Register | Sign In


Understanding through Discussion


EvC Forum active members: 65 (9162 total)
5 online now:
Newest Member: popoi
Post Volume: Total: 915,815 Year: 3,072/9,624 Month: 917/1,588 Week: 100/223 Day: 11/17 Hour: 0/0


Thread  Details

Email This Thread
Newer Topic | Older Topic
  
Author Topic:   Biblical Creation / An Introduction
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 1 of 24 (10)
01-01-2001 12:18 PM


This is message 6271 from the old club by Canonyz:
Was the Church right? Was Galileo wrong? On the 22nd of June, 1633, in the Convent Sopra Minerva, Galileo Galilei, at the age of seventy, signed a confession of recantation. On his knees he read it aloud, before the entire congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. In this confession, prepare by the Inquisition, Galileo’s crime was identified as, heretical depravity. The part of that confession which is pertinent to our discussion reads,
...I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the Sun is the centre of the world and is immovable, and that the Earth is not the centre of the world and moves ... the said false doctrine is contrary to Holy Scripture
This position of the Roman Church was also the Protestant position. Johann Kepler, the great astronomer, was excommunicated from the Lutheran Church on similar grounds. Kepler maintained that the moon is a physical body. The Church maintained that the moon is only a light, as the Bible says, and a light is not a place!
Is heliocentric theory contrary to holy scripture? That opinion, that controversy, has faded into oblivion upon exploration of the moon and the advent of satellite technology. The Churches failed to maintain their case for a geo-centric universe. Protestants now use satellite television to attack scientific theories which are, contrary to Holy Scripture. Modern creationists seem to have forgotten the earthshaking controversy which ruined the careers of Bruno, Kepler and Galileo. Modern creationists seem to think that the holy scripture supports Copernicus. Were the Church’s scholars so ignorant? Are creationists today better informed? Exactly what does the Bible say about the universe?
Because creationists base their assumption on biblical text, I will present my analysis of that text. I believe the arguments are convincing but they do run contrary to popular creationist interpretation. The popular interpretation, I believe, takes unwarranted liberties with the text; is blind to related biblical evidence; discounts classical scholarship; and ignores a wealth of documentation regarding widely held and well publicized theories of ancient, science.
Due to the volume of material and complexity of proofs, I have opted to limit my presentation to a few salient points; just enough to establish, reasonable doubt, concerning the popular spin put on biblical, facts. When we exhaust these, I would be happy to consider related issues. Don’t feel badly should you learn something new here. After years of education, meditation and prayer I am still discovering, as if reading for the first time.
Sincerely,
canon
[This message has been edited by Percipient (edited 01-01-2001).]

Replies to this message:
 Message 2 by canonyz, posted 01-24-2001 10:57 AM Percy has not replied

Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 5 of 24 (124)
01-30-2001 1:15 PM


This is a reply to Yahoo message 6728.
I think in general there are three unique views about the Genesis creation account:
  1. It was written by men and represents an ancient creation myth that should not be construed as informed or knowledgable. The correspondences between Genesis and reality exist only at a superficial level.
  2. It is the revealed word of God, but is expressed at a level that man of 3000 years ago would understand.
  3. It is the revealed word of God and is the literal and true account of Creation.
It would be great to see a debate between views 2 and 3.
--Percy

Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 6 of 24 (125)
01-30-2001 8:57 PM


This is a reply to Yahoo message 6732 from WastingMy.
Wasting: I read an interesting article in Sci Am that hypothesized that life as we know it stemmed from a colony, not a single bacterium. The different individuals in the colony mutated in differnet ways resulting in the different kingdoms. I found it a little far fetched, but interesting nonetheless.
This sounds a little like the article Uprooting the Tree of Life by W. Ford Doolittle that appeared in the February, 2000, issue of SciAm. Is that the right one? If so, then I think it was saying something a little different. It postulated a common ancestral community of primitive cells that through widespread gene sharing gave rise to the three major divisions of primitive life: Bacteria, Archaea and Eukaryotes, thereby explaining why modern DNA sleuthing reveals more commonality among them than would be expected had their evolution been linear through single individuals. Does this sound like the same article to you? Anyway, here's a picture from the article (don't try this at Yahoo
- click to enlarge):
--Percy

Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 7 of 24 (187)
03-01-2001 1:36 PM


quote:
Canonyz: Which reminds me, When are you going to explain about the firmament? I say it is a hypothetical structure to hold up the sky. You have said nothing. If you do not know what the Bible says, isn't it rather hazardous to defend what you think it says?
quote:
WastingMy in Yahoo Message 7469: I don't know about holding up the sky...
In Gen 1:6, firmament seems to be something that separates the "waters from the waters". The firmament is a separator of some sort.
Gen 1:8, God calls the firmament "Heaven". Is this firmament still a support? Seems like Heaven and firmament are the same thing now.
So we have two possible definitions, we'll weigh the evidence found in Gen 1:14, 1:15, 1:17, 1:20, which seem to indicate that firmament is some structure of Heaven, a figurative "support" of some type.
Psa 19:1 "...The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork." Firmament and Heaven definitely go hand in hand.
My conclusion: Firmament is a structure of Heaven that "supports" Heaven. In other words, it separates it from the physical world.

Whether or not one believes that Genesis was written by Moses and the Psalms by David, almost everyone agrees they have different authors. I'm not sure one can rely on the Psalms to shed much light on word usage in Genesis.
My own interpretation is that the Genesis 1:6-8 makes it very clear that the firmament is Heaven. What could me more clear than, "And God called the firmament Heaven."
As to why it is described as separating the waters from the waters, the best explanation I've seen was in a message posted at the Yahoo board some time ago, possibly by Canonyz. Water was seen as coming from two sources. One was from on the ground and underneath the ground, as water could be gained from ponds and rivers and so forth, and by digging into the ground as when digging a well. The other was from above in the form of rain. The firmament separated the water below (on and in the ground) from the water above (that falls as rain).
--Percy

Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 15 of 24 (10510)
05-28-2002 6:20 PM
Reply to: Message 14 by Jet
05-28-2002 5:15 PM


Already answered in another thread, please see http://207.36.64.70/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000002-12.html#168.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 14 by Jet, posted 05-28-2002 5:15 PM Jet has not replied

Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 19 of 24 (10583)
05-29-2002 4:51 PM
Reply to: Message 18 by John Paul
05-29-2002 3:58 PM


John Paul writes to Joe Meert:

Real brilliant response. Must have taken your whole IQ of 10 to think of that one.
I hope you feel better now.

I also think there were more than two humans Created by God but Adam & Eve were the "leaders".
I think this proposal has a significant problem with Christian theology. If God created more humans than just Adam and Eve then we are not all necessarily descendents of Adam and Eve, and hence we are not all necessarily inheritors of original sin.

Only a dolt would think that every detail is in the Bible.
But that wasn't Joe's point. You believe the Bible is literally inerrant but that it is permissible to resolve problems and/or contradictions by presuming missing information. But once you've opened this door then information could be missing anywhere, not just in obvious places like the origin of Cain's wife.
So perhaps there are unmentioned eons of creation. Perhaps there is a missing explanation that the whole world didn't literally mean the entire world, but just Noah's region. And perhaps there's a missing clarification about the created kinds that there was no requirement that they remain fixed for all time.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 18 by John Paul, posted 05-29-2002 3:58 PM John Paul has not replied

Newer Topic | Older Topic
Jump to:


Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved

™ Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024