| Author | Message | ||
     Blake |
http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/world-famo us-scientist-god-created-universe Like Robert Jastrow, (b. 1925) PhD Theoretical Physics recipient of NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, said: The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy ... For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. – Robert Jastrow in his book God and the Astronomers (1992) pp.106-107 | ||
| Torquehd |
I respect him for saying what so many are afraid or unwilling to admit (even to themselves). I concur with his assessment, ‘The final resolution could be that God is a mathematician.’ My friend, He is the Archetype. God GAVE the laws by which the universe operates. To think that laws of physics could evolve from nothing... I don't understand how one would be unwilling to say, "it would sure make a lot more sense if some intelligent being created this framework". I love this verse - Psalms 19:1, The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. You can obsess with the beauty of the universe, or get lost studying mechanics and physics, or nebulae and outer space, or studying DNA or subatomic particles. Understanding the matrix in which we live is simply unattainable, it's a chasing after the fingerprints of God. I believe that we, being created in God's image, all have micro-attributes of God - all of our gifts make us all "chips off the ol' block". Are you a musician? An Artist? A Mechanic? A linguist, an engineer, an athlete, a lover, a fighter? Do you have the need for speed (try racing light!) All gifts and talents are evidence that we are trying to be like our Creator, the archetype of everything. | ||
| Aesquire |
I've long understood the Big Bang Theory is pretty much Genesis..... or more properly, Genesis is Universal Origin as understood by sheep herders before written words. They match up better than most. ( I also don't buy Ancient Astronauts, mostly, even though I read those books back when they were written. I may do plain of Nasca figures next year in my yard instead of medieval mazes. ) People who insist that Science makes religion irrelevant don't get Science. People that insist Religion cancels Science don't get Religion. We only understand a small part of how things work. The simple human scale stuff we have a fair handle on. We've figured out artillery. We still have some to learn with space probes. We're just guessing about Galactic sized stuff. Same story about small. | ||
| Torquehd |
the Big Bang Theory is pretty much Genesis..... or more properly, Genesis is Universal Origin as understood by sheep herders Vast differences. The big bang - nothing exploded and made everything (violation of law of conservation) (nothing also accidentally mutated into dimensions, laws, morality, etc... accidentally... and they're all accidentally able to play nice together) over billions of years by accident; primordial soup hickupped and macroevolution has been defying the second law of thermodynamics ever since. Genesis - God made everything in 6 days on purpose. To include dimensions, laws, and morality. And entropy is alive and well, and that's why we need a savior. The occult teaching is that the big bang and Genesis can coexist. No one in their right mind would ever read six days and presume it meant six random undocumented and indistinguishable segments of time - unless they wanted Genesis to conform to the theory of evolution, which was not invented for some 5,000+ years after those first beautiful 6 days. (Message edited by torquehd on November 28, 2016) | ||
| Blake |
Well it's interesting to discuss exigetically. Lots of room for all kinds of interpretations. Consider that the greatest/best possible being (God) could not create the material word such that it would tend to horribly mislead honest logical investigators. That would be disingenuous and deceptive, which are both far from great/best-making properties and thus contrary to the nature of the greatest/best possible being. | ||
| Blake |
"...the archetype of everything" good. Clarified that a little.  Nicely said Patrick. The book of Genesis is not a science text, and trying to make it fit that mold is fraught with trouble. And science cannot answer the most profound question, "why are we here?". | ||
| Blake |
Patrick, Concerning all the religious stories of creation, are there any independent of Genesis that correlate better to the current scientific understanding than that of Genisis? I don't think any others are even in the same ballpark. | ||
| Aesquire |
I'm totally prepared to mock anyone who does math on the Bible to prove.....anything. It's from oral history, to aramaic, to attic greek, to latin, to middle english, to hippie.... I may have missed a few. Plus every language on earth. And the math is pretty simple stuff. No zero. Good enough for trade accounting. No I don't buy the notion that a divine force makes translations perfect by design. If that's in the Bible it's useless. Self referential claims of perfection are just, like, their opinion, man. That said, Big bang Theory.... There was nothing... void... then "the word/the singularity" Everything comes out of the moment of creation/explosion. We seem to have a set of physical laws that makes life possible... and there is life, so we couldn't exist in a universe with different laws. ( doesn't mean such places don't exist ) How long since the bang? we have guesses based on evidence that depends on our understanding of the laws of the universe. It makes a lot of sense to me that that is on the order of billions of years, but I wasn't there, and I didn't bother to do the math. Previous guesses based on less complete understanding of how stuff works gave lower figures. And I've had people hand me magazines and give me videos that want to push 6000 years for some odd reason, but that seems highly unlikely unless you postulate the world is a stage built with intent in total detail to fool us. Occam's razor. Of course we could be a petri dish experiment in a sophomore lab, but that doesn't really help you with life unless it spurs you to develop space travel to escape the dish. Feel free to argue the details. 6 days? Oral tradition. Metaphor living lessons. People of the Land. You know........... | ||
| Blake |
We still have a Hebrew version of the Old Testament, Man is fallible. The supreme being, not so much. For a real eye-opener, check out the excellent documentary, Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus. VERY interesting, and a perfect case study on the pitiful foolishness of academic assumptions. http://patternsofevidence.com/ (Message edited by Blake on November 29, 2016) | ||
| Alfau |
Not necessarily my view. https://youtu.be/mYXenjpefNU | ||
| Aesquire |
One of the great comedians.  | ||
| Torquehd |
I have faith that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God. It is a great comfort to me that I don't have to figure out how I'm going to help the Bible out, it will stand for itself. I can be mocked, but God cannot, and I will stand on that. It is the core of my hope and strength that the word of God is pure. Patrick, what is your ultimate source of truth? What is the standard by which you test all things? Do you care to expound on what makes you think that the earth is older than 6,000 years? | ||
| Phelan |
I believe in a big bang theory. God spoke it, and Bang! It happened.  God's speaking the world and universe into existence could cover thousands of years, and yet to God, they are days. God knew and created the end from the begining, so I believe Genesis is even much more expansive than it sounds. | ||
| Damnut |
Do you care to expound on what makes you think that the earth is older than 6,000 years? Scientific evidence PROVES that it is older than that. | ||
| Torquehd |
Such as? Unless I'm incorrect, I think that evidence is not the same as proof. Evidence is residue from something that happened or existed, conclusions drawn from evidence are dependent upon the application of theories, laws, assumptions, etc. | ||
| Mr_grumpy |
Unless I'm incorrect, I think that belief is not the same as proof either. We'll have to agree to differ. | ||
| Hootowl |
Uh...carbon dating? | ||
| Aesquire |
I believe in a big bang theory. God spoke it, and Bang! It happened Yes, that seems to meet come current theories. What happened the instant before the Word or Singularity ( if you prefer ) is Unknown. Possibly Unknowable. After that? See a current astrophysics text. The Bang folk think we didn't even have photons or electrons until a certain time after the Bang, it was all too concentrated for the stuff we see and feel today. We can see what is believed to be the echo of the Bang in the background radiation of the sky. And it's not even and perfect. Neither is the sky. The Distribution of galaxies isn't perfect, It's big enough that it's close, statistically, but if you just look at the sky, it's not bland, it's not uniform. The sky is full of swirls and flows and violence beyond rational mortal comprehension. In the 19th century some believed we had it all figured out and using 18th century science.... counting and sorting all things into neat boxes of understanding.. ( all the 5 pointed leaf plants go here, all the animals with fur go here, etc ) we had a lovely clockwork universe, and all you needed was to understand the start & the rules, and you could figure it ALL out. Turns out that was wrong. It's more complicated than that. I have faith that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God...... Enjoy. Not how I see it at all, and I see NO REASON to argue with you about it. It's evident to me that the Bible, while perhaps divinely inspired, even dictated, has been imperfect in it's translation and editing by Kings and Bishops through time. If you disagree, then we disagree. No harm, no foul. I interpret the warning of G-d after the Flood that this is the last time he's going to directly interfere... the last warning, as saying don't expect divine intervention to stop a war, or win a war, or keep a jerk from imposing his ideas on the version of the Bible he's paying for. In other words, I see no more reason to have total faith in the King James Version than the New Hippie Bible & Marijuana Cookbook. ( now I have to go find that on Amazon  ) But seriously, the only part I will get serious about arguing about on the subject of subtle & perfect divine guidance in publishing, is if you want to burn Witches. Wiccans are not sorcerers or poisoners. ( as a group ) It is the core of my hope and strength that the word of God is pure. Fine. I'm happy for you. Not sarcasm. We can have a discussion later on the way the rules of behavior in the Bible change with time. Some, like the Arabic tradition of eating with the right hand only, because you wiped your butt with the left, and "cleaned" it in the sand, are appropriate for time and place. In the Stinking Desert with No spare water, no soap, no toilet paper.... then the rule makes sense. Downtown Western Civilization with running water and hand sanitizer? Enjoy your Ribs at the Dinosaur with both hands and no one notices. ( this isn't a Biblical rule that I know of, but a big one in that part of the planet, a more accessible subject than Shatnez ( Linen-wool prohibition )) Patrick, what is your ultimate source of truth? Oooooh! good question. To the first, I am a bit of a synthesist. I look at the various ideas and cherry pick the ones that make sense to my mortal monkey brain. Even Islam has nuggets of truth. Not surprising, since it's stolen from other religions, especially Christianity, and warped to the cause of Lie To Power. The Core beliefs I have date from my being raised a Christian, in 3 different Churches, and Confirmed Episcopal. I then studied Eastern religions, and have adopted Asatru as my base faith. ( Buddhism is too lazy for me, I prefer a warrior faith, Shinto is very good in some areas, but not for me ) I'm not especially devout, but I assure you we will probably be fighting together against the great evil in the end days. What terminology we use won't really matter when it's down to spears and maces. Do you care to expound on what makes you think that the earth is older than 6,000 years? Ice cores? fossils? Astrophysics? I don't have a clue where 6000 years comes from. I don't remember it from the bible. How old IS the Bible? Aramaic from oral... so how old is Aramaic as a written language? Let us see... Hmm. Aramiac is a trade language 6th century BC. Hebrew is older.. so Hebrew from oral? The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date from the 10th century BCE. Per Wiki. That only gives us 3000 years. Obviously there was life & a universe before Hebrew writing. Writing at all? By definition, the modern practice of history begins with written records. Evidence of human culture without writing is the realm of prehistory. The Dispilio Tablet (Greece) and Tărtăria tablets (Romania), which have been carbon dated to the 6th millennium BC, are recent discoveries of the earliest known neolithic writings. per Wiki "writing" So 8000 plus "prehistory"? Feel free to enlighten me. I just don't see a lick of evidence that the universe is 6000 years old. Plenty that it's much older. As I said, I haven't done the math. What is the standard by which you test all things? Engineering. take for example the "EM drive" currently under intense scrutiny. If it WORKS it wrecks a bunch of assumptions about how things work, some from the "Sainted" Einstein. ( who would laugh his butt off at the notion of being a saint ) If it doesn't, the old laws stand. I don't give a crap if they have to re-write the laws. ( that's how science works, when the facts don't fit the assumptions... change the assumptions. ) If it Works, it Works. Now I agree there's a lot of reality not so easy to decide. Bridges fall or not is simple. How people treat one another is not. Since I favor Freya I have no problem with the core belief that we should love one another. There's ample reference though history that that is a superior way to act in the test of time. I could go on.... a lot. Isn't that the Core Christian Belief? I also firmly believe in protecting the weak from the bullies in this world. ( Eugenics is a separate subject, I'm talking oppression, not genetics ) So... short form. Does it WORK? Does it pass the Gut check on good vs. evil. Is this idea based on Love or hate? Simple. But hard. Like I said, we may argue details & terminology, but I think when the hard choices must be made, we're on the same page. ( don't be surprised if I'm using your page ) And... of course...I could be wrong. I make no claims for divinity. ( I'm usually not even surprised when I find I'm wrong ) | ||
| Pwnzor |
Ice cores? fossils? Astrophysics? By what criteria is it determined how old or new an ice core is? Extrapolation? Imperfect at it's best. Gotta come with more than that. | ||
| Aesquire |
You want certainty, look elsewhere. Snows every year. lots of layers lots of years. Maybe it doesn't snow every year. Lots of layers, lots of years. Hey, if I'm using ice cores to point out that it was warmer 1000 years ago, and I have historical references, written AND oral traditions, going back that far, I have to assume I'm using a decent guess sample. Or I'm lying like Al Gore. You can, of course, just say that all the fossils, all the layers of sediment & ice, all the ruins of towns & cities, all the bodies in glaciers and caves and pyramids and holes cut into the ground, PLUS written histories and uncountable stars and galaxies were all put there to fool us into thinking we live in a self consistent universe that was created on Tuesday last. ( and our memories of third grade are fake too ) Loki, or Coyote, ( trickster gods ) might create such a place as a joke. The very serious God of the Jews doesn't seem like that kind of prankster. However, as Bohr said. "Don't tell God what to do". ( in response to Einstein ) David Weber just completed a science fiction series where in the far future mankind got destroyed by bad guy aliens and the Last Convoy barely escaped. They found an out of the way planet and set up a medieval civilization with a fake church and history, wiped the minds of all the colonists and set up an unbreakable Church to keep technology and advancement to pre-radio days in an effort to hide forever. The original ship leaders set themselves up as Archangels and ruthlessly crushed any dissent, before thawing out the colonists. ( as you might guess, it has issues ) It's just fiction ( and one of those cross time types where you introduce better weapons to win ) and I have zero belief in it. Just good fun. Am I to suppose we as a species are victims of such a plot? Or does it make more sense to assume that pre-historic men didn't get the concept of Billions of years between steps in an explanation of how the Universe happened? I leave to others the argument of "revelation" vs. "rationalization" and just comment that people are imperfect. | ||
| Alfau |
Highlight verses with mouse then right click, search with google. 2pe:3:8 (1000 year thing answered) Ac:8:26-31 (depends who teaches you) (Message edited by alfau on November 29, 2016) | ||
| Hootowl |
Uh...carbon dating? | ||
| Alfau |
Science.. Men assumed the Earth was flat but the bible tells the facts. Isiah 40:21,22 Big words only serve to conceal the simple truth of the Bible. | ||
| Hybridmomentspass |
Is Man flawed? | ||
| Steveford |
Most of the sites I frequent eschew politics and religion as they're too polarizing. I normally keep my opinions to myself but this is more of a story. When I was a little boy my mother remarried and I was subjected to the Sunday chore of going to church. UGH! I listened to what they were telling me and thought about it a little bit as I did my weird little kid stuff. One afternoon I asked my step-father, Denny The Douchebag, who made everything like the world and the stars and everything else and he said that God did it. I said okay but who made God? The answer was I don't know, nobody does. Not much of an answer but an honest one, I believe. At a later date I discovered that there are a whole slew of religions on Earth. I asked about that and said if there are so many they can't all be right, can they? If there is only one right one how do you know which one is the right one? Maybe there isn't a right one, how do you know that they're all not wrong and nobody really knows anything so they just made it all up? I didn't get an answer to that one. I think that my parents felt like beating me at that point for asking too many questions. I guess I was a difficult child. Story over. | ||
| Airbozo |
Steve, I asked the same or similar questions when I was a kid. When I mentioned that the bible was full of incest and wanted to know why I couldn't marry my cousin and have babies, I was told it caused hereditary breakdown of the DNA, I asked how man survived as a species since we all came from the same 2 beings according to the bible, but not one person could ever answer that question. I think the bible and other religious tomes are a good set of stories about how to live a good life. Most of those stories have roots in stories told around the camp fires and in dark caves to keep the kids in line (long before the word "Christian" was invented). Some people need religion to scare them into doing the right things, some people do the right things because it is, right. Other people just need to believe there is a purpose for their life and random acts of violence have a meaning (was it really gods plan to allow scores of little kids to be brutally murdered?) I was raised in a christian home and went to at least half a dozen different churches. I followed even more religions looking for that answer, and then studied world religions for a couple of years at a Jesuit college, still looking for that one religion. Instead what I found was a set of rules created by man to control other men. In almost all religions it is the same story, but the names were changed to protect the guilty. Now I adhere to the church of Dudism and am an ordained minister. I fell better about the world. http://dudeism.com/ | ||
| Hootowl |
People have been through several genetic bottleneck/near extinction events. The result is that we are, all of us, closely related and very much the same. I have more in common genetically with an aboriginal Australian that a dog and her pup. So, no making babies with your cousin. | ||
| Phelan |
Incest in the bible is easy to explain. Sin introduced flaws in DNA, thus we are all born into sin. But for the first 2500 years before the law of Moses, those flaws were much less than they are today. Genetic mutation was much greater by the time Moses came along compared to prior. Same reason that the early men and women lived to be hundreds of years compared to now. https://answersingenesis.org/bible-characters/cain /who-was-wife-of-cain/ | ||
| Torquehd |
The Distribution of galaxies isn't perfect Why not? Why didn't matter expand and distribute evenly? Explosions happen in 360 degrees, times 360 degrees. The only way that I can see for unequal distribution is a bunch of smaller explosions which... you're still left with, what exploded, where did it come from, where did the energy come from? Then, what made the explosion slow down? The ridiculous amount of energy required for the big bang would completely wreck "everything" at the molecular level; it would have to be a sudden release of more energy than any nuclear explosion. Then, in outer space - no friction, everything keeps expanding to the point that density is so low that it mathematically becomes nothing, right? (how many zeros right of the decimal place does it take before it's regarded as zero?) That seems very much in keeping with the second law of thermodynamics. Ice cores? I don't have faith in the scientists claims that they have 100,000 year old ice; i don't have faith in their method of dating. There are places that scientists don't take core samples because they know for a fact that there are several melt/refreeze cycles per year (the numbers are not consistent), and using that method to date samples from those areas would not be possible. So the question is - how do you know that the areas that currently have one melt cycle per annum only had one per annum, say 100 years ago? 500 years ago? 3,000 years ago? Scientists also say that lateral movement mixes up lower layers. Not just distorts them, but mixes them up, according to http://www.egu.eu/news/77/the-oldest-ice-core-find ing-a-15-million-year-record-of-earths-climate/. It sounds like there is room for a LOT of error. fossils? What are you citing about the fossil as evidence of its age? According to https://www.fossilera.com/pages/dating-fossils, "The majority of the time fossils are dated using relative dating techniques. Using relative dating the fossil is compared to something for which an age is already known." That generally means, if they see a fossil and it's theorized that that animal died 30 million years ago, then that fossil is said to be 30 million years old. Or they use the geologic column. The whole geologic column was created by William Smith who based the age of each layer on how old he thought the corresponding fossils were - that's right, the fossils date the rock which dates the fossils which date the rock which date the fossils. If you're citing radio isotope dating - do you trust it? I don't. It's all based on assumptions and is known to be wildly inaccurate. The biggest problem with any type of radiometric dating is that we assume we know how much of an isotope was available to begin with. Scientists claim that Carbon14 in the atmosphere is still in flux and has not reached equilibrium, which according to the man who discovered the process of carbon dating, means that the earth is less than 30,000 years old. And supposedly there was a spike in 14C levels between the 40s-60s when a lot of nuclear tests were being conducted. I don't have a clue where 6000 years comes from. I don't remember it from the bible. I haven't added up the dates, but a lot of folks have. The bible has a TON of ages and genealogies and years recorded. Having listened all the way through the old testament recently, I have an easy time believing that there is a relatively accurate count from "the evening and the morning were the first day" right up to "she was found with child of the Holy Ghost." The genealogy right up to Jesus is recorded twice in Matthew IIRC. One of these days, when I'm sitting around with nothing to do, I'd like to add up the years in the chronologies. I just don't see a lick of evidence that the universe is 6000 years old. I don't see any that it's billions. As for the bible - as Blake alluded to, the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and ancient Hebrew texts are still around, still being found every decade or so. Every time one is unearthed, there is hope for the nonbeliever that it will contradict the bible on my shelf, and hope for the believer that it will affirm. The word of God has been preserved immaculately. We can get into a debate on bible versions, I believe the KJV is perfect, and there are errors in the bibles that were translated from the Alexandrian and Vulgate. That's my personal opinion; I won't say that folks shouldn't read them, but I would say that if you want rock solid infallibility, utilize the KJV. Now I don't believe that OT stories were oral traditions recorded hundreds of years later; I think Adam probably started the book of Genesis, and Noah carried it on the Ark, and it ended up in the hands of Moses where it was joined to what would become the book of Exodus, and so on. This I can't prove, just a hunch. Makes sense. All of the genealogies and years and ages and what not are enough to convince me that it wasn't just a fun thing to sit around and recite. | ||
| Aesquire |
Why not? Why didn't matter expand and distribute evenly? Good question. Probably a mathematical guess available, but I'll just go with that's how it works out/divine intervention. take your pick based on your prejudices. As to The ridiculous amount of energy required for the big bang would completely wreck "everything" at the molecular level; it would have to be a sudden release of more energy than any nuclear explosion. Well, duh. Some theory says matter or even energy as we know it just isn't possible in those first seconds. WAY too high an energy density. No molecules, no atoms, no photons even. Total dark. Makes the center of the Sun look like vacuum. Why are there stars & not even floating hydrogen? OR even just photons? Ah HA! that's the question. Answer is the laws of chaos make it so. Who wrote the laws? Give her whatever name you want. Or use him. Equally wrong. ( how big are God's testicles? Answer, what makes you think they exist or that the measure would make sense? It's not a good question. Just a good substitute curse word for literature.... as in "Odin's testicles! What happened?" ) At this point the science guys and religious guys start yelling nonsense. We don't know, we may never know, it may be unknowable. If your Holy book says to be good, for values of good, and makes a fair attempt at definition... for example "Evil is causing unnecessary pain" then we're good. If your holy book says "all must follow this script or perish in flames" on other than a silly spiritual level, then stay away from me. Every faith at some point claims exclusivity. So does every toothpaste. Says so right on the label. Feel free to convince & educate. Killing infidels because they are infidel? evil. I'll skip a rant on Islam, just take it as given that the claims of one would be prophet on how your gods want you to behave should be taken with a grain of salt. Could have been divine revelation. Could have been brain chemistry. |
