Bible/Archeology Timeline ("Help This Man")

[william1165]

Re: http://randi.org/jr/100104court.html#3, and http://www.cariboo.bc.ca/pubrel/researchmatters/dec.html

I see the point about making unsubstantiated claims as to WHO or WHAT: ('"life didn't just spontaneously generate out of nothing and turn from exploding rock into living beings as evolutionists have previously claimed. Life on our planet was engineered (by an outside force, namely God)."', but the basic fact of coorelating the archological record with the Biblical record is very interesting.

It seems that half the article is based in fact, while the other half makes "leaps of faith" that are presented as facts. Bad science? No. Bad journalism? Yes.

[Dr. Popalot]

"life didn't just spontaneously generate out of nothing and turn from exploding rock into living beings as evolutionists have previously claimed.

This is one of the best examples of a strawman argument I've seen in a while. (A Straw Man Argument is a statement a person makes if they want to more easily attack an opposing position. )


http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lilyth/strawman.html

[Ashles]

This new perspective goes on to examine the course of the universe following the temporal linear regression line. Extrapolations from the line suggest we are close to the event horizon, when everything we know stops and the universe returns to where it first emerged (the singularity).
So, they've decided that Earth was created when the Universe started, and that the fossil record started at the same time?
And that you can predict the future from the fossil record?

I think this quote sums the whole thing up better:
While the film script is still in the work, the paper has captured international attention

This 'University' certainly isn't bothered about having scientific credibility.

[william1165]

I don't think they are trying to predict the future--I didn't get that sense. They only used the assertion that the fossil record correlates to the Bible description as proof that God created it.

William

[Stitch]

Originally posted by william1165

Life on our planet was engineered...


Evidence to support this claim please, a copy of the blueprints will do just fine, but failing that any repeated peer reviewed experiments to corroborate the claim will be considered.

Originally posted by william1165

...(by an outside force, namely God

Evidence to support this claim please, and a circular arguments saying "because the bible says so and the bible is the word of god and the bible says god exists" are not evidence.

[Anathema]

That link appears to be broken now --- anyone able to reach it?

http://www.cariboo.bc.ca/pubrel/researchmatters/dec.html

[Vim Razz]

Not I. It looks like they took down the page, as December is the only month in their Research Matters (http://www.cariboo.bc.ca/pubrel/researchmatters/) section that seems to be "broken."

[william1165]

Only seems to have been brought down after Mr Randi called them on it.

I'd like to see the evidence that God engineered life on earth as well. 2 points:
1) The article was bad journalism in that it reported that the correlation was evidence that God was the force.
2) I believe that God engineered the world, but I don't go around touting correlations as absolute proof.

In fact, I'm a hard core "Darwinist" and am bugged by those who want to reject all that evidence and believe in the absolute 7-day timeline.

[Operaider]

I agree with william to some extent.

Back in my days of belief I never understood how the big bang theory and the reports from genesis were contradictory. Same goes for evolution and the creation of man. Today I'm a fairly strict athiest, but at the time I thought they were fairly compatable.

Example: God creates the universe by causing the big bang. This takes him 7 days (days being a measure of time used as a substitute, inorder to explain billions of years of creation)

Example: God creates the animals, then creates adam. Who's to say he didn't create man by evolving him from one of his older creations. If I were to create humans I wouldn't start from scratch, I'd improve on a previous invention. The problem is that the bible doesn't say that god used animals as base material when creating man. But, it also doesn't say that he didn't

[EHocking]

Originally posted by Vim Razz
Not I. It looks like they took down the page, as December is the only month in their Research Matters (http://www.cariboo.bc.ca/pubrel/researchmatters/) section that seems to be "broken." Fortunately you can recall "old" websites throught the Web Archive site (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php). Here's the link to the archived December issue (http://web.archive.org/web/20031230212521/http://www.cariboo.bc.ca/pubrel/researchmatters/dec.html).

[DrMatt]

Originally posted by Operaider
I agree with william to some extent.

Back in my days of belief I never understood how the big bang theory and the reports from genesis were contradictory. Same goes for evolution and the creation of man. Today I'm a fairly strict athiest, but at the time I thought they were fairly compatable.

Example: God creates the universe by causing the big bang. This takes him 7 days (days being a measure of time used as a substitute, inorder to explain billions of years of creation)

Example: God creates the animals, then creates adam. Who's to say he didn't create man by evolving him from one of his older creations. If I were to create humans I wouldn't start from scratch, I'd improve on a previous invention. The problem is that the bible doesn't say that god used animals as base material when creating man. But, it also doesn't say that he didn't

This involves supposing that the author or authors of Genesis needed to obfuscate their meanings. If they meant billions of years, why didn't they say so? And the Bible explicitly says that humans are made from clay-dirt (adom).

[Stitch]

Originally posted by Operaider
The problem is that the bible doesn't say that god used animals as base material when creating man. But, it also doesn't say that he didn't

I admit I haven't read genesis lately, but I am sure that Adam was created from "earth" or "clay" depending on your bible version which kind of elimates the using of another animal as the basis bit.

The problem for me is that the bible was written at a time when there was poor understanding of science and how things work. If the bible was written today with a similar theme it would probably be rather more credible and less contradictory but would still be a work of fiction.

[Stitch]

Originally posted by DrMatt
This involves supposing that the author or authors of Genesis needed to obfuscate their meanings. If they meant billions of years, why didn't they say so? And the Bible explicitly says that humans are made from clay-dirt (adom).

I don't believe the "obfuscation" was intentional. I have read (I'll try and find the source) that "day" is just a poor translation of the original language which more literally meant "period of time". It was undefined, various translations tried to force fit it to known and exact periods of time.

[Vim Razz]

Originally posted by Stitch
I admit I haven't read genesis lately, but I am sure that Adam was created from "earth" or "clay" depending on your bible version which kind of elimates the using of another animal as the basis bit. Clay it is. It's been the standard material of choice for building primordial humans in the middle east since the Sumarians (http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/SumerianMyth.htm) if not longer. Good ol' clay.Nammu, who is either the sea or the goddess of the riverbed, goes to her son Enki, who is asleep in the deep (the Apsu) and entreats him to rise from his bed and "fashion servants of the gods" (Kramer, History Begins 109). Enki, who after all is the god of wisdom, thinks of the germinating powers of the clay and water of the abyss, and he tells Nammu to have some womb-goddesses pinch off this clay and have some "princely fashioners" thicken it, so she can mold it or give birth to it:
Mix the heart of the clay that is over the abyss,
The good and princely fashioners will thicken the clay,
You, [Nammu] do you bring the limbs into existence;
Ninmah [earth-mother or birth goddess] will work above you,
The goddesses [of birth] . . . will stand by you at your fashioning;
O my mother, decree its [the newborn's] fate,
Ninmah will bind upon it the image (?) of the gods,
It is man . . . . (Kramer, History Begins 109)

[Anathema]

Originally posted by Vim Razz
Clay it is. It's been the standard material of choice for building primordial humans in the middle east since the Sumarians (http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/SumerianMyth.htm) if not longer. Good ol' clay. Yep, good old clay. Now if they can just explain the alchemical miracle that transformed all that Si, Al, Mg, and Fe into CARBON, we might be onto something. Doesn't it seem more sensible to start with someting at least in the organic ballpark?

[william1165]

My learning has said that "Adam" translates to "man". Not sure where the "clay" tranlsation comes from. I've always seen that to mean the species of "homo sapiens". And it is known that other species (at least 2) roamed around at the time.

But back to the original topic, of how such a correlation proves that God (and not something else) was the driving force.

[Beady]

Originally posted by DrMatt
This involves supposing that the author or authors of Genesis needed to obfuscate their meanings. If they meant billions of years, why didn't they say so?

Were ancient numbering systems capable of expressiing "billions" of years? AFAIK, even the Romans would have had trouble going over a few thousand. I have no idea at all how the Sumerians, Egyptians, Hebrews, etc, would handle the concept, let alone the specific numbers.

It may or may not be worth noting that Carl Sagan handled things by coming up with his Cosmic Calendar, where everything since the Big Bang is compressed into a standard earth year. Could the Seven Days of Genesis have had a similar intent?

[UnrepentantSinner]

Originally posted by Beady
Were ancient numbering systems capable of expressiing "billions" of years? AFAIK, even the Romans would have had trouble going over a few thousand. I have no idea at all how the Sumerians, Egyptians, Hebrews, etc, would handle the concept, let alone the specific numbers.

It may or may not be worth noting that Carl Sagan handled things by coming up with his Cosmic Calendar, where everything since the Big Bang is compressed into a standard earth year. Could the Seven Days of Genesis have had a similar intent?

On Christian forums there was a guy there (who's stopped posting unfortunately) that presented something I'd never heard before, but it really makes a lot of sense. Instead of being a literal or metaphorical time line (other than to establish the week and the Sabbath) Genesis is that story of YHWH conquering the Babylonian pantheon.

It's likely that Genesis was not codified until the Babylonian captiviity and served as a metaphorical tool of that time frame. Look at what is described in Genesis. Chaos, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, the waters, the animals, the trees. Each of these things were governed or created by various deities in the Babylonian pantheon. By stating in Genesis that YHWH created these things, rather than the Babylonian deities, the Hewbrews were establishing their deity as superior to those of their captors.

[rppa]

Wasn't Genesis and much of the Old Testament carried in oral tradition for centuries before it was written down? I've always been puzzled by the "have tos" placed on the Bible by the fundamentalists. Assume God told the early Hebrews the correct version of events. Who's to say that their ability to remember and transcribe the story has to be perfect? Indeed, isn't it kind of blasphemous to assume that the human authors of the Bible are perfect and incapable of error?

I was blown away the first time I heard of the Big Bang. It seemed, if anything, to confirm the biblical idea that there was a Creation. Not only that, but in the three-degree background and its tiny variations we can see God's fingerprints. This is heady stuff, if anything I would think it would affirm rather than break the faith of a religious person.

[UncleSon]

Originally posted by EHocking
Fortunately you can recall "old" websites throught the Web Archive site (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php). Here's the link to the archived December issue (http://web.archive.org/web/20031230212521/http://www.cariboo.bc.ca/pubrel/researchmatters/dec.html).

Thanks for posting that link, I'd never have believed it if I hadn't read it myself. What a load of pseudoscientific offal!! (That's crap for those readers who like it plain and simple). A "linear regression line ... using general relativity"? A "decelerating hypothetical time line"?

I only have 2 years of college under my belt, but I know snake oil when I smell it. These "academics" ought to be ashamed of themselves. And I hope their movie bombs, too.

And the University that sponsors this claptrap should lose it's accreditation posthaste, and my advice to all it's current students is GET OUT NOW! Run!!!!!

[william1165]

Originally posted by rppa
I was blown away the first time I heard of the Big Bang. It seemed, if anything, to confirm the biblical idea that there was a Creation. Not only that, but in the three-degree background and its tiny variations we can see God's fingerprints. This is heady stuff, if anything I would think it would affirm rather than break the faith of a religious person.

That's the way I think of it. There was "the void" of a universe in exact equilibrium, then "something" threw that equilibrium out of balance to cause the "Big Bang". God? Why not. I'll believe that. Still uses the laws of nature to create things--evolution, geology, cosmology, etc. Try to explain that to the scientificly primitive mind of the 5000 B.C. man. Thus, the 7-day story to put things in order. Unfortunately, some with the scientfically primitive mind of 2004 A.D. still don't get it.

I like the reference to the Babylonian pantheon. I'll have to remember that one.

William