in a news conference given just after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, said that the main problem one encounters in oneâs research is 'when your grants and papers are rejected because some stupid reviewer rejected them for dogmatic adherence to old ideas.â According to the New York Times, these comments 'drew thunderous applause from the hundreds of sympathetic colleagues and younger scientists in the auditorium."
Frankly people are not open to new ideas. I worked for a man who was instrumental in solving the technical problems of producing oil from shale. Yet 15 years later, when my boss tried to take people into getting into the shale play (this was the late 1990s), they fired him. He went out on his own and became a gazilliionaire. So again, quite the false trype about how being alone means one is wrong. That is a classical logical error called argumentum ad populum. go look it up! I learned of it in grad school. It is the argument that everyone knows you are wrong, or you are alone because you are wrong.
Might I be wrong? Of course I might be wrong and am quite aware of it. It is why I keep my eye on areas of science relevant to my views. If I find some killer fact, I will do what I did when I left yec, turn on a dime and reject the views I now espouse. I have done this on my world view 4 times. I bet you havenât done it once⌠so prove me wrong⌠I donât have a time machine with which to verify my views⌠What I have is what Wegner had. a fit between my theory and the facts of earth history. And as the old song says, Though none go with me, I still will follow! According to you, I should stop following because the crowd doesnât like my ideas. I have spent much of my life following this area because I felt called to this. (Mitch this is the time you can again compare me to mass murderers as you did earlier).
What you have is an account by the God of the universe concerning the creation, which is said to be utterly devoid of saying anything about Nature. donât you find that curious that the God of the Universe would know nothing of his creation? Is He Platoâs demiurge who didnât even know he had created the world?
As you present the idea of water below the crust you are absolutely correct. But that is not what is proposed in the link to the book i sent you to. What is proposed is many points of contact between the crust and mantle between which is the water. So while there would be some movement and flexing of the granite crust it would not be the massive amount that you suggest. What did cause the the granite crust to fail? Over time the tidal effects of the moon on the crust would have caused the crust to lift and settle daily heating the points of contact between the crust and mantle, thus increasing the temperature and pressure of the water. Was that the cause of the failure of the crust? Donât know, but when it did fail there was pressure below to cause the failure to be extremely catostraphic.
I kind of expected the pillars in the water to support the world. The problem is that the tidal bulge itself would fracture the pillars, not to mention torque forces on the outer crust. The bigger the pillars the less water and the other problem is that seismic data from all over the world shows no residual water chambers down there. and there would be some because there is no way every drop of that water would make it to the surface when the system collapsed. Shear waves donât travel through water but shear wave never find regions in the shallow crust where they canât pass, and we have lots of earthquake data to demonstrate that.
There may be no large pools of water, but what has been found is hot water in crushed granite in holes drilled 7.6 and 5.7 miles deep. Water cannot seep more than 5 miles deep because the weight of the overlaying rock closes all channels deeper than that. How did the water get there? I suspect that water in small channels would be found all the way down to the Moho.
I have enjoyed reading your thoughts in this thread.
The porosity of what we call granite wash, in the shallow parts of the earth (say 5000âdeep), is generally around 15% or less. as one goes deeper, diagentic issues occulude the pores and by the time you reach 5-7 miles you are dealing in maybe 1-2% porosity. What that means is that only 2% of the bulk rock volume is taken up by water. If you had that rock in your hand, you couldnât wet your handkerchief with that water because capillary forces wonât let it escape from the rock. And every porous rock in the subsurface has water in the interstitial pores of he rock. Oil is produced from these pores and a great reservoir rarely exceed 30% porosity. All the fractures all the way down are filled with water but the water constitutes generally less than 2% of the rock volume. That is not enough water to wet anything
I want to add something for Pevaquark. He needs to know I have spent 47 years of my life generating theories of where oil is to be found, and I was quite successful at finding oil for my employers. Thus, I do think I know what goes into a geological theory, which is what my flood views are, and I have a good feel for what constitutes theory building cause I was a philosophy of science grad student after my physics degree. I used those skills I learned in grad school to understand and test the theories of my employees. I ended up as Exploration director for China for the company I retired from and then started my own consulting business that worked me 13 hours per day for 8 years. Please, Pevaquark donât underestimate my geological knowledge and knowledge of theory building.
I was describing this debate to a friend, an MD and mentioned Pevaquarks view that if I am alone, there must be a reason for it. His response was fantastic.
âUnpopular views open doors. Popular view donât advance scienceâ
If I could give 25 Amenâs to that I would. Concensus rejection of novel views means no one learns anything
So I tried looking up accommodationalist⌠no such thing⌠mispelled accommodationist I guess.
1. a person who seeks compromise with an opposing point of view, typically a political one.
I certainly havenât done any such thing. I come from a scientific worldview â asking myself if there was any possible value to Christianity and the Bible for someone starting with that? Apparently gbob with his âaccommodationalistâ epithet, the answer is no, because these are opposing points of view according to him apparently. But letâs get real here. Christianity is a spectrum of beliefs so we really need to label his idea of Christianity opposed science as something which is only part of that spectrum: perhaps magical Christianity, or anti-science Christianity. And then we can ask my question again⌠is there any possible value to magical (anti-science) Christianity for someone starting with a scientific worldview? And then in that case my answer is no â no value at all. But the reality is that not all of Christianity is opposed to science with this magification of the Bible, and so I like other scientists found an understanding of the Bible within the spectrum of Christianity that does work for those in science. And frankly I donât think any of us in the sciences feel at all deprived by gbob kicking us out of his sector of Christianity.
Bob, I feel I am in the same boat as you only on my boat it is less stormy. I wrestle with the same issues but my faith is based on more than incomplete science and incomplete history alone, somehow, some day the Lord must have touched your feelings, isnât that enough?
On an intellectual you believe in the resurrection for the same reason as me, the martyr deaths of the apostles meaning the resurrection is true as I donât believe anyone can name a historic event where 2 people died for the same reason while knowing it was a lie, let alone 11, only mad people do that.
Why is the belief in heart of the Bible not good enough and just throw everthing else that bothers under the bus.
Be well.
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I think that one issue is that I keep seeing is that God somehow was teaching something people would not understand. I think itâs the opposite. He taught them something they would understand. He taught them the truth through parables, poetry, metaphors, and mythologies advice well as through doctrine and actions as shown by prophets.
Early man was not in a position to understand the ins and outs of what we understand now days in science. Could God have spent years and years laying it out. Sure. Same as Jesus could have called down a army of angels. But in both cases they did not. The Holy Spirit could have laid out way more detailed information in revelation through John but instead it was laid out in a fashion that called for wisdom.
Viewing the scripture for what it says vs what it does not and how that can be further revealed through science and literary analysis is not accommodating atheistic beliefs.
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Lol, these are NOT âearly menâ. They were fully Homo sapiens sapiens and as intelligent as we are. It is a crock to think they didnât have the same native intelligence as we. They didnât have our technology, that is all they lacked.
Secondly as I pointed out above, the earliest known evolutionist is from 600 BC, Anaximander. He was living in essentially the same cultural level as everyone did from the start of agriculture until the 1700s. If he could understand evolution, so could the Hebrews.
Thirdly, my 7 year old grandson can understand the concept of evolution. Are you telling me the ancient adult Hebrews were stupider and less intelligent than my 7 year old grandson? That is ridiculous.
Finally, I decide to add another question for the accommodationalists here. I have noticed that no one has touched another issue I raised and I think it is because they have no answer for it, because accommodationalism provides no basis to decide the question I am about to ask. I hate to bury such a question this deep in the thread, but here goes.
If there is nothing observationally true about the Bible from Genesis 1:1 through the Exodus (all of which is the wide consensus, that there is no evidence for the Exodus, then tell me why we should believe one of these sources for theology over the other. We have first:
The Book of Mormon. There is not one shred of archaeological evidence supporting the great battles, walled cities and chariots in the part of North America that would become the US. It presents us with a theology where by:
- I will become the God of my own planet
- I can baptize my dead ancestors for their salvationâeven if they donât want it
- God is just one among many Elohim (there is a divine council)
- Faith alone is not sufficient for salvation, it is faith plus works
5 this theology generates generally well behaved people
In the other corner we have:
The Bible. Accommodationalists say thee is nothing observationally true about the above portion of scripture, and as observed in my miracle thread, nothing miraculous either. This book brings the theology
- I am just a creature and will never be a God
- my dead ancestors made their decision and have to live by it
3 There is only one triune God - We are saved by faith alone
5 this theology generally creates well behaved people
Without any observational differentiation between these books upon what basis do we chose to believe the theology of the Bible vs the Book of Morman?
I really am interested in how one tells one religion from another given the assumptions of Accommodationalism.
[quote=âProDeo, post:109, topic:42032â]
Bob, I feel I am in the same boat as you only on my boat it is less stormy. I wrestle with the same issues but my faith is based on more than incomplete science and incomplete history alone, somehow, some day the Lord must have touched your feelings, isnât that enough?[/quote]
Yes, it is enough. Nothing can be added to salvation by faith alone.
On an intellectual you believe in the resurrection for the same reason as me, the martyr deaths of the apostles meaning the resurrection is true as I donât believe anyone can name a historic event where 2 people died for the same reason while knowing it was a lie, let alone 11, only mad people do that.
Why is the belief in heart of the Bible not good enough and just throw everthing else that bothers under the bus.
If you can do that, good for you. You are a better person than me. I canât feel intellectually honest when I ignore problems that exist. As I have alluded to, I spent 47 years looking for oil, generating theory after theory for the local geologic history and structure so as to increase our chances of drilling a successful well, Some wells cost $200 million so I owed it to my masters to leave no reasonable stone unturned in the search for a coherent theory of local geology. I and the groups I mangaged found 34 fields and a billion barrels of oil over my career, meaning at the average price of oil, this added $60 billion in wealth that created all sorts of jobs for welders, oil field workers, truckers, and a job for me.
I learned early on, when people ignored problems, contradictory data, missing data that could be obtained, or just flat used illogic, the chances for a dry hole increased dramatically because we would be misled about where oil is. around 2005, I saw people working the East Coast of the US, an area I was in charge of in the early 1980s/ They claimed that there were 5 significant hydrocarbon discoveries in that area. I was at that time, Director of Technology, so I asked them to name them. The wells they claimed discovered oil were mere sniffs of oil or gas but not a discovery. They were what we call âa showâ which means just a tiny noncommercial bit of oil or gas. There is only one discovery of hydrocarbons off the East Coast, a Texaco well, and it was not enough to fund the pipeline to shore. I knew the area; I knew they were fibbing and those fibs or inflating of the data, could cost my employer hundreds of millions. I canât go cheap on having a coherent, logically consistent theory or at least as close as I can get to that. These people who worked the East Coast worked for my company, so I told them to change the claim. The next meeting, they made the same ridiculous claim. It happened a third meeting, in each meeting I challenged them. This is intellectual dishonesty at its best! I canât be happy if I knowingly leave intellectual problems without solution. To do less, for me, not necessarily for you, would not be doing my best;, not giving God my best.
I wonât put any burden on you or anyone else, but I will fight the nonsense I see which denigrates the power and majesty of our God by making God an incompetent, bumbling, lying old fart who has no idea what has happened in the universe he created. That is how I see Accommodationalism.
Not written to you prodeo but to others: I want to hear from the Accommodationalists how we can distinguish between the theology of Book of Mormon and the theology of the Bible given that they say there is nothing observationally true about either of those books. (see above guys) I am awaiting the coming intellectual pretzel-twisting gymnastics answering that question will take. lol
So again , not onky are these early men, but as stated the message was given to them in a way they can understand. Because no, they could not understand the complexities of science as we know it. Not because their brain could not, but because they had no foundation like we do to graft on to.
Yes and no your grandson is smarter than them. Is your grandson smarter than small tribes in third world countries? Same answer yes and no.
How long would it take to explain in detail how Bluetooth works to someone in the days of Moses? You could not just say well the machine sends a signal of data to another machine that correctly interprets the data of the signal and plays the right sounds it shows the right image. You would have to spend a lot time explaining so many things to him.
So Moses , or the entire world, understood what we are now taught as kids. They believed that the earth was a flat circle/square floating on top of water, sitting on pillars, with a firmament ( dome ) sealing earth off from the waters of the heavens and that angels would open this dome at times and allow water to fall down to earth. They believed that the earth was stationary and that the sun moved around us and that the light from the moon was not a reflection, but actual light given off. They believed that God literally lived up above past the clouds and firmament. They believed that a tower could be built allowing them to reach gods kingdom. They believed a mountain of stuff we now know is not true in the literal sense.
Wow, I guess we will just disagree. They are not early men. They are anthropologically fully modern. It always amazes me at how modern folk feel so superior to them. Having spent years studying anthropology, I know this, we wouldnât last a week in their world. We donât have the necessary skills to do it. We can understand those skills, we just couldnât get proficient quickly enough to feed ourselves.
I guess you are going to ignore the importance of a fellow early man like Anaximander believing in Evolution as evidence of their capabilities. Any theory at all can be believed if one ignores contradictory data.
No my grandson is not smarter than an adult in those tribes. Having been round the world, lived in many cultures, I know this, any concept can be expressed in any language. the main difference between Neolithic languages and ours is the number of nouns.
As to the rest of your note, you havenât taken the time to see what I believe about the dome, so I donât feel obligated to say it again. It would be nice when you debate someone that you actually listen enough to know that they think about the domed sky nonsense. But I have come to expect this from peopleâarguing against something the other guy doesnât believe but acting as if he does.
We will have to agree to disagree. I think the same thing about people who dismiss the commonly held beliefs by the majority of early men or even the simple fact that when the world was first argued to be round how much conflict occurred and how even some scientists were basically accused of witchcraft and how even now days with unlimited resources basically to study out many things we still have people who think the world is flat, or that earth is 6k years old or that early men would be able to easily grasp these thoughts that had no foundation in all of their recorded history.
As for the dome itâs just simply based on what scripture actually says and what ancient people actually believed. Not a modern persons scientific application to what it could have meant based off of what we now know. There are still people this day who believes maybe earth was covered in like 1-3 miles of solid ice or maybe like a belt of ice pieces.
Speaking of straw men, you continue to misunderstand what others here are laboring so hard to help you see. You keep repeating this claim that Anaximander understood evolution.
First of all, it has nothing to do with intelligence. I donât doubt the ancients were every bit as intelligent as people today (probably even more so in a lot of respects). But claiming that anybody in 600BC understands evolution (as that word is typically meant today - i.e. biological evolution) is like saying that the Wright Brothers could have built a 747. Were they smart enough to participate in such an endeavor? Perhaps so - if we transplanted them into todayâs context, and had them schooled in aerospace engineering (some of which they indeed helped develop!) they could probably get up to speed faster than most. But to pretend that all the air-travel developments between the Wright brothers and a 747 are trivial is nonsense, just as the claim that any ancients understood evolution is also nonsense. And you know it.
To claim that we have knowledge that they didnât, and that since them we have been given shoulders of yet more giants to stand on has nothing at all to do with any claim that people today are smarter than those back then.
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Yea, they were so smart that they thought the earth was flat, the sun and moon revolved around the flat earth, they thought the consciousness was in the heart or stomach, not the brain, they thought their part of the world was the whole world itself!
In a sense yea, because they had no concept of evolution at all.
Because they talk about peopleâs encounters and relations with this divine being that we call God and they give us inspiration for our faith. The early church took a lot of the OT as symbolic and non literal.
And I also want to know your opinion on what @Bill_II said on the issue of the mustard seed
So, was Jesus wrong in that the mustard seed is the smallest seed or was he accommodating to his local native audience?
So you still parrot the old YEC line of âIf Genesis 1 ainât true, then none of the Bible is true!â but you take a twist to it. If that be the case then none of the Bible is true if we are to take a strict rigid literalist understanding only. But if we can see that God spoke to those people in their time and age then it donât make God lair, He was merely speaking truth to them in a way they could understand it.
Ask and you shall receive. I for my own personal point of view (I donât represent the majority here) but I believe that Joseph Smith Jr. did have a series of visions but over time went crazy and lost track of the mission that He was given. It did 't help that Birmingham Young only further flamed the errors of Smith and went deep down hill. The same thing with the prophet Muhammed of Islam, he did receive a vision and message from an angel but over time he saw that militant action was the only way to convert people sadly and then after his death it went down hill. The Book of Mormon does have some truth in a sense in its but it is not above the Bible in that this is the sole trusted source of knowing who God is through the revelation of Jesus Christ. I personally believe that we can find God outside of the Christian religion and find His attributes in other religions and philosophies but the Bible is the sole text that we have when concerning the revelation of who and what Jesus Christ is. the BoK is iffy when it comes to the âhistoryâ of the peoples who âcame to the Americaâsâ but the same can be said for the history of ancient Israel/Judah in the OT which doesnât really line up with our modern understanding of the history of the Ancient Near East.
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Abiogenesis is not the falsified hypothesis of spontaneous generation which Augustine and Aristotle and many others held to. Augustine specifically wrote about it and Genesis describing it.
My point is that there are a large number of possible events each of the things in Genesis could be referring to and you can randomly choose from that subset. Iâve done it before.
No. Iâm saying that Genesis 1 isnât making scientific claims. You can of course pick various natural phenomenon and pretend thatâs what Genesis 1 was referring to.
The whole point of accommodation is that God accommodated his message through our limited understanding. Our limited understanding for Genesis = the understanding of creation around 500 BCE. By reading other ancient documents we find support for the claim that Genesis contains no secret advanced science but rather clarifies the WHO behind creation and what his purposes are for various aspects of the natural world.
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Yes when the known concept is explained to him by someone who understands it and explains it in terms he can understand.
Could your grandson come up with the theory by himself? Did your grandson have some other understanding of how life came to be before evolution was explained to him?
See, right there is what I am speaking ofâhelp me see? Am I considerd a slow student? What you donât seem to understand is that I do see what you all are saying and I donât like what I see. That is quite a different situation.
By the way, want to try to answer my Book of Mormon/Bible question above? Given that neither book, according to accommodation has a shred of observational support, I am curious why one would reject the theology of the Book of Mormon but accept the theology of the Bible. Remember, theology is not observationally verifiable.
First of all, it has nothing to do with intelligence. I donât doubt the ancients were every bit as intelligent as people today (probably even more so in a lot of respects). But claiming that anybody in 600BC understands evolution (as that word is typically meant today - i.e. biological evolution) is like saying that the Wright Brothers could have built a 747.
Well in 600 BC Anaximander sounded like a modern multiverse physicist
âThere are many worlds and many systems of Universes existing all at the same time, all of them perishable.â ~ Anaximander
His book didnât survive but quotes and statements about his views are numerous. Other ideas of his which are quite modern is:
Nature is eternal and does not age. Sounds like he holds to Hoyleâs steady state theory-- a quite modern if rejected theory.
All beings derive from other older beings by successive transformation Clearly evolutionary
The age of humans is not explained without its predecessors. Sounds like a modern anthropologist.
The bolded one is a quite modern summary of evolution. Your statement that no one understood evolution as we understand it is true but irrelevant to the issue. They donât have to understand it like we do in order for a Biblical statement by God, of the same simplicity as Anaximanderâs position in 600 BC, would quite suffice to turn the Bible from being viewed as anti-evolutionary, to supporting evolution.
I am delighted you grant their intelligence but if they were as intelligent as us, they would have been quite capable of understanding the concept of evolution even if not âas we understand itâ.
Your example of the 747 is also irrelevant as well. All God had to do to speak the truth about Nature with regard to evolution was to say âAll beings derive from other older beings by successive transformationâ This statement was understandable to the redactors in Babylon if they had run into Anaximanderâs works. Thus I find this claim that they were too stupid to understand the concept OR your claim that they have to understand it to the level we do, to be quite observationally false, given what Anaximander knew.
Now I do believe that what God did say does indicate evolution/abiogenesis when He ordered the Earth to bring forth life. It was through the chemistry and physics on Earth that life arose, so I am content with that being indicative of evolution, meaning God got at least 2 things correct, the universe has an origin and abiogenesis.