Posted on 03/09/2009 3:50:09 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Critics of the Bible have often said that the writings of Genesis reflect an “unscientific view” of the universe—one that reflected the cosmology of the ancient world. One of these criticisms centers on the Hebrew word raqia used in the creation account of Genesis 1. Several Bible versions, such as the New King James, translate this word as firmament:
Genesis 1:6–8, NJKV
Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day. [Emphasis added.]
The argument from these Bible critics is that the ancient Hebrews believed in a solid dome with the stars embedded in the dome. They say that the word firmament reflects the idea of firmness, and this reflects erroneous cosmology. Therefore, the Bible is not the inspired Word of God, and we don’t need to listen to its teaching.
However, other versions of the Bible, such as the New American Standard, translate raqia as expanse:
Genesis 1:6–8, NASB
Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so. God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. [Emphasis added.]
But which is the correct term to use?...
(Excerpt) Read more at answersingenesis.org ...
Does not matter what they believed....it ain’t solid....
The heavens used to be called the spheres and it was thought that they were solid. So this makes sense that the people writing the Bible thought the sky was solid.
It may not matter to you, but it matters a whole heck of a lot to both Christians —and— militant atheists.
Jeepers! I hope not, for then we’ll then have to figure out how many angels can dance on it.
God created Heaven and Earth
Other that that, nothing else matters. Those who try to present the Bible as literal historic or scientific work, in all Books, in all arguments, actually harm the Christian Faith.
How in the world would you explain, to a largely illiterate, totally scientifically ignorant population concepts like DNA, Astronomy, Nuclear Physics and everything else you would need to know, to understand Creation?
Those who are offended that we might have come “from monkeys” have no problem believing that we came from “Humus” or dirt, formed from decayed plants, animals and MONKEYs?
Again, do not use the Bible for purposes it was not intended to serve.
The answer is “yes”... wait, what was the question? ;)
Anyone here recall how to use a concordance? I’d do it, but I don’t recall where mine is packed away..... these types of questions are rather easily resolved by looking at other instances where the same word was used, by looking especially at the FIRST such instance and you can normally discern from the context which is the right translation of the original word
Never compared the density of nuclear matter to the planck density of 'empty space' consisting of planck particle pairs?
So what is the objection to Theistic Evolution theory?
No...and the sky still ain’t solid...
I only posted an excerpt. The rest of the article answers the question. Having said that, it’s never a bad idea to consult a concordance to make sure the author himself is correctly translating the Greek and Hebrew words.
Another point, we have defined the term “day” to mean the rotation of the Earth in relation to the sun; how, then, could there be any “day” (much less multiple ones) before God created the sun?
Answer: The Hebrew term translated as “day” was simply a period of time. In fact, we have a similar usage for the word “day”. Does the phrase “back in my day” mean a SPECIFIC day in your past? Or a general time-period?
Capacity: 1000 angels. By order of the fire marshall.
Planck density is 5.1 × 10^96 kg/m³ vs the density of an atomic nucleus at 2 × 10^17 kg/m³.
That's *solid* even if you don't think so.
==The Hebrew term translated as “day” was simply a period of time. In fact, we have a similar usage for the word “day”. Does the phrase “back in my day” mean a SPECIFIC day in your past? Or a general time-period?
I don’t have time to get into it right now, but the following may change your mind on that. All the best—GGG
http://creation.com/images/pdfs/cabook/chapter2.pdf
the genesis story is pretty interesting how closely it matches scientific theory.
everything comes from nothing, everything is formless but then given form. New life forms are introduced to the world in stages (plants, fish, land animals, humans)
Paul, in 2 Corinthians 12:2, refers to the third, heaven, which is the abode of God. " I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven... "
1st - atmosphere
2nd - outer space
3rd - God's abode
ping
These ancient illiterate shepherds got their divinely-inspired cosmology, physics, geology, and biology right right, they just missed a few decimal places here and there.
The division you referenced is between the waters (fluids, gasses, plasma) above (outside the earth's gravity field) and the waters (fluids, plasma, gasses, and (eventually) dust) below the divide. That which was above became the (remained) as the sun, other planets, moons, asteroids, etc.
That which was below became (is) the earth.
But then the waters below are said to be “gathered into one basin” (one ocean) just as the plate tectonics tells us now - and despite what the ancient Israelis actually saw as separate seas and oceans. The visible sky is, of course, above the seas. You're mixing up a physicist's “fluids” with an old shepherd's “waters” - but both describe accurately the same thing.
Notice that plants created next. But still in the proper sequence.
Because you can't see the stars and moon UNLESS there is a free oxygen and nitrogen atmosphere - which did NOT happen until AFTER the plants created oxygen from the impenetrable and poisonous CO2 clouds at the beginning. (The moon was formed by collision before plant life has been found - though not much before.
Thought you might be interested in the following:
How can distant starlight reach us in just 6,000 years?
http://creation.com/how-can-distant-starlight-reach-us-in-just-6000-years
All the best—GGG
Do you think that's why the Hebrew says, 'evening morning x day'?
Of course, we know that the Hebrew 24-hour day begins at sundown, consistent with the word order that we see in Genesis indicating the same 24-hour day.
Or maybe, Exodus 20:9-11 - "Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy."
This is where Scripture specifically relates the 24-hour days of the work week and the 24-hour Sabbath with 24-hour days of creation.
You have to be really, really, super-duper smart to get around it when it's worded like that.
Its funny I remember discussing this with my father when I was a teenager, its always amazes me how science based on things as they are now think they can determine the way things were in the past, I told my father I believe there use to be a firmament that is why in the days before Noah people lived for hundreds and hundreds of years, then the firmament(even if this firmament was gaseous liquid clouds) gave way we had the flood and now increased radiation shortens our lives. theories are a dime a dozen, like carbon dating based on what, current carbon levels
Don't you realize the absurdity of that statement. You disagree with what they wrote, and then call them illiterate. While illiterate can merely mean ignorant, it is most commonly understood to mean the inability to read or write.
The ancient Israelites may certainly have thought in that fashion. However, I think the fault is in their understanding and (most assuredly) not God’s Word. Basically, air has mass and volume. While it is not as solid as a rock, it is definitely not a vacumn.
I agree, in that something made them live longer, and it was, in my limited understanding, some sort of water canopy above the Earth, which would filter harmful radiation. At the time of the flood, it collapsed, and along with the fountains of the deep, flooded the entire Earth.
And evolution is sound scientific theory? Keep dreaming.
Their history was oral. Doesn't make it any the worse as a history - nor any less divinely inspired for many years of being passed down word-of-mouth before it was first written.
Heck - They had not yet invented the “zero” - so how do you expect them to keep track of decimal places and powers of ten?
But their entire SEQUENCE of events describes what we only now know. And THAT is the miracle of Genesis.
i’m really impressed
Yes, I can see that...
>You have to be really, really, super-duper smart to get around it when it’s worded like that.
Um... God _IS_ that smart. Again, even if you don’t think that the creation-days are 24 hours, it is quite obvious that it was a principle that God set up (the Sabbath, like you pointed out).
I honestly don’t know if the days of Creation were 24-hr days or not, in the end it doesn’t matter... it’s the Creator, not the creation that’s what this is all about.
“Capacity: 1000 angels. By order of the fire marshall.”
__________________________________________________________________________________
Thank heavens we finally worked that one out.
What’s that? Sultan Mehmet and his army have battered down the gates? Guess the church is going to get a redecorating.
Firmament means expanse...What’s intriguing is not the firmament but the massive body of water above it...Above the Solar System...
>No...and the sky still ain’t solid...
Really? Would you like to smash head-on into the Earth’s atmosphere at... oh, say, .4c? Water “isn’t solid” either, and yet you can smash into it breaking your legs on the surface tension from a helicopter’s height with just the Earth’s gravitational acceleration.
If it wasn't important, God wouldn't have written it...
>which did NOT happen until AFTER the plants created oxygen from the impenetrable and poisonous CO2 clouds at the beginning. (The moon was formed by collision before plant life has been found - though not much before.
I protest! CO2 is NOT poisonous. You can survive in a CO2/O2 concentration.
CO (Carbon-monoxide) _IS_ poisonous, in the sense that it bonds to your red blood-cell, like oxygen would, but then cannot [naturally] be unbound/utilized, thusly “killing” that blood-cell’s utility.
You determined it??? How about letting God determine it...
That's your 'logical' understanding of it...Obviously it's not God's...
Light and darkness were created before the Sun was created...A day obviously was determined by God before the Sun was created...
God created the Sun to line up with His definition of DAY, not yours...
I once read a theory that prior to the flood the earth was surrounded by a water canopy. This canopy was responsible for filtering solar damage that shortened our life spans after the flood. It was an interesting read, but as I remember, the volume calculations just didn’t fit.
The Bible was written by many authors, who were inspired by God.
However, the original Editor and Publisher of the Original Bible, the Roman Catholic Church, never claimed that God wrote the Bible, or any of its separate, diverse Books, directly.
It seems odd to me, as a Catholic, that non-Catholics can question Papal authority (Which, by the way, only attaches when it is expressly applied) -— However, the same non-Catholics want to grant “infallibility” to the very HUMAN authors of the many separate Books of the Bible.
The Bible tells us how to live our lives, as the Book was intended to do.
The Bible does NOT tell us how life began, in any scientific sense, but that was never the intent, to begin with.
But I defy you to survive in the atmosphere BEFORE plants released the oxygen we now can breathe. 8<)
Again - What's critical is the sequence, the beautifully exact descriptions of the sequence of events in the story of creation - before “science” figured out the physics behind the story.
Example: In the beginning .... formless and void. But the earth had already been created! How - Because light had not condensed out of energy.
THEN, only after everything was created, did light come.
THEN, after light condensed further into solids - and only matter can cast shadows and “separate the light from the dark” - did matter as we know it could be created.
No.
waters => fluids => gasses => plasmas.
No conflict with science at all. They all behave the same at the level the Story describes.
>God created the Sun to line up with His definition of DAY, not yours...
Indeed. But doesn’t God speak to us in ways and terms we might have a chance at understanding even though we are, literally, little more than dirt in his eyes? (And that ‘little more’ that He gave us, He determined was enough to die for.)
So, I’ll ask you again: does it matter if it’s the “24-hour day” we (humanity) understands and lives by, or the thousand-years that “are like unto a day” to God, or a mere fraction of a second, or “millions and millions of years”? Hm?
The things people read from Creationists sources leave them more ignorant than when they started. Creationists are just not serious people.
What I meant was that men have to really torture the Hebrew to get around 6 24-hour days for creation (Rom 1:22).
"I honestly don’t know if the days of Creation were 24-hr days or not, in the end it doesn’t matter... it’s the Creator, not the creation that’s what this is all about."
Do you say it doesn't matter because you don't know, or do you not know because you don't think it matters?
There is no evidence that cannot be interpreted in a young creation. There's no need to be afraid of what man says about old-ages because that's what underlies the old-earth position. The Bible was always understood to represent a young creation until it became popular for man to say the earth is old. Then the Christians started compromising because they feared the opinions of men more than the opinion of God.
It comes down to whether or not you believe that God is able to communicate how He created the heavens and the earth or whether He needs 'man' to interpret what was written into the exact opposite of what it says. I believe that God is able and did communicate the order and time-frame of creation. You would claim not to be able to know and further claim it is irrelevant.
How can you hold to that position and then say 'it's all about the Creator'? Obviously, your position is not 'all about the Creator'. It's all about what man says the Creator can do and what He can't. That's never been a profitable position.
*nod* - Glad we cleared that up! :)
{Actually I’m tired of people running around bemoaning CO2... don’t they realize that if we had ZERO CO2 we’d ALL BE DEAD!?!}
No need to invoke speeds of 4c or water impacts.
Planck density is 5.1 × 10^96 kg/m³ vs the density of an atomic nucleus at 2 × 10^17 kg/m³.
That's *solid* no matter how you look at it.
Do not lose sight of this one thing my friend, a day unto the Lord is as a thousand years; and a thousand years a day.
So HIS definition of a day is obviously subjective.
Physically a day is variable as well. They are not “perfect” 24 hour days, nor were they always this exact length.
Morning and evening of a day without a Sun? Possibly poetic? No way! And Pi is 3. The earth has four corners and does not move. The sky is also solid./s
I know you didn't say that but I didn't know if you were aware of this little tidbit wrt pi in the Bible.
That's as accurate as pi can be written in Hebrew.
waters => fluids => gasses => plasmas.
No, to you...It says water, so it means, water...There are far too many cross references in the scriptures to THIS water for it not to be water...
Did Noah float on a sea of gas???
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.