In Canada, we’ve kept the language of “entering” but have got rid of the Latin; here, a Crown “enters a stay of proceedings”.
I am not talking about differences in interpretation, I am talking about things written in the book that are not correct. Like Leviticus 11: 5-6. Those verses say that the hyrax and the rabbit both chew their cud, but do not have a cloven hoof, so are unclean. The problem being, neither of those animals chew cud. Which I would think God would know, but men probably would not, indicating that men wrote the verses, not God.
That still sounds a lot like “We are guessing.” With a dash of “This makes us feel more comfortable.”
Except, he didn’t. By your own admission, we don’t know how long Creation took. There are different ways of interpreting the words of the Genesis. How long are those days? 24 hours each? 1000 years? 1,000,000 years? How old is the earth again?
Just to make clear, I use these arguments to point to the Bible not being inerrant, not to God attempting to deceive us. It makes much more sense for it be to written by men inspired by God, who were capable of making mistakes as they wrote, and were struggling to interpret what they were shown as they wrote.
I think Noel is Canadian.
I’ll have to defer a response until after Shabbat - possibly after the weekend. But I am not ignoring your points.
OK, sorry I didn’t get back to this sooner. I’ve had this half-finished, sitting open on my desktop, all week, tweaking the text.
Voyager:
It’s certainly correct that (according to tradition) Abraham used reason and observation to recognize G-d. And it is certainly true that G-d wants us to use our brains. But he warns us against using our brains in the wrong way, and guides us in where our inquiries should start. Consider the following two Biblical passages:
The first passage tells us that when we wish to inquire about the past, we must start from the point of certainty about our ancestors’ historical experience of the divine at Sinai. We must never discount that in the face of what me might immediately experience as contrary evidence, because G-d did something unique and special in order that the Israelite people never doubt the ultimate truth.
The second passage gives us an example of that. If a prophet predicts a sign, and that sign happens, one would certainly be inclined to believe that the prophet is telling the truth. But we are warned to not accept his words if he declares something contrary to the truth of the monotheistic G-d of Israel. It doesn’t matter how much “evidence” he gimmicks up to support his case, it is a priori false. And if we feel the need to wonder why G-d would allow such “trickery”, we can tell ourselves that our faith in and love for G-d is being tested.
Now, I’m hardly saying that all the scientific evidence that points to an old world was planted by G-d merely as a massive test of faith. As I posited earlier, my personal opinion on the matter is that G-d created the world “old” in the sense that it was created with the laws of nature we currently enjoy, and planted evidence to enable us to derive scientific benefit from such laws. If the evidence weren’t consistent with a world in which nature would produce humanity, then we’d be looking at either an unpredictably miraculous universe, or laws of nature which are quite different from what we have now, and for whatever reason, this world is the world which G-d feels best serves his purposes. But I’m not a Rabbi, I’m not a prophet, and I’m certainly not G-d. In the end, this is nothing more than a rationale I find personally satisfying, although it is (in the broad sense) shared by a number of others. ULTIMATELY, on an individual basis, how we resolve such apparent contradictions between the unique experience of Sinai and the evidence of our present senses, is a test of our devotion to G-d’s word. One more relevant passage:
G-d does what he does because it’s the right thing to do, on a universal scale. Humans have the ultimate choice of how to react.
Lok:
That’s still interpretation. Both the phrase “Maalei Geirah” which is commonly translated as “chewing cud” may well be referring to a more broad category of animal behavior, and also the translation of “Arneves” and “Shafan” as rabbit and hyrax is not considered 100% certain. Rabbi Natan Slifkin has an excellent book on the subject of those animals.
Certainly. G-d never gave any revelation that mentioned dinosaurs or rock strata or stuff like that, so we’re pretty much reduced to guessing, based on established theological principles. And no doubt the point of making such guesses is for personal comfort. The bottom line of Judaism is that we, as a nation, received a divine revelation at Sinai, and all things of this world need to be in service of that. Those of great faith feel no need for these sorts of theories personally, as they are comfortable in the simple belief that G-d has a plan for everything and ultimately our role is to follow his laws. Those of a more earthly level of faith - and I will admit to being numbered amongst them - find they (we) cannot ignore such matters and need to fit these scientific issues into our religious world-view somehow.
We know at least that humanity has existed for 5771 years. As for the first six days, we can take it at face value or interpret it differently - what’s important is that religiously, there is no need to consider whether it was six 24- hour days or billions of years broken up into 6 distinct stages. The lessons to be learned from the Biblical story of creation work the same either way.
Oddly, the oldest tree in the world is around 6000 years old.
That’s the only thing we have which doesn’t rely on fancy schmancy scientific mumbo jumbo, just plain, easily understood tree tings, to show that reality has existed for at least that long.
Apparently Eden was in South Africa!
So the phrase that commonly means chewing cud may not mean that in this particular instance and/or those may not be the animals that are meant by those names. The start of a fine example of rabbinic hair-splitting, I am sure. 
While I have a great deal of admiration for that kind of arguing, the fact it is needed to properly explain something as easily understood as the laws of what is and isn’t kosher kind of helps my argument. I mean, the other 2 animals in that section are the camel and the pig, neither of which is at all hard to understand. If it were something that needed to be figured out under the kosher rules for water dwelling creatures, I could understand needing to look at it hard. But for the section on chewing cud and cloven hoofs?
In the first one, you say he told us just how long ago the world was created, in the second, you say it doesn’t matter how long ago the world was created, just how long humanity has been around. Whether or not those 7 days in the beginning happened exactly as described, or are a metaphor standing in for billions of years, is what we are discussing.
You say that God created the world old, to give us instruction in the universe. I am saying that if that is true, we can’t understand the world around us, because every time we carbon date something, the results are a lie. Not as big a lie as my young earth believing friends would have, since with their explanation, He would have had to change the laws of physics a couple of times to get the results we do for something that is only a few thousand years old. But still, not the truth.
He gave us a mind to use, but if we use it to the best of our abilities, helping each other and amassing knowledge, we still don’t know the truth, because we started with a lie.
You apparently didn’t notice, they didn’t use tree rings to date Sunland, because baobabs don’t do tree rings. They use carbon dating.
And there are older trees, since apparently they know where Yggdrasil is. Of course, that is still a piker, compared to other clonal trees.
The story I mentioned was not about Abram finding G-d - he hadn’t yet - but about Abram using his brains to disprove a false god. Abram did not have to deduce G-d or research G-d - G-d spoke to him.
Read straight, this passage refers to those who had seen these miracles, and who had seen G-d’s power first hand. I’m sure you have seen many Christians claim that their god is invisible to us now because his presence would somehow make faith into certainty, as if that was bad. I’ve never understood that position, because G-d clearly has no problem showing himself through his actions, as this passage nicely illustrates. G-d did not take Israel out of Egypt from the Egyptians being distracted by a disaster or an invasion, he did it directly.
However, that was them and we are us. If we could see the record of the Exodus through science, or that of the young earth, or the flood, this passage would be directly applicable to us. However we have no such clear link, no miracles we have observed, so I don’t think the passage applies.
Read that way it is simply a case of a leader telling his followers to not think about alternatives. That’s Big Brother. Why is G-d’s word through Moses more worthy of our belief than Allah’s through Mohammed? In this case, the answer is because the evidence of G-d is there before their eyes. I don’t reject Christianity because of this passage, but because my reason tells me it is false.
I’ve covered this already. One can discover the principles of science just as well in a young universe as an old one. There are a few things we’ve learned from observing the evidence of the Big Bang, but any results from our particle accelerators will be just as valid no matter how old the universe is. In fact, if the new universe theory is correct, there must be some things incorrect about our science directly as the result of this.
Should Abraham have been as grateful if G-d had let Isaac die? He’d still have his reasons. However, my rejection of God has nothing to do with his actions, whether positive or negative. As I’ve said in several threads, a god who is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent logically contradictory, and since I never learned that our God is omnibenevolent, that is one up for him. No, my rejection is based on reason. I suppose if God wanted to construct the world in a way to make me not believe, that is his right also.
Well, all those gosh darn secular scientists are wrong:
So there.
I feel dirty now, off to take a long shower.
Awesome!!! It even has a 4500year old Dinosaur - the Allosaur
…which must be the longest surviving Allosaurin world history
I asked these types of questions of my teachers in the fundamentalist Christian school I attended as a TeenJoe. I was told God did all of this to test my faith.
Head. Blown. poof
If rocks existed 6,020 years ago, you’d think someone would have wrote something down about that, “It’s 14 years after so-and-so became king and rocks exist.” No one did perhaps because rocks didn’t exist back then.
The written Bible is correct to say there are no written records before 4004 BC. That’s why creationists believe the Earth is 6,018 years old.
When I started reading the article titled The 10 Best Evidences from Science that Confirm a Young Earth, I was expecting a typical internet 10 list. Unfortunately, the writer goes on for pages before getting to the list. TL: DR.
Each entry on the list is obviously shakey, and I was hoping there’d be an easily googled debunking. There are a few debunkings, but they’re not really rigorous and tend to point and laugh. The best thing I found on the first couple of google pages was Rational Wiki. They don’t have a reply to this particular list, but they do have an entry for 101 evidences for a young age of the Earth and the universe. I only checked a few, but I suspect that all of the **10 Best **are in there.
When I got to the “wet cement” reference I was drinking a soda-pop, that shit burns in the sinus cavities … no more for me thank you.
You decided 4 1/2 years later to share this?
Zombies can live for more than 6000 years.
If zombies lived for more than 6,000 years, why don’t we have any zombie diaries older than that?
<nitpick>Technically zombies are dead, better is “Zombies can be undead for more than 6000 years” … which is actually true, the undead kinda sorta lie outside the Biblical mythos.</nitpick>
Prove it!!
I have gone through these calculations again using more modern methods and arrived at a date of 4004 BC on the 4th of June at 3pm (that’s daylight savings time).
Which time zone?