That has nothing to do with whether the Bible writers, and their own original audiences, did not know anything of air and thus could not notice anything outdoors as to its upper extent.
I must admit that I’ve always been sceptical of this idea that the ancient Israelites believed that the sky was a solid dome myself. Israel is a mountainous country and with the number of times you read about people climbing mountains in the Bible, they’d certainly have looked down and seen rain falling from clouds below them and not from a solid dome above them. The idea that the raqia of Genesis 1:6-8 was intended as anything other than figurative and metaphorical language simply defies common sense.
By whom? Cite a reference other than your own musings, please.
There is that.
Right. A key to my position is that all things that are phenomenally involved vary. Its not an unvarying sky, and the air is seen to blow things: one’s hair, the clouds, etc… The air’s wind pressure is felt, so the air is not just its up-close invisibility, as if there is nothing there. There is a super-fine, thin substance there, and it is both near at hand and at all horizontal distances.
The only issues, then, are (a) how far up it goes, and (b) what, if anything, the blueness of the clear sky has to do with it.
Are you serious? We are conversing over an ‘internet’ that not only is overflowing with so many things, but an ‘internet’ that has search functions at our finger tips for finding many instances of what you are…skeptical exists outside my ‘own musings’?
But I’m just a YEC, so, for any source that I recommend, you probably will just reject it out of hand, and otherwise the actual arguments of which you’ll think of as “missing the point”.
I don’t know if you saw, but, as I pointed out earlier in the present thread:
(1) the sound of the Hebrew word there is a fair likeness of the sound of hammering a flat sheet of metal,
but
(2) humans had seen the sky long prior to their first hammering out sheets of metal.
And they called that wind. The Hebrew being ruach which is defined as spirit. So the Hebrews at least could describe what they felt as an immaterial spirit.
The fading effect you are talking about is atmospheric haze which is caused by small particles suspended in the air, not by the air. Again in clear desert air (lots of desert in the ANE) there isn’t much in the way of haze.
Your perception would apply to you and not necessarily to everyone else. It doesn’t apply to me for example.
There are a few YEC people here but I wouldn’t say the rest are not anti-YEC. We are here to talk about the intersection of God’s Word and God’s Works. There are some that argue for a cosmic ocean and you have to admit that there are mentions in the OT that could support that (global flood that was sourced in part from water flowing in from windows in heaven). We have records of other ANE cultures that show they believed the sky was made out of blue stones.
So bottom line what is your point?
Are you saying that you think ancient people all thought that the substance of the wind is immaterial?? Lots of ancient Greeks didn’t think so. Were the Greeks just more ‘evolved’ or something?
No, I’m not talking about the ‘haze’. That stuff is obviously not just air, as it varies in haziness. But you, dear Space Age person, are failing to deal with even so little as the fact that it commonly is known today to be a fact that the atmosphere’s own ‘clear’ substance is not perfectly clear. It is blue, by depth, in the bright light of the Sun:
‘The Moon, the Earth’s limb and thin blue atmosphere are seen in this photograph taken by an Expedition 51 crew member.’
(Photo and caption from Space.com)
You cannot just assume that the fading effect of distance is due entirely to haze. As a Space Age person, you know that it is not.
But you keep assuming that the only sensible fading is that caused by haze. The fact is that there is a fading effect regardless, however slight.
But that’s not even my main point (how could it?). My main point is that the air, in daylight, is not perfectly clear, invisible, and immaterial. You are seeing it every time you see the clear blue sky, and that blue substance is what is suspending any particles that make haze.
The only way you rationally can defend the claim that all the ancients lacked a concept of the ‘atomistically’ small parts that make up the sensible and motile air is by saying something like you just said: that the ancient Hebrews all believed nothing more accurate about that sensible stuff than that it is immaterial.
When you are selling a box of flower petals… sometimes you need a little gravitas to go with it.
Frankly, I find it pretty hard to take your approach very seriously if its most advanced demonstration seems to be an elaborate contrivance unique to you.
I have records, made by PhD’s, that clearly show that some children believe a grossly rigid simplistic meaning on the part of adults who say that 'letters make sounds". Just because entire pagan cultures become dominated by those whose brains are neurodevelopmentally so disabled does not mean that all ancient cultures suffered from such neurodevelopmentally challenged brains.
No, I’m not talking about the ‘haze’. That stuff is obviously not just air, as it varies in haziness. But you are failing to deal with even so little as the fact that it commonly is known today to be a fact that the atmosphere’s own ‘clear’ substance is not perfectly clear. It is blue, by depth, in the bright light of the Sun:
‘The Moon, the Earth’s limb and thin blue atmosphere are seen in this photograph taken by an Expedition 51 crew member.’
(Photo and caption from Space.com)
You cannot just assume that the fading effect of distance is due entirely to haze. You know that it is not.
But you keep assuming that the only sensible fading is that caused by haze. The fact is that there is a fading effect regardless, however slight.
But that’s not even my main point (how could it?). My main point is that the air, in daylight, is not perfectly clear, invisible, and immaterial. You are seeing it every time you see the clear blue sky, and that blue substance is what is suspending any particles that make haze.
The only way you rationally can defend the claim that all the ancients lacked a concept of the ‘atomistically’ small parts that make up the sensible and motile air is by saying something like you just said: that the ancient Hebrews all believed nothing more accurate about that sensible stuff than that it is immaterial.
Since the sky is NOT an actual inside of an actual (1) opaque (2) dome, and since God at least in some sense designed humans so that they are able to learn of His creation, it only makes theological sense that the normally functioning human brain would be such that it not only (X) DOES NOT WANT for the sky to be such a dome, but (Y) readily can perceive that it is NOT such a dome.
In converse terms, since the air DOES extend upward to form ONLY A THIN SHEET around the Earth, that normal human brain readily CAN perceive that the air is so. This is not a literal bed sheet, and any adult who gets the impression that I must mean a bed sheet here is an adult whose brain clearly is functioning sub-normally.
I presume that most of you here grant that it is highly likely that most pagan cultures had a very low rate of high literacy, and a low rate even of moderate literacy. Also, I presume that at least some of you grant that it is essentially probable that the ancient Hebrews had a high rate of at least moderate literacy. After all, according to some of you, which essentially includes John Walton, the Hebrews excelled in literary craft.
But the “all the evidence’’ that some of you have claimed shows that the Hebrews were just the godly version of the ANE culture is nothing more than a conflation of the themes and terms in the Bible with that of the entire set of ANE texts that have been unearthed. Those pagan texts all bear the likeness of having been produced by a comparatively very few, and rather uptight, pagan rulers and their scribes and priests. So all of the above thoughts strongly suggest that those pagan texts are all corruptions of the Hebrew Language Originals by way of a combination of (A) a lack of the humble kind of care that normally would have been sure to make and keep careful copies of those originals, and (B) the various neuro-developmental abnormalities (including, most notably, empirical-cognitive association deficits, include that regarding the sky) that tend to result from various greedy and otherwise unrighteous life- and economic-styles: dietary, reproductive (i.e., the inbreeding of the ruling class), medical, sexual, etc…
In other words, my position is: pagan ANE texts all are that which were written by certifiable nutcases, and that these writings do not accurately represent the thinking of every common person in those pagan cultures. So this “all the evidence” in no way immediately proves that the common ANE person was a certifiable nutcase about various commonly-encountered empirical matters, such as the sky.
Is every North Korean a Communist zealot? Many who live and work in the NK countryside are not. This is partly because they have almost no contact with the very concept of Communism—and that what such contact that they do have with it is entirely unnatural to the unassuming ways of life of country farming. And most of those NK farmers do not write much, and those who might write much of ‘deep’ matters never see their actual writings become ‘nationally’ published, much less in stone.
That’s quite the claim. You’d do well to defend it.
You have got to be kidding me. Air is clear. Period. Full Stop. The blue is scattered light from the sun. Which you can verify by looking at the sun at sunrise or sunset and noticing that the sun is red due to the blue light being scattered away from your line of sight. This was first noted John Tyndall in 1859 and is commonly referred to as Rayleigh scattering.
BTW, if it actually was “blue by depth” why is it not bluer on the horizon when you are looking through more air than you would when you look directly overhead? An effect I failed to notice on my drive home.
And fun fact. Colors are not real. They are generated by your brain as the result of your brain putting together the information from the color cones in your eye.
The first written language was pagan and the examples they left indicate common people were literate. What do you mean by “ancient Hebrews”. Got a date for that. It is hard to talk about literate before there was a written language.
If only the Bible didn’t describe the division of all the waters - - below and above the firmament …
And then the Tower of Babel tells us that the builders thought they could touch the firmament itself… an idea that most any American 5th grader can laugh at.
KJV
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
NKJV
Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”
Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so.
NLT
Then God said, “Let there be a space between the waters, to separate the waters of the heavens from the waters of the earth.”
And that is what happened. God made this space to separate the waters of the earth from the waters of the heavens.
NIV
And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.”
So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so.
ESV
And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”
And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so.
HCSB
Then God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters, separating water from water.”
So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above the expanse. And it was so.
NASB
Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”
God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so.
NET
God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate water from water.
So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. It was so.
RSV
And God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”
And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so.
ASV
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
YLT
And God saith, ‘Let an expanse be in the midst of the waters, and let it be separating between waters and waters.’
And God maketh the expanse, and it separateth between the waters which are under the expanse, and the waters which are above the expanse: and it is so.
DBY
And God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it be a division between waters and waters.
And God made the expanse, and divided between the waters that are under the expanse and the waters that are above the expanse; and it was so.
WEB
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament; and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
HNV
God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”
God made the expanse, and divided the waters which were under the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse, and it was so.
VUL
Dixit quoque Deus fiat firmamentum in medio aquarum et dividat aquas ab aquis
Et fecit Deus firmamentum divisitque aquas quae erant sub firmamento ab his quae erant super firmamentum et factum est ita
WLC
καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός γενηθήτω στερέωμα ἐν μέσῳ τοῦ ὕδατος καὶ ἔστω διαχωρίζον ἀνὰ μέσον ὕδατος καὶ ὕδατος καὶ ἐγένετο οὕτως
וַיַּ֣עַשׂ אֱלֹהִים֮ אֶת־הָרָקִיעַ֒ וַיַּבְדֵּ֗ל בֵּ֤ין הַמַּ֨יִם֙ אֲשֶׁר֙ מִתַּ֣חַת לָרָקִ֔יעַ וּבֵ֣ין הַמַּ֔יִם אֲשֶׁ֖ר מֵעַ֣ל לָרָקִ֑יעַ וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן׃
LXX
καὶ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸ στερέωμα καὶ διεχώρισεν ὁ θεὸς ἀνὰ μέσον τοῦ ὕδατος ὃ ἦν ὑποκάτω τοῦ στερεώματος καὶ ἀνὰ μέσον τοῦ ὕδατος τοῦ ἐπάνω τοῦ στερεώματος
She is serious, for two reasons.
First of all, if you make an assertion, it is your responsibility to justify it if challenged to do so.
Secondly, there is an infinite number of different search terms that you can enter into Google. Some of them may give the results that you are thinking of; some of them may not. Some of them may miss the point of what you are saying altogether. By telling us to search Google for ourselves, you are basically telling us to read your mind.
I’m sorry, but asking us to do your Google searches for you is just laziness.
Not necessarily. We’ll examine what it says, go back to the original sources, look to see whether what you quote accurately reflects the context of what was said, and check whether it gets its facts straight. Only if it quote mines, or gets its maths wrong, or doesn’t make sense, or makes claims that we can demonstrate to be untrue, will we reject it out of hand.
Nobody’s opposing YEC for the sake of opposing YEC here. What we’re opposing is sloppy thinking, falsehood, unjustified assertions, and resistance to correction.
Finally. You’ve just made my entire case.