Yes, I’d like to agree with you. I don’t think someone would be able to prove this idea; but it doesn’t contradict the Scriptures and, as far as I see, corresponds with the sensus fidei fidelium.
My first impulse was to respond that every deficiency in the created world must be either the effect of corruption or corruption itself. Than I flashed back to John 9:1-3. Well … Reality is complicated, and the truth is that we don’t know the ultimate reasons of creatures’ deficiencies. Still we hope that all deficiencies will be healed at last; and then we will receive the answers to the remaining questions.
Hi Reko,
again, I certainly do not profess to have all the answers on this, but what I do know I am glad to pass on. The Bible is Gods Word to mankind.
What has happened to the heavenly host, is not overly detailed in the Bible, but we do know that in Luke 10:17-20
17 Now the seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your name!” 18 And He said to them, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like lightning. 19 Behold, I have given you authority to walk on snakes and scorpions, and authority over all the power of the enemy, and nothing will injure you. 20 Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are recorded in heaven.”
AND
Revelation 12:7-9 7 And there was war in heaven, Michael and his angels waging war with the dragon. The dragon and his angels waged war, 8 and they did not prevail, and there was no longer a place found for them in heaven. 9 And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
Thus, we are told that Satan was thrown out of heaven with the fallen angels to the Earth.
I don’t know precisely when that happened but it was clearly at some Earth time prior to the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
As God and Heaven are not in the confined physical temporal realm that we are in where time progresses forward relentlessly, I certainly don’t know, but am wondering if the fall of Satan may be an event that accompanies the Creation when in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
I am not aware of any means that God has prepared for fallen angels to be saved, it is only man that Jesus came to Earth for, to save us all from the penalty of death and separation from Him in eternity.
As the Bible clearly states “sin came into the world through one man”, and names that man as Adam it is clear that sin was not physically manifested in the world until their was a physical disobedience to God that constitutes sin.
So although the presence of evil was on Earth in the form of the Satanically possessed serpent for example, until an act of disobedience was committed by a physical man in the physical temporal realm, sin had not as yet manifested.
A proper understanding of salvation depends upon a correct understanding of where we came from, why we are here, and what is wrong with the world.
Jesus said when He was talking with a group of Pharisees who were plotting to kill Him: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” John 8:44
The temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden is certainly in the beginning, and in fact as far as I know, is the first thing the Bible tells us about, that happened after Eve was created from Adam’s rib, thus she would of course have had the same DNA as Adam. (Though of course the fact of the same DNA was not known then as such, and has only been known for about the last fifty years, but I digress).
The serpent spoke a lie when it said to Eve, “You shall not surely die.”
Firstly, it is a clear and unavoidable fact that the very first lie recorded in the Bible was that told by the Satan possessed serpent in the garden, thus it is apt that Jesus refers to Satan, (the devil) as the father of lies in the Biblical passage above.
Secondly, when Jesus calls the devil (or Satan) “a murderer from the beginning” it is an apt description because think of the countless humans that have died throughout history that have suffered the penalty for sin that is death directly because of the lie told by Satan to Eve that caused Adam to also disobey God.
We have further confirmation that the serpent in the Garden of Eden is under the control of Satan in Revelation 12:9 9 And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
AND ALSO
Revelation 20:1-3
1Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding the key of the abyss and a great chain in his hand. 2 And he took hold of the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years;
3 and he threw him into the abyss and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he would not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were completed; after these things he must be released for a short time.
I hope the above Biblical quotes assist you to get a better grasp of the situation but as I have already stated, I am not an authority in this area and can only refer you to read further if you still have questions at:
Also, I don’t know what your first language is, but there are just over 50 different languages at this site and there may well be articles in your first language at:
These very excerpts demonstrate how God is working to establish the Kingdom. The tree grows; the flour is being leavened - these are the processes that take time. So, the divine work to establish the Kingdom is also the process that takes time.
This process is not “imagined”. If there is no such process, the most fundamental physical theories that enjoy a strong experimental support must be abjectly wrong (in brief, the age of the Universe is estimated by interpreting the observable data through the lens of general relativity, while the latter is also experimentally confirmed). This could have been the case - but only if our creator had deliberately deceived us. Of course, scientists can’t scientifically figure out whether they are deceived by God or not. But the God whom I’ve read about in the Bible is not the deceiver. Thus I reject this possibility.
God has created not only the Earth but all that exist (Genesis 1:1, cf. John 1:3). If you say that this Creation started six thousand years ago, you must mean that the entire Universe appeared six thousand years ago.
And neither do I Certainly, God could have provided any kind of information. But the Scriptures’ writers have repeatedly described how God talks with prophets or edifies them through an angel. These rare and fascinating occasions were not squandered on exhaustively detailed lectures about natural or human history. Instead, the Holy Spirit gives a prophet (and, to some extent, every believer) a guidance - what he or she is to accomplish.
P. S. Please take notice: in the New Testament, the only genealogy that starts from the creation is not “sealed” by the writer; it is just reported as an opinion about Jesus (Luke 3:23).
If bold is the case, that’s why I wonder how come *“satan deceived Eve is not a sin?”
Besides, it open the possibility to raise a question: If Adam not eat the fruit, but Eve only, then sin has not enter the world yet?
I just read about Original Sin, Augustine: before the fall, able to sin - able not to sin, which again, it open the possibility to raise a question: If Adam not eat the fruit, but Eve only, then what will happen?
Why not just make a theory which will “shut” everybody to raise a question? Such as : The fall of Adam and Eve show that no human —when at the appearance just like Adam and Eve— can ALWAYS resist any kind of temptation.
Therefore, no need to make Original Sin theory.
No Original Sin theory, no Christian ask “my one month old baby died, is he going to hell?”
No Original Sin theory, no debate .
These are parables. They are not historical accounts of miracles that Jesus performed. Surely you can see that. The parables are given by Jesus to help the people back then and us now to understand what Heaven is like. Jesus was not performing a miracle like raising a decaying dead person back to instantaneous life, or commanding the strong wind and the large waves to be still that immediately happened on His command. He is teaching!
But trees do NOT take billions of years to grow, even if we were to accept that your analogy of using some parables of Jesus as valid surrogates for His performance of miracles that instantly manifested.
They clearly are not.
Well, again that is plainly not the case.
The very reason why we have to constantly correct the clocks on GPS satellites is because of Einsteins proven Theory of General Relativity. The clocks on the GPS satellites at an altitude of about 20,200 km need corrections for both special and general relativistic effects, which amount to about 38 millionths of a second per day. It’s not much, yet it is a real measurable effect that would result in huge errors in GPS results if not corrected for. As a result it can be classified as real operational science.
If, as it seems quite possible, from observations made by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, our galaxy is near the centre of the universe, then our Galaxy and here on Earth are in a gravity well of enormous magnitude, that may be the explanation that whilst billions of years have transpired in very distant galaxies, only a short space of time has elapsed here on Earth. The research of this is in its infancy, due to the fact that Christians who challenge the validity of the Big Bang and ‘Deep Time’ on Earth Cosmology don’t receive huge funding grants, or further large slabs of telescope time.
I thoroughly recommend that you read the article at:
Hi Reko, Satan deceiving Eve, I think is a sin. But we are interested in the salvation from sin’s penalty of death for human kind, through the Love of God for us, rather than sins penalty for fallen angels which will end badly for them in eternity.
But as I have previously stated I am not an authority on this, and it is almost midnight here, so I’m heading off to bed.
Well, that took me down a rabbit hole reading about the SDSS. Fun stuff to read about how it works and such. My impression is that you have a big misconception as to what it means to locate our galaxy near the center of the universe. According to the Big Bang, essentially all points are located near the center of the universe from the viewpoint of an observer from that point, as that is where they started, and the universe expanded around them. Thus the Sloan DSS confirms the Big Bang and is consistent with it with its observations. Also, that does not put us in a deep gravity well anymore than any other point in the universe, generally speaking.
It’s young-earth-ese for “anything and everything about science that I don’t like.” They frequently apply it to subjects that have nothing whatsoever to do with biological evolution. So for example, you’ll see them referring to calculations about the amount of salt in the oceans, or the strength of Uranus’s magnetic field, as “evolutionist.”
It’s their way of being anti-science while claiming to be pro-science. Divide science in two, wax lyrical about the half that you accept, and denounce the half that you don’t accept as <insert insult here>, claiming that it’s not science because <insert completely made-up specious reason here>.
The creation.com article does something similar. It is peppered with rhetoric denouncing scientific theories that it doesn’t like as “atheist.” But the scientific theories in question are, when it boils down to it, just maths. The idea that maths can be “atheist” is simply patent nonsense. The rules of maths are exactly the same for Christians and atheists alike.
For what it’s worth, the alternative model that it proposes—Earth in the centre of a gravitational well—is basically an appeal to the idea of time dilation due to general relativity. People who have heard of the concept sometimes think that this could be a way of making the Earth six thousand years old and 4.5 billion years old at the same time. The only problem is that they never do the maths to figure out just how much gravitational time dilation they would need for that. And the amount that they would need is pretty extreme. You’d need to be just half a metre away from the event horizon of TON 618, one of the largest known black holes in the universe, which has a Schwarzschild radius of about 390 billion kilometres (0.04 light years or more than 40 times the distance from Neptune to the sun).
But it perfectly parallels Jesus’ life. And since Jesus is the starting point of all theology, that seems a very strong argument that the universe also started off young and grew to maturity.
More science fiction.
This is not a theological argument, it’s an excuse to avoid grappling with issues. What God can do and what He actually did do are not the same thing.
Given that God didn’t bother with providing a complete text of the New Testament writings without variants, I see no reason He would bother to do any differently with a genealogical list.
The purpose of scripture is not to satisfy your curiosity about how things happened.
No, it’s the other way around: since God didn’t preserve the scriptures perfectly, the burden of proof is on whoever thinks God would bother to make sure the genealogies were correct according to a modern worldview. Indeed since there are contradictions in different listings of genealogies as given in different OT books, it is evident that God doesn’t particularly care about them being correct by modern standards.
We don’t inherit sin, we inherit death, and because we inherit death we sin, at least according to Paul.
You have a complete definition of “truth” that doesn’t come from the scriptures.
Paul isn’t reciting history, he’s talking about the relationship between humans and God, specifically having to do with sin. He isn’t concerned with the “serpent” who misled Eve because his concern is the Gospel, and the Gospel is for people, not for angels.
Of course it was a sin, but Paul isn’t talking about the ultimate origin of sin, he’s talking about where the first human sin started. He links human death to sin, and since humans didn’t inherit death due to any sin of any angel, he ignores the angel’s/serpent’s involvement.
Interesting. On the other hand, given that the Hebrew says the flood covered the known world, a dove flying to its maximum altitude right above the ark might not have been able to see anything but water yet. Further, given the worldview of a flat earth disk, the writer may have conceived of a world small enough that a dove could fly high enough to see the whole thing.
We also don’t know if what we think are deficiencies qualify as that in God’s view.
Hopefully not all at once – learning is too much fun!
Theologians down through the centuries have mostly linked this with the Incarnation, though I don’t think there’s a majority view as to exactly when. Rev. 12:1-4 is about Jesus’ conception and birth, and 7-9 follows that, so presumably the war in heaven came at or after Jesus’ conception.
If Job is meant as history, then the war in heaven hadn’t happened by then given that the Adversary was still free to come and go in and out of heaven.
If we assume that demons are fallen angles, then the war in heaven didn’t happen in Old Testament times since demons don’t seem to appear in the world until Jesus came along, and since He encountered them in His ministry it would make sense that they showed up at His birth or conception.
My understanding is that:
1.) the Big Bang Theory is plainly not valid. It is a theory constructed upon a series of ad hoc naturalistic assumptions to explain the origin of the universe. The Big Bang is not a statement of empirical scientific observations or facts, it is nothing more than a collection of unverifiable naturalistic assumptions. It is in essence, ‘a faith position’.
Quoting NASA at: WMAP Formation of Universe Structures " The Big Bang theory is widely considered to be a successful theory of cosmology, but the theory is incomplete. It does not account for the needed fluctuations to produce the structure we see. Most cosmologists believe that the galaxies that we observe today grew from the gravitational pull of small fluctuations in the nearly-uniform density of the early universe. These fluctuations leave an imprint in the cosmic microwave background radiation in the form of temperature fluctuations from point to point across the sky. The WMAP satellite measures these small fluctuations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which in turn reveals the early stages of structure formation.
In its simplest form, the Big Bang theory assumes that matter and radiation are uniformly distributed throughout the universe and that general relativity is universally valid. While this can account for the existence of the cosmic microwave background radiation and explain the origin of the light elements, it does not explain the existence of galaxies and large-scale structure. The solution of the structure problem must be built into the framework of the Big Bang theory."
2.) The Big Bang Theory is propped up by the further ad-hoc assumptions of ‘Dark Energy’ and ‘Dark Matter’. These two entities have never been detected, have no evidence for their existence whatsoever, they are merely ad-hoc constructs designed to rescue the theory, because the amount of matter expected in the universe (through inference of mass taken from stars and galaxies motions), is approximately ten times larger than what is possible for the number of stars and all other matter including dust and nebula.
3.) The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) was measured well before it was proposed as evidence for the Big Bang as a few degrees K above absolute zero. The uniformity of temperature observed throughout space in all directions is evidence to me at least that when God rolled out the heavens like a scroll, leaving a uniform temperature was part of that supernatural event.
There actually is a clear possibility that our galaxy is near the centre of the universe. If you assume that all galaxies in the universe are homogenous, i.e., the large scale structure of the universe is basically the same in all directions regardless of where you view it from, ‘the cosmological principal’, that assumes a random distribution of galaxies throughout the universe, then there should be a consistently continuous distribution of red shift values. But observations have shown that a consistently continuous distribution of red shift values is NOT what we actually observe, using real empirical science. We in fact observe that the red shift values are quantized at regular intervals. A recent explanation for this observed phenomena is that the galaxies are located in shells, like the structure of an onion, with our galaxy near the centre.
There may be another explanation of course, but it does go to show that in truth, we know very little about the universe through empirical science, thus I am heartened that the glorious majesty of the universe speaks volumes about the glory of God.
Furthermore, the effect of gravity on time is well known now and is experimentally verified . Thus if it is indeed the case that our galaxy is somewhere near the centre of the universe, then the time dilation I mentioned in my previous post is absolutely reasonable and consistent with real empirical science.
Hi Reko, it is on my heart to give you an answer to this terribly sad occurrence.
My understanding is that God doesn’t want any humans to perish eternally, He wishes all to come to Salvation through Jesus. But in the case of babies, I think in God’s eyes they are innocent, and will Not go to hell as you put it.
It is important to note that the One and Only Living God is absolutely Just, Righteous, Holy and Loving.
I think when we see more clearly in the future we may well be quite surprised at the reality of how God Saves as many that He is able within the good constraints of perfect Justice and Righteousness that are important aspects of His Holy Character.
I do not believe for a millisecond that babies go to hell; because that is not consistent with God’s Love for us all.
There’s something you need to understand here, Jon.
There is a difference between “incomplete” and “incorrect.”
Or in other words, just because there are some things that we don’t know, that doesn’t mean that the things we do know could be wrong.
Even if the Big Bang did turn out to be incorrect as an explanation for the origin of the universe, that would not reduce the age of either the universe or the Earth to just six thousand years. That would require a complete rewrite of everything we know about physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, cosmology, archaeology, anthropology, ancient history, and even mathematics and geometry.
As for the idea that the Earth or the Milky Way are in the centre of a gravitational well, forget it. The kind of gravitational well that could produce the million-fold time dilation that young earthists need would also result in conditions so extreme that they would not be able to support life as we know it in any way, shape or form. And no, there’s no “naturalistic assumptions” involved here whatsoever. It’s just basic maths.
Statements like this are egregiously misleading. The CMB was in fact predicted well before discovery or measurement, especially by the work of Alpher and Herman. There was discussion over what the exact value that would be expected due to different calculations of gas density at the time of decoupling.
The important thing is that the big bang theory predicted that the universe ought to be permeated by low-temperature blackbody radiation. This is a qualitative prediction, and creationists ought not to quibble over the modest range in the early quantitative temperature estimates or that the actual CMB temperature is slightly below the range.
The CMB remains inexplicable by alternative to the Big Bang. It is far too uniform for local generation or any YEC explantations.
There is much that remains to be discovered in cosmology, but do you know one thing that is not a problem? Distant starlight. Distant starlight is not a problem. It took billions of years for light to traverse from the far cosmos. No problem. There is no distant starlight problem - doesn’t exist.
Along those same lines, every scientific theory is incomplete that I know of. Even things that were labeled “Laws” such as the Law of Gravity are incomplete. That is why people are still doing science. But even if incomplete, that does not negate the observations and measurements that are made, it just means the framework that explains those observations, that is, the theory, has to be refined. The universe is still expanding, telescopes still see galaxies that produced the light they see 12 billion years in the past. Perhaps something else will explain the physics better that what we have now, but the physics will be the same.
Evolution is the same way. No doubt there are things we think are correct that are wrong, but the basic findings will still be the same, only the explanation will be better defined.
I agree with there, Jon. But, I confess I do not know how it works. There was an interesting blog I read about holes in our theology, and this topic is a big one. Augustine proposed original sin, and to get around babies being condemned to hell, infant baptism arose to fill the hole. Protestants came along and declared infant baptism invalid, and had to fill the hole with some variation of “age of accountability.” That too creates problems, as it then seems better for children to die young rather than live long enough to be condemned to hell. So, better to trust that God is good and just and merciful, and be thankful it is not in our hands.
Fair enough, George Gamow did make a prediction in 1948 and Alpher and Herman did also make a prediction in 1948. But a single successful prediction does not validate a theory.
To look at the situation from a simple logical perspective, the premise does not confirm, the proposition or in this case prediction; take the following example:
I get a headache when I eat cane sugar.
I have a headache, therefore I ate cane sugar.
But there are an infinite number of other reasons besides eating sugar that caused my headache.
Well Jason Lisle for one disagrees with that summation; see:
The horizon problem is not equivalent to the YEC’s distant starlight problem. The question for the CMB is “how did the temperature become so uniform?”. Information, such as light, could not communicate over the distances involved, so that is likely ruled out as a solution. There are other possible reasons besides radiative equilibrating that brought about the uniformity.
The so called distant starlight problem, in contrast, directly concerns the speed of light over the distances involved, and is no more involved than figuring how long a road trip will take at the speed limit. In no way, shape, or form, does this exist as any sort of problem to astronomy. Like most of YEC, the distant starlight problem concerns theological dogma and has little to do with science.
Certainly, God could have provided any kind of information. But the Scriptures’ writers have repeatedly described how God talks with prophets or edifies them through an angel. These rare and fascinating occasions were not squandered on exhaustively detailed lectures about natural or human history. Instead, the Holy Spirit gives a prophet (and, to some extent, every believer) a guidance - what he or she is to accomplish.