Mathematics can estimate the date of Adam and Eve

schlaufuchs · Feb 19, 2011

Then again, you could always just identify Genesis for what it is, a wonderfully fascinating story which, while not necessarily true, is important to the Christian faith (and in many regards, Western Culture) for allegorical purposes and for some kind of teaching by parable, and then all your problems would be cleared up!

But then again, you have become significantly less fundamentalist since you've joined up, so I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of thing becomes the reality for you in the next few years.

Anyway, the sort of evolution you described is not plausible, for a number of reasons, but most demonstrably, perhaps, for the great dearth of human-like fossils we have discovered, which show a rather clear and gradual development of humans over the course of hundreds of thousands to millions of years.

Berzerker · Feb 19, 2011

studies of lice show clothing was invented ~170 kya

Cynovolans · Feb 19, 2011

Berzerker said:
studies of lice show clothing was invented ~170 kya

Are you talking about this study? Then it is 107,000 years, not 170 thousand.

GhostWriter16 · Feb 19, 2011

]Then again, you could always just identify Genesis for what it is, a wonderfully fascinating story which, while not necessarily true, is important to the Christian faith (and in many regards, Western Culture) for allegorical purposes and for some kind of teaching by parable, and then all your problems would be cleared up!

I think certain elements of Genesis are EXTREMELY important to Christianity (Not necessarily for Salvation, but for understanding why Salvation is needed yet.) I could pull out several New Testament quotes to prove this, but I will do so another time. I think the primary parts that are important are the stories of Adam and Abraham, and maybe Noah to a certain extent (Its not really important in my opinion whether it was the whole world or just all the people, though I accept the former.)

I don't think whether it technically took six days or six thousand or six trillion days is really all that important. Even though I was taught that it is, I'm really not getting why.

But then again, you have become significantly less fundamentalist since you've joined up, so I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of thing becomes the reality for you in the next few years.

Oh goodness, if you only knew how I've been raised you would forgive me for it.

I still think the world is roughly ten thousand years old, but I've learned to accept that I might be wrong about that.

Anyway, the sort of evolution you described is not plausible, for a number of reasons, but most demonstrably, perhaps, for the great dearth of human-like fossils we have discovered, which show a rather clear and gradual development of humans over the course of hundreds of thousands to millions of years.

Assuming a worldwide flood did happen (Just assume it did for a second) could that explain how old they look?

Also, to my knowledge, there are none of these that have been proven not hoaxes, and many that have been proven hoaxes, but if there are any that have been proven, I'd be curious to see them.

Askthepizzaguy · Feb 19, 2011

Domination3000 said:
That said, I do think supporting human evolution is impossible as a Biblical conclusion since it shows a cruel and heartless God.

I thought the Bible shows a cruel and heartless God to begin with?

Spoiler :

There's also some things about who begat who, and which foods not to eat, and passages showing that incest and slavery are God-approved.

Cynovolans · Feb 19, 2011

Domination3000 said:
Also, to my knowledge, there are none of these that have been proven not hoaxes, and many that have been proven hoaxes, but if there are any that have been proven, I'd be curious to see them.

Whut?

Berzerker · Feb 19, 2011

Cynovolans said:
Are you talking about this study? Then it is 107,000 years, not 170 thousand.

The name Stoneking sounds familiar, but the date on that is kinda old. This was something I just saw Tuesday on Nova Science Now and it was a very recent interview with the research team leader (from Florida I believe).

http://www.americanscientist.org/sc...ice-when-we-clothed-our-naked-hairless-bodies

I went to the pbs site but navigation sucks, but this link says the same thing

GhostWriter16 · Feb 19, 2011

@ATPG- Many of these things are things I struggle with already, so don't think I'm just gonna be able to give a quick answer, but I will try.

The first one- God told him not to eat from the tree, so he knew that was wrong. That said, he DIDN'T have a Sin nature, nor did he know fully what Evil was. God condemned him since he did evil that he knew was wrong.

Why his descendents were cursed as well, I don't know, but they were.

As for the snake, at that time, it stood on legs. God made him turn into a slithering snake miraculously*, and so it was always that way. He didn't start that way.

*Apologies for the "God did it" answer, but that is literally what happened. I think in context its a fair answer though.

At the Second One- The command was inconsistent with God's moral standards, but Abraham did not know this, all he knew was what God told him. So it was a test, to allow Abraham to show he had real faith. Now, God obviously knew what would happen, but he still wanted to give Abraham the choice. Since God stopped Abraham from following through with the order, there is no cruelty.

At the third one- I'll find the Scriptures to back it up later, but it is probably that this is people cohabiting with Demons and having sexual relations with them. This is surely a very serious crime.

As for the animals, no they didn't do anything, but they ARE animals at all. We kill them for meat. I don't see this as cruel (And as I said before, I don't necessarily see animal evolution as cruel either.)

Fourth one is easy. If a man who committed highly negligent manslaughter was brought before the judge, deeply regretting what he did but still a human life was lost, would a compassionate judge be more likely to "Snap his fingers" and let the man go, or pay the fine for him?

Earthly consequences still exist, but God gave Jesus as a way to avoid the Eternal consequence.

Also, God didn't "Command" Jesus to die. The Godhead is three in one, their will is in full agreement.

The Fifth and Sixth ones are EXTREMELY tough for me, and I've been focused on the sixth one on and off for the past couple of years, and still am not necessarilly satisfied. The fifth one is easier than the sixth, but is still a challenge. I can defend it only by saying God spared his wife, who seems not to be saved, yet he killed the children, who, I would assume, were saved and headed for heaven. Thus God was actually sparing them the suffering of life (Yes it cost Job greatly, but I'll go back for that.) Also, it seems while Job was not committing some heinous sin as his friends thought, he still needed to learn something.

Now, does it seem immoral on the surface? I'll admit that. But it seems to have benefited Job at the end of the story.

The sixth one causes me great pain in my heart. While I don't remember any genital mutilation whatsoever (Since when is circumsicion "Genital Mutilation" and since when is there anything wrong with it?), I still have an incredibly hard time fathoming why a loving God would send anyone to Hell.

The Traditional answer is that man is so sinful that God could not do otherwise and still be just. I also believe that nobody who would have accepted it, yet never heard, will be sent to Hell without being given a choice (NOTE: I do not yet know how I would interpret Romans 9 and other passages like it, so this may not actually result in anyone dying without hearing who would have believed, but it might so I put it in there.) I also would deny that the punishment is a literal fire (God torturing people) but rather is a removal of God's blessings, which even for the atheist exist in many forms on Earth, and so would be so terrible as to be described as a "Fire" (The strongest pain John knew), but I don't think John actually knew what it was.

I don't have a better answer than this, sorry. As I said, this is the type of question I ask people who know better than me, and even THEY usually can't answer it.

Berzerker · Feb 19, 2011

Domination3000 said:
The first one- God told him not to eat from the tree, so he knew that was wrong. That said, he DIDN'T have a Sin nature, nor did he know fully what Evil was. God condemned him since he did evil that he knew was wrong.

The Adam didn't know good and evil until after eating the fruit. And what exactly was this evil? They "knew" they were naked and sewed clothing from fig leaves, God noticed the clothing (and Eve's pregnancy) and got mad - he didn't want his Garden being over run by humans.

Why his descendents were cursed as well, I don't know, but they were.

is it not evil to punish the child for the sin of the father?

As for the snake, at that time, it stood on legs. God made him turn into a slithering snake miraculously*, and so it was always that way. He didn't start that way.

The serpent told the truth, God even quotes the serpent when informing the other gods about what happened.

GhostWriter16 · Feb 19, 2011

Huh? I don't get this post, especially the last paragraph.

As for the second part (The only part I understood), no we are punished for our own sin. However, the sin nature makes not sinning impossible (THAT all said, nobody will actually be punished in Hell without committing an intentional Sin.)

Berzerker · Feb 19, 2011

its illogical to say Adam did evil when he didn't know good and evil

and if not sinning is impossible, what kind of "god" would get mad at us for sinning?

as for the serpent, look at what he told Eve and what God told his colleagues - they're the same. God said Adam would die the day he partook of the fruit, the serpent said their eyes would be opened knowing good and evil, they partake and God says look at the humans, their eyes are open, they know good and evil. That aint what God told Adam, but it is what the serpent told Eve.

Think about that, whats really going on here? Look to the Sumerians... Their serpent deity was responsible for humans procreating and their sky deity wasn't too happy about it...

GhostWriter16 · Feb 19, 2011

God only said Adam would die, not that he would die that day.

That said, the Serpent did ironically tell the truth.

Adam didn't know Evil, but he knew disobedience.

bestrfcplayer · Feb 19, 2011

Meh. Eveolution exisits. Just deal with it!!!!!!!!!

Berzerker · Feb 19, 2011

Domination3000 said:
God only said Adam would die, not that he would die that day.

That said, the Serpent did ironically tell the truth.

Adam didn't know Evil, but he knew disobedience.

God said Adam would die when he ate from the tree ("you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die&#8221

, but he didn't die, and according to Eve, God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

You will die "when" you eat of the tree & you must not touch it or you will die... Thats pretty clear...

But no one died... And what was Eve's punishment? She would suffer pain in childbirth. That and the fig leaves to cover their "nakedness" refers to procreation - that was their "sin". And thats why God was angry with the Serpent, the talking snake taught or enabled them to have kids. Disobedience aint evil, would you say Abraham was evil had he refused to murder his son when God told him to? God had to talk Moses into doing his bidding, and it took some convincing... Moses didn't want to do it.

on a sidenote, that isn't actually a command - its a warning. Like telling someone to look both ways before crossing the street. And the Sumerians had a myth in which their serpent deity tells Adapa - the perfected (hu)man - not to eat anything offered him while on his trip to heaven to meet the supreme god. Enki (the serpent) believed he would be poisoned, but instead the supreme god gave Adapa from the tree of life - in both versions the serpent was indirectly responsible for man missing out on "immortality".

wrt human evolution: look at the hominid record, thats all the evidence I need. But the Sumerian version says the gods combined their blood with a creature roaming the southern lands to create a primitive worker - the Zulu have a similar myth, their ancestors - the artificial ones - were at war with the apemen.

emzie · Feb 19, 2011

Domination3000 said:
I think Evolution is unlikely since I do not think God would subject a sinless world to suffering and death, but I do not think believing the animals evolved makes any difference at all in the Christian faith (Believing humans did might however since it gives an implication of a cruel God.) Question to Evolutionists here, is it proven that humans evolved, or is it possible, in theory, that they did not?

Well, yes, I can imagine a situation where evolution is false and humans did not evolve. The only issue is, if that situation were true, it would mean god has created mountains of false evidence for genetics, geologists, anthropologists, linguists, biologists, cosmologists, physicists, paleontologists, oceanographers... probably every single field of science. Thus, you get a cruel god who is intentionally trying to mislead people into not believing his account of creation.

Leifmk · Feb 20, 2011

contre said:
Thus, you get a cruel god who is intentionally trying to mislead people into not believing his account of creation.

Bill Hicks (our saviour) had a routine about that. "Heh heh heh. Let's see who believes in Me now!"

Valka D'Ur · Feb 20, 2011

Kruelgor said:
I believe it's extremely logical to assume that the birth rate in the beginning ages was much much MUCH higher than what we're accustomed to. The human females were almost ALWAYS pregnant during the ages of 12 to 50.

Oh, really - up to 50? So please enlighten us... with modern medicine, it's very unusual for a woman to have a natural pregnancy (ie. accomplished without fertility drugs or other medical intervention) much past 40, let alone 50. So how was this managed before we had modern medical knowledge?

Kruelgor said:
The ONLY reason you do not believe in a creator, despite the millions of reasons right in front of your face in the typical daily life, is because the creator has chosen to conceal itself from you.

That's an extremely presumptuous notion. There are as many reasons not to believe in a creator as there are people who don't believe in a creator.

Notenoughtrebs said:
To be honest, I was a little surprised to see a creationist argument on a civ forum. Not that the game overtly pushes the idea of evolution, but because (to me, anyway) it seems to have an aura of history, science and education, both in its content and among its players.

Welcome to Off-Topic, where this sort of topic is a daily occurrence.

Domination3000 said:
The main point of faulty reasoning I saw was that Hebrew Geneaologies as I said sometimes skip generations.

So we can safely skip the Book of Numbers, since the census takers were incompetent? :hmm:

Domination3000 said:
As I said, I am ignorant, I do not know.

I do not deserve to be laughed at for saying I do not know. You can laugh about a lot of things about me and my beliefs, but for me to Admit my lack of knowledge and be laughed at for it is ridiculous and unfair.

Carl Sagan said "I don't know" is a valid response to any question when you do not know the answer. To admit you don't know something is an act of honesty, which is a good start on the path to wisdom (assuming that after having admitted you don't know something, you then take steps to remedy that).

Domination3000 said:
I still think the world is roughly ten thousand years old, but I've learned to accept that I might be wrong about that.

Question: How old do you think the dinosaur remains are that have been discovered?

Dachs · Feb 20, 2011

This entire thread is embarrassing, even though it's been turned into something vaguely semi-useful

Gustave5436 · Feb 20, 2011

Berzerker said:
wrt human evolution: look at the hominid record, thats all the evidence I need. But the Sumerian version says the gods combined their blood with a creature roaming the southern lands to create a primitive worker - the Zulu have a similar myth, their ancestors - the artificial ones - were at war with the apemen.

In Star Trek, aliens can mix genes with each other because life in the Milky Way was initially seeded by a single race. Presumably, they were engineered in such a way that they would follow a similar path of evolution - this is absurd by real-world science but, for the purposes of a sci-fi TV show on a budget, good enough.

In real life, organisms from different worlds would be wildly different from each other. There is a very good possibility, for instance, that aliens wouldn't even have DNA to begin with. The notion that aliens could mix DNA from themselves and from Terrans is terribly implausible.

uppi · Feb 20, 2011

Domination3000 said:
I think certain elements of Genesis are EXTREMELY important to Christianity (Not necessarily for Salvation, but for understanding why Salvation is needed yet.) I could pull out several New Testament quotes to prove this, but I will do so another time. I think the primary parts that are important are the stories of Adam and Abraham, and maybe Noah to a certain extent (Its not really important in my opinion whether it was the whole world or just all the people, though I accept the former.)

I don't think whether it technically took six days or six thousand or six trillion days is really all that important. Even though I was taught that it is, I'm really not getting why.

The message of the first chapters of Genesis, i.e. that humans chose to reject God, is important to Christianity. How this actually happened is actually quite unimportant. Just like the messages of the parables Jesus told are independent of whether these stories actually happened and we can assume they did not without losing anything of the message.

Assuming a worldwide flood did happen (Just assume it did for a second) could that explain how old they look?

Okay, so let's assume a worldwide flood at one point in time. There are several possibilities:
1) It did not mess with the geological layers, in which case we would find one "flood layer" that would be decidedly different from the rest as it was deposited during a catastrophic event and not slowly over the years. The other layers would be unchanged by such an event and thus the flood would have no impact on dating fossils below that layer.

2) The flood mixed all the layers up. In that case we should not see any structure at all and we should see a totally random distribution of fossils and every attempt at dating would lead to wildly differing results. As we can find layer structures and geologists can make (some) sense out of them, this is contrary to the evidence.

3) The flood was somehow responsible for depositing all the layers. In that case, the fossils should be distributed according to some physical process. E.g. the heaviest fossils at the bottom or something like that. Also the layers would all appear to be roughly the same age as they were deposited at the same time.

But none of these scenarios would have an impact on radiometric dating, so it would not affect the age of a single rock, just the distribution of rocks. In fact, the impact of a flood on radiometric dating should be exactly zero.

So a global flood with geologic impact does not really explain anything about the age of fossils and in all cases would lead to other geologic structures than what is actually observed.

Also, to my knowledge, there are none of these that have been proven not hoaxes, and many that have been proven hoaxes, but if there are any that have been proven, I'd be curious to see them.

Are you seriously insinuating that every find of pre-homo sapiens humanoid remains are a hoax? Do you know how many there are and how well documented these are?

Mathematics can estimate the date of Adam and Eve

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