Originally posted by Beammeuppy
Couple of things. Since English is not my mother tongue and I do not want this to be a war of words I'd like to be clear on what you mean with "mesh with" and "it wore out a God".
'mesh with' means completely agrees.
'wore out a God' means it took God so long to do, and so much effort, that He needed to rest.
Originally posted by Beammeuppy
Also, your explanation invokes a Biblistic interpretation issue for the way time is measured. There are two basic issues in Genesis.
1) Creation is done in 6 days, while you describe it as a lengthy process.
2) The number of years used by strict Bible interpreters to calculate the start of all of it involves the chronoligical overviews of whom begat whom.
Example: And Methuselah lived a hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech. And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters. And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.
Now how strict are you on these expressions of time measurement?
Many Bible scholars take the Bible literally where it is symbolic, and symbolically where it is literal, giving rise to confusion, and worst of all, Young-Earth Crationists.
Point one mentions that it took God six 'days' to creat the world. These days are clearly symbolic, for in the first one, the earth had to be created, and how can there be a day without a world for it to dawn on?
So what is a day to God?
In a Bible verse that I cannot recall book chapter and verse on, we get a clue:
"...a thousand years are as a day to the Lord."
But this passage too is not a literal one. It uses the common speech of the metaphor 'as a', to indicate that a thousand years of human time are LIKE a day of 'God time'.
So what are a thousand years to men, so that we can better understand what a day is like for God?
The age of Methusela is the perfect example. He only lived for 969 years, and he was the longest-lived human ever. So not even the most long-lived human ever tolive has seen a thousand years go by. Yet a thousand years are like a day to God. Put the two together, and a day to God is a period of time longer than any man can comprehend. At that point, the six days of Creation could easily represent 18 billion years.
Originally posted by Beammeuppy
Main point remaining IMHO: a reasoning like "there is a creator and he is still controlling all of it and he is intentionally hiding evidence so there will never be real proof of creation" is making a fact based exchange of arguments very difficult.
The Bible, again IMHO, is a representation of how mankind explained their few of the world given the information they had. New insights mean new explanations which later might turn out to be little to wide off-track.
I understand your objection to my contention that God's desire for His worshippers to have faith makes it impossible to ever prove either Creation or Evolution, on the grounds that it makes the debate rather meaningless, but OTOH, my position does have the virtue of being internally consistent.
Originally posted by Beammeuppy
An example is Newtons theory of gravity. Einstein revealed that it was true in some circumstances, i.e. low speed / low mass, but that in other circumstances it works differently. This does not mean that Newton was wrong, it means he got it right for a limited set of circumstances and it makes his view an extremely good achievement given the information and tools he had. I think the Bible should be put in the same perspective.
On what basis? There is not a single statement in the Bible that science can refute with anything approaching 100% certainty.
If evolution were a closed case, I would have no leg to stand on to make an argument against it. Yet here I am, and while some here would LIKE to brush me aside as just some whacky lunatic, they still feel the need to try to prove their theory or attack mine, as if the answer is still in question(which, no matter how much they proclaim the contrary, it is).
The simple fact is, they don't KNOW how the series of changes in life from the first simple start up to now occurred. They THINK they have a good idea, but they're still trying to prove it. I KNOW, based on my faith, that God created the universe and everything in it, but I'll never be able to PROVE it, because I'd have to out-sleuth God to do so.
