Just a measly 3.1 x 10⁶. ; - ) (And it’s closer in the dead of winter than in the summer!)
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FYI: You’re talking to yourself. Kelli ain’t home. Don’t believe me? Click on her name and find out for yourself.
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Huh. She may have bailed? Some YECish lurkers might still profit though. [No Shannon either.]
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Alas, no. Trying to force together two completely different understandings of the cosmos is a dead-end. The attempt will inevitably lead nowhere, except to confusion and disappointment.
Instead, when reading the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) imagine the picture below. This is how they understood the cosmos. It makes sense in its own terms. For instance, you’ll see that the earth is pictured as flat, as that is what they (mostly) imagined it to be. (The idea of a curved or spherical earth was beginning to emerge in Egypt and Greece at bout the same time, but was in its infancy.) But this view, held by the writers and editors of scripture, we now know to be incompatible with what subsequent discoveries (including that Egyptian/Greek discovery of curvature of the earth) has revealed.
it is quite fruitless trying to force together these notions into some sort of “Grand Unified Truth”. it can’t be done because they are fundamentally incompatible.
Instead, gain a deeper understanding of how scripture came to be as it is from its own day.
A YEC lurker profit from the words of a self-acknowledged atheist?
When pigs fly…
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Truth is truth. Even the stones will cry out as the heavens do already.
Let’s hope that all their school teachers were believers then - because Lord help us if they have an atheist teaching them that 2+2=4.
My “point” was that if they don’t “profit” from the words of non-YEC Christians, what’s the probability that a self-acknowledged atheist would have anything of importance to say. 2 + 2 is among the things that kids learn in the 1st grade. Granted, I don’t know everything about everything, but … I’ve never heard of many public elementary school teachers self-acknowledging their religious beliefs–much less their atheistic beliefs–at the beginning of a school year.
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Perhaps this is not coming across as you meant. If a YEC Christian can profit from the words of an atheist engineer, or atheist physician, why can one not profit from the perspective of an atheist researcher? At minimum, it is good to know the best presentation of the case from the other side.
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What’s your point? That the heavens would tell a lie or be nonsense if you didn’t believe that they were created? Surprise. You don’t have to believe in God to believe in a universe that makes sense.
Point well taken - and tragic it is for YECs (and any of us who engage in similar practices). When anyone pre-filters their educational sources according to the rule: “I’ll listen to and learn from you only if you have first agreed with me”; then I only end up able to learn … what I already ‘knew’. People need to have the results of this tragic ‘educational’ strategy pounded home. That’s why I registered my complaint about it here.
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With an unhealthy dose of political pressure, some arrogance on Galaileo’s part, and obnoxious (and far more arrogant) heretics promoting heliocentrism to contribute.
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My point was and is that non-Christians can tell the truth about physical reality. We were talking about the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun.
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An objective universe has its being in God, and a subjective universe has its being in…
Whose “we”? T’s, to whom I addressed my comment because he was addressing a YEC or …?
… our Universal Consciousness 
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I subscribe to and confess, publicly and privately, The Apostles Creed, which begins with the First Article: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth, …” in whom we live, move, and have our being, as Paul said–quoting words attributed to Epictetus describing the Cretans’ god, Zeus. I believe in an infinite and eternal God the Father Almighty, objectively indistinguishable from an infinite and eternal Cosmos. The difference between me and, IMO, a rational and reasonable agnostic atheist, is that I am quite comfortable being grateful to God the Father, whereas I have difficulty imagining an agnostic atheist being “grateful to” the Cosmos.
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Married bachelors
I understand. “Category confusion” often does lead to confusing some imaginable possibilities with unimaginable impossibilities.
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