Space is not a vacuum. I said that in my previous post. We have little idea what is out between the stars from our galaxy to the edge of the universe. We have even less knowledge of how God set up the universe, other than what he tells us in Genesis and a few insights in other books of scripture.
Think of what you must believe as a naturalist. We have no idea what is out in space at this moment. If it suddenly were to self-destruct from the furthest reaches and toward us, how long would it be gone before we had a clue?
I did say a "restating, not a retelling. there is a difference. restating is using similar words but casting the “context” in a different light. John is making sure that the Genesis story is connected directly with Yeshua Jesus as Creator.
the author of that piece is stating a fallacy. Just because the Genesis story is a foundational narrative, its veracity of truth is not the same as other creation narratives which must be validated on their own merits. The fact that the Gospel of John is lending veracity to the Genesis narrative is far beyond the veracity of the other ANE creation narratives,
Obviously, if you don’t believe in Genesis having any veracity in its continuity of 4,000 years of continued use by the Hebrew culture (as is not true of any other ANE creation myth) then your premise is correct.
Oh, yes! The quibbling is where the fun is! As long as it is not served with rancor, roast quibbling is a delicious dish! (and best served hot from the grill!)
The two categories (plants that grow wild and plants that are cultivated) do encompass all plants.
And the second creation story says no plants had sprung up when God formed man.
But if you want to read it differently, I can only say that you aren’t reading what is actually written.
And the plants are only one of the many differences between the two creation stories. In the second creation story, man was alone so God formed the animals in search of a partner for him. In the first creation story, man was created after the animals.
I’m sorry, but that’s nonsense. We have a much better idea of what is out between the stars from our galaxy to the edge of the universe than you think we do. And no, the methods we use to figure it out do not depend on “naturalism.”
There’s something you need to realise here, Patrick. The fact that we don’t know everything does not give you a free pass to pretend that we don’t know things that we actually do. And rejecting “naturalism” does not give you a free pass to make things up, invent your own alternative reality, or otherwise hand-wave away hard facts that you don’t like.
Yes I did. And I’m sorry, but you are the one who is not considering the implications. I responded to both articles with some specific points, and you haven’t even attempted to address them.
Patrick… Your link on the Beresheet Prophecy has blown me away! I have heard parts of it, but this is the first time I have seen the whole thing… I and indebted to you for posting this link!
The whole thing (i.e., the belief that the first word of the first book of the Bible contains such coded information) is rather unknown…that is, it is a suspicious rendition of the text. It has nothing to do with the topic of this particular post, but may explain one individual’s perspective. So read on for the rest of the debate here.
What is 4000 years if the earth is billions of years old? If Genesis 1-11 isn’t history, then we have no real understanding of sin, death and God. It’s all relegated to the dustbin of mythology, and there is no difference between the bible and the accounts of Zeus’ pantheon or Odin’s brood or the multitude of gods in India and the near east.
What most people, including the majority of Christians, don’t understand is the Bible is only the record of Elohim God’s dealings with humankind, AS IT CONCERNS HAVING A SOUL.
Adam and Eve were two particular "proto-people " who were chosen to be the recipients of Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit) being given, so they would have a relationship with the Creator himself. This is the culmination of long-term creation through evolution. The Garden of Eden was a special “protected place” made by God for the very purpose of this task of creating a “moral soul” of a people who could be in relationship to him: The very purpose of Creation itself and expressed in JOhn 3:1-21 (the center of which is John 3:16).
The time clock of Elohim God is exactly 7,000 years and running. Once a soul was embedded into Adam, and Eve the Bible became historically active.
When it refers to “the whole earth” it refers to the earth of those in whom are the progeny of Adam and Eve. Everything outside of that area is ignored. That area grows over the time of the writing changing and expanding as people with “souls” until Yeshua Jesus came when if covered the whole earth. The “people” outside of that sphere are not held to being accountable for moral actions and are outside the purview of Biblical history. In essence, they are not yet “people” because they had not yet been endowed with a moral soul (how this occurs is not given to us to know) or in direct contact with those with moral souls.
I know, most of my Christian brethren here will refute that, but it the only thing that accommodates both Science, and the Bible both being literally true at the same time.
The Bereshit Prophecy listed above is key to this scenario, which is not concerned with the physical creation. Genesis 1and 2 are foundational to the creation of a “moral being” not a physical being.
This scenario is the only way Genesis and an Old Earth chronology can be reconciled. It explains the existence of other people so Cain can have a wife, and the locality of the flood that covers “the whole known earth” but not the entire globe. Of course, it raises more questions, but none that are unsolvable.
Oh I don’t know about that. Do stories of Zeus and Odin animate your inner life? What actually speaks to your heart isn’t the same as what’s in the dust bin. You just have to claim it and be true to it for it broaden and enliven your world. If it does all that just be grateful and don’t be too insistent on everything making perfect sense.
We have quite good knowledge of the component of what’s in space that interacts with light - based on absorption spectra and the like, we can figure out quite well what the light is traveling through. As already stated, it is close enough to a vacuum to not have much effect on the speed of light, and because it slows the light down a tiny bit, it doesn’t help those young-earth arguments that require light to travel far faster than it actually does. The speed of light in a vacuum is c, the constant that turns up in so many places in modern physics. I did not say that space is a vacuum, but that the speed of light in a vacuum is a limit, which can’t be made faster. You said that an article indicated that the speed of light could be increased, but it was a bad headline of a news article based on another news article based on an actual experiment that changed the speed traveled by pulses of light and did not have anything to do with c. The speed of light through something (such as space) is less than c, but with that limit it could be higher or lower, depending on the density, elements present, etc. In short, there is nothing credible that can be done regarding the speed of light to avoid the conclusion that the night sky shows the universe existing far longer ago than young-earth claims allow. If you want to argue credibly, you need to carefully examine arguments and reject bad ones instead of tossing out random things that often don’t even support your position.
If the universe were suddenly to self-destruct from the furthest reaches toward us, we would have some clue before it was gone because we’d be gone if it were gone. Apart from that, the degree of warning we would have obviously would depend on how fast the destruction advanced and what sort of signal it might produce. But that’s irrelevant to the age of the universe.
A change in DNA has no more inherent meaning than FWIUBDGBFSD. Just as FWIUBDGBFSD might have some significance in some language, or as a code, TACGATCGATC might or might not code for anything useful in DNA. DNA changes in humanly unpredictable ways through mutations, duplications, recombination, etc. and thus produces all sorts of different sequences. Some of them prove to be compatible with the environment and thus persist; others do not. The computer analogy is not perfect, but effectively the environment would be the hardware and the DNA sequence (plus associated mechanisms of using it) would be the software. Both the environment and the DNA are constantly varying. Anything that’s a good enough match between the two survives into the next round. This wouldn’t be the most effective way to run a software company, although sometimes one suspects Microsoft of selling random variations as upgrades, but profit margin and efficiency are not particular concerns in evolution. Evolution works to make a lot of diversity.
Expanding earth is great in the same way that Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is a great movie - so bad, it’s entertaining. Particular problems include needing a viable cause for expansion, a source for all the extra matter so that expansion does not merely cause breaking into pieces, and the fact that it doesn’t match the actual evidences from either geophysical study of the earth’s interior or historical geology. In particular, expanding doesn’t account for most mountain ranges and other features that record collision and relative sideways motions of plates. The rocks underneath me show effects of high pressure with a dominant direction of pressure, as well as a mix of components coming from different sources. Both of those point to a collision. Go to the east end of the county, and you cross an abrupt change in rock reflecting a collision between two smaller plates; roughly another county either way and you find another such collision zone. Different parts of the earth’s surface have moved together, apart, or sideways relative to each other, as shown by their geologic features, and are doing so right now, as GPS indicates. A classic example of sideways motion is the San Andreas fault, where matching rocks on either side of the fault can now be found hundreds of kilometers apart along the fault direction. Expanding earth should just move things apart. It also wouldn’t give any help to make the earth be any younger.
Yeah… Nice try though! I immediatly thought about the change in gravity that would occur with the smaller earth volume, and of course the density of the matter. Besides, where did al the water come from?
Great entertainment…
BTW, grew up in southern calif and climbed all over the Vasquez rocks and the matching set 25 miles to the east… Been through all the big quakes until 1999 when I moved out of state.
Water is the least of problems if you believe there was an ice canopy around the earth. Even without it, there is still as much water locked in the rocks beneath us as in all the oceans put together. Some think many times more.
