King James bible fraught with "embarrassing inaccuracies"...

I agree with this. If you look to the Bible for anything, look to it for the lessons of morality it teaches.

www.theskepticsannotatedbible.com

Look at that site. It highlights all of the instances in the Bible where there were messages condoning violence towards women, slavery, and sexual misdeeds, along with many other things.

But there are good lessons to be learned from the Bible, much as there are lessons to be learned from fairy tales.

My problem is that people treat the Bible, which I feel is a fairly flawed document, as the absolute standard by which we must live. The book was written far too long ago, by people far too removed from our culture to be of much use now. If anything, treat fairy tales as just as important in determing your moral standards.

Of course, no one will do this, because fairy tales don't come prepackaged with "God's Stamp of Divine Approval".

It matters a huge deal. The dinosaurs appeared in the Mesozoic Era, which lasted for approximately 180 million years. They were the size of our modern-day buildings. You would think there would be some mention of them, considering the fact that they were around for hundreds of millions of years, where best estimates put our existence at around hundreds of thousands of years, if that.

And the fact that it doesn't mention protozoa falls in line with my point. My assertion is that the Bible wasn't inspired by God, but was instead merely the work of the man of the time.

The man of the time had no way of knowing about protozoa or dinosaurs, and hence, they were excluded from the writing.

An omniscient God, however, would not have faced these same limits in knowledge. By all rights, if the Bible were truly written with God's will, it would not lose the fight against science. Science would prove the truth of God's word, not disprove it, as it has been doing.

 

Ender, I find it a lot easier to be an agnostic. I'm open minded to there being a god, if it's ever proven to me that he/she/it exists, but I don't lose any sleep over it. I find that there is something intriguing about most religions I've looked into over the years, and certainly much of philosophic value. They have also, one way or another, provided the driving force of much of the violence the world has experienced the last few thousand years. That bothers me a lot.

By the way, have you ever read L. E. Modisett, Jr.? His SF is terrific stuff, and deals with many moral issues at bit differently than you usually see in SF.




Keep D&D Civil!!

 

"The more I study science, the more I believe in God."
-- Albert Einstein

Also check out this link Evidence For Design In The Universe
from Limits for the Universe by Hugh Ross, Ph.D. in Astronomy

just an ice cube on top of that glacier.

 

I always found it amusing that God created plants before he created the sun.

 

Believe me I'm not trying to get you to believe in the bible if you don't want to, but the fact that it doesn't mention the dinosaurs doesn't seem like it should matter. It should discredit the bible as a science text, or as a history text, but not a spiritual guide.

To Kill A Mocking Bird doesn't account for the dinosaurs either, but I still love the book. I don't think it was the intent of either the bible or To Kill A Mocking Bird to account for the dinosaurs.

 

I like being atheist, but sometimes it's so damned frustrating to live in a society where you are very much in the minority as concerns your views on life and its origins. In my eyes, all of the doctrines of the various religions are a form of fairy tale. They teach moral lessons, but are not to be taken literally or as truth.

I value different religions, but as teachers of morality and not the final authority on morality. I think you can look to many different kinds of religion and find fair and just moral standards to adhere to. I just wish that more would admit that their moral standards aren't the only ones.



I am just as "Christian" as any of my friends. The only difference is that I don't believe in God or that Jesus was the son of God.

Other than that, I do my best to be charitable, kind, accepting, and to possess all of the other characteristics associated with Christianity. Not because I feel obligated to act in a Christian manner, but because I believe that they are good qualities to possess.

And I've never read Modisett. I'll have to check him out.

 

Huh? I think you are confused.

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 Now the earth was [1] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning-the first day.
6 And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning-the second day.
9 And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear." And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters he called "seas." And God saw that it was good.
11 Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds." And it was so.

 

It should be noted that Einstein was not talking about a Christian god. His was a more disinterested, scientific (pagan some might say) entity/force.

 

I understand that it wasn't the purpose of the entire Bible to talk about dinosaurs, and I agree that the Bible should be viewed as a spiritual guide.

My problem is that in the story of Creation there was no mention of the creation of the dinosaurs. It's like an old girlfriend that you don't tell your new girlfriend about. Why would God, working through the writers of the Bible, not tell them about creatures that existed for 180 million years?

It would be like if I wrote a story about the immorality of Hitler, but mentioned only his extermination of the Jews, and not his widespread slaughter of gypsies, cripples, gays, and the elderly (not to mention his own German people). Yes, the genocide carried out against the Jews is the defining event in Hitler's legacy (much as the creation of man would be the defining event in our history), but you can't just ignore the rest.

Hitler had over 14 million people killed. Only 6 million of them were Jews. That's an extra 8 million people that I don't bother to account for at all.

People would find that odd. My message would still get across, and my book would still be a good explanation of why Hitler's actions were immoral, but it's hard to take it completely seriously with such a glaring omission.

 

Negatory. Thou art the confus-ed one:

[Day 4] Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth...

Light without the sun? Brilliant!

 

“… it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism.” -Thomas Henry Huxley


Einstein's Interrupted Dream

Quantum Theory advanced steadily through the early 20th century—and so did Einstein's discontent with it. The theory predicts how discrete packets of energy, called quanta, will behave based on statistical probabilities instead of direct observations. Einstein liked some aspects of Quantum Theory, but he never accepted its statistical basis as a means to completely describe the physical world. He thought this new branch of physics did not embrace the harmonious way in which God created the universe: "Quantum mechanics is very worthy of regard. But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the right track. The theory yields much, but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secrets."

Instinct drove Einstein to spend his last decades struggling to mesh the subatomic and universal realms under one "Grand Unified Theory." But his gut feeling eventually gave in to doubt. "All my attempts, however, to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this [new type of] knowledge failed completely," he wrote. "It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under [me]...." Yet Einstein hoped that his work would point modern physics in a new direction. Physicists today still pursue the Grand Unified Theory.
Describing the Universe

Roughly half a century has passed since Einstein ceased his pursuit of one "theory of everything," but many physicists today continue the chase for a Grand Unified Theory in an attempt to understand the nature of matter, energy, space and time...
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/einstein/legacy/unified.php

 

Heavens created, Light created i.e Sun. Then stars are placed into the heavens. Obviously I'm not saying that this is what literally happned but it seems as if are you purposely avoiding Genesis Chapter 1 to try and prove a point here. I'm not saying you have to believe in the almighty but come on, at least read it in the right order to try and prove your point. It is obvious that Genesis says that light was created before plants.

 

I've said this before here. I don't think the Bible is a science text. It doesn't say how God did anything...it's not what it's about. It's not at all the intention of the book. Genesis is about setting up a Creator and establishing, the problem through various "falls"...namely, sin...separation of man from God. That's the foreward. The whole rest of the Bible is dealing with that problem...the story of how it's dealt with. Restoration after the fall.

 

Oh, believe me, I'm not trying to prove anything, just killing time:

I'm reading it quite literally (never a good idear, but what the hey):

Day 2: "Light" created, no mention of where the light comes from
Day 3: Plants
Day 4: "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day..." Sounds like the sun to me.

Again, no agenda here, I just find it funny.

 

No agenda here either, although I believe in God, I just find your argument flawed.

If you want to get into semantics created and made can have different connotations. Created ie brought into existance and made meaning the thing that was previously created.

God created Light and then mentioned that light that he made as those in the sky.

Still another way to look at is that he may have created the essence of light and then formed the sun later to light and warm the earth. We are speaking of an entity that in this book is thought of as being able to do anything. It's not that far fetched a conscept for a being that can do anything in and out of time to create light from nothingness.

You are trying to put God into a place governed by the laws of the universe, ie plants without light when the bible says that God created that Universe. If he created all things, you think a plant that can survive without light until he deems it necessary for it need light is somehow impossible?

 

I forget where I read this theory but it dealt with time, expansion of the Universe, some Einstein stuff and more physics then I can accurately recall. In summary, the person said if light was traveling out from the point of the Big Bang then time is different then if on a planetary body. Moving at the speed of light, then the time would only be in days while on Earth time would be passing in the millieniums. Basicaly the person was saying that each day going at the speed of light (God's time) would have ammounted to millions of years in Earth time. The person was suggesting that we are currently in the seventh day in God's time and he is resting. Humans were created during the sixth day, but dinosaurs were created earlier and had already died off by man's creation. The lack of mention in the Bible could be in the fact that nothing else of creation was explained in great detail. Dinosaurs would have been lumped into the group of land animals. No distinctions are made in the creation story between reptile and mammal.

So the theory would suggest that God's creation worked within the boundary of Earthly time and took a billions of years, but in space time from the big bang it has taken less then a week.

 

Interesting. I like stuff like that and have a difficult time wth the literal interpretation of creation. To me it is obviously poetic license to attempt to describe what the creator has brought forth. The problem is the task is to great to be described properly.
Kind of reminds me of a visual trick I read about once. There was a way to project or display a face that was inside out the problem was that the brain could not comprehend this happening and so it automatically viewed the image as they way ot normally sees a face. It couldn't wrap it's head around an insode out face. I like to think that this is true of God's power as well. It's just not something our puny minds can handle.

 

i know you don't like strobel..but you need to read Case for a Creator. it cites a lot of interesting stuff you might enjoy reading.

 

The story of creation is a poem. It is written in a standard format for a certain type of poem during that period. I wouldn't expect a poem to contain everything. It is also important to look at the context and meaning. If the book is trying to say that there is a diety that created everything, and put forth mankind, animals, water, food, etc. and told this story in a poem. I don't think that it is odd that dinosaurs were left out. I don't think dinosaurs were the most numerous animals on the planet. I think insects, fish, and things like that were. The bible mentions creatures in the sea, but not specifically fish, and doesn't really mention insects specifically either. Insects that were around then are still around today, and probably are better able to survive than humans, and may be better designed as a species than humans. But they still aren't mentioned. I think the audience at the time probably didn't have any knowledge of dinosaurs, and the mention of them, might have distracted from the intended message.

I am sure I just muddied up the waters with that last rambling. Anyway I agree the bible holds zero credit as far as a science text, and some accuracy as far as a history book.

 

I'll accept that.