Hi Victor,
I’m not asking you to respond to all suggestions. What I’m saying is that you would be a lot easier to follow if you were to indicate exactly what you are responding to. You can do this by selecting the part of our replies that you want to respond to and clicking the “quote reply” link that comes up. Also, if you think a specific point that one of us makes is incorrect or fallacious, it would be good if you could say exactly what is wrong with it.
Hope that helps.
> To prevent what is visible scientists fill the universe up with undetectable magic: the 99% invisible universe
I think he might be referring to dark matter here.
Victor, you have some interesting though unusual positions. If you don’t mind, share how you came to believing as you do.
`The table of content is there but it doesn't appear that the publisher is still in business. I wonder why.`
It is available on Amazon $6.95 paperback. If you are not interested in technical minutia of experimental data, it it probably not for you. It is a book reporting on experiments, not a grand unifying theory of gravity.
Victor
A 480 page book for $6.95 kind of implies it lives on in the bargain bin. Also the other books published by Apeiron kind of raise red flags. And anyone who wants to throw out the work of Einstein is going to need more than some emperical observations that in 50+ years have never been duplicated.
What do you think of the work of Immanuel Velikovsky and his Worlds In Collision?
Have you ever read Thomas Kuhn, “The structure of Scientific Revolutions”? According to Kuhn, a physicist and historian of science, scientific revolutions always come from outside the accepted system. Kuhn claims that science is a “puzzle solving” activity based on paradigms. “No natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological BELIEF that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism.” “The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly.” Kuhn claims that when practitioners of “normal science” encounter evidence that does not fit their paradigm, they either adjust it or ignore it. They do not know how to think or do science outside of the conceptual box they were trained with. Occasionally a revolutionary claims that all that evidence we were ignoring has some validity. The old guard dies off clinging to the old version of science while a new generation of scientists begins explaining things with the new paradigm.
You ask, what do I think of Immanuel Velikovsky? As a researcher of ancient writings, he studied hard. As an explainer of why things were so different a few thousand years ago, he fails. He was a friend of Einstein’s. You can read their correspondence here.
http://www.ericmillerworks.com/images/pdf_files/EINSTEIN%20LETTERS%20TO%20V%203-15-13-.pdf
Einstein accepted his writings, but asked him to provide a scientific reason why planets passed close to Earth a few millennia ago. Velikovsky proposed that,
“The accepted celestial mechanics, not withstanding the many calculations that have been carried out to many decimal places, or verified by celestial motions, stands only if the Sun, the source of light, warmth, and other radiation produced by fusion and fission of atoms, is as a whole an electrically neutral body, and
also if the planets, in their usual orbits, are neutral bodies.”
Of course, Velikovsky and Einstein were both professors, trained to think like philosophers. They did not know how to think like the people who recorded close planet passages and evidently “gravitational tsunamis” from such passages. Ancient people understood that everything is changing. Scientists are trained in the medieval Dominican notion that matter is not changing itself with age.
Einstein cannot accept the visible history of the universe because it violates his fundamentalist medieval notion that matter has fixed properties. Even his definitions of time and mass depend on the notion that an atom today is just like and atom yesterday.
Yet we can see the past. Billions of galaxies spread out from the unformed matter God created first. Trillions of star streams emerged and spread out from tiny primordial cores whose atoms clocked much less than 10% of the frequencies of modern atoms. Often the star streams propagated out (in violation of Einstein’s theories) into huge, local, dusty growth spirals.
What is visible only fits the LITERAL, GRAMMATICAL texts of the Bible.
God continues to command the lights in the heavens (including the Sun and Moon) to become spreading things (raqiya).
Victor
Like all Western children, I was trained to think like a philosopher. My teachers were Christians who amalgamated the Bible with science. However, serious issues result, which thousands of Christians youth discover each year when they go to college. I tried for years to force the Bible to fit science. Then one day I read that even if I ask God for wisdom, he cannot give it if I am double minded. I prayed, please God show me where I am double minded. It was only then that I learned to examine the biblical accounts with grammar, instead of science and logic.
By the way, if you are interested in reading a hermeneutical interpretation of the first week, you can read about it here
Victor
Actually I have read Kuhn and Velikovsky. I had a feeling that you would think kindly of Velikovsky.
And could you please explain, if possible, what you mean by “atoms clocked?”
Velikovsky spent years studying ancient references to catastrophic planet passages. He tried to align these with the catastrophes during the Exodus. He noticed that many ancient societies refer to Venus’ coma (long hair) etc. Indeed, there are references to close passages in the Bible. For example, a sudden flood wiped out the chariots of the Canaanites. The mountains quaked. The kokabiym fought from the skies above. From their courses they fought against Sisera. The river Kishon swept them away. Kokav Nogah is Venus, the queen of the skies. Mercury was Kokav. Mar’s was Ma’adim, the red one.
Interesting that Venus has a rotational resonance with Earth. It rotates backwards at just the right rate so that when it passes us, it always points the same longitude to Earth. Venus is the five pointed star that repeats its synodic approaches five times in eight years. If you compare the conjunctions every eight years (five different statistical comparisons) you will see that it is a real resonance, since the longitude does not drift off. Yet we never experience Venus tides today. The ancients however mention floods during close planet passages.
The best book to read on this subject is not Velikovsky. You can find a little book by Johann Gottlieb Radolf on Amazon: “The shattering of the great planets Hesperus & Phaethon & the ensuring destructions & floods on Earth.”
It is a translation of a book first published in German in 1823. He uses Greek records of close planet passages when mountains uplifted and tidal tsunamis destroyed those not on the mountains. For example, the Greeks also mention how the Sun swung north and south during these cataclysms, similar to Joshua’s account of the Sun and moon remaining over a valley. (During a close passage, the Earth does not stop spinning. It precesses its spin axis one way on approach and back the other way on egress.)
The Bible mentions the crushing of a nearby planet four times, similar to all ancient societies. The major difference is that the Bible does not admit that planets are gods. Indeed, it forbids the worshiping of planets which were worshiped in all other societies.
The best description of an atom is found in Job 38:19-21. The paths of light in its house are mysterious. The house has a border where darkness dwells. Light and matter are a dithering relations as implied on Day One. Ancient atoms shine at different colors (light frequencies) from modern atoms. the earliest galaxies shine in the far infrared and microwave at the fringes of what our current telescopes can discern. At closer ranges, atoms clock faster frequencies. The fastest (normally energized) atomic light clocks are local. Yet when we compare the speed of todays atoms with those from yesterday, (Pioneer Anomaly) we find that modern atoms are changing their frequencies in the same direction and “distance rate” as the atoms in countless galaxies. We can be sure this is real change, not the vacuum adjusting the frequencies of passing light (the scientific ad hoc story) because the orbits acclerate outward along with the accelerating clocks in billions of galaxies at many ranges.
Change and science are opposite worldviews. The authors of the Bible lived in the age when change was the standard for reasoning. Science was founded on the medieval notion that matter does not change itself as it ages.
Victor
You mean this Job 38:19-21?
19“What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
20Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings?
21Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years!
Which, in context, is God speaking to Job. I especially like the sarcasm in verse 21. So how do you get a description of an atom out of this? God is speaking of daylight and night and asking Job if he knows The Way To San Jose.
The Pioneer Anomaly has nothing whatsoever to do with atom clocks. It was caused by heat emitted by it’s onboard RTG.
I forget to ask you opinion on
Eric von Daniken and his Chariots of the Gods
Big Foot
Yeti
Anything else you would care to add?
Speaking of the planets, did you know that mercury was once used to treat syphilis? That’s why the Bible says, “One night with Venus means a lifetime with Mercury.”
God asks Job about many things he cannot figure out about nature. He is demonstrating that he is in charge, managing intricate details like the horse’s character or how lions (that once were herbivore) are now meat eaters. If I can manage nature in this way, surely I have a plan for justice. (Job has complained that God has treated him unjustly).
Of of the many mysteries God asks Job is the house of light. Light lives in a house with borders. Darkness also lives in this house. The paths of light in its house are mysterious. The house of light is very ancient. The house of light
is the best description of an atom, where light never stops dithering around within (see how God gave form to substances on day one by continuing to command dithering light).
Physicists call the light that dithers around within an atoms, virtual photons. they know they are there, but they cannot directly observe them. According to QED theory, an “electron” moves by exchanging a photon with itself. Evidently electrons have clusters of photons around them. Photon exchanges with other electrons produces repulsion. Photon exchanges with the nucleus, produces repulsion. They detect a smearing of the spectra of an atoms emissions, which they calculate are continually photons dithering around within an atoms. A recent experiment is very interesting. By using mirrors to reflect light back and forth in a tube and by imprecssing a magnetic filed on the tube, the entire apparatus began to act like a giant atoms. Atoms really are houses of light and God really is wise beyond our comprehension.
polariton acts like giant atom
the story that the cause of the Pioneer Anomaly is thermal radiation from the RTGs is an effort to prevent the evidence. The RTS are on poles way out past the back of the radio dish. The fins on the RTG do not radiate towards redio dish, except along the thin edges. The radiation radiates out into space in all directions. As the RTG’s degenerate, the effects of the “alleged” thermal radiation should degenerate. No evidence that it degenerates.
John Anderson, who discovered the Pioneer anomaly noticed that one possible cause if all atoms are degenerating so that atomic clocks acclereate at 2.92 +_ .044 x 10^18 seconds per second. It turns out this is almost exactly the estimate for the alleged expansion fo space time (the Hubble constant). A simpler explanation is all atoms accelerate their internal dithering everywhere in the universe.
Victor
Like where snow and rain is stored. Do you happen to know where these storehouses are?
22 Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail,
23 Which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war?
You are reading what you want to see into scripture and not seeing what is actually there.
The simplest explanation is the unequal heat radiation resulted in the very small force needed to explain the deviation in Pioneer’s course. No need to resort to conspiracy theory.
Indeed, this is the core of my argument, that Western people read into the scripture their philosophical reasoning. We try to understand creation and Earth history with science. Yet not one verse in the Bible would have been interpreted with science by a contemporary of an author. No wonder even Christians struggle with things like the age of the universe in only 6,000 years. They try to understand Creation with time. Time is a philosophical idea that germinated about 1000 years after Moses. Early societies used the way nature changes to record when, not time. Their clocks and calendars were not for measuring time. They were adjusted to fit the way nature changes. Change and time are opposite worldviews. Time, per se, is never once mentioned in the Bible only timing “events” such as new moons. A Jew could run out of daylight or opportunity, but not time which was not part of the worldview of common people when the prophets wrote.
Yet the Bible predicted Western science by predicting the fundamental idea upon which it was contrived. Peter predicted two things that mockers in the last days will do with the arche ktisis (first law) that all things remain the same. Indeed, Western empirical science was founded on the medieval idea (that derived from the writings of a Dominican Friar) that matter is NOT continually shifting its properties.
They would obfuscate (lanthano) the evidence that the plural heavens came out long ago (ouranoi ek palai). Indeed, the greatest system of mythology in human history are scientific cosmologies. Scientists fill the universe up with undetectable magical things to prevent what is visible, that the properties of matter are always shifting relationally. Indeed, billions of galaxies came out long ago, as streams of star globs emerged and spread out from the formless matter God created first. He continues to command the lights in the plural heavens to become spreading things (noun raqiya). This is exactly what we observe. Streams of star globs emerged from point-like cores as billions of galaxies grew into huge, local growth spirals. Visibly, the properties of all matter are shifting, the atomic clocks, the orbits and matter’s volume all shifting together. Indeed, he commanded the plural eons to passively form as lights appeared from things not seen (Hebrew 11:3).
The geology of our planet ONLY fits a biblical earth history. The sea was born, wrapped in swaddling cloths of thick clouds (Job 38:4-11) Indeed, the early Earth was covered in water that shot evidently hot geysers ito form rings of ice in space as the atmosphere concurrently formed (Day 2). Then the plural seas were all gathered into one place so that the singular land appeared. The only way this could happen is if the seas seeped underground into the subcrustal tehom. It did not rain in this era. There were no major surface seas, only lakes and rivers that divided as they flowed around the land. Indeed, we find hundreds of feet of chalk and limestone, the remains of sea creatures that died, only on the continents where the seas used to stand with the land. Then a great cataclysm broke up the underground seas over a period of ~1/2 a year. Psalm 104 tells us that a wide valley opened up to accept the surface waters as the modern oceans began to form. Earth continents fit together on a minuscule globe without the modern, spreading oceans that are forming along a global expansion seam. The Expansion seam sends out hot water and lava, as the Earth continues to grow. The Bible repeatedly tells us that the Earth spreads out in unbroken continuity. It even explain why. God continues to lay the foundation of the earth in unbroken continuity (Zech 12:1).
Notice how much different a literal account of creation and Earth history are from scientific stories. Why? Scientists have a first law, the very idea the Bible predicted for the last days. They believe that all things remain the same. Yet we can see the history of how the galaxies formed. The atomic clocks and the outward accelerating star streams accelerate together. NASA’s atomic clocks are doing the same things as the atoms in hundreds of billions of galaxies, accelerating continually when compared to their clock rates yesterday (Pioneer Anomaly). Change and science are opposite worldviews.
God will get great glory when he makes foolish the wisdom of this age.
Victor
The early societies used nature to define time as they had no other way to do so. As soon as they developed means of dividing the passage of time that would indicate they understood at least on a basic level what time is. The earliest societies learned the hard way they had to plant their crops at the right “time” of the year. They used the sun and the moon to determine that right time. A pretty sophisticated use of time don’t you think?
Seeing as how science as we understand it wasn’t invented yet you are right. The Bible was written from the viewpoint of someone who can see nature and is trying to relate what they see to God. That is the reason you don’t (and won’t) find “science” in the Bible. So any attempt to read science into the Bible is doomed to failure.
This is so wrong that I won’t even try to answer this. One look at the Grand Canyon shows you that earth has to be more then 10,000 years old. And if that doesn’t convince you go look at the Nile River Canyon. It is 6000 ft below sea level at it’s lowest point. When was there time in the last 10,000 years to carve this canyon?
Perhaps because the Bible is not trying to give us the scientifically accurate version of earth history?
I am quite late to this discussion and I gave up skimming at about post 70, but I thought I’d throw in my two cents about aspect-based verb systems and the concept of time, since I am trying really hard to learn such a language right now.
Both tense and aspect concern time, they just emphasize different relationships in time. Tense systems emphasizes the relationship between the time of the utterance and the time of the situation under discussion, whereas aspect systems emphasize the relationship between the topic (the activity described by the verb) and the time frame of the situation under discussion. So with aspect dominant languages, the focus is on the “shape” of the action in time, whether it was completed during the time under discussion or not or whether it happened repeatedly or once, or whether the action is a state or an activity- to name a few aspectual distinctions.)
Just like in English we can express aspectual information without encoding it on the verb, languages with aspect-dominant verbal systems have no problem encoding relevant past/present/future time information using other words. We don’t have an iterative aspect in English, but that doesn’t stop us from conceptualizing or describing iterative activities with semantic constructions. We can say “he kept on pounding the piano” or “he hit the nail over and over again with the hammer.” We can use adverbs like “repeatedly.”
The language I study in Mexico has an aspectual verb system, and there are no grammatical tense markers. People definitely have a concept of time and can easily situate actions in time with language using adverbs or adverbial phrases. For example, unlike English which has today, tomorrow, and yesterday, there are three words each direction from today (past and future) that you can use to talk about what day something happened or will happen. (Day after the day after tomorrow, day before the day before yesterday, etc.) You can say how long ago something happened or the order in which actions took place using adverbial phrases. You don’t need to encode tense on a verb in order to situate actions in time or express a sequence of events.
@godsriddle Victor’s idea that the ancients had no concept of time is nonsense, and the idea that aspect-dominant languages can’t express time is also nonsense, as others have perhaps more politely and delicately pointed out.
Archeologists have found an animal bone in Swaziland dated to 37,000 years ago with 29 grooved notches carved on it, presumably to mark a lunar cycle. A similar bone was found in a cave in France and dated to 13,000 years ago. Humans have been keeping calendars and marking time since prehistoric days, and every major ancient civilization we know a lot about had arrived at precise time keeping methods based on the sun, moon, stars, and seasons.
I contend that a concept of a time CONTINUUM is philosophical reasoning. It is never alluded to in the Bible. The Bible does not say “in the beginning” (of time) God created they heavens and the Earth. It says first he created the heavens and the Earth. What you do first has to do with the sequence of changes that God continued to produce during the first week.
The ancients did not have to imagine the existence of time. They tracked the changes that continued to happen in nature. They counted days, new moons and years without imagining a philosophical notion that time exists. What existed were the changes, not time. Their clocks and calendars were dynamic. They were not for measuring time. They were adjusted regularly to fit nature’s changes.
Why did the concept of time arise? It perhaps came into existence when philosophers began to invent mathematical solar system theories. The Babylonians tried to correlate changes on Earth with planetary phenomena (omens). They did not have to imagine that a calendar was measuring time. It was when this particular planetary alignment or eclipse happened, that an omen might reoccur. The priests could suggest sacrifices or the king to act with humility to prevent the omen. Omens and science are opposite ways of interpreting the solar system.
When one starts subdividing the durations observed in nature into smaller increments, for mathematical theories, a time continuum seems to arise. Think of Zeno’s paradoxes.
Why is it important to use change, instead of time, to understand beginnings? The very changes listed in the grammar are the ones we see in the visible history of the galaxies. There are probably at least 5 trillion galaxies in all directions to the limit of the resolution of our telescopes. The visible history of the universe does NOT FIT any scientific story. It only fits the grammatical text of the Bible. God continues to command the lights in the heavens to become spreading things (noun raqiya). The spreading things are to mark off the days and years on Earth. Notice that time is never mentioned. We confirm that billions of galaxies spread out from the formless matter God created first . Even the Earth has continued to grow, exactly as we read of in the Hebrew text. The visible properties of all matter keep shifting, the clocks and the orbits both accelerating. Change is confirmed, the very kind of changes the Bible mentions.
Of course the changes we observe violate the medieval assumption upon which Western science was contrived. Therefore, scientific version of history cannot be made to fit the only history that is visible as it happened, cosmic history.
Victor
What are genealogies if not a representation of the continuation of a bloodline from the past into the present with relevance to the future? I don’t know exactly what you mean by “continuum” or how that is relevant, but the ancient Hebrews surely did have a concept of their past. What was the point of their holidays? It was to remember their history so they could call on the God of their covenant to be similarly faithful in their present and for posterity. How does one have a concept of eternity, and the word of the Lord enduring forever (unlike the flowers and the grass, or the span of a human life) without a concept of time moving forward. I will grant that some cultures view time more cyclically than linearly, but that doesn’t mean that they are unable to grasp the concept of time.
PBS had a good program on time. Used to be that every village had their own time usually based on the town clock, then the railroads came in and they had to standardize timekeeping to make the trains run on time.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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