Yes, we have our differing viewpoints but all either point TO the truth or AWAY from it. I come from a sceptical scientific viewpoint because I know the devil is a trickster who leads many a believer astray. For instance : my own national presbyterian church just voted to go with the homosexual perverts.
After 50 years in that church : deacon, choir singer....I'm GONE; not going there again. They made their bargain with the devil, now let them live with it.
People either GRASP the bible as their linus security blanket or reject it out of hand as fairy tales for children. I look at it for scientific gems of wisdom.
Take for example the statement : "And the morning stars sang together"(in JOB I think), what does THAT mean? Well, LO and BEHOLD : astronomy(the hubble telescope and other 'scopes)has looked to the very dawn of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. The COBE mission shows the almost uniform distribution of the 2.73 deg K background radiation and yet galaxies started much earlier than expected(quasars and black holes).
So, what came between the BIG BANG/radiation-matter decoupling era at 300,000 years and about 1 billion years and the first galaxies? It's a real poser. The only model that fits is a first generation of massive stars(100 to 500 solar masses)that quickly formed, burned, and went supernova within 50 million years or less.
Thus they seeded the gas/dust with heavier elements(beyond H and He) and the shock waves thereof created the "soap bubble" texture we see in galactic structure today.
The point? Higher intelligence gives us a phrase, a clue; but only later does SCIENCE learn : AHA, that's what they meant : a first generation of massive supernovae that blew up at almost the same cosmic instant("sang").
There's another clue : Gen 2:6; what does that mean? I know the answer. It has to do with the formation of the earth-moon system, but could you guess what it is?
Are there mistakes, wild, implausible numbers in the bible? Of course there are. Remember, the old testament was written BY old jews for young jews, not YOU. If 600,000 MEN went with moses into the desert, with women and children, that's around 2.4 MILLION people. That's probably as many or more people than were living in all of egypt at the time.
Obviously an inflated number. Or the 25,000 main men of Israel that attended a royal dinner by King David, another inflated number. Or the city of GOD. A league is 1/8th of a mile. An object 12,000 leagues by 12,000 leagues in area = 1500 miles by 1500 miles, HALF the diameter of the moon.
As a pyramidal form(half of an octahedron), the base center would be about 145 miles below the curved surface of the earth, well within the HOT mantle. Obviously an outlandish-sized object to SIT on the earth. Try 12 leagues by 12 leagues = 1.5 miles by 1.5 miles = a rational size.
Then GOLD from the planet mercury. By the TEDF theory it should have a high percentage of AU79. Then robots, computers and Wa-La a city of GOLD made without hands.
See, science and religion don't have to be at odds with each other, just different ways of arriving at the TRUTH.
Here's a test for you : is that JESUS on the shroud of Turin? Yes or no....
A league is generally the distance traversed in an hour's walking time or about 3 km or 1.5 miles. A furlong is an eigth of a mile in English units.
The Roman mile was 5000 ped (ft) and the league was 7500 ft.
A furlong was 660 ft, used in agriculture and a contraction of forrow' long. The English penchant for a system of measures which were divisible by two and four, petitioned the Queen to change the definition of mile from 5000 ft to 5280ft so that an English mile would equal 8 furlongs.
If we are considering the measurements recorded in Revelation to John, Chap 21:vss 15-17, the angel used a reed to measure the breadth and length at 12,000 stadia, translated in the KJV to furlong.
The stadia is the general dimension of a stadium for footraces interpretted as being anywhere from 185 to 192 meters in length (607-630ft). There might be an interpretation of stadia associated with the process of measurement, so although John 's revelation provided the metric, the identification of that metric to our daily use might have different conversion factors.
1500 miles square seems fairly reasonable as the space used for a city for all the believers in human history.
We will never be able to reconcile our understanding of “all that there is” because we evidently have very different epistemologies – how we know what we know and how certain we are that we know it.
For me, reasoning is very much subordinate to the revelations of God.
So I will not pursue discussing your views except to offer an additional view of the CMB versus the verse you mentioned from Job 38 (emphasis mine) :
“The results were presented as plots of slight temperature variations in the CMB that graph sound waves in the dense early universe. These high-resolution ‘power spectra’ show not only a strong primary resonance but are consistent with two additional harmonics, or peaks.
“The peaks indicate harmonics in the sound waves that filled the early, dense universe. Until some 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was so hot that matter and radiation were entangled in a kind of soup in which sound waves (pressure waves) could vibrate. The CMB is a relic of the moment when the universe had cooled enough so that photons could ‘decouple’ from electrons, protons, and neutrons; then atoms formed and light went on its way.”
Berkeley Lab “The Universe May Be Flat But It Is Nevertheless Musical”
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. – Gen 1:3
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. [There is] no speech nor language, [where] their voice is not heard. – Psalms 19:1-3