The author of the Book of Abraham clearly had insight into what we now know as general relativity.
Correct, but published in 1842.
You’re making my point. Hence the allegorical approach.
??? I said no such thing
And you are doing just that.
It was not written as allegory. It was written to start off the chronology (not that they would use such a word) Genesis means beginning. it is the beginning. Why make it any more? Because of some need for biblical supremacy?
Richard
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I’m all ears. Tell us more.
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Moses’s readers could understand “light.” But electromagnetic radiation? The creation story is an allegory. It’s full of symbolism.
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You can read what you want. Doesn’t mean it is actually there or intended by the author.
I will ask again. Why do you need to see all this symbolism? Isn’t it enough that
God created the universe and it was good. And He created the sabbath as a day of rest and to be holy.
Genesis is about Who not How.
Richard
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Observation does not need an intentional observer. What about all the unobserved history? Can you point out where Bohr or Heisenberg or Sommerfeld or Pauli or Feynman or Dirac or Dunning or Kruger said that last paragraph?
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You weren’t talking about Moses’s readers; you were listing relevant properties of light in (more or less) modern terms). Making up everything in the universe is not a property of light. Possessing energy is, of course, a property of light, but it’s equally a property of everything else. There’s no obvious reason that light should be the symbol for energy rather than the water or the stars or the serpent – they all possess energy. Which illustrates the central problem with your approach. In science-speak, you have too many researcher degrees of freedom. You can make any aspect of a scientific understanding of the world correspond to anything in the story, with no constraints and no way to test whether the assignment represents anything the author(s) intended.
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That’s another whole paper.
Certainly not to the degree where you try to give the Bible credit for what science has discovered!
The farthest I will go is in reading “Gen 2:7 then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” as God created our body with the stuff of the Earth according to its nature (natural law) and brought the human mind to life with His inspiration. For Genesis 1 I think the point was only that God created all these things rather than any of them being things we should worship. I just don’t see any need for the religious to fabricate some feeble one-up-man-ship over science. It is far more reasonable to simply accept that science has a great deal to offer in understanding the universe and ourselves. And that what religion has to offer is of a different nature entirely.
This is a complete absurdity!
A mention of flying in the Bible does not equal an insight into the science of aviation.
A mention of intelligence in the Bible does not equal an insight into computer science or AI.
A mention of healing in the Bible does not equal insight into modern medicine.
You weren’t talking about Moses’s readers; you were listing relevant properties of light in (more or less) modern terms).
It’s an allegory, a metaphor in story form.
Making up everything in the universe is not a property of light.
Everything in the universe is energy, by E=mc^2. In the Genesis allegory light means energy.
Possessing energy is, of course, a property of light, but it’s equally a property of everything else. There’s no obvious reason that light should be the symbol for energy rather than the water or the stars or the serpent – they all possess energy.
We’re not talking about energy as a property, as kinetic or potential energy. Everything IS ultimately energy. The “waters” does symbolize energy in the allegory.
Which illustrates the central problem with your approach. In science-speak, you have too many researcher degrees of freedom.
I disagree, because the hypothesis carries perfectly through the entire creation story, including the fall of Adam and Eve, which we haven’t talked about yet. There are far too many points of agreement. This destroys the degrees of freedom objection.
You can make any aspect of a scientific understanding of the world correspond to anything in the story,
If science and the creation story correspond, then you have made my point.
with no constraints and no way to test whether the assignment represents anything the author(s) intended.
The constraints/test is how well the creation story agrees with known science, given the hypothesis.
Yes, I get that. But in the part I objected to, you weren’t talking about the symbols; you were talking about the things being symbolized.
Well, no, physics doesn’t really tell us that. ‘Energy’ is an abstract concept that we use to describe the behavior of the physical world in a model or models. In those models, everything is characterized by energy, but I’m not aware of any model that defines everything as energy. Every system is also characterized by momentum and angular momentum, but I doubt you would describe everything as being fundamentally momentum or angular momentum.
No, it doesn’t. You have virtually no limit on your degrees of freedom, and your proposed relationships between symbol and symbolized are tenuous and flexible enough that pretty much no one but you finds them persuasive. According to your reading, light is energy, light is spiritual vs. physical reality, light is a wave function prior to collapse, and all of these exist prior to the existence of space – and then light is later just light.
The point of an allegory is to represent something (usually an abstraction) in a way that can be grasped by readers. Your proposed reading of Genesis doesn’t do that.
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What? You write papers?
Absurdity? A whole chapter on time dilation caused by a very large mass is an absurdity? You really should not criticize something you know nothing about.
I am a physicist. I do know what I am talking about with regards to General Relativity. The idea that anything of General Relativity is in some writing of Joseph Smith in the 19th century is completely absurd.
Physics is about the mathematical relationship between measurements and I don’t think there is any such thing in this writing of Joseph Smith. Obscure mentions of things which are vaguely cosmological does not amount to an insight into General Relativity. But go ahead and quote the Book of Abraham for the people here to read and see if anybody on this forum will agree that these are “insight into General Relativity.”
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Sorry to suggest that you wasted tons of time and thought on what seems to me to be a typical effort by religionists. And that is to academically and structurally pound a square peg into a round hole and call it truth. My advice: enjoy the sun for what it is.
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I think you are not using the steps of the scientific method correctly. How do you defend the definition of the biblical day in light of scientific knowledge?
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No, not “clearly”.
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Perhaps the imprecise way he stated it wasn’t quite correct. But physics has discovered that most of the things it studies are indeed different forms of energy: motion, heat, light, sound, and matter certainly. And thus they can theoretically be changed from one form of energy to another. In particle accelerators we convert electrical energy into the energy of motion of particles and then colliding those particles we covert that energy of motion into massive particles.
On the other hand we can certainly name other measures different than energy such as momentum and information which are not forms of energy in of themselves, though they have no existence completely apart from forms of energy in which these measures are manifested at any particular time. So for this reason, it is technically overstating things to simply say that all things are energy… but it is not entirely incorrect either, if you see what I mean.
I quite agree with your objection to equating light with energy – but only in our current epoch. In the earliest periods of the universe, I am not sure such distinctions are entirely valid.