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To: aruanan; editor-surveyor; Agamemnon

The Bible supports a spherical earth.

The only ones who claim that it doesn’t at the atheistic, God hating ones who want to make believers look like idiots. So they go around making unfounded and untrue statements about what the Bible says and what believers must believe about it.

IOW, they lie.


81 posted on 09/25/2010 8:13:52 PM PDT by metmom (Welfare was never meant to be a career choice.)
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To: metmom
The Bible supports a spherical earth.

The only ones who claim that it doesn’t at the atheistic, God hating ones who want to make believers look like idiots. So they go around making unfounded and untrue statements about what the Bible says and what believers must believe about it.

IOW, they lie.


For my first two years of college I went to an extremely conservative Christian school. One of my professors was a creationist who said, when I pointed out such verses that mention "he hangs the earth on nothing" and "the circle of the earth," that such verses cannot be used to claim that the Bible explicitly teaches a spherical earth; the first because, whatever "hanging on nothing" means, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sphericity except by imputing to that passage something currently known by other means; the second because it also describes with complete phenomenological accuracy what happens when you stand on a high place and, pointing, trace the horizon until you come back to where you started, describing a circle. The most you can say is that it doesn't teach anything that contradicts the (to be more completely accurate) oblate sphericity of the earth.

The fault in logic, though, of many who seem especially eager to discover in the Bible a teaching about the sphericity of the earth or a Copernican astronomy is their assumption that not having anything explicit must be equivalent to contradicting observable facts of nature. This, curiously, is the same attitude of those who try to claim that the Bible teaches verifiably untrue things about nature. They claim that "the circle of the earth" proves the Bible is teaching a flat, disk-shaped earth, which, as I have shown above, is not a necessary or even adequate interpretation of that verse.

The Bible doesn't have anything to say about radioactive decay or the number of elements or the atomic nature of matter or RNA versus DNA viruses or the role of mitochondria in programmed cell death and millions of other things. Who cares? Failing to cite them is not equivalent to contradicting their existence or evidence of scriptural failure. It was never intended to be an encyclopedia galactica containing every fact about every thing throughout every moment of time. Those who say it is false if it doesn't harmonize with their now-current scientific paradigms are fools if they believe it must or deceptive if they claim it should. Those who believe it cannot be true if it doesn't harmonize with now-current scientific paradigms and spend extraordinary amounts of time and effort trying to make it look as though it does are, likewise, fools if they believe it must or deceptive if they claim it should.

Take, for one small example, those who claim that the Bible asserts that bats are birds. They take a current classification system of living things and impose it upon another system, find things that don't match and then claim that the other system has made a scientifically inaccurate claim. This is just a steaming pantload. If I have a system of classification that places all flying things that don't have more than two legs into the same category, I haven't done anything unscientific, I just haven't made the specificity such that it would make a distinction between flying things with two legs with feathers and flying things with two legs with fur.
93 posted on 09/26/2010 7:56:25 AM PDT by aruanan
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