So, are you saying that God held a writing seminar for Moses to teach him to write in genres that would have had no meaning to people back then?
Given that reading it as history throws out almost all the theology, reading it as history is foolish, it is a quenching of the voice of the Holy Spirit.
And given that the theology appears when reading it as one or more of the types of literature that Moses would have known, reading it as history is doubly foolish.
That’s a lie and by now you know it – or you just don’t care and have no respect for anyone here except those who might agree with you.
“Deep time” as a concept first came from Genesis – not from the pagan mythologies, which depicted the world and everything as young (didn’t know you were following pagan teaching, did you?). It came from the fact that before the “two great lights” were made the only measurer of time was God Himself, so they called it “divine time”. It came from the fact that the grammar of Genesis 1 does not indicate that the days followed one after another, it says “a second day”, “a third day”, etc.
Human death – that’s clear from the context.
Of course he was; the opening Creation account demonstrates that: he took the Egyptian creation story and turned it into two different literary genres at once while making a polemic that demoted the great Egyptian gods to the status of created things, even going so far as to not even give the names of the sun and the moon! and declaring that night was not an enemy of Creation but just another part of it that YHWH-Elohim made.
Any plodding literate teenager could have written that Creation story as history; Moses brilliantly wrote a short piece that told Israel that all the world is Yahweh’s temple and we are His representatives in it, that He doesn’t need to go into battle against chaos and darkness but just gives commands, and that all the vaunted gods of powerful Egypt were disobedient servants of Yahweh.
Of course He doesn’t. The problem is that you think that something can be truth only if it is written 100% scientifically and historically accurately – a worldview aspect that does not come from the scriptures and thus must not be applied to them. The writers chosen by the Holy Spirit told truth, but they did it using the forms that would have the greatest impact on their actual audiences – because that’s how God does things, using the most effective methods to try to bring everyone to the knowledge of His Son.
The opening Creation story, as history, isn’t about Jesus except secondarily; read as the ‘royal chronicle’, temple inauguration, and polemic that it is it has Jesus all over the place. Read as history, it has little to do with the Gospel, but read as those ancient literary kinds (in the historical context) it tells the Gospel.
Or out of lumber in the first place.
That’s a great and important point: in the ANE, the way to tell history was to take a great event and mythologize it – they would have seen anything else as a declaration that the event wasn’t actually important.
And a critical part! “Let the Bible be what it is” is a great mantra, but it can only be done by first of all figuring out what it is – never by reading it from one’s own worldview (unless you’re an ancient Israelite, or Egyptian, or Babylonian, or . . . ).
Notably, AiG claims to follow the historical-grammatical method, but I have never once seen them pay any attention to the historical (aside from some lip-service platitudes) and have seen them trample grammar at will.
Yes, granted to the things you listed are invisible to the human eye, however they all differ in one key property, they are invisible things that can be experimentally tested, manipulated, put to work in a myriad of ways and repeated in the laboratory over and over in a multitude of ways that produce the same results, whereas DE & DM are not testable in the laboratory in any way known that confirms they are even real. They are the product of a theory, that in truth fall out of mathematical calculations from an unproven theory that attempts to explain the CMB however even the postulated expanse of time is insufficient for the CMB to reach an approximate equilibrium as is observed in all directions in the universe, in short the BB horizon problem.
The salient word in my post is “confirmed”, which up to the present point in time has NOT been achieved, thus I repeat, as yet, there is “not a skerrick of confirmed evidence that any observed effects are caused by them”, and I would add, even confirm that they exist at all. As stated above, they are the result of mathematical calculations made within the BB paradigm, that are explanatory within that paradigm for the absence of the amount of matter expected to exist.
And until then, the sequencing we presently have available is a poor substitute for comparison purposes between morphological similarities and DNA similarities to validate or disprove belief in evolution.
Dear Tim,
. . . . . . . . I reject that summation as it assumes evolution at the outset and fails to account for inherent error in the sequencing methodology usually employed at present, (usually, to make available grant dollars go as far as possible, it is expensive to sequence an entire genome, though technology is advancing rapidly and the cost is coming down, thus eventually completely accurate genomes will be available in the coming years).
As I said, I prefer to take a precautionary approach, and will wait and see when orders of magnitude more accurate sequencing is performed on a broad range of eukaryotes.
Tim, what I think you are misunderstanding here about this whole matter, is that the premise of evolution as a given reality is embedded in the rationale, the lens if you like, through which the data is interpreted.
I understand that you do not see what is occurring here with these research projects, that they’re all assuming evolution to be real at the outset. They’re examples of creatures that are quite possibly from the same original created kind. Using these extant sessile aquatic invertebrate animals, as examples of evolution from within the evolution paradigm hardly confirms that evolution is a proven reality, and perhaps to some degree, a degree of confirmation bias at work.
I’m certain that all the researchers that have put their names to the papers are honest, diligent hard working professional scientists seeking the truth. It is not their fault they are working within an academic system that propagates and continually reinforces a false prime paradigm
The matter that I take issue with is the a priori assumption that evolution is a given, therefore we can look for phylogenetic evidence, and when we find it, we have ‘voila’, proved evolution! But I repeat that rationale is deeply flawed, and emanates from the unwavering belief in the ruling paradigm, though most mainstream educated folks will likely disagree.
At best, with these research projects, more knowledge is obtained about the genes studied. The evolutionary phylogenetic trees assumed to be real are in reality a theoretical construct that assumes evolution without proving it.
Well again, we will just have to agree to disagree.
It may well be theology but it most certainly IS REAL HISTORY in every way, shape and form!
Of course it is real history. The propensity of some people on this site to deny the clearly Truthful REAL accounts of events in the Holy Scriptures astounds me.
Whether you call it history or whatever is irrelevant, the salient matter is that the Holy Bible faithfully informs us about REAL EVENTS THAT OCCURRED IN THE PAST.
I accept in faith the Holy Scriptures of Genesis to accurate and true accounts of what happened in the past. If you wish to believe otherwise, go for it, it is none of my business what you believe.
But do not expect me to discredit the Holy Scriptures in order to slip evolution/deep time myths into the Holy text. That I will never do.
Absolute gobbeldy gook.
What has “History” today got to do with anything relevant in this matter.
Sorry but by your rationale and irrational reasoning here, the miraculous events performed by Jesus and recorded in the New Testament Gospels are NOT REAL HISTORY!
Utter nonsense!
The miracles that Jesus performed here on Earth about 2,000 years ago areREAL EVENTS THAT REALLY OCCURRED!
It doesn’t matter one iota what you label it with, whether it be ‘history’ or ‘a record of events’ or ‘a complete biography of Jesus on Earth’, or whatever, the label is utterly irrelevant, WHAT DOES MATTER IS THAT REAL EVENTS OF THE PAST ARE FAITHFULLY AND ACCURATELY RECORDED FOR OUR INSTRUCTION. The Holy Bible does precisely that!
‘See above’
What has “Modern historical writing” got to do with REAL ACCOUNTS OF REAL EVENTS in Genesis?
I wrote: "It may not have been called ‘history’ as such in the Hebrew, though how you can faithfully believe you are sure about that, for the author of Genesis, (perhaps Moses), was around so very long ago, thus this is a question that needs a powerfully strong answer of unquestionable authenticity. Do you have such an answer?"
Because you’re claiming Genesis is NOT A REAL RECORD OF REAL EVENTS, I was simply asking you if you have any documented proof of unquestionable authenticity supporting that claim.
I’m at a loss here as to what you are meaning when you say “Yes”.
Either you agree that Genesis is describing Real Events that actually occurred or you don’t…
At the risk of again being repetitive here:
Sorry but by your rationale and irrational reasoning here, the miraculous events performed by Jesus and recorded in the New Testament Gospels are NOT REAL HISTORY!
Utter nonsense!
The miracles that Jesus performed here on Earth about 2,000 years ago areREAL EVENTS THAT REALLY OCCURRED!
It doesn’t matter one iota what you label it with, whether it be ‘history’ or ‘a record of events’ or ‘a complete biography of Jesus on Earth’, or whatever, the label is utterly irrelevant, WHAT DOES MATTER IS THAT REAL EVENTS OF THE PAST ARE FAITHFULLY AND ACCURATELY RECORDED FOR OUR INSTRUCTION. The Holy Bible does precisely that!
You have had three people try to explain it to you, but no, Jon’s transceiver is fixed on transmit. So by this point I will be blunt. You evidently have no idea what you are talking about, and are seemingly too obtuse to learn.
DE & DM are not attempts to explain the Big Bang or the CMB, neither of which are essentially dependent on DE or DM. As you have already been informed of observational evidence of DE and DM, I will not repeat it yet again. I do not know what it would take to disimbue from this quixotic quest, but perhaps AiG’s Danny Faulkner can reach you.
There is strong observational evidence for dark matter. Yet, many biblical creationists remain skeptical of it. This skepticism appears to be based upon a misunderstanding of the reasons for belief in dark matter. Contrary to popular misconception, dark matter is not a rescuing device for the big bang model. It is true that dark matter is used to manipulate the big bang model, but that merely is because there is good evidence that dark matter exists and that the big bang suffers from problems that need fixes. The big bang was the dominant cosmogony for years before dark matter came to be accepted, so it is clear that the big bang model is not nearly as dependent upon dark matter than many creationists seem to think. If dark matter suddenly fell out of favor, all that it would eliminate is the current version of the big bang model. Soon, a new version would arise to take its place. Therefore, it is misguided to believe that denial of dark matter is a sort of silver bullet that would destroy the big bang model. Absent dark matter, the big bang model, in a different form, likely would survive.
Jon can a real event be metaphysical real and physically real in differing ways?. For example, I believe revelation to be descriptions of metaphysical and spiritual realities but what they manifest in our reality may be very different.
Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars. 2 Then being with child, she cried out in labor and in pain to give birth.
3 And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great, fiery red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. 4 His tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth, to devour her Child as soon as it was born. 5 She bore a male Child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron. And her Child was caught up to God and His throne.
I really think the Alpha Omega name for Christ must be linked directly to Genesis and Revelation. Genesis and Revelation are both metaphysical and spiritual realities about Him that might manifest in our reality very different than we expect. If the end is mysterious the so too the beginning!
What offensively patronizing twap. But it does serve as an example of disillusional bubble inhabited by YEC. The vast majority of working scientists accept an old Earth and evolution, the proportion of those who do not is vanishingly small. Scientists are not at war with Christians, and in fact that is typically not even in consciousness. The war in fact exists only in the minds of YEC.
The disciplines of geology, biology, paleontology, physics, and astronomy encompass concepts antithetical to YEC. Evolution is biology over time. Given that those with the expertise and experience are on board with evolution, YEC must concoct some reason why this is so. That scientists are guided by evidence just won’t do, so instead cast them essentially as dolts. The poor little dears dedicating their lives to hands on research, gathering the data, doing the analysis, and making the discoveries, are innocents that have no clue what they are up to. Who needs science when there is YEC pseudoscience?
Do you believe Ephesians 6:12 is true and correct, or does that Scripture mean something else completely different too, just as you believe Genesis, means something completely different to what is plainly written?
12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
I don’t find it at all surprising the very real forces of darkness have gained much influence over many mass media and academic education systems of most western countries.
You are most likely, as yet quite unaware of the madness being perpetrated right now, here in Australia, in the name of woke political correctness, it is truly quite shocking.
If you live in America, you are very fortunate to live in a country that is still very much Christian.
Honestly. it pains me that Australia has compromised to such a degree that once overflowing mainstream Christian Churches are now in far too many cases reduced to a handful of congregants.
Whether you like it or not, the prime reason of the decline from surveys conducted is evolution.
Many people believe that evolution explains the big questions, thus God is obsolete in many peoples minds and hence, agnosticism and atheism are growing whilst Christian faith is declining.
Most of the media is heaping hearty approval on the madness and Christians are portrayed as dangerous nutcases who are intolerant and who promote hate, which is ironic, since the exact opposite is the reality:
“Love thy neighbour as thyself, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Evolutionary belief is rampant, euthanasia is promoted and is unfortunately now legal in all Australian states and the Australian Capital Territory, and is rapidly gaining wide acceptance across once conservative societies, abortion is seen as a right and access to abortion is decriminalised across all states and territories in Australia but Western Australia, and sexual perversion is seen as something to proclaim and be proud of with the ‘Pride Movement’.
Thus you may mock all you want, but what I’ve stated about biological research based upon evolutionary belief holds true.
yes, I absolutely agree God is full of surprises and what He chooses to do, at any particular juncture, may be a surprise to us all.
I have stated that very reality, when witnessing about the salvation through Jesus, to a Buddhist atheist friend.
The difference I see is that Revelation is written by John who was in the spirit and appointed to record the testimony of Jesus Christ. John was chosen to see a vision of future events that will come to pass at the end of the age.
Genesis is a revelation of past events that came to pass when God created all that has been made, and set in motion, all life on Earth.
Not as the alleged primordial slime, billions of years ago, but within creation week, as a world immediately full of complete, perfect and beautiful creatures and plants that comprise diverse ecosystems, as He is so capable of doing and is consistent with the ‘modus operandi’ of the miracles performed during His earthly Ministry about 2,000 years ago.
Yes there are similarities, and the more that is revealed to each of us, the more profound and amazing the Holy Scriptures become to us, God is truly amazing and again yes, He is certainly full of surprises.
Dear Ron,
thank you for your kind thoughts, you are so generous of spirit.
As I’ve already stated, DE & DM don’t matter very much to me, primarily because a theory of postulated stuff that is invisible, has never been seen, cannot be tested even once, let alone repeated, is as far as I am concerned not worth wasting effort on.
If it is empirically confirmed, then fine, I will accept it, but until then it is nothing more than an unconfirmed theory that I see little point wasting precious time on.
They are testable in the laboratory; the problem is that they’re so hard to detect on small scales that no one has succeeded in doing so yet. Also, “testable in the laboratory” is not a good criterion for figuring out whether something is real–plate tectonics is real, GPS systems can measure it; stellar nucleosynthesis is real–neutrino observatories can measure its output; long-distance bird migration is real–I can observe that; none of those can be tested in a lab.
Of a theory (General Relativity) that, if wrong in more than extremely subtle ways, would make GPS systems stop working.
No, they come from measurements of gravity, redshift compared with distance, and General Relativity.
Also, solving the horizon problem is probably a matter of figuring out a detail of “What happened in what order, for how long, and why within the first microsecond after the Big Bang?” Answering the question will probably require some sort of reconciliation of QM and General Relativity.
Galactic rotation speeds are confirmed evidence of extra, invisible mass; gravitational lensing shows confirmed evidence of extra, invisible mass; the oddly placed center of mass of the Bullet Cluster shows confirmed evidence of extra, invisible mass. Type 1a supernova brightnesses and spectra are confirmed evidence that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.
That would be impossible for Dark Matter as it was first proposed the year before the Big Bang.
Given how well single gene phylogenies agree with multi-gene phylogenies and genomic phylogenies, no. I’ve run independent analyses of three different genes and gotten roughly the same results for each one (places that had poor resolution in one gene were the only ones that moved around dramatically), which then agreed rather closely with multi-gene studies, and general conserved loci studies. Single gene phylogenies work.
No, it is not. The only instructions given to the computer are “arrange these sequences so that the most similar ones are grouped together” (different types of analyses used different exact definitions of “similar” and different grouping methods.
All of Lophotrochozoa is one created kind? That’s what one of the papers that I linked was a phylogeny from. There are trees that have been run of all of Animalia, all of Plantae, all of most phyla, etc., etc.
All that they assume is that observed relative rates of mutations are accurate, and that the input sequences are accurate. Then a computer is told something like “Arrange these by similarity to each other, put this one first in the output display.”
No, it is not “history”. Theology is not history. You are implying that history is the only reliable way of talking about the past.
That “history” is not a good term for account that include
THOSE ARE TWO DIFFERENT QUESTIONS! Whether they were real and historical events is a completely separate issue from whether our accounts of them are in a form that could reasonably be called “history”.
I. AM. NOT. I AM CLAIMING THAT IT IS NOT “HISTORY”.
REAL EVENTS ARE NOT ALWAYS RECORDED IN WORKS OF “HISTORY”.
“HISTORY” IS NOT THE ONLY TRUTHFUL WAY OF TALKING ABOUT THE PAST.
Judges 5 IS NOT HISTORY: it is a victory hymn, NOT HISTORY. IT CONTAINS REAL EVENTS.
They were real events.
The Gospels are not historical reports.
Stuff and nonsense – dark matter has nothing to do with theory, it has to do with observations from all over the visible universe.
Um, what?
No, the CMB is pretty darned close to what theory predicts.
I don’t know where you’re getting you’re information, but it’s a crap source.
Maybe repetition will help: that’s false.
Dark matter is a term for something observed, it has nothing to do with theory. It isn’t “the result of mathematical calculations”, it’s the results of observations. The only calculations involved are the normal ones for gravity that apply right here in our solar system, which don’t require a Big Bang or any other cosmology; the universe could be steady-state and ark matter would still be there.
Nonsense and stuff.
Phylogenetic evidence exists. It exists even if you’re Lamarckian, it exists even if you have no opinion. It’s merely an application of what is observed: that new species emerge as descendants of known species. There’s no logical reason to invent some other mechanism when we have an observed mechanism in front of
us.
That’s an assumption that cannot be supported from the text. Why YEC insists on ignoring the actual text and substituting their own novel opinion baffles me; they are throwing almost all the theology of the opening Creation account – the TRUTH conveyed – into the trash, which is astounding given that they claim to be Christians.
That view comes from imposing a modern scientific worldview onto ancient literature. How? It assumes without saying so that writing must be historically and scientifically accurate to be true. Where does that assumption come from? It comes from a rationalist viewpoint that led to scientific materialism. Why would Christians hold such a view? Because they were raised with that worldview and don’t even know it.
I’ve pointed out before, and do so again, that the idea of “deep time” came from the scriptures long before it appeared in any sort of science. A young earth was the default position of paganism for millennia; only in Genesis did anyone see deep time – except they called it “divine time”, in accord with God’s title “the Ancient of Days”; in fact some derived deep time from that title.
That’s a statement from ignorance: the Gospels are a different literary genre, one that purports to relate the events of someone’s life in order to portray the character and personality of the subject. They are in fact the only literature of that genre in the entire canon.
That matters to people who don’t want to do the heavy work of actually studying the scriptures – it does not apply to those who love the scriptures and so delve into the history, the context and culture and literary type.
That’s easy: by your criteria, the books of Tom Clancy, John Grisham, James Michener, and John Steinbeck qualify as " REAL ACCOUNTS OF REAL EVENTS".
No one is saying it’s not a real record, nor that it isn’t about real events, we’re saying to let the Bible be what it is, ancient literature with an ancient worldview, and that reading it as history throws tons of the theological truth in the trash.
BTW, if it’s what you say, how do you explain the fact that Genesis 1 follows the Egyptian creation story very closely? how do you explain that it matches the temple inauguration genre closely also? how do you explain that it matches the ‘royal chronicle’ genre just as well?
Wow – there’s the MSWV in spades! It’s only in modern scientific times that people have considered that the way to convey truth is with objective reporting; ancient peoples had their own ways.
Has it ever occurred to you that God wants us to delve into those different ways and that ancient worldview? that it is a remedy to our modern, sterile, scientific-fact-oriented worldview? That the scriptures were written for our instruction does not mean they were written to fit a modern worldview, it means that we have to do work to understand them, and that means respecting the people spoken to and the Holy Spirit Who inspired the writers by studying the scriptures in context – the “historical” aspect of the historical-grammatial method. The treasures that emerge from working to read the scriptures the way an ancient Israelite would have heard them are immense, and anyone who loves the scriptures should be seeking them out.
Just BTW, Paul does not share the YEC view: he tells us that the story of Sarai and Hagar is an allegory.
Actually if you put those parameters into an astronomy program you find that it describes the skies over Judea at a specific time in (IIRC) 3 BCE. In fact if you look to a somewhat larger piece of sky, there is information about that birth, including that it would be from the tribe of Judah.
John seems to be describing what was in the sky when Jesus was born.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
During my university days there was a prominent biologist invited to speak on the topic of Christianity vs Science. He declined on the basis that the topic was a lie, so his remarks could be done in two minutes.
I’m starting to wonder if they are driven by a need for “war”, a need to feel persecuted (and thus special).
For comparison, that’s approximately the size of England. Or Pennsylvania.
It takes me six hours to drive from my home in the south of England to the Scottish border. A flood that big would be pretty serious business, and even more so in Noah’s day when they didn’t have cars, motorways or sat-nav. Anyone around at the time would have been justified in thinking that it was worldwide in extent because they wouldn’t have any way of knowing that it wasn’t.
Why do you keep insisting on comparing texts from totally different genres?
Oh, a reminder: you can only know what is “plainly written” if you are reading it as the kind of literature it was written as; otherwise you’re just infusing your own opinions. (That may have been the hardest lesson in my literature courses.)
It’s interesting that if Genesis is read as the ancient literature it is, Paul’s point is evident from the start, right there on the first page.
That’s not because of the content of ToE, it’s because of lies.
And on U.S. university campuses, the big driver of people rejecting the faith is YEC.
If Genesis was preached as the ancient literature it is, that would change! I’ve said before, if the opening Creation account is read as history, its content is enough for one short sermon, but if read as the multiple genres and messages it bears there’s enough for ten sermons. This time I’ll add that the content when read as those genres can show just how non-obsolete God is.
See, reading it as being about material creation sells out to the materialists, so if all that the first Creation story is about is material creation, then of course people will conclude that God is obsolete because then it reads as a “just so” story explanation of the existence of the universe, it reads as something competing with science, and in this period of time science is going to win in people’s minds.
Forget doing YEC stuff; it’s a waste of time and energy. Go out and do random acts of service to people and shine that light.
Worth noting: what tipped the view of Revelation and got it in the canon was that Christian in the second and third centuries read it and saw there what they saw happening around them. We’ve been in the end of the age ever since the Ascension.
A valid distinction: field science vs lab science. In the list of requirements for my university degree I had to take at least two courses that engaged in both field and lab science (I went with botany and volcanology).
That’s a good way of saying it – I’ll have to remember that one.
A corollary is that objective history would have been a meaningless way of talking about the past three millennia back and earlier: if an event was worth remembering, it was put into mythic form.
5:8 is a puzzling verse when it says, “They chose new elohim (gods)”.
5:10-11 has some really old Hebrew that translators are still guessing at.
And they are both true. While βίος is a form of biography, it does not count as historical reporting even though the included episodes are meant as historical. Indeed it’s a good example of a subtle difference: the point of a history is to report events objectively, the point of βίος is to use selected (and edited) historical material to illustrate the personality and character of the subject. That same difference can be found in other literary forms as well. One of those forms applies to the tales of the patriarchs which have been called “theo-history”; the historical material is only there to illustrate theology.
Which reminds me of something that truly bothers me about YEC readings of Genesis: they strip Jesus out of the story. If the opening of Genesis is just history, Jesus isn’t a story element until the third chapter; if it’s temple inauguration and ‘royal chronicle’ He’s there at the start. Given that Jesus told the disciples headed for Emmaus that all the scriptures are about Him, I’ll take the second option.
Dear Tim,
granted! However, as I have said previously, my preference is to take a wait and see approach to what if anything comes out of the search to even confirm the reality of DE & DM.
No General Relativity is empirically testable in the Laboratory and has been shown to be very REAL. The confirmed reality of DE & DM has not!
Actually, NO!
The postulated possibility that stuff generally described as DE & DM, may exist comes out from one particular interpretation of many to explain measurements of gravity, redshift compared with distance. There is a world of difference between the two statements, i.e., yours and mine.
Further more observations have been made on more than occasion of associated bodies in space where a star for example is in front of (i.e., it is closer to us), another larger structure that is near but clearly behind the star, yet the star has greater redshift than the larger structure behind it, thus using redshift as a way of measuring distance is fundamentally flawed.
I strongly suggest you read the article at:
EXCERPT FROM THE ARTICLE
The problem is that a quasar has been found embedded in the galaxy NGC 7319 only 8″ from its centre. See figure 1. The arrow indicates the quasar. It was recently reported on the University of California, San Diego webpage (10 January 2005).1 The subtitle was “Can A ‘Distant’ Quasar Lie Within A Nearby Galaxy?”, extolling the riddle. The work was done by a team of astronomers/astrophysicists including Geoffrey Burbidge and Halton Arp, and will be reported in the 10 February issue of the Astrophysical Journal.2
Figure 1: Photo of nearby spiral galaxy NCG 7319 with high red-shift quasar at arrow (below).
Credit: NASA/Hubble Space Telescope
In the paper2 it is reported that the object is from a class called ultra-luminous X-ray object (ULX) because of the very high emission of X-rays from the source. The quasar in this case was found from its X-ray emission and optically identified with the Hubble Space Telescope. ULXs have been found in and near galaxies and recently the Burbidges and Arp suggested they were quasars.
Based on the Hubble law, which may be written as z = 2×10-4 r with r expressed in Mpc (= 3.26 million light-years) and where z < 0.2, we can determine the distance to the source.
In this case we have a galaxy (NGC 7319 with z = 0.022) at a distance of 360 million light-years and, assuming the above equation holds approximately for larger redshifts z > 0.2, the quasar (with z = 2.114) is 100 times farther or 35 billion light-years. So according to the dominant prevailing belief, these objects cannot be physically connected to each other.
However, Arp has shown3 that there is a very strong case that quasars that lie close to active galaxies, on the sky, are, in fact, physically associated with those galaxies. That is, the closeness is not just a trick of the line of sight, where the quasars are millions of billions of light-years behind the galaxy and merely happen to be almost directly behind it from our point of view. Arp (and others) have gone on to contend that the quasars have been ejected from the hearts of their parent galaxies.4 Creation of new galaxies via this mechanism has been suggested.
END OF EXCERPT FROM ARTICLE
Again, what you are stating here is merely one interpretation to explain some phenomena, and it may well be an incorrect interpretation. As I have said previously, I will wait and see what the future holds before I waste time on some cosmologists speculations.
Hold on a bit here!
Many things in science are proposed at different times in history, but its disingenuous to use that to take a sideways step and deny that the mathematics of Big Bang cosmology doesn’t require DE & DM to account for the massive lack of expected matter from the theory.
That may be so, however are the phylogenies you have documented, similarities between morphologically different organisms and more importantly does the similarity hold true across the entire genome of each organism, or is it that the similarities are only from discrete sections of code on each organisms genome?
Get a grip here, Please!
I am not talking about the simple mechanics of writing Linux or Python language commands for a computer program, I’m talking about the overall assumptions implicit in the conclusions reached from the processed data!
Again, I will wait until we have a good number of actual eukaryote genomes sequenced from scratch rather than using genome templates from other organisms that result in far less than perfect results. If that takes twenty years to happen, so be it, but to make claims from far less than perfect data is fraught.
Tim, the computer will do whatever you program it to do, to sort, to arrange by topological similarities or whatever you want it to do with the input data, but that doesn’t prove evolution any more than saying that all hand power tools have bearings, therefore they have all evolved from a single archaic hand tool with bearings millions of years ago, simply because they all have bearings. Which is utter nonsense of course, and granted is a poor analogy, but I hope it makes the point.
Furthermore, as I have previously stated, a degree of similarity is expected anyway, as all life created by God is made to live on Earth, it is designed and calibrated to exist in Earth’s gravity, and use water and oxygen in most cases, and respire, oxidise food for energy and growth etc. thus similarities are always inevitable, and of course the most obvious of all, is that all life has the same brilliant genius designer, Jesus.
Hence again similarities are expected; thus finding some discrete similarities here and there does not in any way prove evolution.
In the future, when a large number of eukaryotes have had their entire genomes properly mapped from scratch will be the first time when any meaningful comparisons can be made that attempt to validate or invalidate evolutionary phylogenetic trees. Until then the question right or wrong, for or against evolution, is in Truth held in faith and not through any empirical evidence that I am aware of, contrary to the numerous claims here.
No, I am not implying anything of the sort!
Why do people on this website insist on fabricating words that they put into my mouth so often?
I have never stated Theology is history?
And, I am NOT, as you fabricate here, " implying that history is the only reliable way of talking about the past." Utter nonsense!
I don’t know how many times I have had to restate this simple fact, but it must be many.
The Holy Bible is inspired by God.
Genesis 1 informs us about the creation, how God commanded and “it was so”!
What is it about that straightforward fact do you not understand?
God is not deceptive, He does not tell us things that are myths from pagan tribes in a radius of the surrounding 500miles or 800 kilometres.
He is far greater than that!
The deception forced onto the Holy Scriptures here in order to accommodate mankind’s feeble attempt at explaining how we got here without God, i.e., evolution mythology is a grievous error and very wrong.
The Holy Scriptures are faithful and True, just as God Himself is Faithful and True.
The Holy Scriptures can be trusted implicitly to be honest, and we are instructed to believe in faith and hold to all that is good, and is just and righteous.
The bile and dishonest misrepresentation towards fellow brother and sister Christians for whom our ever patient Loving Lord died on the cross for is reprehensible.
The many false claims by some that a straightforward reading of the Bible as it is reliably translated in over seventy translations, is wrong and through a maze of contorted tales, ends up with the lie of evolution front and centre as Gods mechanism of creation, even though there is not a single mention of evolution or the alleged deep time of billions of years ANYWHERE in the Holy Bible.
The Holy Bible reliably tells us:
20 “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse”:
When I look at my hand, I see brilliant design,I can play music, I can scratch an itch, I can gently caress and comfort another human in need.
The belief that attributes such a simple thing as my hand to time and chance mutations is tome utterly insane, beyond the pail, in a word blindness.
When I consider all the amazing things we presently know through microbiology and genetics, the situation comes into even clearer focus, yet it unfortunately appears many people are incapable of seeing the simple Truth that God spoke, “And it was so.” that confirm immediate Real events in a real creation account told to us by the only Living God.
The nonsense about a big E or a little e for the place God created for biological life to inhabit and man to have dominion over; the claims that Adam and Eve did not exist as described in Genesis, that there was no Tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that Satan possessing a serpent did not deceive Eve, that the Flood of Noah was only a limited local flood, and the many other arguments aimed at casting doubt on the veracity of the Holy Scriptures are dire errors for Christians to make.
Please understand Tim, despite the strenuous claims by yourself and others here, “history” is indeed a very good term to use. As I have said previously I repeat:
The miraculous events performed by Jesus and recorded in the New Testament Gospels are CLEARLY REAL HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS OF WHAT OCCURRED IN REALITY!
That is, the miracles that Jesus performed here on Earth about 2,000 years ago areREAL EVENTS THAT REALLY OCCURRED and they do include explicit statements of the supernatural causes of events, such as water into wine, calming the storm, casting out demons into a herd of swine etc…
It doesn’t matter one iota what you label it with, whether it be ‘history’ or ‘a record of events’ or ‘a complete biography of Jesus on Earth’, or whatever, the label is utterly irrelevant, WHAT DOES MATTER IS THAT REAL EVENTS OF THE PAST ARE FAITHFULLY AND ACCURATELY RECORDED FOR OUR INSTRUCTION. The Holy Bible does precisely that!
And thus the Holy Bible is recording REAL HISTORY in Genesis about the creation and the Flood!
I hope you realise you are arguing semantics here about what you have assumed as fact,that about what people understood from the original text.
Surely it is sensible to believe the reality that God is omniscient, He always knew from eternity, that people will come along and attempt to discredit the truthfulness of the Holy Scriptures; and that is one of the reasons amongst many, why I believe the accounts of events in Genesis are a faithful and True written record of real events that transpired that God has revealed to us for our instruction.
When an event really happens, and is accurately written about, so that future generations will know what occurred, that is history, in the sense of the implicit meaning of the word history today.
The Genesis accounts record real events that actually occurred in the real world, whatever semantic games people here wish to play, the fact that a written record of real events that comprises the first book of the Holy Bible is history in the same manner as we understand history to be today.
Tim, you can call it what ever you like as far as I am concerned. That is semantics again.
If you accept that Genesis records in writing REAL Events, then what is the problem?
Oh Tim, is this more semantic games? Of course they are contradictory statements!
Of course the miracles and the resurrection of Jesus are REAL EVENTS.
Again, it does not matter what you call it, as long as you acknowledge the Truthfulness and Trustworthiness of the Holy Bible as an honest God inspired recording in writing of the REAL EVENTS of the miracles and the resurrection of Jesus.
I am alive on Earth right now in the year 2024, and unremarkable as it is, I use the language that we have in our society, right here, right now.
Thus, I see no reason why describing REAL EVENTS THAT HONESTLY OCCURRED IN THE PAST is such a monumentally important semantic problem for you.
The only rationale that makes even a skerrick of sense to me, as to why this semantic game needs to be played at all, is in order to introduce doubt about the accuracy of the Holy Scriptures, and accommodate an alien agenda that can then be added to the text, i.e., faith in ‘deep time’ and ‘evolutionary’ belief of the purported billions of years of struggle and ‘death’ BEFORE Adam!
If you were paying attention you’d have noticed that your claim here has already been refuted.
The only assumptions in what he described are that the analysis was done correctly, i.e. that the computer program contained the correct math. And the conclusion is that since the computer did the math correctly, then the resulting comparisons are valid.
You show little evidence of having the least clue about how science actually works.
Guy, am I wrong or is this just nonsense talk?
It’s not the existence of similarities that matters, it’s the patterns of those similarities. Again, it appears that you have a false impression of how science works.
Yes, you are, because you claim that if Genesis 1 isn’t history then it is false.
There is no “straightforward fact” unless you start with the assumption that it must be history.
It is not; it is the wrong kind of literature.
The deception is the attempt to force the ancient literature of Genesis to talk in a MSWV, which is what YEC is all about. Moses did not have a MSWV, he had an ANE worldview, specifically an Egyptian one given where he was raised. So he didn’t use modern literary genres, he used ones that would be recognized by and thus speak to the people given into his charge – why would you think anything else? Why do you think that the Holy Spirit is so inept that He didn’t let Moses use the best means of communication available? Why do you think that the Holy Spirit was more interested in talking to a few people today rather than to Moses’ actual audience?
Correct – but that does not mean that Genesis is history. Thinking it must be history is the result of a MSWV that requires truth to be conveyed in objective reporting, which ignores the fact that objective reporting would have meant nothing to the ancient Israelites. “Honest” depends on the genre, it dos not require a specific one, especially one that did not emerge until several millennia later!
It has nothing to do with translations – translation cannot convey genre. What you call “straightforward” I called “ignorantly bastardized” because yours requires the assumption that God was required to force Moses to speak in something other than the literature he knew. What did he know? He knew the literary forms of Egypt, which were essentially those of the ANE at large, and which were known to the Hebrews, and he knew that using familiar forms would get the message across best.
But I see that you aren’t interested in actually discussing the scriptures, you only want to repeat your mantras regardless of whether evidence points the other way, regardless of whether they require redefining the Hebrew rods, regardless of the Hebrew grammar, regardless of the ordinary use of the Hebrew language, regardless of anything other than your mantras.
Is not nonsense, even though you have to call it that in order to sustain your redefinitions of words in the text and your rejection of the ordinary use of the Hebrew language. This was clearly explained to you, yet you reject it.
To everyone but YEC types, it is reading Genesis as history that casts doubt on the veracity of the scriptures. Reading it the YEC way is what causes thousands upon thousands of university students every year to reject Christ – and that fruit alone is enough to mandate that the entire YEC enterprise ought to be shut down immediately.
Your conclusion does not follow from your premises. The Gospels are not the same kind of literature as the opening of Genesis, so the comparison fails.
So? That’s not a reason to force the scriptures to fit a MSWV, which is what YEC is all about as evidenced every time a modern meaning is stuffed into an ancient word. By ignoring the actual genres of the original literature, by trying to make things that are not historical accounts be historical accounts, YEC throws most of the message of the opening of Genesis into the trash – that constitutes discrediting the truthfulness of the scriptures!
Where does Genesis say that it what was intended?
It’s not a fact, it’s a lie. “Record of real events” is what a modern Westerner would expect; it is not something that fits the biblical view.
The problem is that calling it history misrepresents the type of literature and destroys the actual message. It also lies about the material since the first Creation story follows the Egyptian creation story – or do you think that the Egyptians had it almost right?
Because that would have been of no interest to the original audience, and because Moses would not have been so foolish as to not use the forms that audience would recognize – and thus treating it as historical narrative insults Moses as well as the Holy Spirit Who stands behind him. It isn’t just semantics, it’s a difference on which the actual messages of the first Creation story depend.
When you say “describing REAL EVENTS THAT HONESTLY OCCURRED IN THE PAST” you mean “objectively reports what actually happened”, but to an ancient Israelite such a report would have meant that the events were not important – so you are saying that Moses write to send the message that YHWH-Elohim being the Creator is unimportant!
That original audience would have recognized that the first Creation account was a temple inauguration story, and from that would have recognized multiple messages; they would have recognized it was also ‘royal chronicle’, and from that would have understood several messages; and they would have recognized that it was built on the Egyptian creation story and understood a whole theology from that fact. YEC throws all that in the trash.
On my part its an attempt to get you to actually pay attention to the text rather than your mantras about the text. It is thus an attempt to get you to grasp “the accuracy of the Holy Scriptures” by letting them be the ancient literature they are; and that means trying to get you to see the theological bankruptcy of reading them as history when they are something else entirely.
Take some random persons who do not have a science degrees. They watch blockbusters, not BBC nature docs; they like music, not debates on origins; they are into their sports, cooking, careers, and hobbies. They may not be nerdy, but they are intelligent and have a bare bones scientific awareness.
When they read that some galaxy is a billion light years away, they can do the arithmetic. They drive cars. At 100 kph, they know it takes 2 hours to get 200 kilometers. A billion light years, one year per light year, it is not that difficult. They will not look up what Humphreys, Lisle, you or I have to say about distant starlight, because that poses no problem for them. If it takes a billion years for light to reach earth, that does not stress them. They have figured it out for themselves. So someone pounding that the universe is 6,000 years old just gets clicked into the junk folder.
Same with sauropods and T-Rex on the ark. You can say what you want about heterozygosity, ecological zones, sharp teeth for coconuts, and juvenile forms, but the average Joe or Jane is just going to take a moment to flip between visions of Flintstones and Jurassic Park, and think bonkers.
So it is not us you have to convince. The YEC task is to persuade the great swath of people who are not scientists, that their common sense grasp of reality is wrong. If that is your price of admission, you are in for a tough sale.
no one is telling any lies here, but in answer, as I trust the Holy Scriptures, I suggest that the Truth of the matter is:
1.) that all nations on Earth had some knowledge of the Flood because they all descended from Noah’s family, thus it is a memory that was passed down through the generations,and their likely weren’t all that many generations, so the facts would have remained reasonably intact.
2.) the Egyptians based their beliefs on the accurate Hebrew knowledge, and as they ended up seeing what transpired before they let the Israelite people go, they certainly would have stood and taken serious notice of the actions of the Living God that befell them, and as a consequence likely adopted what they knew of the Creation Flood accounts into their pagan mythology.
so that is your intuitive belief, I get that, however, it is always God who draws people to Him.
I know of people who have had strangers walk up to them and tell about Jesus and then walk away. When that happens to a person, half a dozen times in different ways at completely different places by completely different people, the person starts to get the message that God is tapping them on the shoulder.
It is not Christians that draw people to God, it is God Himself, we can be used by God to spread the Gospel if we are willing to do His will, even when we with our limited intellect, and handle on the big picture think that what that little voice inside us is telling us to do won’t help.
I myself am guilty of not doing that which deep down I know I should, unfortunately on more than one occasion, only to find out a month later that each of those people passed away from a heart attack or an accident or something else.
My personal observation is Churches who have swapped the Truth of the Holy Scriptures for man made beliefs do not impress anyone, least of all, those searching for the Truth.
