Or not lie about it, misrepresenting the truth.
So wrong. The article says nothing whatsoever that speaks against the antiquity of the universe, the antiquity that glorifies Godâs enormity and doesnât pinch him into a flawed reading of early Genesis that elevates science over the intent of scripture.
This fits over here as well:
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.
Being raised in a YEC environment (I didnât 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.
According to one set of ancient rabbis, the light just flowed freely through the thinning fluid (âwatersâ) 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!
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. âAntiquity of the universeâ, 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.
Learn science. It is not âsecularâ 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.
Donât act like a fourth-grader, please.
Yes, He did â and it nowhere says it was twenty-four hours. If light shone for a billion years before God moved on, then that was, by Godâs own definition, a day, because it wasnât darkness.
The scripture says there was day before God created our world! He commanded light, which didnât exist (wrap your mind around speaking to something that doesnât exist {yet}!), to âBeâ! before anything else.
Thank you for your uninformed and close-minded opinion. Iâll take the words of rabbis who grew up speaking Hebrew and studying it since they were eight years old over that of someone who doesnât know Hebrew, has no clue what kinds of literature the Creation accounts are, hasnât the slightest grasp of the worldview when those were written, and thus doesnât even have a starting point for understanding the text.
It means youâre trying to force the scriptures to fit a modern worldview instead of asking what kind of literature youâre looking at and how the original writer and audience understood it.
The tragedy here, besides the fact that you keep asking questions Iâd expect from a fifth grader, is that the worldview you are trying to impose on the scriptures is something called scientific materialism; thatâs the source of the idea that in order to be true the scriptures have to be 100% scientifically and historically correct (even when whatâs being read isnât history and nowhere do the scriptures say that they intend to communicate science) or they canât 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 itâs a philosophy that denies the existence of anything not in the material world and is thus atheistic at its core.
Rather obscure; I didnât 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 âJehovahâ, which is the result of ignorance on several levels at once â the only thing it has right are the two "h"s (besides which ârefreshedâ is misrepresenting the Hebrew).
âForâ isnât necessarily exactly the same as âbecauseâ, but to put it in the middle of the sentence when thatâs not where the scriptures put it is dishonest.
That aside, I wouldnât trust Ken Ham if he said the sun was shining without checking.
Somewhere between Abraham and Joshua. Iâd 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 isnât 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 âdivine daysâ 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 âone thousandâ â symbolically itâs ten times ten times ten, which indicates completeness and thoroughness, usually in created things, on a divine level, so if âas a thousand yearsâ 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 âthe Ancient of Daysâ, then a divine day would have to be as many days as it would take for it to be regarded as ancient â which would be somewhere between half a millennium to upwards of millions or even billions of years.
Yes â 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 isnât called âthe second dayâ, the grammar structure is much more likely to mean âa second dayâ.
No, âa second dayâ as in second in whatâs going on, which is making the world. If something else was the topic, it would be a second day of that â 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.
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Darkness was on the face of the deep: âdeepâ 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 âthe deepâ; itâs worth noting that the parallel clause structure here matches âthe deepâ with âthe watersâ, so whatever âthe deepâ is is being associated with âthe watersâ, from which association it isnât 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 donât 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 âhouse, poor, wonderful, peace, hand, mudâ, but then this approach wasnât emphasized much in my Hebrew courses so I could be 'way off base.
Iâm not dismissing anything, Iâm refusing to be chained by a translation when reading the original. Youâre reading modern science into it by insisting on a 24-hour day; Iâm looking at the Hebrew and asking, whatâs going on here?"
Besides which, treating the first Creation account as history strips it of its actual glorious meaning.
Nope â thatâs an uninformed opinion based on treating Genesis 1 & 2 as though they were written by a good friendâs grandfather in English in a diary of events he experienced. And unless youâre reading in the original, any claim of âplain languageâ is just invalid because the old saying that âit loses something in the translationâ 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 isnât found in the Hebrew but is tacked on due to word choice.
No, He didnât write those on a stone tablet. He wrote the Words â what are improperly called âcommandmentsâ â on stone, not the commentary.
You insist that any idea that you donât like is âadding to the textâ â but thatâs exactly what youâre 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, âThe text means thisâ, that is something that should be heard.
And no, He didnât 'equate" them â thatâs something youâre adding to the text.
But you put yourself above the scholars, above the actual writers, and above the text every time you say, âI see it clearlyâ â but you donât see it clearly; at best you see a shadow because thatâs 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 Iâve 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 âa plain readingâ 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.
I met a Lutheran pastor who twice a month on his day off pedaled his bicycle up Pikeâs 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 youâre starting from a trailhead thatâs at over ten thousand feet a twelve thousand or twelve-and-a-half scaling them isnât 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; itâs 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, itâs gotten so popular. I once did it with some friends and we camped on top; I donât know if thatâs even legal any more. Iâd 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 âaccidentallyâ took us to 12,200 feet for a jump the pressure when we popped open the planeâs door was just under 9.2 PSI. Itâs a strange comparison that I used to work at over 8,000 feet and didnât 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 â I was all the way down to 4,500 before my anatomy cooperated, and I can tell you, anyone who doesnât 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.
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 didnât 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 âskier downâ 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 couldnât agree on whether I needed surgery â so they asked my opinion! I asked them to describe the surgery and its impact on use of my knee, and didnât 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 canât imagine what it would be like to have had that surgery; they said they would have tried to suture things up but if that didnât work pieces would have to come out. I still shudder thinking about it!
Now back to your regularly scheduled interaction.
Iâve read that article before, but itâs still a nice review. But all it does is what Iâve maintained for a long time: it tells us that the Big Bang was a phase change from a realm whose characteristics we mostly canât know â like flame people living in the combustion of a candle wick and wax canât 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, donât 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.
Or remember that in the ancient near east numbers werenât 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 âa job well-doneâ as one of my professors put it. And when you multiply the same number by itself, it âelevatesâ 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 âyearsâ, it would mean a period of time in which God got something divinely well done.
How long is that? However long pleases Him!
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, donât you think?
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 âsuckedâ right down to the middle but really what goes in just keeps on behaving as it did already, itâs just that thereâs no going back; the singularity, if itâs there, is something in the future that is inescapable, not something that magically draws things in.
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.
My understanding is that an orbit is the inertial path along a straight line of space time. As the event horizon approaches all of the universe is seen in a narrowing portal facing away from the black hole. After the event horizon rises above the prior orbit, the last pinpoint of up seals off and all directions then face the singularity.
Of course the worldview of the writer comes into play â the other option is God behaving like a demon and possessing the writers. Not everything in there is quotes â and calling them âquotesâ in the first place assumes that God spoke in human language.
Why would you think God didnât speak in human language? He spoke the ten commandments to the entire nation of Israel in the wilderness. (Ex 20:1-17) Immediately following that, He was quoted by Moses as saying, âThen Jehovah said to Moses, âTell the Israelites this: âYou have seen for yourselves that I have spoken to you from heavenâŚâ
He also wrote the ten commandments in human language on stone tablets with His own finger, and once sent a human hand to write on a wall in human language. (Daniel 5) He also spoke from heaven in human language at Jesusâ baptism, saying, âThis is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.â (Matt 3:16-17)
So I donât understand your comment, since quoting what someone says to you does not require demonic possession - nor any alterations in the quote due to the listenerâs personal worldview - but does require communication in a language that is understandable to both the speaker and the recipient(s) of the message.
And your juvenile false dichotomy is just that â juvenile. Most people learn by about eighth grade that there are rarely situations when there are just two choices. Itâs also juvenile because it assumes that only two positions can be possible: your opinion and the worst contrast you can think of.
But didnât you just sayâŚ
Of course the worldview of the writer comes into play â the other option is God behaving like a demon and possessing the writers.
Was that a âjuvenile false dichotomyâ?
At any rate, I donât offer a âjuvenile false dichotomyâ. I offer these factsâŚ
-
In the Bible and throughout history, any time the word âdayâ is mentioned along with a number (and especially a number plus âthere was evening and there was morningâ), it refers to a literal day.
-
While the singular word âdayâ is used metaphorically in the Bible and throughout history to refer to a general period of time, the plural word âdaysâ is never used that way.
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In Exodus 20:11 and 31:17, Jehovah explicitly equated the six days of creation with the six literal days the Israelites were to work before taking a day off.
So there are many choicesâŚ
- God did create heaven, earth, sea, and all that is in them in six literal days.
- God didnât tell Moses any such thing, and Moses just made this stuff up based on his own worldview.
- God did tell Moses these things, but He was speaking metaphorically/parabolically.
- The Bible is a fairy tale.
- There isnât a God at all.
EtcâŚ
As you know, I believe by both faith and science that the first one is correct. Some people here opt for 4/5, and that is their prerogative. But I believe that those of you opting for 2/3 should at least offer some scriptural reason to support your choice. Merely claiming that Genesis is not meant to be a historical account, or that it is metaphorical/parabolical means nothing if you cannot provide any valid scriptural reason for your conclusion.
And claiming that the Bible does include metaphorical/parabolical passages, therefore Genesis is one of them is an empty claim unless you can provide valid scriptural evidence that Genesis should be considered as such.
Exactly, like parables were not given as history. The dots are connected, even though some cannot read the little numbers to get them right.
Help me connect the dots thenâŚ
I agree that the Bible contains parables - many of which are identified as parables by the writer. How do I get from there to âGenesis is therefore also a parableâ?
Also, do you believe that the entire Bible is a parable?