You are saying he fabricated something that is not true, and set up things so all the evidence we can find or theorize points to that falsehood as being the actual state of reality. We are to ignore all of that evidence and instead, take the word of a book with multiple authors who contradict each other, and is full of poetry, metaphors, parables, and occasional mistakes. But on the point of the creation and age of the earth, it is literally true, rather than being another poem or metaphor.
That is what I would consider the heart of the deception if it were true. There are things in the Bible that can be checked from other sources, as mentioned in this thread, and there are things that can’t be checked or verified, like the Exodus, but which could have a basis in reality. But the age of the earth and universe is something we can check and determine for ourselves using scientific methods, and it is not close to agreeing with what can be worked out from the Bible. But we are supposed to know that we need to ignore the evidence and go with the book.
Sorry, as CurtCsays, that is a Coyote or Loki move, not Christ or the All-Father.
That the world was fabricated is clear. But couldn’t he have made a world where the evidence shows it was fabricated 6,000 years or so ago? Why create rocks with radioactive isotopes indicating that the rocks were formed millions of years ago? Why create a consistent set of fossils pointing to evolutionary development? If there was a flood, why can’t we see geological and fossil evidence consistent with it? None of this would keep us from discovering the scientific principles that God set up, and would support the Bible story.
Instead we have independent branches of science independently discovering evidence from biology, physics, cosmology, geology and astronomy, among others, pointing to an old Earth. Certainly God could make the Earth look as old as he wants to and do it as convincingly as he wants to, but why?
And seriously, why no evidence of the Exodus? Not even a lot of the poop you’d expect from so many people? Did our ancestors hold it in for 40 years? No wonder they were so effective at conquering Canaan - they needed to get to the toilet.
I’d wager that the beliefs of such creationists includes a belief in the Bible being the work of G-d himself, not of “multiple authors who contradict each other” or contain “occasional mistakes”. As for metaphor, poetry and parable, I (and many creationists) are willing to allow that there may be non-literalism in the first 2 chapters of Genesis, but how could you possibly read poetry into the list of generations in Genesis 5 & 11, which is the basis for the age calculations? There might be wiggle room to say the Earth and Universe are older than approximately 6000 years, but it’s pretty clear that that number is at least the amount of time that humanity has existed on Earth, from a single breeding pair, and that too is something non-Biblical-literalists would dispute. Not to mention that it also fixes a date for Noah’s flood.
Voyager:
With the disclaimer that we can only speculate and never fully understand the intentions of G-d: because there are practical things to be learned, and principles we can apply in the future, based on evidence consistent with antiquity.
These were events that occurred through miraculous means. The flood waters, at least in part, came from some unknown “wellsprings of the deep” and maybe we can speculate that the evidence we’d look for based on our knowledge of the effects of fully natural floods is not there because of those. As for the poop of the Exodus, according to the Midrash, the manna eaten by the Israelites was a miraculous and holy food that yielded no disgusting waste products, and many other forms of waste that you’d expect people to produce also were not present. For example, the Bible says explicitly that their clothes and shoes miraculously never wore out.
Some time after Ussher’s work on dating the Earth, Armagh Observatory was (sort of ironically I guess) founded in the city by a later Archbishop of Armagh, Richard Robinson.
But natural laws would begin at the very moment of creation. Galileo’s experiments could still get done in an obviously created Earth. We can handle a singularity 13 billion years ago - we should be able to handle one 6,000 years ago. And think - every year we would see more and more stars. Wouldn’t that be awe inspiring? A 6,000 year old universe need not be only 6,000 light years in radius from us.
Where the waters come from matters little. What does is that the animals living at the time would have been mixed together in the rocks deposited during the flood (another problem, to be sure) and not stratified in a way supporting both evolution and an old earth. Sure, God could have put them down (like the world-builders in Terry Pratchett’s Strata do) but why be misleading? If natural laws began with creation, why suspend them in such a big way during the Flood, except as necessary to get the water there?
And I know about the explanation for the Exodus. The Baker Street Irregulars have nothing on justifying inconsistencies in the story compared to the Midrash.
Yes, they do believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, directly from Him. And that is where the mistakes come in. If He created it, then how can there be mistakes?
And even if you ignore the mistakes, how do we know which things we are to consider literal and which we don’t? As you say, there is disagreement even among creationists about this. Why do you believe the first couple of chapters of Genesis are not literal, but others are? Are we supposed to guess? What if we guess incorrectly? If it is literally true in Chapter 5, then why not Chapter 2?
And lets not get started on the entire population of the world coming from a single breeding pair. Even allowing for perfect genes when they started, the inbreeding would have resulted in a die off long before a viable breeding population was established.
And Voyager explains why I don’t go for your explanation of the age of the earth. There is no need for the falsehood, except for deceiving us. It would be entirely possible for us to learn from the universe without it.
Genesis 5:3-4…
“When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. 4 After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters.”
Not that you’re in any way obliged to believe this, but at least the potential mothers are provided for in the text. Which leads to the question of whether brother-sister incest is less reprehensible than mother-son incest, I suppose.
If one believes he created it, there are no mistakes. Just things that one does not understand. If one starts from the viewpoint that it is divine and inerrant, one studies it deeply enough to gain an understanding of points that, upon a superficial reading, may seem contradictory or erroneous.
No, we’re not supposed to guess. We’re supposed to assume it’s literal unless there are in-text reasons to think they are not. In the case of the creation story, the reason to think it might be validly interpreted non-literally is that it refers to “evening and morning” and to “days” before the creation of the sun, which means that our usual definition of “day,” which depends on the rotation of the earth and which portion faces the sun, cannot truly apply. Therefore, there is wiggle room to say that maybe “days” means “eras” or “stages” or something of the sort. That said, it’s still possible that the literal interpretation IS the correct one and it really did mean twenty-four hours, as creation was certainly a supernatural event, and our knowledge of the impossibility of a natural development of the present world in 6 24-hour periods is irrelevant.
That’s a pretty presumptuous statement. You don’t know what there is or isn’t still to be learned. In addition, I can think of a number of principles we wouldn’t know without the universe appearing to be as old as it does. How would we ever have discovered Hubble’s constant, for example, without stars at their current distances and stages of development? Or the many things we’ve learned from observing pulsars?
And I repeat that if indeed G-d did tell us the true age of the universe in his book, then he can’t rightly be accused of deception.
Voyager:
That assumes that it’s the flood that is responsible for the extinctions that we consider ancient. I never implied that.
Whenever G-d performs miracles that subvert nature, it is only because the needs of the moment require that the hand of G-d be evident to the people of the time. Perhaps he felt the sinning generation needed to understand that their demise was a result of their sins rather than a random occurrence. Or perhaps he felt that the efforts he requires of Noah and his sons would require a supernatural degree of inspiration to strengthen them in such a task. We can’t truly know the precise criteria that G-d uses for determining when a miracle is required.
True enough, but bear in mind that said Midrash and Talmud stuff was written long before there was any science of archaeology for them to need to explain an absence of physical evidence. What’s written there is purely what they derived either from the Bible text itself or from prior oral tradition. The fact that statements they made pretty well anticipate what archaeologists have found (or not found, as the case may be) speaks well for those traditions, not ill.
This is starting to sound like Great Debates rather than GQ, but why would it make more sense that G-d wrote down a completely accurate description of the origin of the universe, and then for reasons we are too mortal to understand, created a universe that seems to contradict it. Rater than creating a universe that has physical laws as we observe them and then for reasons we are too mortal to understand creates a book that contradicts this.
Hubble’s Constant is important in that it showed that the universe had a beginning. If we saw that the event horizon expanded a year every year, that would be even better proof. Sure, it would still be within our galaxy (and I don’t know if there are any pulsars withing 6,000 ly of us) but that hardly justifies a fake cosmos.
The deception here, assuming you believe G-d created everything in the cosmos, is between what is written in the book and what is written in the Earth and in the stars.
There was only a small amount of time between the Creation and the Flood - I’ve computed it based on Genesis. Would there be extinctions then? In any case, I’m not talking of extinctions, I’m talking about layers of fossils, extinct or not.
If God designed and created the fossil record, why does it strongly point to an old earth and evolution? If not, how do you explain it given the Flood and the lack of time to deposit it pre-Flood?
The Flood violates all sorts of natural laws, so a miracle is clearly required. One of the things that makes “scientific” creationism stupid is that they don’t use the perfectly valid “God did it with a miracle” explanation but instead try to invent complicated scientific explanations for miraculous events. But the way the flood happened is not important - I’m more worried about how the record left after the flood does not support that there was a flood. If we confirmed the flood, wouldn’t that be a sign against sinning? Rainbows were supernatural when the Bible was written, but not now. If we could prove that there were no rainbows 5,000 years ago that would be good evidence also, but that is kind of hard.
God gave us brains. If he created a world which tells our brains is very old, it either is or God is lying. The very first story in my Hebrew History book I had in Hebrew school was about how Abram discovered that the priests were taking the food sacrifices to the idols, and that the idols didn’t eat it themselves. I learned this over 50 years ago, so you see it made an impression. So think - is it more probable that G-d lied in creating the rocks and the stars or that the actual story was not told to whoever wrote the Bible, and that he or they used their best guess at the time, including the vital need for the Sabbath?
As for my user name, the expression “nolle prosequi” is lawyer’s Latin for (in essence) “I will not prosecute”. The jargon is that if a prosecutor decides not to prosecute a particular case, he “enters” (onto the court record) a nolle prosequi. (Other jurisdictions may have varying terms for “enter”, but it all means the same thing - you tell the court you are not going ahead.)
I am, however, actually a prosecutor. So I have made a feeble joke at my own expense by turning a Latin phrase into an (unlikely) man’s name.