Change and Time in Genesis

Faith & Science Conversation
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I agree. Ancient people had impressive evidences for creation, which we also have. They saw how the solar system changes during a lifetime. We observe how the universe changes throughout cosmic history, with telescopes.

All people, before the philosophers, believed in change. For example, they recorded close planet passages and the crushing of a great watery planet. Job gave God the credit for clearing the skies after the planet crushing in Job 26. The pillars of heaven tremble And are amazed at His rebuke. He quieted the sea with His power, And by His understanding He shattered rah’hav. By His breath the heavens are cleared; His hand has pierced the fleeing serpent. Behold, these are the fringes of His ways; And how faint a word we hear of Him! But His mighty thunder, who can understand?

They saw the crushed watery planet and thanked God fro saving the Earth. They interpreted everything with change instead of science. Why? that was the worldview of all people everywhere before the Greeks tried to invent science.

The only reason science works locally is because the medieval Catholics “solved” the problem the Greeks could not. They invented the basic assumption that matter is not changing itself (that the essence of substance is changeless). Scientists use this assumption as the basis for their mathematical time, mass and gravity definitions. Science works because it uses the assumption the Bible predicted for the last days: that all things remain the same.

However, the more scientists try to understand the past, the more ridiculous are their myths: big bang, invisible matter, black holes, vacuums that stretch light, the accretion of stars from dust and subduction. All of these myths are needed to support the basic creed of all scientists, that matter is not shifting its properties relationally as it ages. Matter is OBSERVED to always shift its properties in parallel, relationally. Therefore, none of the operational definitions of physics are valid, even though they work so accurately locally.

By the way, the Grand Canyon is not evidence for Noah’s flood or a young Earth. It is evidence that the oceans used to stand with the land, internal to the continents. The fossils are marine, often found in situ. Shale and limestone and sandstone formed in the sub-crustal seas. Notice that this was a dynamic world with billions of of marine creatures. Why no dinosaurs? Because dinosaurs were evidently not swimming in the sub-crustal seas. They were air breathing creatures, even the aquatic dinosaurs.

But from Adam to Noah’s 600th year is only 1536 years. So? Everything changes. The orbits accelerate along with the accelerating atomic clocks as we observe in the visible history of billions of spiral galaxies. Ancient days and years were vast geological ages, as Job so plainly explained during the dinosaur era. He grew thick Neanderthal brows as he watched the Nile incise a canyon deeper than the grand canyon. Isreal even explains that the days and years of teh son are shorter and worse than the days and years of the fathers. How could days and years change? Gravity evidently is what emerges from matter as it changes it properties. It has an aberration. The Sun pulls more on the dawn than the sunset steadily accelerating days and years, while pushing orbits outward into logarithmic spacings.

Understanding biblical history in the ancient changing worldview, is diametrically opposite to understanding it with science and theories of time.

Victor
Changing Earth Creationists are not like Young Earth or Old Earth Creationists

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Well I just note that when presented with a question for which you have no answer you just fall back on your “everything is changing” speech.

The ancients could see the sun, moon, and stars. They had no concept of the planets and of course to the naked eye the planets appear as wandering stars. The earth did not move, but the sun and stars did. So exactly what did they see change?

The shale and sandstone wasn’t formed under the ocean. They contain terresterial fossils. Some of the sandstone contains tracks of terresterial animals and cross bedding which shows it was deposited on the surface and not under water. Some of the sandstone was formed under fresh water. None of this supports your theory. You really should read the book.

You keep wanting to put vast amounts of time into those early “years.” So what exactly is your definition of time? Has the current time changed from Adam’s time? Is an Adam second the same length of time as a current second?

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The Sumerians drew the planets with crescent shapes, like we draw the moon. The 7,000 Babylonian omens focus on planet positions and conjunctions. They described the surface of the planets and their moons. How did they know that Mars had two tiny moons, when we did not discover this until recently? They feared the great years when the planets would pass closely and ravage the Earth. The major pagan gods were planet gods. In their system, older planets were being pushed back into the cold and dark (Tartarus) as newer planets fought battles in which the orbits were rearranged (Babylonians called these the tablets of destiny). The Bible describes the same kinds of planet catastrophes, such as Joshua’s long day. (The pagans also mention when the Sun remained on one side of the Earth during a close encounter. The reason the Earth alters its spin axis during a close passage is called precession. What we could call tidal tsunamis ravaged the lowlands during these catastrophes, according to the Greek accounts). The Bible mentions the crushing of a watery planet four times. (During the Judges era, Baal (Jupiter) would disappear into the underworld for one lunation every every 13 lunations. The Canaanites conducted monstrous orgies trying to bring Baal back into the visible sky. Worshiping the planet gods Baal and Asteroth (Venus) were forbidden, yet the Isrealites regularly gave in the the pagan orgies.

[quote=“Bill_II, post:210, topic:5594”]
The shale and sandstone wasn’t formed under the ocean. They contain terrestrial fossils. Some of the sandstone contains tracks of terresterial animals and cross bedding which shows it was deposited on the surface and not under water. Some of the sandstone was formed under fresh water. None of this supports your theory. You really should read the book.

Peter wrote that the ground (Greek ge) was actively standing in the same place as the waters (Greek synistemi). The land was standing out of the water and in the water and was later destroyed by the water. The water was not sill and quiet. It was dynamic and moving. Combine Day two with Proverbs 8:28 and we find that hot water geysers existed in that era that ejected water into space that formed clouds (possibly rings) of ice. According to day two, the spreading atmosphere formed concurrently with the water being separated above the spreading atmosphere. Evidently the geysers were spewing out gases along with the water, like the hot geysers on Enceladus that is also forming ice clouds in space.

By the garden phase, it no longer rained. Rivers divided and flowed around, but not into the modern oceans that did not exist in that era. Instead water emerged from the ground to water the entire surface of the Earth. Notice that the water is dynamic and probably hot, geothermal in nature. The early rivers, lakes and deep caves are active places where hot water is moving around. Even today, we still find anaerobic life that lives in geothermal hot water deriving its energy (not from the sun) but the Earth’s own heat and consuming minerals, such as sulfur. These are non mitochondrial life, that still exist today.

Moses had no concept of time, like all early (pre-philosophy) peoples. He had no words for time or verb tenses to modulate events with an external entity: time. They understood durations with the way nature continues to change, not with time. In the ancient system, days and years continually shorten and worsen for each generation (See Genesis 47:9).

We can see the past to the creation era. Ancient atomic clocks ticked at much less than 10% of the frequencies of modern atoms. At many ranges, throughout cosmic history, the clocks accelerate along with the outward accelerating orbits as billions of galaxies grew into huge growth spirals from the formless matter God created on the first day. Even local atomic clocks, when compare to their own reflections through the transponders of four spinning spacecraft also accelerate. They accelerate (relative to distance) in the same direction and approximate distance-rate as the atoms in hundreds of billions of galaxies. (Please recall that atomic clocks are really two clocks. The input radiator is tuned by the output counter for maximum emissions with a feedback circuit. When atoms keep changing themselves, the clocks keep tuning themselves to the changing atoms).

Change and science are opposite worldviews. Change is not a fall back position. It is the starting position for Changing Earth Creationist. The Bible plainly states that the creation is enslaved to change. There is no time. It is completely undetectable apart from philosophical speculations. Only change exists. The changes we observe are the very ones the Bible mentions. This is why we can be sure that the Bible will vanquish science, for His great glory.

Victor

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Kind of implies time exists.

Until it doesn’t.

But wait, yes it does.

Until you can describe what it is you believe in consistent terms it is hard to have a discussion.

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Yes. True. Shenanigans could happen. Undifferentiated does purport that I as subject am able to discern this “undifferentiation” which in and of itself is absurd, imo. As a judeo-christian I accept that God creates everything. If not then God at that moment is being differentiated by his very own creature…which is blashphemous in the pure sense.

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Actually the difficulty in rendering an understanding is that it is easy to be subject to a common world-view of which we accept as our own. Therefore anything that seems to question that world-view in terms of stating ideas and concepts linguistically and conceptually makes it more difficult to render an understanding. This is the same problem when an opposing or new-on-the-scene world-view is articulated before its time as Gadamer did in Truth and Method. All this has wide bearing significance on the issue of creation and creator , issues which are presented here in this forum. Actually a return to the German mystics would help in finding some agreements in some of the ways that creation/creator issues are presented here.

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You cannot stand firmly on a first principle while perusing through a nother worldview. You must at least temporarily abandon your first principle in order to view another. Sorry, there is no way to understand the history of the cosmos while still holding to the idea the Bible predicted for the last days. It used to grip my mind like a vise until I stopped trying to tailor the Bible to fit science.

I believe that change is fundamental. Nothing in the vast universe is without change. This is the worldview of all people before the Greeks tried to unseat this way of thinking with science. The Greeks understood that if everything is really hanging, science is impossible. This is why they debated for centuries trying to find a basis for science. The Greeks failed to find a basis for changelessness. The scholastics, because they wrote in Latin, were able to invent a new idea: that the essence of substance is changeless.

STARTING with this worldview, rather than Western science, we confirm the actual words of Biblical creation with optics, not science. We can see with sight in hundreds of billions of galaxies how the atomic clocks and the orbits accelerate together. There is no time. All there is is change.

Our ancestors lived for vast geological ages without imagining time. They used natures changes, the very ones we confirm in the geology of our planet and the visible history of the cosmos. The world is both old and young. It is old in age and young in years because days and years continue to accelerate throughout history, just like old man Israel implied. Every old person remembers how much slower life was in their youth. The optical parallax to the Sun and planets keeps decrease for century after century.

Why should days and years accelerate, relative to yesterday?

Visibly, the clocks and the orbits accelerate together throughout cosmic history. Evidently gravity is not a perpetual motion effect (as Newton and Einstein imagined). It is what emerges from matter as it visibly changes its properties (its lock speeds).

Gravity has an aberration. It only travels at light speed. This means teh Sun pulls more on the dawn than the sunset. This accelerates days and years together while pushing all orbits outward into logarithmic spacings (as we observe in the solar system, exoplanets and the arms of spiral galaxies)

Victor

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In your universe maybe, but Newton defined gravity as action at a distance. No propagation time. Einstein has come up with the correct explanation as a force due to a curved spacetime due to an objects mass. Einstein’s general relativity has been confirmed many times.

You really need to try to describe this in a better method. Sunrise and sunset are just moments in time for a given location. As soon as that moment passes there are another two points on the earth’s surface that are experiencing sunrise and sunset. How does this lead to any type of acceleration? You need to define acceleration also as it is currently defined as a change in velocity over a period of time. How do you define it in terms of your change theory?

You keep using modern terms which according you to can’t be correct without defining what those terms mean to you.

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Indeed, Newton assumed instant action at a distance without propagation delay. This was appropriate to his concept of time. He imagined that time runs at the same speed irregardless of anything else in the universe. (See his definitions in the scholium of his Principia). All places in his universe run the same “time.” Perhaps, this is why he imagined that gravity has no propagation delay.

Einstein also imagined that time exists and it is measured with clocks. He allows one particular clock to run at the same speed irregardless of anything else in the universe. He calculates the variable speed of clocks with this “formula time.” His formula time only exists in formulas and does not have to track with any clock. Formulas time is based on the medieavl notion that matter is not changing as it ages.

Several experiments using gravimeters during eclipses show that the Sun and moon’s effects on the Earth propagate at light speed.

The BOW of the Earth is the dawn. It is Approximately 90 degrees from the Sun pointing forward to our motion along the ecliptic. Since gravity (whatever it is) has a delay, this means that the Sun’s pull on the Earth has a tangential effect. It pulls more on the Dawn than the Sunset. This accelerates days and years together as it also pulls the orbits outward. The tangential effect of gravity decreases with the square root of the distance, unlike the straight pull that decreases with the square of the distance. This is because it is proportional to the speed of the Earth along its orbit.

There is a simpler explanation for the universe that uses different assumptions from Newton and Einstein. All matter is observed to change relationally throughout cosmic history. Relational change can explain what we observe in the universe without invoking complex mathematics. All atoms change themselves. The changes are relational, affected by the local environment as well as age. We confirm this without relying on undetectable things like space time. We can see the past at many ranges to the creation era. Atomic clocks keep speeding up as the orbits propagate outwards and matter’s volume increases.

Change is the opposite of science. Yet change can explain the visible history of the universe. The atoms and the orbits visibly accelerate together as billions of galaxies become spreading things (raqiya) as in the literal text for day four.

Changing Earth Creation is not like scientific creationism.

Victor

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Changes in the force of gravity do propagate at light speed. But there you go again referring to time as if it exists.

Only changes in gravity have a delay. No change, no delay. And there is that pesky reference to time agin.

Since you say science is all wrong, what tells you this is what is happening? You keep trying to sound all sciency in your descriptions.

Wait, there is no time so how do you get history?[quote=“godsriddle, post:217, topic:5594”]
The atoms and the orbits visibly accelerate together as billions of galaxies become spreading things (raqiya) as in the literal text for day four.
[/quote]

And this reminds me, you keep mentioning spiral galaxies. How do you explain the many other galaxies that are NOT in the shape of a spiral? Let me guess, they are too “young” to have assumed the spiral shape.

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You have said that, but if you look at the earth in relation to the sun, light leaving the sun would hit at noon wee bit sooner that at the edges of dawn and dusk. Although the sun is so much larger, you would have to state that light from the exact same spot on the sun reaches the earth at noon first, as the sun is not a single point.

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Again, time has no actuality. Yet things happen in sequence separated by durations. The Bible lists the sequence of Creation and Earth history without ever admitting to the existence of time. All ancient societies used the changes observed in nature to record when, not time. They did not even have words for time or verb tenses to refer to time. They only monitored the changes observed in nature. We can see the history of the universe. You don’t have to imagine undetectable things like time to see the past. You can just compare the shape and colors of ancient faith, distant galaxies with the colors and shapes of local galaxies. All we see is change: We can’t see a shred of evidence for time, mass or energy. These things were contrived with the medieval, Catholic idea that the essence of substance is changeless. Yet we can see how the colors shift along with the growing shapes of galaxies as they continue to become spreading things, just like God commanded them. The orbits accelerating outwards violates every definition and law of physics. How could that be? Modern physics was contrived on the false idea the Bible predicted for the last days: the notion that all things remain the same (2 Peter 3:3-6).

In the case of the delay in the propagation of gravity from the Sun and Moon, the experimenters on solid ground in Eastern China compared when the gravimeters changed during eclipses. The experiment shows that today, gravity from the Sun travels at approximately light speed. If this were so, then days and years MUST accelerate since the Sun must pull more on the dawn than the sunset. Old man Israel claimed, like the pagan poets, that the days and years of the son are shorter and worse than the days and years of the father. You can’t say it more clearly.

Elliptical galaxies seem to be the parents of spirals. Elliptical galaxies do not rotate although later in their life they may begin to rotate, which is why some ellipticals are changing into spirals. Elliptical galaxies are often found in the heart of galaxy clusters that are awash with X-rays. The ellipticals eject star globs (quasar like globs) that often grow into small spirals.

Halton Arp (died a couple of years ago) was the observational astronomer who documented how quasars turn into galaxies as they intrinsically grow.

The Milky Way has a dozen small galaxies that were ejected from our core. In the case of the Magellanic galaxies, the remnants of a river of neutral hydrogen still link us to these satellite galaxies. What we see in the universe at all ranges is what God began to command on day four. He continues to command the lights in the plural heavens to become spreading things (Hebrew noun raqiya). Thousands of years later, he tells Isaiah that he continues to call the stars to come out. He continues to spread out the plural heavens (not the vacuum but the stars). We confirm what He says he does in the visible history of the universe, the only history that we see to the creation era.

By the way, we were discussing life that lives underground without energy from the Sun. Today’s NY Times (paywall) has an interesting article of researchers who collected water from warm rocks one mile down in a South African gold mine. (Gold was deposited by bacteria in quartz veins in a saturated water environment.) They found bacteria that eat nitrogen and sulfur. They even found a tiny worm that eats bacteria that live on minerals, not the energy of the Sun. God manages his creation in astonishing ways.

Victor

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I am pretty sure this is the definition of time.

Where in the Bible does the Bible call itself the Bible? Answer, nowhere. Now does that mean the Bible doesn’t exist?

Because that is all they had. If you take one of the ancient water clocks you have talked about and filled it with water would it mark the same passage of time today that it did when it was new? If yes, why?

So if I take a baseball bat and gently hit a piece of glass that won’t break it, but if I take a good swing and hit the glass rapidly it does break. You don’t think that is a good example of the kinetic energy of the bat?

No we were discussing one organism that you said lives underground when we know that it needs sunlight. You dance around this but never answer the question, how?

You are going to have to draw a picture of this. Sunrise and sunset are both about 90 degrees from the sun. Those points have the same velocity relative to the Earth’s orbit, about 1040 mph, Those points are not moving relative to the sun so they would have 0 velocity relative to the sun. So what is geting pulled on? And you always state this as fact. Where did you find this? What is the source? I will note that I am assuming a circular orbit and ignoring the tilt of the earth’s axis but I don’t think that matters in this discussion.

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The Earth moves around the Sun. One side faces the Sun. One side faces the night sky. The instantaneous interface between the sunny side and the night side are two positions on the surface of the Earth: dawn and sunset. Dawn always faces to bow of the Earth, the part that lies in the plane of the ecliptic facing the “windshield”. (Meteorites tend to fall into the dawn sky because we run into them like running into insects as we motor down a freeway). The sunset is the instantaneous part of our surface that faces “our wake.”

We detect that the pull of the Sun actually travels at ~ the speed of light. YOu don’t need to imagine that “time” exists to detect this. You can just compare how the Earth surface distorts with a relative delay during an eclipse. The distortion from the Sun happens with five hundred time more delay than the distortion from the moon, therefore gravity appears to propage at light-speed. This means that the Sun’s pull is offset about 20" arc ahead in the direction of our motion around the Sun. If this is so, then the Sun must accelerate days and years throughout cosmic history so modern days would be a tiny fraction of an ancient day. Why? It pulls more on the dawn than the Sunset. This also pulls orbits outwards away from the Sun. This effect increases with distance but also decreases with the orbital speed. (Evidently this is why exoplanets, planets and the arms of spiral galaxies typically have logarithmic spacings. Logarithms are evidence for incremental and continuous changes.

Indeed, we have records of people traveling much farther in a day than we could with similar means. Jacob went about 350 miles from the neighborhood of Haran to the mountains of Gilead in 7 days. A similar journey today, driving suckling lambs, could easily take two months. Xenophon and Alexander could march further in a day than modern armies could on foot. A woman from Shunem makes a extraordinary trip on a donkey to Mount Carmel and back in an afternoon. A Levite leaves Bethlehem late in the afternoon and arrives at Gebeah as the Sun sets. Even the Apostle Paul is accompanied by spear men on a night march from the fortress of Antonia in a portion of a night, an extra ordinary march. How could they travel such long distances in short periods? Because ancient days and years really were much longer than modern days and years as Jacob explains to Pharaoh. Job explains the vast geological phenomena associated with the few days of life during the dinosaur era (such as the Mediterranean dries). Nothing in the whole universe is fixed and constant. Everything is changing because the visible properties of all matter keep shifting throughout cosmic history. Friar Thomas was wrong, which is why western science will catastrophically fail just like the omens of Marduk failed.

What could cause days and years to continually accelerate? Accelerate relative to what? To yesterdays rotations and orbit. The visible history of spiral galaxies is your friend. Orbits accelerate outwards as the colors of light shift from infrared to UV. We see a correlation. The atomic clocks accelerate along with the outward accelerating orbits that do not close but open outwards. Evidently gravity is not some sort of perpetual motion effect as in Newton and Einstein. Orbits accelerate along with the atomic light. Evidently it is the force that emerges from atoms as they continue to shift their properties throughout cosmic history.

Change and science are diametrically opposite worldviews. the Bible was written by people who told Earth history stories based on change, not time. Time was not even invented yet by philosophers when Moses wrote about Creation.

Victor

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Does anybody remember dscsccc? If he were around right now we could just situate godsriddle and him up in a private thread together, and then peek in every couple months or so to see if either one said anything off message.

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20" towards the sun or 20" away from the sun? To me pull means it is towards the sun, but you are the one defining things.

Why? What is different between sunrise and sunset?

You do know that as an object is pulled into a smaller orbit that it’s speed increases. Just like an ice skater when they pull their arms in. It is called conservation of angular momentum. But I forget that is science and it must be wrong, even when you can see it with your own eyes.

Longer than what? Time doesn’t exist.

As I pointed out, and you ignored, that is the definition of time.

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Glad I could make you smile, Eddie! You have to admit though, that such patience and perseverance (as is shown by Bill and others here) in trying to show them the error of their ways can also be an admirable and perhaps profitable thing (to others at least, even if not to the recipient addressed).

@godsriddle, you have seemingly planted your flag firmly on the hill of your faithfully repeated lines … “Change and science are opposite worldviews”, “ancient peoples had no notion of time”, “the bible will vanquish science”, etc. --repeated enough, in fact, that it has the feel of attempted indoctrination --that you are satisfied even just to get us repeating your mantra.

While some of us may accuse you of focusing on distracting fixations and still getting it wrong even where your attention is fixed, it occurs to me that you and others could level the same charge at ECs here: that undue attention is being brought to bear on disputable issues (although unlike you, the ECs are actually attending to evidence to back up what they are saying.) But on the question of distraction; I do actually have one bit of agreement with you. Science can be a distraction, especially where it is lifted up as a Promethean competitor to set against Christianity. And those who have historically embraced and promoted that contest have unfortunately accumulated faithful disciples such as you, who now have intellectually and spiritually locked yourselves into that arena. Let me suggest that for you, science has already “won” – by its very possession of your locked attention to this manufactured contest. In that regard, you can call yourself whatever you want, but you occupy the same space as the very militant YECs from whom you try to distance yourself.

The one thing that you (and all of us) stand in need of being reminded is that our fixation, our central reason for everything we do as Christians, is bound up in the life, teachings, death, resurrection, and hope that we have in Christ. All pretentious powers and authorities (including science if that functions as one of these for you) have already been vanquished under his authority. Indeed, they got nailed to the cross: Colossians 2. And that (the cross) is our calling in Christ here and now already. Christ crucified is already the one necessary stumbling block that is worthy to cause us to stumble as indeed it does. All other stumbling blocks that would come between us and that cross are no better than millstones around people’s necks. And that is what sets the Biologos project apart from yours – they are busy removing a huge unnecessary stumbling block while you and so many others are not only trying to keep it in place, but to polish it!

I’m not saying that Biologos (or more accurately the great variety of its workers, supporters, and participators here) have everything perfectly right or don’t have to be confronted about other stumbling blocks of their own; we are all human. But I think God is using them mightily and in a needed way --more in some parts of the world than others perhaps. Scriptures do not give us leave to set aside either God’s word or his works as testimony, all of which is to be taken seriously. And science (or knowledge --it may not make Paul’s ‘top three’ list of faith, hope, and love, but it does make Peter’s list in II Peter 1:5) in its proper subordinated place can be just one more useful kingdom tool to help level that road we need to trod.

-Merv

“The cross is not a detour or hurdle on the way to the kingdom. Nor is it even the way to the kingdom. It is the kingdom come.”
–John Howard Yoder in “The Politics of Jesus”

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I absolutely agree that the death burial and resurrection of Jesus is the focus of our faith. We never come to faith through humanist knowledge, but by the Word and God’s choosing.

The biblical grammar does agree with some aspects of “Evolutionary Creationists.” According to Genesis 3, all animals were put under the passive continuing in unbroken continuity curse. All animals passively change. God also lists the weather and a number of animals that he specifically changed since creation. He says he did it in Job 38-40. Yet animals never (by reproduction) become different kinds of animals (Genesis 1).

Why is it important to examine science rather than use it to interpret the Scriptures?

  1. Because Peter wrote: know this first that in the last days mockers will come following their lusts. Then he lists three other identifying features of the last days. They have a first law (arch ktisis) that all things remain the same. Indeed, modern science developed only in the West where the notion that “the essence of substance is changeless” came from the medieval scholastics. What scientists define as evidence and their mathematical methods were founded on the principle that matter IS NOT changing itself continually.

  2. Peter lists two areas where the evidence stands in opposition to this first principle but the last day mockers disregard this.

  3. The plural heavens came out long ago (ouranoi ek palai). In Peter’s day, people could not use telescopes to see all the way back to the creation era. We do see the visible history of galaxies and indeed the galaxies spread out from tiny globs of primordial matter that visibly has different properties than modern matter. At many ranges and in billions of examples, we observe that, as the properties of all matter shift relationally (together), stars emerged and spread out often growing into huge, local growth spirals. God commanded the plural eons to passively form as lights appeared from things not seen (Hebrews 11:3 Greek).

  4. Earth’s water used to stand with the land. Later, that water destroyed the land. Indeed, all the ancient oceans stood on the continents. We find millions of cubic kilometers of marine fossils (chalk, limestone and shale) only on the continents, not in the younger, newer oceans. The continents fit together on a minuscule globe.

The idea that the Bible will defeat science is NOT MINE. Paul warned believers to not seek to be wise in this age. It is better to be stupid (moros) so that we may become wise. Why? The wisdom of this age is moros. Besides God is taking the wise in their craftiness. He knows that the reasoning of the wise are being vain (1 Cor 3:18-20).

Victor

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First, what is your definition of “the last days?” I know how it is used in the NT, but would like to hear what you think it means.

Are you translating arch ktisis as “first law?” Where do you find this? I am not seeing it in my English-Greek Interlinear. I do see arches ktiseos which translates as “beginning of creation.”

One more comment, the text in Greek panta which is translated “all things” does not always refer to material objects. It is also used to refer to spoken words for example. In this context it is not referring to matter. The full context is “They will say, ‘Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.’” (NIV) The scoffers, or mockers, were basically saying nothing about life has changed since the creation so why should we expect a change now?