Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
- Oh My God. He made everything. The Heaven and the Earth. No, wait, that's not everything, there is a whole universe out there. Unless the mention of Heaven means the Universe, in which case, when did he make Heaven?
- Boom, he made light! But... where is the sun, unless he meant he created the sun and the sun is light, but I thought he already made the whole universe. So the universe was made, including the stars and the sun but there was no light from the burning balls of hydrogen gas? Maybe he meant he just made Heaven. Oh, I'm so confused already!
- Ooh, I know. The moon! But wait, its not a light. Its the reflection of light from the sun. But they wouldn't have understood that when they made this stuff up. I mean, wrote the bible.
- Whew busy day, so the earth, moon, stars, and the whole of the universe, including this... light got made in one day. I'm impressed, I think...
- Woohoo! Life! Umm, hold on a second. He said "fowl". That means birds. No, that can't be, since birds evolved from Dinosaurs. Birds didn't even exist in the fossil record until 150 million years ago, and we know from carbon dating the rocks that our planet is made from that the Earth is much older than that. So... this doesn't make any sense.
- Again, with the birds. Either it took 3.8 billion years between when he made the first cell in the ocean till when he made birds, or something is wrong here. I suspect that when this book was written, the tribal and uneducated people who wrote this text could not have known that birds were not as old as the earth. This alludes to the idea that the story is made up by tribal people.
- Cattle? He made Cattle? According to the fossil record, mammals including the genus Bos did not exist for another several hundred million years after birds, so that's correct in a way I suppose. However the "Cow, Goat, Sheep" and other typical "cattle" that the general word refers to did not take the form humans domesticated until less than 75 million years ago (being generous here).
- "Us"? "Our"? Who exactly is this "us" that god seems to be speaking of. Is he some sort of hive mind, or does have some kind of friend or family over for dinner? And this self-glorification and justification of the writer who obviously wrote this passage in order to explain why they felt they owned the whole planet is plain to see.
- Six days. He made this in six days? This cannot be reconciled with geologic data. This cannot be confirmed in any way by the known laws of physics or chemistry. The earth, as we understand it took 4.5 billion years to form, coalesce, spawn life and evolve to the point where beings of sufficient logical capacity could come to question their own existence.
Summary
This story so far has left little to go on. Assertions of events with no evidence to confirm their validity have been presented. In all actuality the story continues to fly in the face of all the known facts about our existence and where we came from. We know the age of the earth by measurements of the universe and the world around us. We know the order that organisms came to evolve and live. We know how the land came to be, how the water came to be, and where the light comes from. Light is a byproduct of the fusion that takes place within a star, our star called the Sun is a yellow star which has been producing light for a measurable time period.
Our planet is formed of known substances, which have a similar composition to the materials ejected from the last major explosion event from a previous sun-cycle. The moon shares such similar composition as to suggest that it is made, literally, from the same material as the earth, and the studies of the moon's orbit, mass, and shape back that up. Water is possible from the accumulation over millions of years from deposits made by ice-comets which were being pulled in from the outer asteroid belt for millions of years after the earth cooled. Landmasses have been changing shape and moving about for billions of years due to tectonic plate movement.
Lastly, our own evolutionary path which is plainly visible in the evidence left behind says not once, but by hundreds of thousands of instances of proof, that we, as a species evolved alongside all of the other species of ape, and that we belong to the same family and genus of mammals dating back to the development of warm-blooded animals by natural evolutionary processes.
The story does, however, have merit. Not as a truthful representation of history, but as a look into the mind of a primitive and tribal culture who needed answers about the world around them. The literary contribution of the bible and in particular, the first passages of Genesis is profound throughout history and literature.
Also worth noting:
The creation myth asserted in the bible is not unique. The story shares most, if not all, of its major points with not one, but many other cultures and religions of the time before the bibles writing. This shows that the people who wrote this text did not provide much, if anything, new to the stories that were already being used by other primitive cultures and religions that came before. Having said this, it should also be said that repetition and mimicry does not equal validity.
http://reformedgoadkicker.blogspot.com/2009/03/here-comes-flood.html
ReplyDeleteI do not approve of drive by linking to your own blog as a valid comment. Please refrain from simply posting links with no description of where they go or why you linked it.
ReplyDeleteSure, it's a post regarding the arguments you posted about the "verified" age of the earth.
ReplyDeleteIn that case, referring to the post that you linked to. The concept that you can "interpret" any form of information and evidence is false logic. You cannot "interpret" all forms of evidence. Some, and most scientific evidence is either true or false. As an example, Water is composed of Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms paired at a ratio of 1:2 and the bonds that hold them are based on the electron that is provided by the hydrogen atom. Nowhere in the previous statement is there room for "interpretation". Your argument that any evidence can be "interpreted" to form different results only applies to metaphoric and euphemistic works such as the bible, not scientific findings and evidence. For further information, please see: Critical Thinking, The Scientific Method, and Logical Arguments and Hypothesis.
ReplyDeleteWell, I'll counter. While the makeup of water is incontestably true, the dates given by modern science for the age of the earth are not. They are based on real data, but filtered through a sort of a "house of cards" of assumptions that really beg the question. They are interpretation.
ReplyDeleteThe age of the earth is determined by using data from several sources which corroborate and back each other up. Radiometric Dating of materials from Earth, the Moon, and meteorite samples which fall to the Earth are quite accurate. Several crystals from Australian have been measured to be within a margin of error as small as ±0.010 billion years, to be 4.4 billion years old. This, again, backs up the moon samples. The moon is a static entity which does not suffer from plate tectonics. This means that the surface material of the moon is unchanging, providing an excellent resource for studying the conditions and age of the moon and its counterpart, the earth at the time it was created. The moons age is approximately 4.5 billion years old, which is about 50 million years after the earth had formed. This data is further supported biologically by the rate of genetic divergence which has been calculated using known values to be around 3.8 billion years. This data is further backed up using luminary data from the measurement of stars. We can determine the approximate age of a star by the different bandwidths and the concentrations of those bandwidths of light. While less an indicator of the direct age of a planet, it does show about the time-frame when the star was born and therefore when the accretion disk would have formed around it and began the planet forming processes.
ReplyDeletePlease, explain how multiple sources of corroborating evidence is a "house of cards"?