Change and Time in Genesis

I have to save this one to the folder in which I’m collecting “bizarre claims made on the internet”. It has become like a zoo of interesting species. Soon I will be able to make a multi-million-dollar enterprise in which people receive a tour through the most extraordinary views expressed on the internet:

“Now, if we look to the right, we see a very rare view called “Changing Earth Creationism”. Proponents are difficult to find in the wild, but some say you can lure them to your web page using blog posts on the book of Genesis.”

Sorry for the satire Victor, I trust you can handle a joke :slight_smile: .

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Bizarre means strange or unusual, unconventional, unorthodox. Biblical creation is unusual and unconventional. In our day, Creation is doubly unusual because most scientists claim there is no evidence.

My claim stands.

  1. We Christians should interpret the literal creation account with grammar instead of longstanding Catholic traditions.

  2. We must use the evidence the biblical God points to in Isaiah: this is the evidence for what I do. He commands us in the imperative to lift up our eyes and see what he does in unbroken continuity, calling the stars to continually come out. Trillions of star streams emerged and spread out from point-like galactic cores which violates every definition and law of Western science.

  3. If we interpret this simple, non mathematical evidences with the worldview of the biblical authors, change instead of science, we find overwhelming visible support for the creation. We also see how God will triumph over the wise of this age, as he predicts that he will (I Corinthians 1).

Why would God want to defeat Western science? What is in it for him? Glory! The praise and honor of those simple folk who believed his word and put their faith in Jesus’ death for our sins. The last will be first and the first will be last. He is taking the wise of this age (1 Cor 3:18-20) with their skills. He warns us to accept foolishness rather than the wisdom of this age so that we do not deceive ourselves. Notice that he is not a deceiver. He made the universe exactly like he said. It is science that using the medieval assumptions upon which it was contrived: time and immutable matter to measure synthetic unreal things.

How will the Bible triumph over science? Bigger and more sensitive telescopes are coming on line every year. Statistical evidence from the XHUDF (Wide Field Camera 3 that observes from near infrared to near UV) suggest that a minimum of 5 trillion galaxies exist.

Scientists, however try to interpret this with their mathematical empiricism, rather than optics. This has resulted in the greatest mythology in human history: scientific ad hoc stories about how the universe began. Only the LITERAL biblical text supports the visible creation of the universe.

Victor

What does the biblical text actually say about animals changing?

(1) In Genesis 3 he cursed all the animals with a passive (continuing in unbroken continuity) curse. All the animals are to passively change. Previously, he commanded them to reproduce after their kinds. Animals don’t change into other kinds. Change happens to all animals, the serpent more than the others. However, God did not cause the changes since the curse is passive voice. In a similar manner, God cursed the ground with a passive continuing in unbroken continuity curse. He did not create the thorns and thistles, they passively sprang out of the ground because of Adam’s disobedience. All animals change passively for the worse. This is the opposite of evolution since it is degenerative.

(2) God himself continues to change nature as he explains in Job 38 - 40. He is loving to all he made. For example, in Job he talks of the mountain goat. Mountain goats have special adaptations for climbing up almost vertical cliffs. God gave them these since creation because there were no mountains in the early Earth (Genesis 2). God says he feeds the lions and the ravens, carnivores and omnivores. (Job 38). Yet these animals were fruit eaters in the garden phase. Countless genetic and lifestyle changes are needed to change a herbivore into a carnivore. God claims it was He who did these. In Job 38-41, God claims He changes many things in the world of physics and among the animals, since creation. Change that preserves life we should ascribe to God, not to random mutations that degrade all living things. (By the way, carnivores were needed when the world was no longer covered with thick vegetation. Now the herbivore eat the vegetation and the carnivores eat the herbivores and this allows for twice as much life as plants alone could support).

By the way, Job 14 is one of the best places in the Bible to understand how our ancestors lived long ago. Job says man who is born of woman is of few days. A tree can die, its roots parched in the ground. However, at the scent of water it sends up shoots and lives again. But man, when he dies will not rise until the resurrection. Job says I will wait until my change comes. You will call and I will answer. He expects that with his own eyes he will see his redeemer.

Then Job lists what it was like when dinosaurs wallowed in the Jordan river. He uses the dried Mediterranean sea (Hebrew word west) as one of his markers for a lifetime. Indeed, drill cores show that the Med dried repeatedly leaving thick layers of plankton oozes sandwiched between layers of salt and gypsum. (Scientists claim the last Med drying was five million years ago. Biblical Job was a distant descendant of Noah. Another of Job’s lifetime markers was that water wears away stones and washes away the dust of the Earth. Near Job’s home, the Nile river wore a canyon into granite deeper than the Grand Canyon. Evidently the water was rushing down to the mostly evaporated Mediterranean. (A channel at Gibraltar shows how the Med refilled from the young Atlantic). Job also states that water washes away the dust of the Earth. The Nile completely filled up its canyon and covered it with a great delta after the Med filled up again. Job ends his poem on the brevity of life by claiming their faces intensely changed in unbroken continuity before they died (verse 20). If you lived long enough to watch the Mediterranean dry, to watch vast, slow geological changes, you would grow thick Neanderthal brows from vast age. (The skull is the only part of our skeleton that gradually changes as we age.) Neanderthal child skulls look like modern children, clear evidence that Neanderthals grew their features from old age. They were not precursors to humans. Their genetics was probably purer than ours, since they lived for vast geological ages in few days, as Job explained.

Victor

The Bible has the answers you are looking for, not someone knowledgeable in the theory of evolution. Please notice the three biblical passages I focused on. They plainly explain the issue that evolutions argue.

First all animals and plants change, as God commanded them to with a passive continuing in unbroken continuity. Yet he also commanded them to only reproduce after their kinds. A fish does not change into a land animal by means of reproduction.

Please look at the passage where God claims to feed the lions. All animals were herbivores in the garden phase. For a herbivore to change into a carnivore is not a gradual, genetic mutation process. All the changes must happen in parallel, suddenly. Lions have different digestive systems, different teeth and different dispositions from herbivores. Since God claims to feed the lions, who according to the Bible were originally herbivores, then Christians should take him at his word.

When mutations happen they reduce the animal’s quality of life.

When God changes animals since the creation, it is not a one off thing. You will find that he changes several species so that they have long range relationships.

Change is not contrary to the scriptures. It is animals having a common ancestor that is contrary to the scriptures.

Victor

I think that many churches feel that if they give up on Genesis as description of God’’ actual creation then it helps to undermine the bible.The bible has become subjected to a lot of cultural and historical criticism and therefore to give in to sicience against Genesis helps to undermine the rest. The argument is that if we can’t trust the bible on Genesis creation then we can’t trust it on salvation either. I don’t go with rthat argument but I can see why people may be fearful in that way.

However I come back to some things I’ve learned from Bonaventure and Duns Scotus, that knowlege obtained in the world and about the world can be God’s truth. We can look at the world with our senses (and scientific instruments) and yet also recieve a different sort of truth from revelation in the scriptures.

We know that large mammals appeared on Earth… and we know these large mammals (like Elephants and Rhinos and Whales) appeared long after dinosaurs disappeared.

So, I have to say “busted” to your theory that animals haven’t changed… or haven’t changed a lot… or that there hasn’t been enough time for them to change a lot.

All 3 of these statements are proved false by the animal/fossil record.

I see you looked up my reference to the Nile River Canyon. However can you explain how the Nile River cut the canyon through multiple layers of sedimentary rocks that contain fossils (had to have been laid down before the river cut through them) and then the crystalline basement rock. That takes a lot of time. Then the Mediterranean Sea had to fill the canyon at which point the canyon would be full of sea water. Then the Nile River would have to gradually fill this canyon with the sediment carried from the head waters. It would take a very long time to fill the canyon and then generate the current delta that extends out into the Mediterranean. And all of this was accomplished in just 6000 rotations around the sun?

BTW, full details can be found here, Naturalis Historia - The Lost Grand Canyon of Egypt

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Looking at the word with senses is not like measuring it with scientific instruments. Duns Scotus helped form the basis for scientific measuring by modifying some of Thomas’ ideas about the nature of substance. Most scientific measuring units depend on the medieval notion that matter is not changing with with age.

The Creation account is the only version of beginnings that we confirm with telescopes. We see the actual words in Genesis confirmed in galactic history. However, what we see is not scientific at all. Only visible in all parts of the spectrum.
Victor

The Bible tells us the reason why marine fossils, such as hundreds of feet of chalk, lie under surface rocks with terrestrial fossils. Let’s review the grammatical creation account.

  1. God’s wind dithered in unbroken continuity above the dark surface of the Earth as he continues to command light. Indeed, light dithers around within every atom continuing to go give it extension to this very day. Most of the verbs in the creation account show continuing actions, continuing commands and actions that repeat in unbroken continuity. Unfortunately Bible scholars stick to the Latin traditions when translating the creation account.

  2. God continued to command a spreading atmosphere to form between waters above the spreading atmosphere and waters below the spreading atmosphere on day 2. Day two uses the noun form of the Hebrew word to continually spread out (raqiya) five times. Proverbs 8:28 tells us that the water firm was firm and in the form of fine material, put their when the geysers of the tehom were powerful. Evidently it was in the form of ice rings, like the ice rings found around the outer planets. We observe hot water and gases emerging from the surface of the moon Enceladus right now today. The water forms fine ice in space, exactly as we read of in the Proverbs 8:28 text.

  3. Then the surface waters gathered into one place into multiple seas. However, there was only one continent (singular noun in Hebrew). Evidently the water (one of the smallest molecules even today) seeped underground so that the single continent appeared. Indeed, the continents fit together into a single land mass (on a much smaller globe) before the younger, modern oceans began to form. As Peter explained, the water used to stand with the land and this water later destroyed the land. Indeed, ancient oceans were largely sub-crustal residing in shallow seas, cave and lakes that existed only on the single continent. Hundreds of feet of marine chalk and limestone, sometimes with inclusions of chert that fell down from the roof of the cave, are found only on the continents. The remains of these ancient oceans contain billions of marine fossils attesting to the biblical statement that the multiple sees teemed with living things back in Adam’s era.

So why are surface rocks with terrestrial fossils found in canted layers above the marine layers? Again, the Bible alone has answers to Earth history. Over a period of 190 days, the sub crustal seas collapsed and the water cataclysmically roared out onto the surface as the ice also rained down. (The word for flood is a misnomer. In Hebrew it evidently means a violent flow, a violent washing - cataclusmos- in Greek). The modern oceans did not begin to spread out until after the cataclysm, as we read of in Psalm 104. What triggered this cataclysm. Some ancient people believed it was a close encounter with a planet.

The modern oceans are all younger than the continents and continue to spread out along a global expansion seam. Hot mineral laden water and lava emerge from the core of the Earth all along this global expansion seam as the modern oceans continue to spread out. Our planet continues to grow, exactly like the Bible states that God continues in unbroken continuity to lay the foundations fo the Earth (Zech 12:1) and continues in unbroken continuity to spread out the Earth (repeated 3 times in the Scripture).

Why are scientific stories of beginnings so different from the Biblical record? Science was founded on the false idea the Bible predicted for the last days: the notion that all things remain the same. Scientists “measure” synthetic things like mass and time with their medieval notion that matter is not changing itself. Yet we can see the past. The orbits accelerate outwards as the visible properties of all matter keep shifting as billions of galaxies grew out from the formless matter God created first.

How great will be the triumph of God’s creation record over science. Only the literal text of day four can explain the visible history of how the billions of galaxies formed without invoking pure magic, like a big bang and vacuums that adjust the frequencies of passing light.

Victor

So hundreds of feet of chalk, formed by a marine phytoplankton that requires sun light to form their exoskeleton were growing in caves? How does that work?

So during the global flood this sea water rushed up to the surface, right? So you are saying the terrestrial fossils formed over the roof of the caves containing the oceans, right? But when was there enough time to lay down the many layers of terrestrial fossils? It would have had to happen between the fall and the flood.

And I have asked it before but will ask again. How did these deposits get lifted from the sea floor to the surface of the unchanging continents?

  1. Two thirds of the modern surface of the Earth is deep oceans. These oceans clearly did not exist in the early Earth. In fact, the modern oceans are all younger than the continents. The Earth spreads out in unbroken continuity above the waters (Psalm 136:6). Indeed, a global expansion seam keeps on spewing out basalt and hot mineral laden waters from deep in the Earth. The Biblical God says he is the one who continues in unbroken continuity to lay the foundations of the Earth (Zech 12:1) and to spread out the Earth in unbroken continuity.

  2. Area of a sphere = 4 pi r^2. Therefore, the ancient Earth surface, which was a single continent according to Genesis chapter 1, was 1/3 = 4 pi r^2; 1/12pi = r^2 ; r^2= .02652 and r= 16% of the modern Earth’s radius. During Adam’s garden phase, the radius of the Earth was 16% of its modern radius.

  3. So where did the ancient oceans reside? In the tehom, the great deep, that existed only on the single continent. The water stood with the land, as Peter described in 2 Peter 3. Later that water gushed out onto the surface, which is why canted layers of surface rocks overlay the chalks, limestone and shale of the ancient sub-crustal seas. The chalk grew in the great tehom, in hot water, in the sub crustal plural oceans that seeped underground on the first part of day three so that the singular dry land could appear. In that era it did not rain (a) because the Earth was surrounded by fine powdered ice (see the Hebrew text for Proverbs 8:28) and (b) there were no large surface oceans in that era. Why not? (c) Water came out of the ground, rivers flowed around the single land (not into the oceans) and there were no dessert plants (grass of the field) in that era. Why not? Genesis 2 explains why there were no dessert plants in that era. The entire surface of the earth was watered by by upwelling water back before there were any mountains or hills.

How did millions of cubic kilometers of chalk grow without sunlight, in the subcrustal oceans.? How do vast amounts of oil form deep underground without exposure to sunlight? Mineral eating bacteria live in hot water. Some bacteria eat sulfur, and so the oil they produce with their dead bodies is thick with sulfur. Oil is continuing to form in the hot waters that exist deep under the Earth even today. Oil wells that run out of oil, years later, are filled with oil again. Evidently the anaerobic bacteria that manufacture oil are still active in the hot water. Indeed, smokers spewing out hot water from deep in the Earth along the global expansion seam are loaded with bacteria. These bacteria eat minerals, not dead animals.

Chalks and limestone are the skeletal remains of the creatures that lived in the subcrustal oceans (tehom in Hebrew) that lived between day five and Noah. These anaerobic bacteria and tiny marine organisms formed the chalks and limestone that we only find on the former single continent, back when the Earth was 16% of its modern radius.

Understanding creation and Earth history with the ancient concept that everything is changing is diametrically opposite to trying to understand it by assuming the medieval Thomasian idea that matter is not changing itself.

We can see the past to the creation era. Every single galaxy clocks a different frequency than modern atoms, the most distant galaxies clocked much less than 10% of the frequencies of modern atoms. The orbits visibly accelerate outwards (in violation of every law of physics) as the volume of matter continues to increase and the light clock frequencies increase. Change and science are diametrically opposite ways of interpreting nature. The Biblical authors lived in the age when commoners understood the world with change, not science.

Victor

Chalk is not formed by anaerobic bacteria. Marine organisms would also require sunlight in order to live. Again, how does this happen in a cave? Life requires sunlight. And the chalk and limestone layers show there was a tremendous amount of life going on.

And I will ask yet again, how do you explain the Nile River Canyon?

Interesting. The would reduce gravity to 2.5% of it’s current value. I am not a physicist but that will have to make a big difference in the amount of atmosphere the earth could hold on to which is going to lead to a whole host of other problems,

@godsriddle

Your question is nothing like the assertion that I posed. The key to my question is the sudden appearance of large mammals in the spectrum of life … your comments about marine fossils is quite beside the point.

Perhaps I did not make myself clear. The marine life and the terrestrial fossils both existed together, in parallel, living in the same eras. One environment was above the other. The ancient seas stood with the land, existing only on what are now continents that have completely dissimilar geology from modern oceans.

During Noah’s 600th year, the ice dust in space around the Earth fell as rain during a period of forty days. They may have been perturbed by a close encounter with a large planet. The sub-crustal seas, teeming with life and already extant millions of cubic kilometers of marine chalks and limestone began to collapse. The collapse of the sub-crustal seas was not instantaneous. Perhaps they fell like dominoes, one after the other over a period of 190 days. We find shale, chalks and limestone, remnants of those ancient seas, only on the continents. These are laced with marine fossils, trillions of them. The sub-crustal seas squirted out onto the land, covering the highest point of land by a depth of 15 cubits.

The fountains of the great deep burst forth and the underground seas
collapsed and flowed up onto the land. Where did the water go? A wide valley (the first modern surface sea) opened up as the mountains rose. (There is no mention of mountains before the flood). Psalms 104:6-9 “You covered it with the deep as with a garment; The waters were standing above the mountains. At Your rebuke they continued to flee, At the sound of Your thunder they continued to hurry away. The mountains (continued) to rise; the valleys continued) to sink down To the place which You established (perfect verb) for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass over, So that they will not return to cover the earth.” Notice that a wide valley opened up as the mountains rose so that the waters of the cataclysm flowed down into the wide valleys. This is known as the isostatic equilibrium that still exists between the deep seas and the continents, both of which float on plastic layers deep far under the surface.

Notice that ancient seas were very different from modern seas. They existed in different environments. The modern seas continue to spread out along a global expansion seam that keep on producing basalt and streams of hot water that come out of the center of the Earth.

None of these evidences fit Friar Thomas’ idea that matter is not changing itself as it ages, the basic, historical assumption of scientists.

Victor

This conversation is truly amazing to me. Since post #149, not counting quotes, the primary author has typed 5,284 words. That’s 18 pages, extracted from a mere 12% of the thread. If those rates are constant (no ironic reference to changing over time intended!), we’d be looking at about 42,775 words, or 143 pages. He could have actually written a book to publish, and instead of reading his 143 pages, we all could have read a nice solid work of quality literature.

Amazing.

Sorry, this post does not contribute to the thread in any way. Just me expressing my awe.

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Your math here is incorrect. To find the earth’s new radius if it were to have 1/3 of its current surface area, you do NOT set
4pi r^2 = 1/3. You set 4pi r^2 = (1/3) 4 pi R^2
where r is the radius of your hypothetical small earth and R is the radius of the current earth. Then, solving for the ratio of r/R you get about 0.577 (the square root of 1/3 to be mathematical about it). It is then 58% of our current radius, not the 16% figure you give.

So … @Bill_II, if we play along with more “minor” assumptions, such as that this reduced earth still has the same density as our real one, its gravity would “only” be reduced to (1/3)g on this new smaller surface. Maybe that could help explain how the patriarchs lived so long. People age more slowly in lower gravity, right? Cue Einstein and relativity. Doesn’t time travel faster in lower-g environs? Come to think of it, that’s the opposite effect from what we want, and much too small --but we can shovel aside the less cooperative facts here.

In our lower-g world, people might grow taller too! --so we could work in an explanation for the Nephilim (the giants) of the day.

@Casper_Hesp, your file of bizarre claims may have its mother lode source right here. I think you’ve got your golden goose.

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Merv, without some compensating physiology the patriarchs would have died younger, from osteoporosis and coronary artery disease, if studies of astronauts are any guide.

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Pesky facts, Jon! People can overdose on those you know. I may exceed my daily allowance if I’m not careful.

I am wondering, though, why @godsriddle assumes that the pristine original earth starts with no oceans when Genesis one clearly states that God created the oceans and the multitudes of creatures in them.

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@godsriddle

While you fixate on separating the terrestrial and marine life forms… you lose your ability to explain the separation between terrestrial dinosaurs and large terrestrial mammals.

When T-Rex lived… there were no elephants. Then T-Rex disappeared …and suddenly elephants appeared.

I’m looking forward to the crazy explanation you come up with to explain both kinds of problems simultaneously.