This is something the Hebrews picked up on in Babylon; it is after the Exile that we find discussions among rabbis disputing over how thick the crust was (in terms of cubits and spans). Some argued that the solid earth must be the same thickness as the solid raqia, others that the raqia, being closer to God, must be thicker (usually three times or seven times as thick)(they also argued about what the raqia was made of; the dominant view as I recall was sapphire, though a minority said diamond and that the blue of the sky was due to the waters above).
I wonder if this was where Lewis got his view of Hell as told in The Great Divorce.
You “could cite britannica”…what tripe…because you said that its plainly obvious, you dont even have a Brittanica account with which to access it the full Brittanica Encyclopedia articles. I do have a full subscription…so i expect you will sign up in order to use that resource from now on?
Anyway, thats an irrelevant sidetrack
Id suggest its important that we get back on track and have you answer the dilemma…
If the Old and New Testament teaches flatearthism, please explain that God didnt lie in the visions about the earth he gave to Daniel and the apostle John?
Your claim must be, that those visions were of a flat earth…you must be co sistent with your position there to directly support the claim you use to refute Creationism… that the fossil record contradicts the bible that God intentionally lied …in this case, now you are are also claiming God is lying to two biblical prophets about the distant future. Both prophets record visions of the earth given to them by God.
Daniel cites “a stone cut without hands… fills the whole earth”
John “sees a new heavens and a new earth”
The trouble is, its also recorded that God spoke to Moses face to face…so if God was able to show Daniel and the apostle John spherical earth, its pretty obvious he could accurately describe creation to Moses.
You cant have it both ways St Roymond…you are now demonstrably playing straw plucking games with scripture for your own convenience and in this case youre shown to be errant in your theological claims. The evidence in the ancient text clearly shows that the writers did not believe the earth was flat and the reason why is clearly in front of you…the visions of the prophets about the earth could not possibly have been of a flat disc because if it was presented to them that way, mighty God is a liar!
No one has said that.
There is a difference between adhering to some view and teaching that view. The scriptures speak of the sun rising but do not teach that the earth is motionless with the sun moving across the sky; the scriptures speak of Jerusalem as the highest of all mountains but does not teach that Zion is taller than Everest; the scripture speaks of all streams running to the sea but does not teach that streams that run into lakes instead do not exist; the scripture speaks of hills singing but does not teach that hills can make sounds; the scripture speaks of trees clapping their hands but does not teach that trees have wrists and palms and fingers.
You know I do no such thing.
Nope – it only looks like that to you because you put YEC philosophy above the text and refuse to admit that God condescends to speak in human terms . . . a view that puts the Incarnation at risk.
But in saying He did you are adding to the scripture.
I didn’t know that anthropology was a theological discipline. Why do you think that it is?
No, it doesn’t – the evidence is that the Hebrew conception of the earth and heavens matched that of the ANE.
To get our view you have to change the meanings of Hebrew words. You serve the Tempter in trying to get me to deviate from the text, but you will not gt me to budge from the text.
What visions? There aren’t any in Genesis.
No – that’s just your limited understanding of God. If God can condescend to humans by letting His writers speak of sunrise and sunset, He can condescend to speak of earth as flat.
Your limitation comes from putting science above scripture, demanding that scripture has to be correct according to your understanding of science. Those who in the medieval period forced the scripture to fit their science (of just four elements) committed an error, and YEC trying to fit it to their science is just as much an error.
God speaks to the people of each age in their own terms – but that does not mean He is teaching those terms. Don’t measure Him or His inspired text by a modern definition of truth.
We probably tend to forget that news of the latest and greatest thinkers of those times would not have spread like news of new discoveries spreads today. When we hear that Eritosthenes correctly calculated the diameter of the globe, our imaginations quickly jump to “Oh - so the people 300 years before Christ not only had it figured out it was a globe - but also how big it was!” But no. That would be just one person, and probably most of the people alive around the earth at that time (and even for many generations later) would never have heard of the man, much less any new radical idea he might have had the luxury to be spending time thinking about. So just because we celebrate a few ancients who happened to land close to a right answer that we can see now doesn’t mean the ancients (even the few educated ones alive at the time) would have known of it. Shoot even Columbus in the 1400s managed to get wrong (regarding earth size) what Eritosthenes from a thousand years earlier got right! So … flat earthism could (and I guess plausibly was) alive and well as the popular perception of the masses (to the extent that they interested themselves in such questions) even despite a few radical luminaries whose writings survived so that we can retrospectively celebrate their brilliance now.
I actually read an article about that, which estimated that maybe 120 people would have known of Eritosthenes’ work during his lifetime, the majority being colleagues at the Great Library and the majority of the remainder in Greece and Pergamon. That seems minimal, but for the time it was substantial and amazingly spread-out; he was known on three continents (Africa, Europe, Asia).
Another article I read, this one by a historical anthropologist, concluded that by the time of Christ understanding that the Earth was round was widespread yet limited: found all over in terms of nations but almost exclusively along coastlines where people operated ships. A weird factoid was that apparently many sailors in the Roman empire thought the land was (roughly) flat but the Mediterranean was curved, the latter because of experience watching the shore and other ships disappear over the horizon.
How do Trinitarians glean such a doctrine from the bible given there is no word Trinity found there?
Those two prophets were specific examples that address two points YOU support on these forums.
So the problem these cause for the notion regularly presented here:
God doesnt lie in the fossil record…(from that i say its thousands, you claim the earth must be millions/billions of years old)
God spoke to biblical writers in vision and we have two well known examples here where visions of the earth are shown to two prophets. These are, Daniel and John
Given God spoke face to face eith Moses, its impossible Moses misundertood
Moses obviously did not misunderstand, what he wrote was with intent to record history (because the text reads that way)
The historical account that Moses wrote aligns with geneolgies of the new Testament
The genealogies of the New Testament wrote align with the patriarchal historical figures of the Old Testament
If the above support literal historical reading of the writings of Moses, then itis clearly you who is manipulating the text. Im reading it as written, you are twisting it to suit the convience of naturalisms influence. Indeed i would suggest you are frightened by the push from outside religion to stand up for your own bible. So you “walk past on the opposite side of the road” when presented with these dilemmas!
How about you do some bible study and actually use that to answer the claim about the two prophets i mentioned and that very obviously the bible demonstrates God showing the earth as it is, in vision to Daniel and John. These are two examples where the flat earthism as a YEC doctrine fails miserably. As an SDA, this is the very reason i can know my church has the most appropriate version of Christianity, biblical consistency. Unsound theology isjt hard to expose…the fact your arent quoting scripture in your answer above speaks volumes as to where your true allegience lies…and its not biblically founded because if it was, that would be your foundation here in response. I dont knkw why individuals who claim to be Christian listen to a individuals who dont use consistent cross referenced scripture to push ideas. That habit fails the Christian stink test every time and should not be trusted.
The prophets Daniel and John were clearly given visions of the earth. If God is not a liar, thej those vidions of the earth showed it as it is…a sphere.
Moses spoke face to face with God
Moses was educated the best institutions in Egypt…he was royalty and no dummy. Given science is a big part of Egyptiaj royalty…
Clearly Moses also saw the earth as it is when he wrote Genesis.
God didnt lie to Moses…the earth Moses saw is the same one Daniel and John saw im vision.
I cant help it if some other christians are complete dumbasses when it comes to conspiracy theories in religion. In your criticism its flatearthism, i can also add covid vaccines to the bandwagon. I am a YEC, as fundamentally 27 million other SDA church members would be around the world…the notion YEC are flatearthists is tripe. Even by your own claims its tripe, because your side claim YEC is a modern doctrine that i extrapolate you blame on individiuals like Ellen White… If by your own standard here, flatearthism is ancient, how can it be a YEC derived doctrine?
Thats not a good argument there Mervin, given your level of academic training and achievement is vastly superior to mine, im suprised you allowed that one through the quality control separator…its severly deficient:
My immediate response is this…
Of course but that was 80 years before Moses wrote the history of the creation earth by God, before his time in Midian, before his introduction to the real God of the burning bush.
Tell me, what evidence do you have that Moses had any interraction with God prior to the burning bush in the land of Midian?
So at what age was Moses when God began to talk with him directly? Was it not between 40 and 80 years of age?
What was it about the burning bush that was so strange to Moses…wasnt it that a bush on fire but not being consumed by fire was a scientific impossibility? How about the withering hand (Exodus 4.6)? What about the initial sign God gave Moses to present to Pharoah (rod turning into a snake)…wasnt that miraculous in that science could not explain it?
You say Christianity and the bible arent scientific…Moses was clearly very scientific and God hit him betweens the eyes with some scientifically impossible miracles. Thats whats so fascinating about the Exodus story…it turned the science of the Egyptians on its head!
We know the Egyptiajs had a different story of origins, that Moses was also taught thst story, however we also know that Moses clearly learned more from God as a result of, and after his experience at the burning bush. We know this because of texts such as Genesis 2.4
“This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made them.”
Excellent source! I recognized the Lapp story with the North Star as a nail holding the sky in place, and a couple of others.
Adam should read this; a solid sky-dome nearly always matches with a flat earth-disk.
This caught my attention:
Interestingly, around AD 200 a school of thought arose in China that posited that the sky was empty space. This is to my knowledge the first and only time that anyone in the ancient Eastern world thought of the sky as not being solid. So novel was this idea even to the West that as late as the sixteenth century a Jesuit missionary to China wrote home saying the idea that the sky is not solid is “one of the absurdities of the Chinese”.
And this is definitely true:
Only by taking Genesis 1 out of its historical context could one say that raqiaà means
merely “an atmospheric expanse”
A good point:
there is no reason to believe that Genesis is dependent upon Enuma Elish.
Surprising!:
Indeed it was thought to be a necessary part of the Christian faith to believe in accordance with Genesis 1 that there was a real body of water above the solid sky (with sun, moon, stars, and clouds beneath the sky).
Second century YECers!
Noteworthy point:
Unfortunately, creation science is not really bound by Scripture, but adds imagination to Scripture whenever necessary in order to sustain its theories.
Worth repeating:
. . . what . . . creation scientists have done is to become so committed to a theory that they have been willing to remove “the water above the firmament” from its historical and biblical context, redefine it in a way that fits their theory, and then rationalize away anything in Scripture that would testify against them. Certainly no one can say he is accepting the Bible in a straightforward way, while changing Scripture’s solid firmament into mere atmosphere, changing Scripture’s one firmament into two firmaments, and changing Scripture’s permanent water above into temporary water below.
The introduction establishes what I explained to Adam, that belief in a flat earth was nigh unto universal.
Of note:
In summary, there is no OT verse which implies the sphericity of the earth.
Rather, all OT references which imply the shape of the earth confirm the
historico-grammatical definition of “earth” in Gen 1:10: the earth is a
single continent in the shape of a flat circular disc.
Why? When did he see it?
Given he was educated in Egypt, he would have understood the earth as a flat disk under a solid sky-dome.
Their science said the earth was a flat disk under a solid sky-dome that literally held back waters above it.
Why do you think your science should be used instead of his?
Then stop saying it – no one else is. People are just pointing out that the methodology is the same: both YEC and FE pick and choose what to take literally and what not to. Flat earthers are just a bit more consistent.
Moses didn’t write any such thing. It only looks that way if you insult the scriptures by demanding that they conform to your modern scientific worldview.
No – it was a common-sense oddity. Nothing in the text says anything about science, so why are you insisting on putting it in?
Science had nothing to do with it. And it wasn’t all that miraculous given that Pharaoh’s magicians could do the same.
Where is that in the text?
You make up gobs and gobs of stuff that isn’t in the text then pretend it is what the text says. We are warned about that more than once!
And we know that he used that story as the framework for the first Creation account – that’s a fact.
Crappy translation – the Hebrew text flat-out says “the generations of”. That doesn’t mean a scientific essay no matter how much you want it to.
