Oh I’m definitely a heretic in religion. Any other century and I’d probably be burned at the stake.
I totally agree with this. And your point is exactly why it is quixotic to attempt to read billions-year-old events into the opening chapters of Genesis. Reading billions-year-old events into the Bible is not the point!
The Lord God created the heavens and the earth: On that we can agree.
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Actually, there’s a single body of water, then it gets divided into an ocean above and an ocean below. Where is the ocean above? Well, when you look into the ocean below in daytime, it’s blue. You look at the sky above in daytime, and it’s blue…
True. When land first formed it formed as a single super-continent. So all the ocean’s water was a single body.
They’re in there. Explained in a way they’d understand, as best as they could. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth and heavens just “banging” out of nothing is pretty much how that’s understood.
Great oxidation event is described as a “firmament”. They don’t know what oxygen is, or that there are other gases beyond the air you’re breathing, but they know the sky. That’s that metal dome up there.
Cambrian explosion it just says " Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life…". Ehh, same thing.
That really didn’t help me. Let’s skip the atmosphere clearing as it seems you’ve listend to a lot of Hugh Ross in particular.
How exactly are the sun/moon/stars as described related to the position of continents? Continents are still moving today and have been slowly moving for tens to hundreds of millions of years.That is the ‘present day’ configuration didn’t happen until the present day. Also stars are moving relative to each other so the specific night sky that we see has never been seen before by anything that lived on Earth before.
Ehh, no. This paper is a useful summary of the tip of the iceberg of how this wasn’t the ‘first’ such radiation of life:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-019-0821-6
Basically the thing you are arguing is the wording is so vague which means it can be applied to literally anything with creatures of the sea or land that occurred. Hey I just re-read Genesis 1 and day 5 talks about Tiktalik!
Well, when you’re right, you’re right. And he’s right.
" And God set them in the firmament"
Some translations say “positioned them in the firmament”. The drifting of the continents to their current position between the poles “positions them in the firmament”.
Yes, they’re still drifting, but it’s going to be a loooong time before they leave their position between the poles again.
In fact, though I’ve yet to find anyone qualified to back up this little theory, I suspect one of those mass extinction events where everything froze to death wasn’t actually a “global freeze”, but was actually the continents being situated around the south pole. The life that lived in the sea would presumably exist on the continental shelves of the land masses, travelling with them. A few thousand/million years under the planet might kill some things.
These are not intended as insults. I’m trying to get through your smug belief in your own competence. For that purpose, I’m being blunt about my opinions of your writings. It doesn’t seem to help.
Yes, if by “there” we refer to Genesis 1, which makes no mention of it. What you’re calling the water cycle is a description of the creation of the sky, a solid dome, that separates the primordial water into two parts.
No. It’s imaginative at best.
Delusions of grandeur.
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Yeah, I’ve been getting that for a decade now. It won’t help. I’m stubborn. Besides, in my experience that stuff stops once others begin to realize that as crazy as it all sounds initially, my explanation stays consistent. When you first hear something so different than how you’ve already preconceived it, it sounds absurd. But the more it marinates it begins to get a little less absurd.
I’ve seen it play out over and over many times. Stick with this and you just may find yourself there too.
The smugness I guess came along somewhere along the way. I can be pretentious and downright unbearable. I recognize that in myself. @swamidass has gotten onto me about that. I don’t hear it in myself when I’m typing it, but I totally know what you mean. It’s not deliberate.
Makes no mention of it? It says the water separated above and below. How else should it have said it? Should it have said “The heat from the sun’s light caused a portion of the deep to evaporate and float up into the air because it was lighter than the air in its vaporized state”?
But yes, before this century, when people read that they thought it was talking about that solid blue dome up there where the Celestial waters went. We know better than that now.
Except he doesn’t know that and neither do you. Your concordism is different from his a bit (i.e. what each ‘day’ really means is different) which is different from the concord I found from the 1870s which is different from other concords.
Yeah probably exactly as you say.
Yeah, I read a little booklet he published like 30+ years ago that detailed his view of the creation account. There were a lot of similarities, and then some pretty big differences. I remember the bit about land was very different. But, to be fair, I don’t believe we knew quite as much about plate tectonics back when he wrote that as we do now.
Which means there’s even more creative ways people can do concordism!
Well, as St. Augustine said, “If at any time the book of God’s word and the book of God’s works seem to conflict, it’s human interpretation that is flawed.”
Is it creative? Or is it just true?
A book that can be made to say anything says nothing at all?
Made to say anything? Not really. But shown to correspond with Earth’s history by giving specifically described and named creations that actually do line up with what happened as if observed from the specific point of view it states? Yes.
Yes pretty much anything:
Day 1 of Genesis:
- Formation of first stars and galaxies. Dark matter and dark energy are part of lambda-CDM and are literally’ darkness.’ However, they are not actually ‘dark’ but transparent as they don’t interact with light as Genesis really says.
- Or you could go cosmic microwave background where the universe went from opaque to really fuzzy at recombination.
- Or maybe this is the formation of the protoplanetary disk where the sun first formed and the earth literally was formless and void.
Day Two:
- Let’s make sure that ‘water’ can mean fluid or particles of any kind that have a density. Then we can have anything we need to here. The cosmic ‘waters’ refer to the upper atmosphere which physicists tell me is a fluid.
Day Three:
- The plants with seeds is tough, so let’s look at some simple diagram I found on a Google image search (I’m not sure if this is right but it doesn’t matter to be precise when doing this):
- The first part of the verse (land plants) is talking about 475 mya and the last part of the verse (seed bearing) takes place around 360 mya, long after the Cambrian explosion.
Day Four:
- Refers to the evolution of eyes but specifically for land animals so Tiktalik is a good candidate of one who can see which means now ‘the sun appears’ as a sign for early animals to follow the Israelite festivals mentioned in the text.
Day Five:
- God was thinking about the past and remember to put the fossils from the Cambrian explosion back in since he forgot them in the fossil record.
Day Six:
- Obviously dinosaurs were the main focus here and then humans at the end.
This is pretty good I think.
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Let me do you one last favor… one heretic to another …
This is not a brand new video… but it is a recent one… and it challenges all the old thoughts about the history of Judah and Israel!
It doesn’t start with Genesis… but by the time you get 3/4’s of the way through the video… everything in your worldview is going to be shaking and re-working itself!
@Greg, you probably shouldn’t watch this video!
I like the evolution of the eyes bit.