Did Genesis Copy Sunmerian, Babylonian, and Egyption Creation Accounts?

Which part wouldn’t you say?

Maybe Hammurabi’s code was given for a just society and not just the king’s convenience.

I don’t think you get my point…my point was, Abraham came from UR of the Caldees originally, which is in Mesopotamia (the same region as Babylon).

Job, was from Uz…which is a long way southwest…in the lands east of the Red Sea

Melchizedek was from Salem…which is a long way north of UZ and no where near Mesopotamia

Job and Melchizadek were gentiles. According to the Septuigant, as i said in earlier post, Job was the grandson of Esau, however, he was not Israelite.

These three individuals have no connection between them, and yet were all very devout believers in the most high God!

This means that the worship of the God of Heaven as described in the Bible long predated Abram and we know that Abraham existed well over 1000 B.C (probably around the 2nd millennium B.C).

His father, Terah, was the ninth generation after Noah… given Noah was also a worshiper of the God in Heaven, I very much doubt that we can make the claim the Jews copied/plagiarised their beliefs from pagans. Of course, the bible very clearly tells us that at the time of Babel, there was a movement against the God of Heaven…so I do not have a problem with colinear pagan religions after the time of the flood (the bible makes no secret of this).

Another point i note here…the ongoing claim of fable/allegory of the writings of Moses…research has been conducted on the literary aspects of the bible…none of those claims are consistent with what research has produced. An example of one research project on this can be found online at Amazon (https://www.amazon.com.au/Thousands-not-Billions-Challenging-Questioning/dp/0890514410)

The Bible very specifically makes the distinction between historical narrative, poetry, and apocalyptic prophesy. Those who really understand this would never agree that allegory can be applied here even without studying the research above. One of the main problems with the allegory claim, it reduces the entire Bible to a fairytale and that is a terrible position on which Christians may stake their claim of salvation.

It never claims to be science in Genesis 1.

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i fail to see the relevance of that to Christianity?

What i do see, however, is the claim made by some individuals, who have a very poor theological knowledge btw, that “God was/is learning”. That is their answer to the “inspiration of God” dilemma faced by Theistic Evolution.

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Since it’s historical and scientific, is the earth really flat and is it stationary (not moving)?
Did God actually bring animals to Adam to see if one would be a good helper for him? A sheep? A cow?
A pig? Why not make two humans the way he did in Genesis 1?

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can you quote me the texts in the Bible where it says that?

Also, you have not answered the literary dilemma faced in claiming that Moses was a fictional character or that his writings are an allegory as my assumption is that as an evolutionist, you believe that Socrates really existed right?

The well known RATE project which could not come up with a way to get around the incredible heat generated by accelerated nuclear decay. Which is not the only heat problem that results from trying to squeeze the earth’s history into 6,000 years.

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Claiming that God created the universe in six twenty-four hour days chases people away from Christianity. That seems relevant to me, not to mention that I don’t like my Father being mocked because of it.

You haven’t seen me saying anything like that, so your eloquent verbiage is wasted.

My claim is biblical: God is not constrained by time and he knows the future. He has nothing to learn. Are you familiar with the word omniscient.

With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
2 Peter 3:8

It was just something I read somewhere. In actuality, I wasn’t there so how could I really know?

I never claimed that Moses was a fictional character. Holy Moses!

The earth doesn’t move:

Psalm 96:10
Psalm 104:5
1 Chronicles 16:30

The earth is flat:
Rev 7:1

That’s a stretch. Job should probably be read as a play or a parable. Melchizedek is somewhat of a puzzle. Abraham was a Chaldean, the first person God revealed himself to.

Would we really expect them to understand the cosmos as we now know it? With no other scientific instruments than their own eyes, they made a good model of the cosmos. God was fine with letting them think the earth didn’t move or that the earth was flat. It made no difference as far as fulfilling the promises God made to Israel, so He saw no reason to explain Quantum Mechanics to them.

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Of course not. But if somebody thinks we have to take the Bible literally, let them address this.

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Right. Which science do literallists expect Genesis to follow? 1st century science? 10th century science? 18the century science? 21st century science?

Their own brand.

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ah but it has Bill…they discuss that in a later chapter (Ch9 Theories of Accelerated Nuclear Decay) in the book and it is mainstream secular science that has already provided the likely solution to that problem. I am not expert on any of the following nor do i claim to be, however, clearly scientists far more educated on the topic than i are at work searching for solutions…

  1. A change in the depth of the “Potential Nuclear Well”.

The theory is that if the half life varied with small changes in the nuclear radius, the curvature of the nuclear well wall, and the shape of the column barrier, significant differences in the ability of the alpha particle to escape the nucleus are possible. This in turn would see the nuclear half life reduce by as much as 100 million.

  1. String Theory and more specifically, Superstring and M-Theories

the question proposed by RATE study is whether or not an application of String Theory might be useful in isotope decal.

“The extra space dimensions, if they exist…, are said to be compactified or confined to an incredibly small size…the theory shows a direct connection between the radius of these hidden dimensions and the “fermi” constant.”

“If string theory turns out to be a correct description of nature, then we may have a mathematical model that could account for an acceleration of the beta form of nuclear decay”

“For example, such a model could explore small temporary adjustments of unseen dimensions, perhaps by the direct hand of the Creator. This might alter the fermi constant and in turn, adjust nuclear decay rates significantly”

Obviously the question of heating is a big one. As has been illustrated by posts on this forum already, the temps would have been many thousands of degrees…enough to be very destructive to the earths mantle and certainly crystal defects such as radio halos and fission tracks would not be present in the event that occurred as these exist only if temps remain below about 150 degrees.

  1. The theory of “cosmological cooling” (Humphreys 2000)

“an expansion of space would result in cooling on a universal scale. In this explanation, the heat energy generated by accelerated nuclear decay goes into the expansion of the fabric of space itself. The key is to have accelerated decay simultaneously accompanied by a temporary, large-scale stretching of the space surrounding earth. Since there is evidence of much radioactive decay throughout the solar system and in space beyond, the expansion must be universal in its extent.” DeYoung, Don. Thousands…Not Billions (p. 145). Master Books. Kindle Edition.

Doesn’t work.

They just proposed that as a possible avenue for research, but they didn’t provide a workable model. As far as I’m aware, they still haven’t come up with anything workable, eighteen years later. Last I heard, they were just hand-waving it with appeals to miracles saying “God must have done it.”

Expansion of space only cools gases; it does not cool solids. Even if it did, the Earth would have to have been much smaller in the past (and correspondingly much denser, with a much greater gravitational field) and orbiting much closer to the sun (and correspondingly receiving much more energy). On top of that, the expansion would have to have cooled rocks much faster than water, otherwise the oceans would have frozen over.

Furthermore, their accelerated nuclear decay hypothesis held that long-lived isotopes must have been affected more than short-lived ones (such as carbon-14), while stable isotopes were not affected at all. Changes to the fundamental constants of nature, whether the strength of the strong nuclear force or anything else, simply do not do that. On top of that, they have to account for the cross-checks and correlations between nuclear decay and continental drift, as seen, for example, in the Hawaiian islands. And then there’s the problem of what the increased radiation would have done to Noah and the animals on board the Ark.

One does not simply speed up nuclear decay rates to squeeze 4.5 billion years’ worth of evidence into six thousand, Adam. Even if there were a physical mechanism by which that could have been achieved, the effects would have been very far reaching and very, very complex. There are numerous intricacies and layers upon layers upon layers that would have to be filled in to make the resulting effects come anywhere close to fitting the data as closely as constant rates do.

And even if you could fill in those layers, what do you have in the end? Not just miracles, but pointless miracles. Even if the Flood was global in extent, accelerated nuclear decay and all the extensive workarounds involved are totally unnecessary to either the plot or the outcome. All you’ve done is proposed that God went to extraordinary lengths to make the earth look older than it really is in the most complicated and convoluted way imaginable for no particularly good reason other than to mess with our minds and leave us completely at a loss to figure out what is real and what isn’t. That isn’t in the slightest bit consistent with the character and nature of the God of the Bible; it’s a combination of Q from Star Trek and Slartibartfast from The HItch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s complete science fiction.

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You mean as in

Since no explanation for this miracle is provided then no they haven’t come up with a way around the heat problem. This is commonly referred to as “hand waving” the problem away.

As I mentioned before, the heat from accelerated nuclear decay isn’t the only problem. There is also heat generated by:

  • limestone formation
  • magma cooling
  • plate subduction

The amount of heat generated by these activities is also staggering.

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