Me as well. I’m in my mid-geezerhood, you may have seen me say. I also used to be an avid biker, but I still have the bad knee. ‘Back in the day’, before shaving or suturing a torn meniscus was a thing, they took the whole thing out. And I did all that hiking and biking and taking the stairs to the fifth floor of the hospital where my office was completely without a right lateral meniscus.
Mikey, do you even know what weights and measures actually are?
Weights and measures are not Bible verses. Not even the Bible itself considers weights and measurements to be Bible verses. Weights and measures are physical things that are used to figure out numbers that describe other physical things in ways that can be repeated by everyone to give the same result, no matter what their worldview may be. Things such as length, or volume, or weight, or concentration, or density, or speed, or age.
Seriously, this is something that gets taught to six year olds. if you can’t even get your facts straight about what measurement actually is and how it is done on that level, what makes you think you’re qualified to judge who is being honest and accurate about it and who isn’t?
No she didn’t. The people who break the rules of the game here are the young earthists who claim that she found things that she did not. She did not find actual DNA, actual red blood cells, actual osteocytes, actual collagen, actual haemoglobin, or any other actual unstable biomolecule of dinosaurian origin. She only reported finding the ultimately stable breakdown products of those molecules, which present no measurable challenge whatsoever to the measurements indicating that they were 65 million years old.
This is one of the “rules of the game” that I’m talking about here, Mikey. Before you can make any claims about how the evidence is interpreted, or what assumptions may or may not be involved, you must first get your facts straight about what the evidence actually consists of.
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Right, it’s collapsing right under their noses.
No more singularity, but I am sure whatever it is needs a big explosion to get going. Somebody must have put some gas on it.
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Or not lie about it, misrepresenting the truth.
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So wrong. The article says nothing whatsoever that speaks against the antiquity of the universe, the antiquity that glorifies God’s enormity and doesn’t pinch him into a flawed reading of early Genesis that elevates science over the intent of scripture.
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This fits over here as well:
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It is odd that people who are so bound to a literal day with a literal evening and literal morning, just whistle along as they skate past there being no literal sunset or sunrise until day four.
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Being raised in a YEC environment (I didn’t know there was anything else as a child and young man), the explanations of where the light came from on day one never did sit well with me, seeming contrived and not really biblical.
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According to one set of ancient rabbis, the light just flowed freely through the thinning fluid (“waters”) that made up the universe.
When I first read one of those commentaries it gave a really eerie feeling because it sounded like a description of the Big Bang and cosmic inflation!
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The singularity will be gone in 5 years by any self respecting cosmologist, James Webb is crushing that errored hypothesis. But the singularity will remain in the text books for centuries. “Antiquity of the universe”, hardly. From the geologic column, to the Grand Canyon being slowly created by a creek, to the lack of transitional forms, to the geneticists scientifically proving life is irreducibly complex and more. www.navigatorsway.com. Seek truth.
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Learn science. It is not ‘secular’ any more than plumbing is secular.
Truth comes from reality, and you have been misled, you are misleading yourself and you are trying to mislead others.
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Don’t act like a fourth-grader, please.
Yes, He did – and it nowhere says it was twenty-four hours. If light shone for a billion years before God moved on, then that was, by God’s own definition, a day, because it wasn’t darkness.
The scripture says there was day before God created our world! He commanded light, which didn’t exist (wrap your mind around speaking to something that doesn’t exist {yet}!), to “Be”! before anything else.
Thank you for your uninformed and close-minded opinion. I’ll take the words of rabbis who grew up speaking Hebrew and studying it since they were eight years old over that of someone who doesn’t know Hebrew, has no clue what kinds of literature the Creation accounts are, hasn’t the slightest grasp of the worldview when those were written, and thus doesn’t even have a starting point for understanding the text.
It means you’re trying to force the scriptures to fit a modern worldview instead of asking what kind of literature you’re looking at and how the original writer and audience understood it.
The tragedy here, besides the fact that you keep asking questions I’d expect from a fifth grader, is that the worldview you are trying to impose on the scriptures is something called scientific materialism; that’s the source of the idea that in order to be true the scriptures have to be 100% scientifically and historically correct (even when what’s being read isn’t history and nowhere do the scriptures say that they intend to communicate science) or they can’t be true. In its application it is a philosophy of desperation, as though God would be made a liar if there was anything at all that was scientifically incorrect in the scriptures, and in its origin it’s a philosophy that denies the existence of anything not in the material world and is thus atheistic at its core.
Rather obscure; I didn’t go past a dozen most common translations so I missed those.
And I have no respect for any translation after about 1950 that uses the grotesquely wrong “Jehovah”, which is the result of ignorance on several levels at once – the only thing it has right are the two "h"s (besides which “refreshed” is misrepresenting the Hebrew).
“For” isn’t necessarily exactly the same as “because”, but to put it in the middle of the sentence when that’s not where the scriptures put it is dishonest.
That aside, I wouldn’t trust Ken Ham if he said the sun was shining without checking.
Somewhere between Abraham and Joshua. I’d put it closer to Abraham; the case for it being as late as Joshua is more due to skepticism about anything the Bible days than to scholarship. And the evidence as I read it is that there really was a Moses and an Exodus, though it may not have matched exactly what is in Exodus.
It isn’t adding anything at all to the scriptures, which you would know if you understood Hebrew and actually paid attention to the text. If no one but God is around to measure time, then by definition those are “divine days” and the only question is how long a divine day is. A rather shallow argument can be made that it was a thousand years, but that misunderstands the meaning of “one thousand” – symbolically it’s ten times ten times ten, which indicates completeness and thoroughness, usually in created things, on a divine level, so if “as a thousand years” is taken in its numeric meaning then a divine day would be however long it took for something to become complete. And that fits with an old rabbinic idea that since God is “the Ancient of Days”, then a divine day would have to be as many days as it would take for it to be regarded as ancient – which would be somewhere between half a millennium to upwards of millions or even billions of years.
Yes – the Hebrew grammar allows for it.
Because it was the second day on which God worked to form the world. The point is that it isn’t called “the second day”, the grammar structure is much more likely to mean “a second day”.
No, “a second day” as in second in what’s going on, which is making the world. If something else was the topic, it would be a second day of that – for example, if an army was besieging a city, and there had been one day on which they assaulted the walls but failed to capture any part, and the army then rested a week and tried again, that would be a second day of assaulting the walls.
I have no idea what this is even about or where it comes from.
“…וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י תְהֹ֑ום וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם …”
Darkness was on the face of the deep: “deep” can mean an ocean, or it can refer to the (infinite) reach of the heavens.
And Spirit-Elohim meditated on the face of the waters: the Hebrew word for water(s) could be used to refer to any fluid; since these waters are not specified as being on Earth, then they could be some kind of heavenly fluid that fills “the deep”; it’s worth noting that the parallel clause structure here matches “the deep” with “the waters”, so whatever “the deep” is is being associated with “the waters”, from which association it isn’t an unlikely conclusion to say that the deep of the heavens was filled with some sort of fluid.
The rapid expansion comes from examining the first word of the text using a not-uncommon method of taking the meanings of the different letters. I don’t remember exactly how it works, but I do know that ancient near eastern alphabets were used that way. When I read it that way ti starts out “house, poor, wonderful, peace, hand, mud”, but then this approach wasn’t emphasized much in my Hebrew courses so I could be 'way off base.
I’m not dismissing anything, I’m refusing to be chained by a translation when reading the original. You’re reading modern science into it by insisting on a 24-hour day; I’m looking at the Hebrew and asking, what’s going on here?"
Besides which, treating the first Creation account as history strips it of its actual glorious meaning.
Nope – that’s an uninformed opinion based on treating Genesis 1 & 2 as though they were written by a good friend’s grandfather in English in a diary of events he experienced. And unless you’re reading in the original, any claim of “plain language” is just invalid because the old saying that “it loses something in the translation” is true, but so is the reverse, that it "adds something in the translation: in other words, that some of the Hebrew meaning is inevitably lost and some of the English meaning isn’t found in the Hebrew but is tacked on due to word choice.
No, He didn’t write those on a stone tablet. He wrote the Words – what are improperly called “commandments” – on stone, not the commentary.
You insist that any idea that you don’t like is “adding to the text” – but that’s exactly what you’re doing by reading the text from a modern worldview. When a scholar who has studied the ancient near east and its worldviews plus ancient Hebrew and its meanings says, “The text means this”, that is something that should be heard.
And no, He didn’t 'equate" them – that’s something you’re adding to the text.
But you put yourself above the scholars, above the actual writers, and above the text every time you say, “I see it clearly” – but you don’t see it clearly; at best you see a shadow because that’s what a translation necessarily is. If you saw clearly, you would be willing to learn, but instead you pronounce yourself a master but know nothing.
None is so blind as he who will not see: All I’ve offered is from scripture, yet you deny the text, preferring your modern worldview to what the writer actually put down on parchment.
Well, maybe we should get a clue from these, since in “a plain reading” of Genesis 1 the first three days and (even the fourth, entirely) could not have been literal solar days:
A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.
Psalm 90:4
But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
2 Peter 3:8
Talk about putting your foot in it. 
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I met a Lutheran pastor who twice a month on his day off pedaled his bicycle up Pike’s Peak. I was quite impressed until I actually drove up, and then I was immensely impressed!
In my time in Colorado I only got to the top of a handful of peaks, but when you’re starting from a trailhead that’s at over ten thousand feet a twelve thousand or twelve-and-a-half scaling them isn’t all that impressive, especially when you take the route with the shallowest slope. I think the ascent to the top of South sister in Oregon is tougher; it’s almost a full mile elevation change from trailhead to summit, plus it starts out slow and gets worse.
Sadly it requires major planning ahead to even park at the trailhead, it’s gotten so popular. I once did it with some friends and we camped on top; I don’t know if that’s even legal any more. I’d love to do it again but would probably have to make parking and camping reservations by Tax Day.
Probably for me as well, but I really would like to go up South Sister again and Middle Sister if I can; previous attempts there have never reached the summit, always turned back by something.
Yeah, the day our pilot “accidentally” took us to 12,200 feet for a jump the pressure when we popped open the plane’s door was just under 9.2 PSI. It’s a strange comparison that I used to work at over 8,000 feet and didn’t find 12,000 that big a deal, but going from about 120 feet to 12,000 feet higher you notice the pressure change fast. Heck, jumping from 10k once with a slight cold I though my right eardrum was going to pop from the difference; I opened my chute higher than usual to give my head more time to pop the eustachian tube and equalize the pressure – I was all the way down to 4,500 before my anatomy cooperated, and I can tell you, anyone who doesn’t think the air pressure changes as you go higher should skydive one day when they have a cold; the pain will deliver the message quite well.
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The last time I ever went skiing I hit a mogul wrong (it was a weird slope, lower to the right than to the left, which meant perpetually turning left to compensate) and took a tumble. The binding on my left ski popped like it was supposed to but the right ski didn’t budge and I actually spun around several times with that ski tip on the ground before encountering another mogul that twisted my leg hard one last time and I went down, which popped the right binding, and I barely managed to grab the ski before it got away, so I could jam it in the snow as the “skier down” signal). When I put pressure on my right knee while jamming the ski end into the snow I about blacked pout from the pain.
That was to lead up to the fact that after my emergency ski-mobile ride down the mountain (we actually found my left ski, which had been caught by someone and stuck in the snow on the edge of the slope) The docs at the resort couldn’t agree on whether I needed surgery – so they asked my opinion! I asked them to describe the surgery and its impact on use of my knee, and didn’t like the outcome; they gave me about a 40% chance of having full use of that knee again. I went on crutches for almost two months with my knee immobilized to give it a chance to heal. And late that summer it was good enough to go waterskiing!
I can’t imagine what it would be like to have had that surgery; they said they would have tried to suture things up but if that didn’t work pieces would have to come out. I still shudder thinking about it!
Now back to your regularly scheduled interaction.
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I’ve read that article before, but it’s still a nice review. But all it does is what I’ve maintained for a long time: it tells us that the Big Bang was a phase change from a realm whose characteristics we mostly can’t know – like flame people living in the combustion of a candle wick and wax can’t know very much at all about before the candle was lit.
It also fits with what a cosmologist who gave a guest lecture when I was in university said: first there was space, then God reached out His finger to a place before there could be places, and space started to spin.
The state of the universe at T=0 is not understood with certainty. It is certain that the universe has expanded from a very dense state and is over 13 billion years old.
We do not understand the state of matter at the center of Black Holes either, but they are very much a reality. Equations predict a singularity, but there is no way to observe directly. Still, we are learning a great deal about black holes, pulsars, quasars, and blazars; it is an exciting time, don’t you think?
What are you talking about? The JWST observations do not involve the singularity at all.
The YEC narratives for all of this is nonsensical, including the navigatorsway website you have been hawking.
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Or remember that in the ancient near east numbers weren’t always numbers, they had meaning, and for the meaning of one thousand we start by noting that it is 10[math]^3[/math], or (101010). Ten is a number that represents completion or fullness, with the idea of “a job well-done” as one of my professors put it. And when you multiply the same number by itself, it “elevates” the meaning, so (1010) would be a job really well done, and thus (1010*10) would be a job divinely well done since three is a divine number. Then since this instance of one thousand is tied to time by the word “years”, it would mean a period of time in which God got something divinely well done.
How long is that? However long pleases Him!
OTOH matter that gets included due to expansion of the event horizon as the density next to it rises high enough for it to be included presumably just keeps orbiting whatever is at the center. We have this image that anything that crosses the event horizon gets ‘sucked’ right down to the middle but really what goes in just keeps on behaving as it did already, it’s just that there’s no going back; the singularity, if it’s there, is something in the future that is inescapable, not something that magically draws things in.