The Theology of Leap Years

It’s a leap year. What does this mean? Why did God choose to create a year ratio that needs so much calculation and explanation?

It’s crazy that we came up with this thing called “keeping time” somehow, isn’t it?

It is definitely not how people would have designed it and doesn’t really favor the idea of design at all. I think God’s design is limited to the laws of nature which enabled the complexity of life and the details like this are not a matter of design but the automation of the mathematical structure of space-time.

I think it has to do with the fall and the curse of creation. Everything was tidy and even up to that point.:wink:
Perhaps whatever you say about God, one of his attributes is not OCD. It does bother me that October is not the eighth month. December not being the tenth, not so much. We Yanks have never really bought in to the metric system, loosely associated.
Let’s not get started on daylight saving time. Seriously, let us not start it this year. Sure, you say we get that hour of sleep back in the fall, but the reality is, it is gone forever.

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SO TRUE!! :rofl:

If they are the laws of nature, God can’t design them. They are independent of Him, or the if null then not null principle, apart from in their instantiation.

Such a non-issue!

And how many angels can dance on the head of a pin again?

Because God has a sense of humor.

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Then again, look at π (pi)

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You are of course free to believe as you choose in this regard. There is no objective evidence either way. But as an argument, that is as silly as the silliest arguments I have heard for the existence of God, like arguing that complexity means it must be made by an intelligent designer. Counter examples so easily show how absurd such arguments are. In your case, I can point to any machine such as a watch, and the fact that it operates on its own independent of anyone does not mean that it was not designed by anyone. Nor does the name we give something imply anything about its origin. I certainly cannot prove that you were created by God simply by calling you “Jehovah’s little golem.”

Oh… I changed the wording in my post from “mathematical laws of space-time” to “mathematical structure of space-time” since I think the so called “laws of nature” pretty much follow from the geometry and certainly nothing like human legal statues.

BUT as a little reminder… this forum is for Christians who support evolution. It is a basic premise here therefore that God is responsible for our existence and posts can take this for granted and the posters are not required to prove any such thing. If you don’t like that you can go elsewhere.

4 ( 1/1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + … ) what’s so much?

And what’s it, or the orbital period of the 3rd rock from a second class yellow dwarf type G, about 15kly along the Orion-Cygnus arm of the Milky Way, redundantly phrased, galaxy, got to do with God?

Orbits decay… there’s perfection in everything’s apparent “imperfection”… Watches will wind down or lose battery power, etc. I believe the only perpetual-motion-device is the Universe itself. In time that moves so slowly only God could keep track of it - the Universe will slowly grow cold and collapse upon itself as small black holes that were once solar-systems attract bigger Black-holes that were once entire Galaxies… until everything collects into one Universal black-hole that then collapses upon itself until all matter is condensed to a 0-dimensional singularity and then BANG! …Reborn… Infinity in all directions of time and space… 99.9999…% of all material turning to nothing as anti-matter attacks matter and that which remains becomes a new Universe as we know it, with time taking it’s time to once again develop something akin to humanity- to be taught once again slowly but surely, by God, everything we need to know… and then watch us evolve (for better or worse) our collective thoughts once again… I wonder if each soul then gets another swing at life? SO many things to wonder about, so many things to ask God about… so many things we couldn’t even dream of to be told about… as an atheist in my youth, I though spending an “eternity” in heaven would be boring after the 1st millenia or so… but given the concept of infinity in all realms of existence, I would imagine there are infinite things to discover in the afterlife… nobody will be bored. See ya’ll there! =D

I think Jim’s notion that time is a bit of a jumble, confuses time with the way we humans choose to measure time. In the past, we humans have often used a lunar or a solar calendar. Time did not change when we switched from one to the other. Time proceeded merrily along its way. The fact that the orbital time of the Earth (years) and the orbital time of the Moon (months) and the rotational period of the Earth (days) do not divide into each other, shows nothing about the passage of time. It shows that the way humans choose to measure time is a “rule of thumb” that works in rough terms, but not in accurate terms. We could take a hint from the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians who chose to measure such astronomical events using base 60, that is, sexagesimal numbers; not in Base 10, as we mostly use today. Base 60 gives us a different picture that is not quite so jumbled. Yet even Base 60 is a human attempt to measure time and indicates nothing of the nature of the universe. Why should our years, months and days divide into each other? Even crazier is the notion that our calendric systems indicate something about the existence or not of God.

As for the “Laws of Nature”, I am always reminded of the declaration by the famous quantum physicist, Max Planck, as he explored the nature of quantum physics in the final years of the 19th century, that the most fundamental laws of physics were violated. (See Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner. Quantum Enigma Physics Enounters Consciouness. 2006.Oxford University Press.p53.) It seems the laws of physics are laws until they are not!

I think the most accurate measurement of time we have today is not through measurement of astronomical events, but by atomic clocks. With that level of accuracy we can detect that the flow of time is altered by gravity and velocity, as Einstein predicted. The satellites which orbit the Earth and give us location and time have to be corrected for time given that they orbit further from the Earth than us on the surface.