Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: OneWingedShark
"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)."

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.

45 posted on 03/09/2009 5:33:35 PM PDT by GourmetDan (Eccl 10:2 - The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 32 | View Replies ]


To: GourmetDan

>It’s all about what man says the Creator can do and what He can’t. That’s never been a profitable position.

This is true. A lot of the “If God is omnipotent/omniscient...” disproofs of God, are in reality non-statements, contradictions, and illogic. The classic example being “If God is all powerful, then can He make a rock so big He can’t move it (immovable)?” This is a ridiculous contradiction and should be thrown out; but let’s disregard that and play with it a bit first.

If God is powerful enough to create the universe, and he created a rock that was as big as the universe, then the rock (which defines the universe) could not be moved; however God could create more “universe and displace the rock and then destroy that old universe bit... so yes, God COULD move a rock so big it was immovable.

How about the question “Could God create a figure that has three sides, which has points all equidistant from the center?” Again, notice the word-tangling, logic-mangling, definition-mismatching that’s going on here: they’re asking for a triangle which has the properties of a circle! That’s plainly impossible in Euclidean geometry. It’s a stupid question that contradicts itself. But let’s try poking at it again, The assumption with this question is that the figure would be in Euclidean-space... but you can do a LOT of funny “impossible”/”nonsensical” things with math (like ‘i’, the square-root of -1! What preposterous rubbish! But it works... and there’re actually REAL-WORLD phenomena which demonstrate it’s use in the physical world! Weird!) What about having a three-sided figure which was that of a triangle imposed on the surface of a sphere, or the mathematical transformational equivalent? It would have three sides, and all the points would be equidistant from the center (of what we would precive of as the sphere).

Keep that in mind as I answer the next part of your question:
>Do you say it doesn’t matter because you don’t know, or do you not know because you don’t think it matters?

I used to think, and still do, that it is a literal 24-hr day. But, I could be wrong. And, in fact, I don’t think that minutia really matters anymore. Who am I to tell God “it has to be 24/hr days!” Honestly, He could have made everything 24 seconds ago... or 24 million-million-million years ago... Who am I to say “No, it has to be literal!”?

Do you remember the story of Elijah and the fiery chariot? Does it matter if it was a chariot made of fire? Or a super-bright rift in time-space? Or a Cadillac of light? Or a meteor? The point is that something super-natural took him off to be with God, still alive! That’s the exciting part!

Like if you’re hearing a story of navy seals going behind enemy lines to rescue POWs and killing several guards. One time you hear about one killing someone with a knife, one you hear of him killing a guard with his bear hands, another shooting a guard in the neck. Does that mean that this Navy seal didn’t kill anybody? I mean all these stories are different in his methods of quashing those who are in opposition to his mission of rescuing the POWs. Or, could it be that there are three different incidents which got stuck into the different SEAL team’s minds when reporting on their mission?

In fact that’s how the Hebrews would have thought about things, using something termed “block logic” which is something similar to a bunch of police reports on the same thing. This type of thinking is different from our “classical logic” thinking which says, basically, that if the premises are true, then the outcomes are true as well. (This actually gives us two points of “contention”/argument; one that the person’s premises are wrong, and two that his mappings/modelings are wrong, which is to say that the premises of the premises’s interactions.)

So, is the earth only 6 thousand years old. I think so. Does the bible explicitly say? not really, though you can look at the genealogies and life-spans and use that to present things in a young-earth world-view... but, also, we know that humans would not have died prior to the fall. If something so natural to us as dieing is in reality UN-NATURAL, then what of aging? Could Adam and Eve have been alive for thousands of years before they got kicked out of Eden? (And that getting kicked-out is when their “clocks” turned on.) It’s possible, but I think that’s not the case, I really don’t know.

In the many parables that Jesus told, does it really matter if they were actually mapped into real life? IE Does it matter if there really was a “good Samaritan”? Or was that point merely to answer the question “Who is my neighbor?”?


53 posted on 03/09/2009 6:19:23 PM PDT by OneWingedShark (Q: Why am I here? A: To do Justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with my God.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 45 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson