Posted on 02/11/2015 3:05:42 PM PST by Graybeard58
Ping
What difference does it make?
The whole question of the actual, temporal length of a Biblical day in Genesis seems like a futile pursuit. The early part of Genesis is clearly metaphorical (even poetic). I don’t think the author intended the wording to set a thousand mathematicians in action.
God tells us what a day was in creation
William Jennings Bryan was an old earth creationist. The contrary impression created by the play Inherit the Wind is false - it may have been what Clarence Darrow hoped Bryan would say, but he didn’t.
Einstein provided on solution. time is relative.
“When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems as a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”
Lorentz factor (gamma) = 1 / (1 v^2/c^2)^.5
Which formula says at low speed, gamma equals 1 - no time dilation.
And at high speeds, approaching the speed of light (c), the terms goes to infinity.
FR has creationists as well as evolutionists on the site. I don’t any of them will ever change their mind.
True. If God wanted to mean a 24 hour day, how else would he have said it? He called it a 'day', and then described each day as evening and morning. Amazing how easily intellectuals twist scriptures.
And for those who make each day a 1,000 years, then how did the plants and fish survive? They were created on the third day, but the sun, moon and stars weren't placed in the sky until the fourth day.
Well, leaving aside Darwin (who I think was kind of a jerk) and the science of geology, it strikes me that Genesis uses the word “day” as a unit of time, but that it’s hard to see how it can be a “day” in the strict sense if the sun and the moon were not yet created on the first day, since they supply us with the measures of time.
Similarly, the Bible says that the sun rises and sets and goes around the earth, but that is a way of speaking that we still use today, even though most of us believe that the earth goes around the sun. But to all appearances, the sun rises, travels across the sky, and sets, and there’s no reason not to speak of it that way.
Or, as Terry Pratchett might say, “It’s turtles all the way down.”
“whether orthodoxy necessarily entails believing in a young earth”
This isn’t the sort of question we should waste our time on in that it is clearly no, orthodoxy does not entail necessity to believe in “young Earth”.
I see this insistence on young Earth a form of idolatry.
I don’t think anyone will argue the following:
God is eternal, having no beginning and no end.
(Well, the Mormons will argue with that one, but anyway....)
The arguments in the article and the thread boil down to this, as far as I can tell:
1. God was alone for all of eternity, doing nothing, until a weeklong burst of activity brought everything into existence, somewhere between 6,000 and 50,000 years ago (that’s what the article said, I only repeat it), and that’s what Genesis 1 says, and anyone who disagrees dares damnation.
2. God created everything, in such a way that certain derived knowledge and/or conjecture can be deemed correct, and the text of Genesis 1 has been mistranslated, or misinterpreted, or just plain misunderstood.
3. There is no God and you’re all a load of useless dolts whose arguments are a nuisance to the rest of us (this doesn’t include me!).
Then there is my theory, which I do not urge on anyone, but will suggest if people are curious; it gets me in trouble with my YECist friends, and I don’t really like to talk about it. Since I regard it as of minimal doctrinal importance, I am content to wait until my entry into eternity, when I am certain all will be made clear.
You might not be an intellectual but you ought to at least find out the accurate facts about OEC explanations. It is quite easy to explain such things.
Try http://www.reasons.org for one major proponent of that explanation.
As for the “24 hour day” — evening and morning are a far cry from making any claim about rate or time. A frame of reference is needed. You did know that it is always day at some spot on this earth didn’t you? It would never naturally be evening for the entire earth. And that days and nights on this earth are figured with respect to a small locale? Yet we are not told that creation was limited to a small spot on the globe.
The Beginning Genesis 1
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Time.(the beginning)..The Universe.(the heavens)...Matter.(Earth)..All in one sentence long before the scientists and agnostics ever got their warped little minds wrapped around it.
From a unbiased and straight reading of the Genesis account of creation - without carrying forth any of today’s bias ... that straight reading indicate ordinary days, with an evening and morning.
If one was to dig down into the original language of the Old Testament, the analysis FORCES one to conclude it’s an ordinary 24-hour day.
There is one reason and ONLY ONE REASON why ANYONE would look for another explanation outside of an ordinary 24-hour day ... and that is, this person has been INDOCTRINATED (and INTENSELY SO) into “having to believe” that there could not be 24-hour days to creation because the earth has been around a WHOLE LOT LONGER than that. Before that indoctrination came into being, no one had a single problem with it.
BASICALLY those people who have a problem with it do not want to accept God’s Word or the Authority of Scripture in that section.
The idea of prolonged creation days is actually, quite old. Your accusations say more about you than they do about this idea.
Except God hadn’t created the sky until the second day, the earth on the third day, and the sun and moon until the fourth day. So the light wasn’t from the Sun, and could not mean a full rotation of the earth as neither had been created yet.
I have read where the term “day” might be better translated as “period of time” or “era”.
These primitive people that had not witnessed Creation, but it had been revealed to them, on their own terms, described it in their own terms the best they could.
As with so many things in the Bible that can be considered a mystery (the Resurrection is perhaps the most important mystery to me), I take them on faith, even if I don’t completely understand them.
On the first day, I have wondered if the “let there be light” was more like “let there be energy” (what we now theorize is something like the “Big Bang”). And that energy is distinct from the empty dark expanse of nothingness previously.
I have seen electrical engineering T-shirts that were printed with
And God said
[put the 4 Maxwell’s equations here, which refer to all electromagnetic phenomena, not just visible light]
And there was light.
And don’t forget spiritual light, a very frequent topic in scripture. Was it the physical alone that came into being at the creation event? Very doubtful, given the sheer importance of spiritual light.
If something is “in Scripture” ... this applies ...
2 Timothy 3:16-17
16 All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,
17 that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Which means it must be used correctly. You can’t throw the bible into a blender and apply the result for any such thing.
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