Astro-centrism, and God outright *told* Adam to name the animals? (respectively Genesis 1:3 and Genesis 2:19b)

Faith & Science Conversation
61

First, you keep assuming that ‘the ancients’ all believed only the same backwards things about the sky, no matter how far back into human history one may consider.

Second, without any preconceptions, an adult human will not just think that the Moon is the source of its own apparent light. That light is entirely cool, compared to that seen-and-felt of the Sun. And when the angles are imagined, it will be obvious that the Moon’s light is just that reflected from the Sun. There is no difficulty for a fully-functioning, psychologically normal adult brain to imagine those angles.

62

That’s part of my point about the color of clear-sky in daylight.

63

I do not deny that that. But you are asking them about ‘air’ as if they are inside a classroom looking around inside that room.

Instead, ask every child you can, in person (one-on-one, not crowds of kids) about the blue fading of horizontal distance (as you and the child are standing outside looking at it, and ask the child what makes that fading.

64

So you go outside and observe a blue dome that stretches from horizon to horizon. I look around me and see the many colors of nature. I go to the sea coast and look out over the ocean. I see blue ocean until it meets the blue sky. And this is supposed to show me that air is transparent? Where does the blue come from?

My point is in the dark a blue sky would be black. The ancients would be aware of the fact you can’t see something in the dark.

Ok I found the Rosetta stone and have decoded what you are trying to say. You are talking about the blue appearance of objects in the distance. Well first that is not always visible if the distance to the horizon is not great. Even when the distance is great if the sky is clear there is no bluish cast to distant objects. I have looked across desert and the desert is tan and the sky is blue right down to where they meet. So how does a bluish cast get you to air is clear?

Having raised two I am pretty sure I know what they would say. What do you expect a child to say?

Talk about preconceptions. You are full of them.
Big fire hot, small fire not so hot.
Angles? Did they know trig also?
Obvious to you perhaps.

65

@Daniel_Pech, Did you ever comment on this verse in Job? Because, frankly, I think it is pretty clear evidence for very primitive notions about what is beyond the sky …

These “treasuries” are not sitting around somewhere. They are up in the air, floating around somewhere, where you would expect snow and hail to be stored for God’s use.

66

This is quite bizarre for me to follow. I still don’t think I understand astro-centrism after reading all 65 posts thus far and what the main point of the thread is.

As far as those brutish pre-scientific Israelites, I actually had some of my students write a paper on ways that we ‘measure the heavens,’ citing Jeremiah 31:37 which reads (in the CSB for example):

Only if the heavens above can be measured
and the foundations of the earth below explored,
will I reject all of Israel’s descendants
because of all they have done—
this is the Lord’s declaration.

Amazingly, myself nor any of my students actually read the verse in Jeremiah, instead just showing and illustrating the beautiful ways that we measure the heavens through…

  • The Parallax Method
  • Tests of Einstein’s General Relativity
  • Cepheid Variable Stars
  • The Redshift and Expansion of Space
  • The Cosmic Microwave Background and its Anisotropies

Scriptures like these do not make sense anymore in our modern context. Not only would the ancient Israelites have had a different cosmology than ours, but they would have never dreamed of measuring the sky and sending telescopes into orbit to take pictures of objects billions of light years away. Nor would they have imagined giant tools to dig into the Earth (though presumably they were aware of some kind of mining with their access to gemstones). Either way, God is basically saying that He will now start rejecting Israel because we can measure the heavens. Unless of course, God was speaking to them in a way they could understand with their limited revelation of the natural world. Those blasted brutes!

1 Like
67

Interesting verse, I do not think I have ever looked at it before. Thanks for sharing.

I think Daniel has a rather unique view of things, which is interesting to contemplate, though cannot say I understand the position fully. Sometimes it is interesting to look at things from a different view, however.

68

We have our own colloquialisms for saying things are never ending (or at least will be lasting a really long time). Love songs speak of ‘forever’ blithely ignoring the fact that we get old and die. We may say things that really would confound paleolinguists centuries from now like: “I could do this till the cows come home.” --meaning I can do this as long as I want or indefinitely. Yet literally I suppose cows could home at any moment so far as any of us know --so it is already a strange phrase even as we use it now.

“That’ll happen when pigs fly” is a commentary on how something will never ever happen and is not at all commentary about pigs. So I am fairly sure that the Hebrew text is commentary on God’s faithfulness and not at all about cosmology or actual measurement capabilities.

69

While that isn’t commentary on pigs, I suppose it would showcase to the future historian our cultural presupposition about pigs --they can’t fly. One can imagine the future historian’s line of thought here: “Ah --so their pigs back then were flightless, eh? --not yet like our evolved flying pigs today; … speaking of which, I need to buy another barrel of windshield washer fluid!”

1 Like
70

You still aren’t getting my point. First, you are thinking here in a simple binary distinction about night and day, despite that what is right there in front of you is not presented in an either/distinction. If the sky were a solid dome of opaque blue, then how are there stars there when that supposed dome is unlit? Do the stars shine at night because night is when the Big mean-and-scary Sun is asleep? Do they have courage to shine only then? Is that what your mind senses of it, and so your ‘modern’ education is just always fighting against that sense? Is your brain just that of the pre-modern ‘brutes’ about the nature of sky, so that it is only because of your ‘modern’ education that you can manage to rightly perceive anything of the sky?

Look to the purple saged hills far distance. Don’t you see that they appear faded compared to the same exact purple sage bushes that are right next to you?? If you cannot see something that obvious, then your brain’s visual perception of the sage far and near is just being simplistically re-interpreted by your brain’s merely conceptual functions of the fact that the sage bush itself is the same color regardless of the fact that the air of distance obscures the full saturation of color that you see of the bush up close.

71

@Daniel_Pech

I think it’s time you produce at least one journal article, by any PhD, showing this analysis applied to any ancient writing.

I’m sure we would all learn from it…

72

Modern man is often disconnected from observations that were common 100 years ago. It is a pleasure to sit and watch the stars and planets appear as the light fades and they appear one by one.

73

It isn’t a solid dome but it sure looks like a solid dome that extends from horizon to horizon. Can you tell me that it doesn’t?

Sorry but I thought you were trying to say the ancients would know air existed and that it was clear. You are now arguing that air isn’t clear. So which is it?

You and I both know that the faded effect is the result of haze in the atmosphere. Haze that is usually the result of air polution which didn’t exist in the past. In really clear desert air you don’t see this faded appearance and it isn’t my brain trying to compensate my vision.

74

I’m trying to get you to stop preconceiving as to what the ancients knew or didn’t know. I’m doing that by trying to get you to stop preconceiving ‘air’. Stop conceiving of air at all. Just sense it with your physical senses.

So, First of all, surely you can feel the air on your skin as the breeze blows?!?

Is it invisible on your skin? Yes, it is invisible on your skin. It also is invisible around you in a room. But if you can sense it despite its being ‘invisible’, then surely so could humans who lived two + thousand years ago???

Second, you just now claimed that, since that sensible air is invisible, it has nothing to do with how we can see any color of fading effect on distant objects.

So which is it? Is that sensible-yet-‘invisible’ air something about which the ancients could not have known? Or, instead, according to you, did they know of it only within the kinds of perceptions of the sky that brains like yours have of the sky?

So, in answer to your own most pointed question: No, I do not perceive that the clear blue sky is a solid opaque dome. I perceive only that that blue is a vast depth of blue, not a flat surface far up there.

I see its depth in a way that is somewhat comparable to the curious ‘depth’ of color of certain biological colors, such as that of many kinds of bright flowers, or of the brightly colored wings of a butterfly. But as far as I can see, the blue sky actually is deep.

In very fact, some person in your anti-YEC camp have claimed that the ancients though that the blueness of the sky meant that it was deep water up there. I can understand their claiming this, except that that blue seems to me to become clear (at night) when too little light is shown through it.

75

So the whole world was a desert ‘in the past’?

76

‘PhD’ articles have nothing to do with what I am trying to show you here. Is the air insensible to you for its being merely invisible to you up close???

77

We weren’t talking about air. We were talking about the atmosphere. Ancients had no idea about the troposphere or the ozone layer or anything like that, or how far it extended into space, etc. They simply weren’t concerned with that and had no categories for it. You cannot deny this fact. All evidence we currently possess points to the fact that ancient Israelites (and their Near Eastern neighbors) believed in a flat earth with a solid dome firmament. No, it doesn’t make sense to us with our modern categories; yes, it did make sense to them, because they didn’t have our modern categories.

It does no good to be anachronistic and think of them as “stupid” for holding incorrect beliefs about the shape of the cosmos. For most of Christian history, for example, every major theologian believed the sun revolved around the earth. Copernicus and Galileo set us straight there, but you can’t argue that Irenaeus, Ignatius, Tertullian, Augustine, Bede, Ambrose, Thomas Aquinas, St. Benedict, Martin Luther, John Calvin, etc. were all a bunch of idiots because they didn’t know the earth revolved around the sun. They had either never thought about it, didn’t care, or, being educated, likely accepted the Ptolemaic cosmos because it was the best explanation of the astronomical data to that point.

The Israelites, on the other hand, along with their Near Eastern neighbors, were entirely pre-scientific. They weren’t trying to answer the same questions we are asking, nor were they concerned with accurate “scientific” descriptions of the cosmos. They just believed what they believed because it made sense to them, according to what they could observe. This doesn’t somehow make them less than human or lower their IQs.

1 Like
78

We were, are still are, talking about what the Bible writers, and their main audience, knew of the air, thus of how far up it extended.

You are making an erroneously hard empirical distinction between the sensible ‘air’, and ‘atmosphere’. They are not two separate things within the natural world, but only in a lab, or indoors!

79

“As read by an astrophysicist, which Hugh Ross was at one time.” Very few Hebrew prophets were astrophysicists. :slight_smile:

80

Your dual and conflated claim here as to what is the ‘fact’ which ‘all evidence’ shows is highly and widely disputed, and is grossly simplistic for being based on nothing better than what your modern-centric mind can conceive of within a closed room. You may as well have grown up having never been outdoors, never having seen the sky, and never known of what the sky looks like except in flat paintings.