To be honest, I'm not reading most of their walls of text, but it is pointless to comment on things before the Big Bang, given that we have no conceivable way of knowing if indeed there was anything before then. As it happens though, I thought you were attempting to tie that into your reading of Genesis 1.
In the Beginning...
- Thread starter Berzerker
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Berzerker
Deity
God didn't place the water, he used the firmament to divide the water
http://biblehub.com/interlinear/genesis/1.htm
http://biblehub.com/hebrew/7549.htm
Rakia is the firmament called Heaven, it means expanse as in something beaten out or expanded and was considered solid. Air is not solid and it wasn't beaten out.
God didn't create the water, he created the dry land called Earth upon which we live. But yes, the watery world of Gen 1:2 had a sky, the light produced day and night on that world.
Berzerker
Deity
But I dont believe Genesis is talking about the universe or big bang. The people who research the big bang and what if anything preceded it dont think its pointless. I dont either and some day we'll figure it out, but speculation is part of the process. Are you telling us you dont speculate about the unknown because its pointless?
timtofly
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Would not pumping air in between the water force the water apart and place the water above the air at the same time? The skies the limit here, it is God.
Are you saying that there was some solid item between the two waters? It would seem to me that anything other than air or any gas for that matter that would be solid would block out the light for quite some time, until it was removed. What substance would that be and what happened to it?
Are you saying that the earth then rose up through the water, this solid substance and then the water again? Or are you saying that the water was separated by land and then the land pushed up through the water at the top? Where then were the sun and stars placed if there was no longer a firmament?
Apparently you've missed the fact that I'm quite open about my preference for science fiction as my primary fiction reading material (and forgotten that both of us used to be active in the Test of Time threads in the Civ II forum here). No, I'm not at all opposed to the idea of aliens evolving before Earth was formed... in fiction, or as a "wouldn't it be really great to find out if it really happened" long-term goal (a really long long-term goal). I sincerely hope we do find alien life some day.
But we live in the real universe, and so far nobody's even confirmed life elsewhere in the Solar System, let alone aliens anywhere else. There's not one shred of evidence that aliens had anything at all to do with Earth in the past, or in the present.
That's a shame. Most kids love to be read to, or to be told stories. My grandmother would read to me, but the others in my family preferred to teach me to read so I could read the stories for myself.
Of course it is important that kids be able to tell the difference between fiction and nonfiction.
So why do you cling to such odd notions, then? Maybe you don't tell your kids stories, but you've been spinning plenty of them here.
Nope. Bzzt! Wrong. Tiberius wasn't deified, but Caligula declared himself a god (and his sister Drusilla a goddess), Claudius deified Augustus' second wife Livia (Claudius' grandmother) after her death, and Claudius himself was deified. And there were others... many others.
One list of deified Roman rulers
And here's another list of deified Roman Emperors.
And since then, I seem to recall reading about people who pray to various saints. Even though they're not on the same level as God, being prayed to does imply some sort of divinity. So there have been plenty of people who have either claimed divinity for themselves or others did it for them.
Theatre has been around in some form or other for at least 2500 years.
My point is that it's hard enough to render an accurate account of yesterday's news just by telling someone about it, because memory is imperfect, and the retelling normally takes on at least some tinge of the speaker's own point of view and biases. How much more difficult must it be for an accurate oral retelling of events over tens, hundreds, or thousands of years, particularly when most of that time there was little or no literacy.
I don't disagree that people today are more careless and dismissive of the need to remember things. We're so used to Google and Wikipedia to do our remembering for us. Why bother remembering stuff when we can just look it up?
I'll admit to being lazy and making use of Google and Wikipedia to look up facts quickly instead of pulling out one of my reference books. But there was a time when I memorized a whole rock opera - Jesus Christ Superstar, actually - from overture to curtain call. This was 35 years ago, and I still remember most of it, both visually and aurally. But sadly, some of it's faded over the years, and I do make sure to avoid any other productions of JSC because I don't want to contaminate my memories with other things that were never part of the production I want to remember.
But you're talking about a timespan of millennia, and even though some people did have excellent memories and language skills, you're just not going to convince me that everything was remembered perfectly, word for word, for all that time before these stories were written down.
I suppose it's possible that some people could memorize long parts of the first 5 books of the bible. But I tried to read that long list of "begats" and other census-type stuff and it's mind-boggling why anyone would even bother. Maybe the same sort of people who memorize years' worth of sports trivia would be able to memorize this stuff (it's names and numbers, after all). I just skipped to the end, figuring that if I ever wanted to know any of it for some unimaginably weird reason, I knew where to find it.
I don't see how your statement could apply equally to all of them.
Wow. So you think they just sat around the campfire, maybe did a little hunting or had the occasional war with their neighbors, and that was it?
Some of the Native North Americans had very sophisticated and complex societies. And you think that only information that relates to European technology and concerns is worth retaining?
You've talked about the flood in several other threads in OT, and did some pretty fancy pretzel twisting to try to convince me that it happened. It hasn't worked.
What do you mean, you're not sure if I accept "the birth of Jesus as dividing between time periods"? I'm not even going to state definitively whether he existed at all. I wouldn't have a problem with the claim that he was an ordinary person who had some good ideas that eventually got hijacked by some of his followers and twisted into something else that was used as the excuse for some pretty horrible things, like slavery, genocide, suppression of women's rights, and so on. It's the supernatural nonsense I have a problem with.
Most societies broke it down according to who the ruler was at any particular time. The Romans thought of events as being either pre- or post- founding of Rome, and that was their "year 0".
Would you STOP attributing things to me that I never said? When did I indicate disrespect for Native American oral traditions? Like anyone else, they don't have perfect memories, and they've gone longer without literacy. And not all of them have flood myths.
You claimed that scientists made it up. No, they didn't. There's this thing called the scientific method, that is a procedure to figure out if a hypothesis is true or not. Very often, it turns out not to be true, and the scientist goes back and tries again to figure out whatever the problem is.
There are politicians and others who try to force this nonsense into science classes. There are some who want to make prayer mandatory in schools. Some think it should be illegal not to swear on a bible in court or other places where people are expected to promise to be truthful and honest. I can't even sing my own country's anthem in good conscience, because it excludes atheists and others who don't believe in God.
Some people insist that Jesus is God (that they're two aspects of the same being).
I know what a day is. It's the length of time it takes for a planet to make one full rotation on its axis. Some people define a day as the period of time when the Sun is over the horizon, or at least when it's not dark. So yeah, I don't go for this nonsense that "well, a day back then could have really been thousands of years...". It's just disingenuous tap-dancing, in a desperate attempt to claim that the bible really is a science book. It isn't.
I accept evolution, yes. There is evidence for it.
I did not say every single human did, or does. STOP PUTTING WORDS ON MY KEYBOARD THAT I NEVER TYPED.
You accept extraordinary claims without any evidence. I don't. I require evidence.
Your point? Just because they believed it, it doesn't make it fact. The Southwest US landscape is attributed in some myths as the bodies of monsters slain by the Hero Twins.
Guess what - they're not the corpses of monsters. They're just rock formations that were made naturally, by erosion and weathering.
I don't know how to make it any simpler.
I'm talking about how imperfect the human memory is. If I asked you to recite - from memory - yesterday's newspaper or last night's newscast, the only way you could do so would be if you had a photographic or eidetic memory. Most people don't have those abilities. I'm saying that every day, people remember the previous day imperfectly. If asked to relate what happened, they will hit the highlights, but either miss or blur the details, and even make up some of those details to compensate for what they don't remember.
Think of it as the problems inherent when trying to get witnesses to describe a traffic accident or fight. Almost nobody gets it exactly right, the first time, and two different witnesses can have wildly varying accounts.
They do if they later decide it was newsworthy.
Funny, about all that stuff in the bible that uses the number 40. Forty days and forty nights for the ark. Moses wandering around for 40 years, when the reverse trip only takes a few weeks. There's a joke that the reason it took 40 years to go from Egypt to Canaan was because Moses was a typical guy who wouldn't ask for directions. Then the 40 days and 40 nights for the Ten Commandments. Do you really expect me to believe that all these events took exactly 40 days and 40 nights/years?
That's why the scientific method is so useful. Some of us are saying you're wrong because your claims are based on mythology and tabloid-quality pseudoscience, not real science.
There's an interesting question asked by Lawrence Krauss in one of his videos: He uses the hypothetical example of choking. Would the person choking prefer being helped with the Heimlich maneuver, or should people just pray instead?
If spiritual stuff makes people feel better, fine. But it's no substitute for proper medical procedures.
Then maybe you should stop speculating.
WHAT???!
You're honestly sitting there and saying that science is hypocritical because it changes when new information comes along that disproves what we thought we knew before?
That's how it's supposed to work.
If the Sun never existed, then Earth would never have existed, and neither would the freezer, the ice cubes, or the electricity that ran the freezer but failed, causing the ice cubes to melt within a space that has no working light bulb.
You're talking about the Sun. I'm talking about light. In this context, they are not the same things.
Why do you keep assuming that if the "Big Crunch" is a fact, that the preceding universe would be anything like ours? There's nothing requiring one universe to be like any other, including one in which water exists.
Just because there was nobody to see the sky, that doesn't mean there wasn't one. Even the Moon has a sky.
That's arguable or at least somewhat a matter of definition; there are credible scientific theories that postulate that the big bang marked a transition point between ours and a previous universe including causal relationships - of course if you define big bang as a point of beginning this means it wasn't a "true" big bang. Big crunch is one of the words used instead in this context, which is among the vocabulary Berzerker throws around without understanding what it means.
Emphasis is on credible and scientific of course. Relying on interpreting books and "the science" doesn't get you very far here.
I have a pop-science awareness of astrophysics and (probably slightly better) familiarity with quantum physics, which is part of the reason why I try not to speculate about matters of which I have no knowledge. That's the job of the theoreticians after all.
Berzerker
Deity
No, try pumping air into water and it bubbles out
Yes, the firmament is solid... The asteroid belt divides the waters above from the waters below (which became our seas) but does not prevent sunlight from reaching the outer solar system. The firmament was placed amidst the waters, not between the Sun and Earth.
No, the water below the firmament was gathered together into Seas thereby revealing the Earth. That suggests either the amount of water was reduced and/or some process (like plate tectonics) pushed land up thru the water to become dry (earth). Lacking that process this planet would still be covered by water with the possible exception of an occasional volcano breaching the surface.
That means sometimes you do speculate
How did I mis-understand the term? I shouldn't have to ask but you're in the habit of posting unsupported insults
Insult is the wrong word, it's mostly a dismissal. I've long come to the conclusion that talking to you about science in any way beyond that is a waste of time since you seem to be unwilling to follow basic principles such as sticking to definitions or acknowledging the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. My posts are devoid of support because that only invites your gish gallop of incongruous quote walls which add nothing to the discussion.
You can call me close minded for that.
You can call me close minded for that.
Berzerker
Deity
You do that to other people
Here's what you said:
You changed your argument from removing the sun to it never existing, it doesn't matter in either case - water would be frozen.
Did the light in Tim's argument refer to a bulb in a freezer? No, you replaced his context with your own.
I said water likely did exist, I didn't say it was required
The Earth (dry land) did not appear until the 3rd day, therefore the Earth had no sky on the first two days. Did the Moon have a sky before the Moon was created? No, so why would the dry land have a sky before it was dry land?
Berzerker
Deity
Like I said:
How did I mis-understand the term? I shouldn't have to ask but you're in the habit of posting unsupported insults
Insult is the right word and you did it again... But now you're complaining about rebuttals that dont add to a discussion you're avoiding?
Well, the speculation is important, 'cause then you can go on to watch for the clues you need so that you know when you can know the answer. A list of 'things we don't know yet that will help us know more', so to speak.
I also enjoy speculating on future that we can help shape. Big fan.
Poor choice of words on my part. I always did mean if the Sun never existed, so no, my argument did not change.
Forgive me for assuming you (and he) would understand the simple fact that there are no lights in freezers, yet ice cubes don't melt for lack of light. It's not light that's necessary for liquid water - it's energy sufficient to raise the temperature to the point where water can exist as a liquid. If light was all it took, we'd never have ice and snow during the daylight hours.
You keep assuming that if this Big Crunch thing happens, that each universe is like the other, with the same laws of nature. While they might be, they don't have to be. So you cannot move the goal posts and say that the water you claim was sloshing around the asteroid belt before Earth was created was a leftover from the previous universe.
If the Big Crunch is what really happens, NOTHING survives from one universe to the next. Including the water you're so obsessed with.
You're still acting as though the bible is a science text. It isn't, so this "3rd day" nonsense is totally irrelevant. All planets have a sky, whether they have dry land or not, and whether or not there's anyone there to look up and see it.
Are you seriously insisting that you can only see the sky if you're standing on dry land? How do people manage when they're out in a boat, in the middle of the ocean - does the sky vanish?
timtofly
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I used to read a lot. Once the computer was available, I played too much civ, and the exploration games that came out in the early 90's. My dad complained because he thought I kept living the whole of civilization over and over again. I have lived in the North, the South, and spent time in Mexico. I have read through the Bible probably ten times. That was back when my memory was forming. I have not read much recently, because after the computer, it was harder to just sit there and read. I am not much of an actual conversationalist, as should be evident, but I can think, and post what is in my thoughts.
Seeing as how I am not claiming to be right or wrong, but merely posting my thoughts/speculating, I tend to think that we get information from the ancients as a whole people group, or at least their ruler. We do not get a personal perspective, until the Greek philosophers introduced life at a personal level. That may be because like today, the people tend to do the will of the majority, or at least the current leader, or religious authority. The people group as a whole has a god, or angelic being that represented the people as a whole. Then it would seem that if one group conquered another group, they added that "representative" to their repertoire. That comes from reading about the exploits of one particular Assyrian King. I realize that The Egyptians viewed life differently and they actually deified their rulers and there were representative gods for almost every aspect of life. My point was that some thought there was a representative for every living thing and some viewed that representative as a whole people group. They both observed the same phenomenon. They just did not practice the phenomenon, in the same way.
Even the pagans taught there was deity in all aspects of nature. The atheist were people who did not accept the local gods of any kind. Even the early Christians were accused of being atheist, because they did not accept the local teachings, and were viewed as closed secretive groups. They were not even considered cults, because they were viewed as being antagonist against every religion of the day, including Judaism. Perhaps some saw them as a cult of Judaism, but not all people every where.
We are not talking about rendering yesterdays news.
We are not even talking about every single person's interpretation of life, and I never said the information had to be boring. It could be very rich in detail, but the core facts did not change over the millennia.
I'd go with the phrase "willfully obtuse." I agree, although willfully may be a tad strong. I like to learn new things, but I don't think I am willfully making my self look stupid in order to that end.
What description - for entertainment purposes only? I agree
I don't actually find this entertaining. I agree
It's not easy when either of you post humongous walls of text that reiterate the same nonsense you've posted a dozen times already. I agree
You seem to be the one who knows what they did on a daily basis. Then you turn around and claim they cannot pass that on from one generation to the next. Are they liars when they said they started out as clay bodies and a being came along and taught them all they knew? You "claim" they were "scientist" and learned things from experimentation and trial and error. They did not say they were taught all they would need to know for thousands of generations. I accept that evolution happens, and different knowledge is added and some forgotten. The only fact that did not change is that someone taught them a way of life, which you find as an extraordinary claim. I am not making that claim. That is what they have always been taught since it happened. Why would they make that up, any more than you think they learned by trial and error? They did not say they learned by trial and error. If being a scientist is an important fact (to you), could they not have just as easily made that up?
You may not accept the calendar every one uses, but if you wanted to actually be "atheistic" about it, you could live by your own calendar.
I am pretty sure that Richard Dawkins wrote a book in the fictional vein of "The Canterbury Tales", and he did not travel back through time to meet all the members of the evolutionary tree, and observe them in action. I understand that humans have dug up the past, and have tried to re-create the process into some reasonable framework. You claim humans cannot even get the day before correct. How in the name of common sense can they know something that they never observed?
Humans are accustomed to that. Would that change if they lived on the moon? The moon makes a complete rotation every 27 days. Are you saying that if humans adjusted to the "rotation" effect, their day would turn into 648 hours? If there was a being that associated time to a place that had a rotation of 1000 years, then theoretically if you hold to rotation as your measure, the day would be a thousand years. Why would associating rotation with a day, be any different than accepting billions of years of similar life cycles?
We do not observe Fish changing into birds. Would that not be an extraordinary claim? I would require to see it happen, if you made that claim. I just saw a picture of a fish with an appendage like robin wings on the side of their body, but they are still swimming and not flying through the air. There are fish that can jump out of water, and have the ability to fly for some distance. Does that mean fish are evolving into birds? No, because we have birds and we have fish. We have species of fish that can fly. Fish are not birds, and birds are not fish. It would take millions of years of modifications for a bird to change into a fish and a fish into a bird. Therefore when we date some skeleton that we "think" we can date back millions of years, then that proves that there has been millions of years, and thus there was plenty of time. That is circular reasoning like the circular point that Fish can evolve into birds and birds can evolve into fish. El_Machinae produced an example of evolution in process, but it did not produce another actual dog species that was viable as a dog. It was a tumor that is now part of the canine family. I called that a dead end, but the response was: False. I guess at some point it is expected that the tumor would eventually be a viable dog. You do not observe God as a bright light, therefore you deny any other human in history the ability to do so. I do not see any fish producing bird babies, therefore I deny any one their so called idea that it can happen.
I get flack for speculating on what humans wrote about 3000 years ago, along with not accepting what humans thought happened millions of years ago.
My point is you either believe what happened in the past, or else you are claiming you actually know what happened in the past.
Can you produce a definite reason that you know actually happened because you were there? Obviously we would have to discount anything any one else claimed at that time, because all that information has been changed over time.
Humor works when one takes things out of context.
Some humans are atheist and some are not. Can we change nature?
Why? Can you stop being an atheist?
I keep forgetting that humans wielding the Scientific Method are way above the rest of humanity.
I have typed out reams of thoughts, in response to something, and then deleted it. Obviously sometimes that enter button has a life of it's own. ; )
God can some time do some things and then cannot? I agree, one big bubble and it was the sky. Just one air bubble will do. Are you going to rule out no air bubble now? If it is possible to allow some water to repel the forces exerted by the air molecules to form any bubble, then why not one bubble that God is putting the air into?
It would seem to be with all that air between the asteroids, it would be less solid than a closer body of air called the sky. The earth was heading closer to the sun. The asteroids blocking the sun from planets further out would be meaningless. The Sun is not beside the asteroids the sun is the center, and the asteroids do not even block the sun from getting to the outer planets. It is not solid enough.
Even if the earth was the center, what does the sun in relationship to the asteroid belt have to do with anything. Technically the earth would see the asteroid belt in a different orbit around it, than the sun. Just like the Sun views the earth as a different orbit than the asteroid belt. In fact the sun would more than likely obliterate any other orbiting body, especially the asteroid belt. The only reason we can see other planets is because the sun is in the center and all the bodies can be seen because they are far enough away from the sun and still reflect it's light in such a way as to be seen by other bodies.
From space the earth is the earth whether it has a different color over continents as it does over the oceans. We call the planet earth and we call the soil on it earth. It would be nice if you would distinguish between the two, Because the Bible calls it dry land and you keep calling it earth like only the dry land can be the actual planet. I realize that you keep calling the water some other body distinct from the earth itself, but at some point both earth and water has to be referring to the same planet.
Even if you think that perhaps the water came from somewhere and then happened across a body that was just land, then that should be indicated. But it would seem that the dry land was somewhere forming in the same corporal body with the water. It was the same planet, but still in the accretion phase. As the earth, both water and land still refer to this body of matter that seemed to be only water at one time. Water is water, land is land, but the two together make up the earth, not just the accreting land under the water. A formless earth even in water is still the same body. Form defines form, but body describes the entire process. I feel like Aristotle at the beginning of scientific thought.
@ Valka D'Ur
Is it wrong to explain the Bible in a scientific way? I hardly think that we are explaining science in a Biblical way. Last time I checked participation in this forum is voluntary, and the topic is not illegal, and no one says that it is the dogmatic truth that has to be taught to every single human.
Berzerker
Deity
Yes, the amount of heat is the relevant factor. Was Tim's light a tiny bulb in a freezer?
I didn't assume that, I said it was likely water existed before the universe if the big crunch happened. You said thats possible after telling Tim it was ridiculous to argue water preceded the universe.
I didn't say it was leftover, but I cant rule out the possibility some water survived the big crunch and big bang
How do you know? How much of a prior universe is required to trigger the next big bang? Everything? Or maybe %90? I dont see why its impossible for water to survive the transition if it never reached the big bang. Maybe the reason we see fluctuations in the background radiation is because the big bang was triggered as material was still falling inward.
The dry land is not a planet
Are you seriously insisting that you can only see the sky if you're standing on dry land? How do people manage when they're out in a boat, in the middle of the ocean - does the sky vanish?
Would you STOP attributing things to me that I never said?
STOP PUTTING WORDS ON MY KEYBOARD THAT I NEVER TYPED.
hehe
I'm insisting the dry land had no sky until the dry land existed... Before the dry land appeared on the 3rd day water covered the world. Thats why the lights in Earth's sky dont appear until the 4th day
Now that you've single-handedly slain the entirety of quantum physics, do you have any other revelations for us?
Also, for someone complaining about walls of text, you're certainly producing a lot of them yourself.
Unless you're firmly in the land of mythology, the world would still have had a sky, dry land or otherwise. How are the lights in the sky at all dependent on whether there's dry land or not?
Berzerker
Deity
You argued the sky (air) pushed water out of the way to create the water above the air from the water below.
Air is not solid, asteroids are... Air was not beaten out to form an expanse, the parent body(s) of asteroids was hammered into a bracelet. Asteroids not only divide the solar system into inner and outer planets, they divide the waters below (our seas) from the waters above (all that ice and water on the other side of the solar system's snow line).
Of course it is true our atmosphere is between the seas and the waters above the firmament, but it wasn't air that God used to separate the waters.
Thats what I said
Earth is the name God gave the dry land when it appeared on the 3rd day. Thats why the Earth's sky is described on the 4th day.
The Earth was without form because land submerged by water is not dry
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