Ah, but we’ve only directly measured the distances to stars within a couple hundred light-years! All the rest of our measurements assume “standard candles” … e.g., “The spectrum of star X looks exactly like the spectrum of star Y, and we’ve measured the distance to star Y as 80 light-years. But, star X is 10,000 times dimmer than star Y, so if star X really is putting out the same amount of light as star Y, it must be 100 times farther away. Therefore, star X is 8000 light-years away.”
What if God set a cut-off point out at 1000 light-years or so, and everything that looks farther away than this is actually just really really small and dim but with a spectrum made up to confuse you into thinking it was larger? (I guess it makes as much sense as God sending the photons from a distant galaxy on their way to Earth so that they’d arrive here and now.)
You also have to remember that there are two distinct creation stories in Genesis. As one example of their differences, in one story God creates man and woman at the same time. In another story there is the familiar Adam and Eve story. Slight hijack: The best thoughts I have heard on the Bible vs. science, is that the people who wrote the words of the Bible were men of faith, not men of science. The same (mainstream Protestant) pastor who said that also was opposed to prayer in school, since he believed it cheapened the devotional act to make it secular. Better. he said, that people who believed in the importance of prayer take a few minutes at home to pray with their families.
You’re right; it paints him as a lying toady whichever way up you stack it; red shift couldn’t be faked by making the fainter/smaller stars redder because the absorption lines would be all wrong.
Also of course, anyone wanting to posit smaller/dimmer stars, but having the same spectral properties as brighter ones would have physics against them, wouldn’t they? - it wouldn’t be possible to have a star of any size you like, unless Goddidit.
Sorry, we don’t have a “gotcha” on this. Christian scholars had been working on the gaps and contradictions for over a millennium before we figured out the heliocentric solar system and Evolution.
Non-literalists see the Bible as an inspired source of MORAL and THEOLOGICAL teachings; those happen to be set among a series of period “stories” that may go from roughly accurate on major points (yes, the Romans ruled Judaea in 29AD) to evidently allegorical (talking snakes?!). That the scenario stories don’t jibe with historical fact is beside the point.
Absolute literalists, OTOH, will VIGOROUSLY dispute your claim that the multimillion-year reign of dinosaurs is an “indisputable fact”. They’ll claim WE are the ones taking evolution on Blind Faith.
Thanks, Buckner, I was looking for something like that to show that some people have really put a lot of work into explaining something that seems highly unlikely, but all my searches brought up were some sites really disrespectful to science or non literalists.
To me, sometimes one’s faith can mimic credulity.
And some religious people are extremely biased.
FTR, I am not a Creationist, though I do believe in God and creation. I also trust our sciences, though we sometimes have problems reconciling the two beliefes. I’m still learning quite a bit, as you well know. So, I’ll let someone else deal with that.
(And I’ll keep civil, promise.)
I’m going to look up some stuff on “Heaven” as used in the Bible. If I find anything useful to this thread, I’ll post it. Unless someone beats me to it.
Well, people have put a lot of work into all sorts of things. I would say there has been a great deal of wasted effort over the course of human history on things like young Earth creationism, or trying to defend the Protestant Bible as being without contradiction or error.
The response below has its basis in a biblical “fact” that is commonly accepted. If you wish not to accept it, then the answer below will be meaningless to you, so I will state it before directly addressing your questions:
The Bible says Adam and Eve were created on the sixth day. They were created as adults, not as infants. Someone seeing Adam and Eve when they were less than one day old would think them to have been twenty years old. Now, to your questions:
They weren’t there. Just as G-d created Adam and Eve in a mature state, he also created a world that was already in a mature state, consistent with scientific principles that would lead to the arrival of mankind on the scene in the modern era.
Indisputable? Seeing Adam and Eve on the day of their creation, you could have said that it’s “indisputable” that they’d been around for twenty years, when in fact it would have been untrue.
I dunno. Did the Bible mention kangaroos? Elephants? Beavers? Three-toed sloths? Plenty of things exist now, and could have existed in the past or existed only as fossils, that have not been mentioned in the Bible.
Do automakers sell cars in an “already mature state” complete with rust, or do they sell them brand new? A planet does not need thick layers of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock interspersed with igneous layers (impossible to result from a flood) to be habitable. A layer of soil on the surface, perhaps, but in that case you’d expect to find a uniform layer if igneous strata topped with just enough soil for cultivation. And then there’s erosion, glaciation, plate tectonics, ice core samples, etc.
And why would the light from distant celestial objects visible only thru telescopes need to be created? Tracer, what about distant galaxies? Are they inside our own galaxy?
Did the Bible mention that the World is round? Pretty basic underlying fact of existence and easily stated in so many words. And why in Geedee’s name would some living things exist only as fossils?
So DNA showing we’re somthing like 98% the same as apes and all the skeletal remains are conspiraces, fakes, dont exist, or im talking from my ape-like rectal cavity?
Assuming God is omniptiant, wheres he gone? He was all over the world in the old testament, smiting people here there and everywhere, flooding the world, and now wheres he gone? .
Though, I have to disagree with cmkeller. Sorry, but I cannot dismiss all of science in this regard. Your faith is your own, though. I’m not about to correct someone else’s faith, just disagree.
The Bible is not a book of science. It is a book of theology. Where it touches on science, it can be interpreted many different ways. Some of the language is vague, I think intentionally so.
Anyways, that’s my take. I haven’t yet formed a complete idea for my own beliefes, so I’m not in a position for debate on certain matters. I may not ever get some answers, but I’m happy to learn and discuss all sorts of new things.
Sinful, by your posts, you seem to be not just an atheist, but actually anti religious. What has led to this possible bias? If I’m wrong or asking too much, my apologies. But, I am curious.
And, er…, I never did get around to looking up the heaven stuff like I said I would. Will try again after supper. Unless I get sidetracked. Or find nothing of note. Or die (though I will try to post from the afterlife, provided there is one after all).
Dinosaurs lived with man. You’ve been lied to by a vast atheistic evil conspiracy run by devil-worshipping hippies. They want you to believe in the evolution “myth”, because if you can believe that something came from nothing and violate natural “laws”, then you are prime realestate for devil worship.
God them. Noah took them on the ark. Read about it here
Oh contrar! It is disputable! I’ve just given you a link to one of the top PhD’s in the world. His evidence is so compelling that NO Darwinist has ever take the 250K he has offered right here
The bible says nothing about making dinosaurs in God’s image.
Wait, the rhetoric you’ve used isn’t supposed to create an argument?
A literal reading of Genesis is not incompatible with a god who created our existent world according to it, but such a god would have to be a trickster god of the Loki/Coyote sort, not YHWH. On the other hand, the idea that Genesis must be read literally is a human conception, a precondition on a story obviously told from a storyteller’s standpoint, using classic storyteller techniques. (Compare Goldilocks and the Three Bears; every three-year-old that hears that story twice knows that the baby bear’s whatever will be just right about five paragraphs into the story.) On each day God says “Let there be [things],” [things] come into existence at his word, he looks on [things], and the evening and the morning are the [Nth] day. (And this despite the idea that the sun and moon are not created until the third day, but light itself on the first.) To say that this is an accurate scientific account of creation is to suppose that the other story is the result of a blonde girl’s researches into ursine behavior in their native habitat.