Explaining one third of our sun going dark suddenly

Faith & Science Conversation
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The events that are coming according to Scripture are monumental. If there is any scientific explanation, that would be worth looking at. What explanation is there for a third of the sun and stars and moon going out? The effect is that a third of the day is no longer light and a third of the stars in the heavens go out.

Rev 8:12 And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise.

This is not the end of the world. Life is going on still on earth.

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Ahh! Another flim-flam thread by dad that goes nowhere.

Revelation 8:12 predicts the darkening of one-third of the Sun, Moon, and stars without explaining how it will occur. Even assuming a literal future fulfillment, why should science be expected to explain in advance how a predicted act of God will be accomplished?

Posing a question that science cannot presently answer, and perhaps never will, establishes nothing about the validity of science.

An unanswered question is not a scientific failure, and manufacturing one is not a scientific achievement, … nor a Christian one.

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If it’s not merely apocalyptic language (symbolizing the uncreation of a stable order) it is describing some miraculous future judgment. If we could explain it, then it wouldn’t be a miracle. God is certainly capable of blocking out a third of the sun and sustaining life as He sees fit.

Good questions to ask are what genre are we looking at? Does Revelation look forward to the future or backwards to the past? Is the language literal or figurative? I would look at Jesus’s own statement about stars falling to the earth as well. We know they are a tad bit too big to do that and the smaller ones are so dense they bring their own problems. Apocalyptic language doesn’t need to be “literally” true as written but if it is then it’s a miracle. If God wants to unwind and shrink creation around the earth and bring it crashing down on us, that is His business. Until that day comes we strive to enter and continue doing accurate science.

Vinnie

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Your opinion then, is that science cannot answer how. OK

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I actually do not think they are too big to do that. All distances (and therefore sizes etc) depend on natural based assumptions. Such as that time exists out there and exists the same as here. Also that space exists out there with time as we know it here with our spacetime. Then of course, no matter how it exists or not anywhere, the great force that controls all forces and time and space merely has to will it, and everything jumps into line accordingly. Normal rules are out the window then. Another point to conside id that no matter how big a star may be (we have no way of actually knowing) By the time they get to earth, they will be just the right size! A universe under perfect control of God. How unlike the little pale vlue speck concept of Carl Sagan.

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It is pointless to ask for scientific explanations for apocalyptic imagery. There isn’t any, so you have your answer.

I cannot count the prophesy sermons I’ve sat through, Apollo missions tied into blood on the moon, something about red heifers in Israel, computers in Brussels were the beast, and nations ascending the EU were setting up the Antichrist, horses for Chinese mounted armies, red algae blooms to poison the sea, Gog and Magog heading to the Megiddo valley for battle. Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth was a best seller. So if you want to add to the list, knock yourself out.

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Calling events that will happen funny names to try and make them unreal does not address reality. The passage in the OP is specific. It was also mentioned by Jesus. Mark 13:25 the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken
Also in Isaiah
All the stars in the sky will be dissolved and the heavens rolled up like a scroll; all the starry host will fall like withered leaves from the vine, like shriveled figs from the fig tree.

Also in Revelation 6:13 and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind.
Don’t show up here with an intellectually dishonest snide reply. This is an event that is spoken about several places and by Jesus Himself. We had one honest poster here simply admit science has no explanation.

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Stars are people, why don’t you just find a way to ask them? You have all this insight that nobody else has ever had before.

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The future (at least for the most important eschatological events). The son of perdition, the Beast, hasn’t been revelead yet and he will be revelead only after the Katéchon is taken out of the way.

Imho the Katéchon is the Eucharist (as celebrated in Catholic and Orthodox liturgy) and I’m hardly the only one thinking that way.

Joseph Ratzinger – Eschatology: Death and Eternal

“The katechon must be understood as the power of the presence of Christ in history.”
(p. 160)

“Christ remains present in the world through the Church, and the Church lives from the Eucharist.”
(p. 162)

“The delaying of the final unleashing of evil is bound up with the sacramental presence of Christ in time.”
(p. 163)

Hans Urs von Balthasar – Theo-Drama, Vol. V: The Last Act

“The persistence of Christ’s mission within history takes form in the sacramental actuality of Christ’s self-giving.”
(p. 405)

“So long as Christ is really present, history cannot collapse into total negation.”
(p. 406)

Aidan Nichols OP – The Shape of Catholic Theology

“It is Christ’s eucharistic presence which delays the full manifestation of the mystery of lawlessness.”
(p. 282)

Tracey Rowland – Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI

“The Eucharist stands at the ontological centre of this sacramental restraint.”
(p. 146)

Henri de Lubac – Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man

“So long as the Eucharist endures, the Church stands between the world and its final disintegration.”
(p. 336)

Jean-Luc Marion – God Without Being

“The saturation of evil is impossible where the gift of presence is not withdrawn.”
(p. 187)

“This presence is not conceptual but eucharistic.”

(p. 189)

David Bentley Hart – The Beauty of the Infinite

“What restrains the violence of the principalities is not force but liturgy.”
(p. 379)

Romano Guardini – The End of the Modern World

“Only where Christ remains present can the powers of chaos be restrained.”
(p. 86)

“From the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished and the abomination that causes desolation is set up, there will be 1290 days. “ -Daniel 12:11.

Revelation 13:5: “The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise its authority for forty-two months.”

Even Hippolytus had a similar interpretation

“For when the threescore and two weeks are fulfilled, and Christ is come, and the Gospel is preached in every place, the times being then accomplished, there will remain only one week, the last, in which Elias will appear, and Enoch, and in the midst of it the abomination of desolation will be manifested,viz., Antichrist, announcing desolation to the world. And when he comes, the sacrifice and oblation will be removed, which now are offered to God in every place by the nations.”

P.s: this brings me back to what the Archibishop Fulton Sheen said in 1948, when he talked about the false prophet (who will be thrown into the lake of fire with the Antichrist and the Devil, see Revelation 20:10) who will pave the way for the Antichrist.

“The False Prophet will have a religion without a cross*. A religion without a world to come. A religion to destroy religions. There will be a counterfeit church. Christ’s Church will be one. And the False Prophet will create the other. The false church will be worldly, ecumenical, and global. It will be a loose federation of churches. And religions forming some type of global association. A world parliament of churches. It will be emptied of all divine content and will be the mystical body of the Antichrist. The mystical body on earth today will have its Judas Iscariot and he will be the false prophet. Satan will recruit him from among our bishops.”” - Fulton J. Sheen, Communism and the Conscience of the West, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1948, pp. 22–25

*Without the Cross, there is no Eucharist, for the Eucharist is the sacramental making-present and offering of Christ’s one, definitive sacrifice on the Cross.

Also 2 Thessalonians 2,3-12

“Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God. Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things? And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.”

The singularity of Scripture
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Events that haven’t happened (yet) don’t need explanations (yet).

If/when it happens is the time for explanations. They aren’t necessary now.

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  • What is the purpose of this thread?

    • I suggest readers examine what dad has actually accomplished here.
      1. He begins with a question science cannot reasonably be expected to answer. He asks for a scientific explanation of a predicted future event described in Revelation 8:12, although the passage provides no explanation of how the event will occur. He converts the absence of an explanation into an apparent concession about science.
      2. When I questioned why science should be expected to explain a predicted act of God, dad replied: “Your opinion then, is that science cannot answer how. OK” But that was not my argument. Questioning whether science should be expected to answer a particular question is not conceding that science has failed.
      3. He then challenges established scientific knowledge when it conflicts with his interpretation of Scripture. Responding to Vinnie’s observation about the enormous sizes of stars, dad writes: “All distances (and therefore sizes etc) depend on natural based assumptions.” He then declares: “By the time they get to earth, they will be just the right size!” Notice what has happened. dad begins by asking science for an explanation, but when established astronomical knowledge presents difficulties for his interpretation, he questions that knowledge and invokes God’s control over nature. He announces the result he wanted.
      4. In his response to rsewell, dad writes: “We had one honest poster here simply admit science has no explanation.” There is the apparent objective of this exercise: obtain an acknowledgment that science cannot explain his proposed event and present that acknowledgment as a meaningful concession.

  • But what has actually been demonstrated? No scientific theory has been tested. No astronomical observation has been refuted. No scientific prediction has been shown to be false. dad has presented his interpretation of a biblical prediction, demanded a scientific explanation, questioned established astronomical knowledge when it creates difficulties, and then treated the absence of an explanation as a victory.

  • That is not a demonstration of the inadequacy of science. It is a demonstration of how to manufacture the appearance of scientific failure without actually testing any science.

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All distances, at least to the nearer stars, depend on basic geometry and the fact that the earth orbits around the sun. I know you accept the second based on your fixation on the length of the year and hopefully you have enough high school math to accept the first. Time, out there, is not a factor. Only time here on earth. I have pointed all of this out before which you refuse to answer.

Yes a universe that God is perfectly capable of creating last Thursday.

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Apocalyptic literature seems to be a stranger for modern humans. Taking the apocalyptic visions or images as literary reports is very far from the way how apocalyptic literature works.

Even if we would assume that the author was shown visions from the future, the visions had to be interpreted and the author described them through his worldview. Stars falling and heavens rolled up like a scroll was a rational possibility from the viewpoint of a person with an ancient worldview.
Genesis 1 describes a firmament above the earth, so the image of heavens rolled up like a scroll would refer to the rolling of the firmament. Firmament was believed to be a flat curving structure that might be scrolled by someone like God.
According to the ancient worldview, stars were small lights (or visual representations of spiritual entities) that were attached to the firmament. Stars falling would be like lamps dropping from the roof or figuratively, spiritual entities being cast on earth.

When we interpret this kind of image that is built on an ancient worldview, interpretation becomes challenging. It is evident that the real stars cannot fall on earth and the heavens cannot be physically rolled up like a scroll, so a fully literal interpretation is not possible. The message is something else.

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And yet, just like in Genesis, there is a core of things that will actually happen (just like Genesis refers to a real primeval event that happened in the past, which doesn’t mean that everything literally happened as described): the coming of the beast (which even Paul talked about in the second letter to the Thessalonians, linking his coming with the abolition of the Katéchon, which is “the power that restrains”) and the second coming of Jesus.

The problem, in Revelation as well as Genesis, are the extremes, with people who interpret everything literally and people who interpret everything figuratively (or just flat out dismiss everything).

That specific part refers to a past event, i.e the angelic rebellion. That cannot be a future event or even a “present event” (I say this for those who think, very wrongly imho, that the entirety of Revelation was , in a figurative way, talking about the present times of its writer ), because the presence of demons is aknowledged even in the OT, for example the book of Tobit which talks about Sarah being demonically possessed by the demon Asmodeus.

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Psychology has yet to explain why dad apparently believes that asking science to explain an unspecified future miracle, and then announcing that science has no explanation, constitutes a brilliant demonstration of science’s inadequacy.

Therefore, psychology has failed.

Obviously, psychology is useless.

See how easy it is to discredit an entire scientific discipline simply by asking a question it hasn’t answered?

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There is no point in attempting a rational discussion with someone untethered to facts, evidence, logic, math, or rationality. How far gone do you have to be to consider the concept of distance some sort of questionable assumption?

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Do you admit the Bible has no guidance as to how many electrical outlets can be wired to one panel board circuit breaker? That is about as relevant.

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  • According to Genesis 1, the Earth existed before the Sun, which does not appear until the fourth day. Yet the first three days are each described as having an evening and a morning.
  • An ordinary solar day is measured by Earth’s rotation relative to the Sun. But according to the Genesis account, the Sun did not yet exist.
  • So, what determined the duration of the first three days, and what evidence establishes that each lasted 24 hours?
  • Appealing to the fact that God wrote the Bible does not answer either question.
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I guess the sun and moon are people too?

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Having one third of the sun go dark would be astounding. Maybe science would say it would be impossible, considering what they say the sun is and how it came to exist. The moon also, how in the world could there never be a full moon again, but a third of the moon not shine at all? And, the piece de resistance here is that the stars in the universe will go out. One third of them. Hard to imagine a scientific explanation for any of this.