We see history in a strict chronological sequence with dates, etc. for events because that’s the way we learn it at school. The ancient Hebrews saw it very differently, not necessarily chronologically but talking about events in order of importance or in other orders. Thus Genesis can be viewed as historical but spoken of very differently from our idea of history. I would refer to Adam and Eve as real people (there must have been very early humans) but Gen 5 says God called THEIR name Adam (maybe multiple people?). It is a bit shrouded in mystery - the important message is that God created all things, not how He created them. There are flood traditions all over the world and evidence of flooding at some stage almost everywhere, but not at the same time. When it says the waters covered the earth, it may not be referring to the entire globe, but all of the known earth at that time which would have been quite a limited area of the Middle East.
That’s because @Christy’s been spending a lot of time lately writing definitions.
Too late for this entry?
Ancient Science does not refer to the scientific method. The term is roughly a synonym for “ancient cosmology.” Those who prefer “ancient science” simply are saying that the ancients had theories about how the world worked.
Denis has been helping. 
I think ancient science might be covered in the cosmology entry.
Sumerian and Babylonian math exceeded the Greeks.
We have evidence of the development of a complex system of metrology (land measurement) in Sumer from about 3000 BCE, and multiplication and reciprocal (division) tables, tables of squares, square roots and cube roots, geometrical exercises and division problems from around 2600 BCE onwards. Later Babylonian tablets dating from about 1800 to 1600 BCE cover topics as varied as fractions, algebra, methods for solving linear, quadratic and even some cubic equations, and the calculation of regular reciprocal pairs (pairs of number which multiply together to give 60). One Babylonian tablet gives an approximation to √2 accurate to an astonishing five decimal places.
The Babylonians used a complex geometrical model to calculate the path of Jupiter. Observational science?
Interesting line at the end of the article: “The purpose of all this refined astronomy is astrology,” Høyrup said. “They never speak about themselves in a way that suggests that they were pure astronomers or mathematicians; their profession was to be scholar-priests.”
You totallly misunderstood our conversation. mtDNA is used for females, x-chromosome for male. dates for the Time to most recent ancestor for both is wrong.
As to Dennis placing Adam at 200 K, I have found him saying that in an interview. But I won’t quote it here, I have no desire to rev this up again.
Further x-chromosome Adam, which actually merely dates the age of that piece of DNA lies in in the 300-400kyr range anyway. Michael Hammer found a guy from South Carolina who really moved the TMRCA back for the x chromosome.
Again, I think you totally messed up reading what we were saying and to further my 200k, remark, maybe you should contact Wiki about this issue? It seems they are reporting TMRCA in the 100-230 kyr range.
It’s a red herring … because the best way to extrapolate the minimum age of a population is to:
- Define the assumed limits of how big the population was in its formative years;
and - Calculate backwards from existing diversity of alleles on key traits.
The mtDNA and yDNA calculations are a completely different process, and don’t actually produce useful conclusions.
I agree with you, those calculations produce nothing useful because, as I have said many times on this board an elsewhere, we are not a piece of walking mtDNA. We should always have been looking at nuclear DNA but that wasn’t always the case.
Otherwise, given that my youngest son tells me that I probably won’t last too long in my present state, I intend to do other things with my remaining time than discuss messed up understandings of communications. I did notice that Dennis hadn’t read my books either, in spite of his eagerness for me to read his. lol. Our fields do not overlap much but a bit of geology would not hurt anyone at all. And no, I no longer have time to do any books. Besides, I soon get to look at the answers in the back of the book. God has been so good to me in this life, it will be interesting to see the changes in the next! God bless you Mr. Brooks.
According to The Smithsonian (and I see no Biblical reason to disagree), “the Ledi jaw (human), from Ethiopia is 2.75 to 2.80 million years old” (March 5, 2015). I’ve seen articles that said the oldest human skull ever found was 5 million years old. I won’t be surprised if much older human fossils are found. As ALL top Bible scholars know, “No humans beyond 12,000 years old are from the Adamic race.”
Well, I believe in absolute honesty as close as I can get to it,and you Mike Riter, have taught me something brand new!. Few get to do that in Anthro, but I took off from creation/evolution in 2010 cause I was sick to death of it, and didn’t read much stuff then and missed this interesting find. We need more of his body parts to know much about him, but Mike, my hat is off to you.
I don’t put arbitrary limits on God’s activity.If God wants a 12,001 year old Adamic man he can certainly have it, or if God wants a 20kyr adamic man, God can have him. I am not God’s boss and can’t tell him what to do!
I thought about things last night while in bed and decided to urge each and every one of you to stay the course faithwise, but not necessarily ‘data wise’. Whatever job you feel God has laid on your heart, keep at it don’t give up. If it is to build an orphanage, to get a church up and running etc. Just don’t get caught thinking the same at age 70 as you did at age 25.
I want to deeply thank people who have thanked me over the past few months. When I came out of college a YEC, I thought I was going to help my fellow christians fight off the evolutionists who were hurting the faith. The problem was, what I was offering them wasn’t helpful, and those I proposed to help knew it. I was the clueless one.
I knew many people left the faith via creation/evolution, having given up on the scripture and the Bible and turned to atheism or something else. It tore me up. Yeah, there is that platitude, about if they are now against us they never were with us, but that rang somewhat hollow to me.
And when in 1986 or so, I left yet, I had absolutely nothing to offer them to help them. I didn’t even have YEC anymore. So I watched and watched as co-believers chose to leave the faith and I could do nothing to help. I now lacked the certitude that Christianity was really true and I literally and really cursed the day I had gone into my branch of geophysicis–which dealt much more with geology than the computer number crunching I had been doing. If I was unsure of creation, how could I make someone else sure of it"? IF they were unsure, they would not remain convinced of their faith and would eventually fall into accommodationalism.
In the mid 1990s when I figured out that the Mediterranean flood was likely the flood of NOah, I got one or two thank you’s per year about having helped them, only to find later, I just made their landing into accommodation that much easier. What did I lack? Within the past 3 months, with a full story (and maybe a full deck), I have received more thank yous in a shorter time than I ever got before, and that is so meaningfull for me. Thank you. 50 years is a very long time.
I lacked what uniformitarian science had, a full coherent story about what REALLY and TRULY happened in the past history of OUR UNIVERSE. our real universe. I also lacked the certainty that this story actually happened. Only with that tool could I help my fellow believers. But I had no cogent,coherent woven well together story of the Biblical history of the world!
Through out the next 20 years I would get one or two polite notes about how my flood had helped them, but I lacked the real ‘umph’ factor’. That is what I found in March, that the rivers of Eden actually existed as described. This has helped me help many and I appreciate the gratitude many have shown (I will miss some, Nick, HelpI’monaSlipperySlope, Shoes, and others. but it isn’t me who has helped, it is Christ. He is the one who showed me the data, I didn’t make the data up.
Coming or going, which is it?
Somewhere things went very wrong and we do things backwards. The first question, as I recall I got when I came to this list was 'why would you want a historically true bible? The first person I spoke with was Help, Im on a Slippery Slope, meaning he was unable to put science and Scripture together and was headed to atheism. I had been thet\re myself.This was last year, I gave him a few tidbits but not the full story because I still lacked it.What I saw apalled me more. people were giving him arguments for atheism, dunking his head deeper beneath the water. Are we suffering our children, our youth and adults to come to Christ, or are we more interested in our shiny new theory about theology that will win us some friends and make us look smart?
When we become Christians we are taught to let the little ones come to him. We think sweetly about this, and bring our children to Christ. We don’t try to talk them out of Christ. In Ex 20:3 it says our God is above all Gods. Do our theories that come out of Academia made our God a God above? or just another God on the side of the road? The constant claim that Creation, Eden, the Fall, The flood, the miracles along the way, like the talking donkey, and the raising of the widow’s child, all seem to be explained away with the greatest of ease because we alll know there is nothing very special about our God anymore. He has lost his mojo somewhere along the line and is just another cultural artefact to be studied. The reserrection? We still give lipservice to it but not much.
We are to draw men unto Christ but with all our theories about genetics, no Adam and Eve, no Fall, no Flood, we go out into the market place of ideas and say, "Come to God! He is wrong about everything in His book! That is not a very good sales technique.
I don’t claim special knowledge or status, I just spent a bunch of my life selling oil deals and know that is not the way to do it. We need to stay with our faith; keep at it until God clears the path–which in my case was 50 years. We should continue expecting God to surprise us and take us intellectual places we never thought we would go. But above all, we need to proclaim to this world that God is indeed above all other Gods, and not merely an artefact to be stored in a dusty room and brought out when we need middle-class morality… All men of faith in the Scripture were promised things long before they received them,often they looked foolish, but by staying the course, they changed the world. Change the world my friends.
Amen. Thank you for the wise words,my brother.
Well said. I keep on keepin’ on. The results are in the Lord’s hands.
I only hope I too can go on opening myself to better realizations of the truth as times goes on and not get too attached to defending less perfect renditions. You’re a good guy, Bob.
Thanks Mark, we all try and we all fall short.
Very true, God can do whatever pleases Him. But He has more or less told us how long ago He created Adam by inserting genealogies! To place huge amounts of “missing” years, according to our top scholars, simply is unbiblical. It makes the genealogies rather meaningless. The ONLY reason Hugh Ross inserts these extra 40,000 or more years, is because, “Progressive Creationism” (PC), can’t work within the Biblical framework the Biblical scholars believe in. Don’t get me wrong: I respect Hugh as Christianity’s greatest astrophysicist, but there are glaring weaknesses in PC. For example, in PC there is no account of the creation of planet Earth in Genesis, despite the fact that he believes it was created in Genesis, which I certainly do not believe (see my “Local Creationism and The Statement of Fact View” here).
I would not say there is no room for this, but the burden of evidence is correspondingly greater. Does matching up some parts of the text in an excessively literal way justify ignoring or altering other parts of the text like this? When it comes to evolution, the evidence is more than sufficient and thus we find there is no good reason to explain away the other people mentioned in the text of the Bible at the time of Adam and Eve just so we can insist on an excessively literal reading of the text as a story of golems of dust and bone created by necromancy. But the text strongly suggests that all this is something that happened closer to 6000 thousand years ago rather than 5 million years ago.
On the other hand, it is never a good idea to overestimate our knowledge of things. If we find evidence of human civilization from millions of years ago (particularly on the bottom of the Mediterranean sea) that would certainly change my estimate of whether gbob’s theory has merit, and likewise for similar evidence and other theories. I will go where the evidence points for now, but I will not ignore new evidence that suggests otherwise. It wouldn’t be the first time that someone has proposed something not supported by evidence at the time which then proves to be true.
Well, it isn’t totally unsupported by evidence. I have listed that evidence several times, but mainly it comes from the fact that 4 rivers NO ONE THOUGHT WOULD EVER EMPTY INTO THE SAME SEA DID AT ONE TIME!. 2. Those rivers empty into a basin where the largest flood in geologic history took place, the only thing that even approaches being worth of being called Noah’s flood.
We are talking about the equivalent of filling the MED to a depth of 12-18000 feet with water in a one year time frame, and it happens at a time which matches the age of humanity’s oldest genes, in a basin that would have trouble getting rainfall, and having rainbows, but which was also able to support magnificent wildlife.
But Mitch, I agree with you that I would love to see something from the bottom of the Eastern med, like a dead human. That certainly won’t be the case for me, and I don’t think any core barrels will be pulling up anything like that during the rest of your life time. But that said, Ya gotta admit that this idea so far has more going for it than the Mesopotamian area does–which can’t cause a year long flood, sends the ark into the INdian Ocean (or has water flow uphill), and Mesopotamia with rivers arranged as they are today makes the Gen 2:8-13 description of the rivers 100% out of possibility.
Mitch, you said you wouldn’t take such a risk as I am. That is your perogative but it tells me much about how quickly you grasp something dropped into your lap. risk is good. I think this is a highly fruitful line to pursue, and that is what science is all about–finding new ways to look at things and then seeing if the data continues to support it. So far it does. Maybe in the future it won’t. But at least I can say I tried to solve a really hard problem. I don’t think you will ever be able to make that claim.
I agree the burden of proof is on me while I am here and then on those who might get interested in it. But by jiminiy, MItch, this is a possible way for all our bible stories to be actually true. We dare not drop it for fear we might be wrong. Being wrong is part of life.
Mike, your link doesn’t work. I am going to be going slow here for a bit. I have about a month to 6 weeks of work on the book left. I won’t be spending too much time taking barbs like MItches, or good questions like your because of the time deadlines. My editor gets back in town Saturday and I have to have my book like I want it, then go through her work, then index it, then figure out how to get it on Kindle. Price will be modest. I am not in it to make money for me or my family, but I have found that if you give a guy your book, he never reads it. That has happened several times in my life so I stopped doing that. lol
BTW, Hugh and and Rana have gone at it in the past. I feel for him because I think his donors won’t let him acknowledge the genetics and as of 2020, biblical scholars seem to be ok with 150,000 year old Adam. It started at 30k in 1991. I feel for him. Our best astrophysicist was Guierlmo Gonzalez, who was run out of academia years ago. It is a sad story.
That is absurd! Going where the evidence points is not about taking risks or not. It is about about having sufficient reason to swallow your fantastic whale. I tried to be kind, but apparently such is completely lost on you! You have to respond to any disagreement with insult!
I was pretty specific about the evidence which was lacking. Without which your so called evidence just isn’t enough – not to push Biblical history back to 1000 times what text suggests.