Genesis 1 v 3 says: And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light
I think an all powerful deity is capable of making a temporary source of light other than the Sun
Which begs the entire question of... why. If he's so omni why the fuck would he have to do that?
"he".... <_< I crack myself up hehe... force don't stop jammon.
Temporary light? Do you read your own book? He created light as a thing and then broke darkness out from light. The formation of the sun and the stars all had to do with logistics of maintaining the light/dark seperation.
We know for a fact the Bible was written by people. Even if you personally believe that all or any of it were directly transcribed from the word of God- those words have been re written and translated by humans into many versions. Now- even if we pretend that no one ever changed a word or made a mistake here or there- imagine talking to a small child who can’t even understand basic math. Now- would you explain things as though you were giving a college lecture- or would you use terms and analogies they could understand to give a general idea? Science is the human attempt to understand how the mechanics of the universe work in terms we can understand because simply put- an omnipotent god doesn’t need a particle reactor. They create, they change the laws of physics if they want to. We would never be able to understand a gods methods unless we ourselves transcended to god hood. However- science 101 says just because we don’t understand or cont explain doesn’t mean something isn’t real.
*Before I get hate from the budding scientific atheists- no. It doesn’t mean it’s real either. So if you want to achieve god like scientific ability to shape reality so that you can prove once and for all your beliefs- do it. No one loses. But it’s a silly debate to have. No one can prove or disprove either position, and science doesn’t detract from religion any more than religion detracts from science. There are no equations in the Bible. It’s a manual of parables on living life and open to interpretation- not a scientific text meant to teach the workings of the universe. Sciences exist to explain things so that we can understand them- theological works and humanities exist to give context to the knowledge brought by science. Atomic power open doors to the stars and undeamt marvels- or it can make a bomb. Science comes up with the way and humans educated on theology determine how to use that power. If more humans actually followed books like this in life we wouldn’t have atomic bombs.
The entire idea of the Bible being translated makes no sense if there really is a God behind it. There would be no need for it to be translated. It would be eternally written, impervious to age, nor even any need to replicate it. The entire idea of a human having any participation in the creation of the Bible single handedly destroys any type of credibility is could ever have.
Also, science 101 does not say that. Science 101 is that something doesn't exist unless you can demonstrate it. If you can demonstrate that it exists, then we have to assume that it does not. There is a quote that I love dearly, "The absence of reason to believe is reason to not believe."
Plus, the whole idea of not being able to understand God's ways is ridiculous. To even make that claim requires you to prove that there is a God and that this god has ways.
Science saves billions and shows that they have value. Theology finds an excuse to kill them all.
That is an incredibly closed minded and logically flawed argument. The idea of not being able to understand gods ways is not so different than the very credible and seriously considered scientific quandary of how to communicate with let alone how to recognize extra terrestrial life if it exists. Google it if you like. But the basic idea is that we don’t actaully know if we would even recognize real extraterrestrial life if we encountered it- let alone if we could understand each other. Hence- we don’t onow if we could understand an omnipotent being of one existed, hence we can’t really speculate on why a bible would exist or again- any other logical whim of such a being. A reason to believe or not is subjective. For a very long time the “greatest” scientists of the times chose to believe the world was the center of the universe and to burn anyone who thought otherwise. Early quantum theorists were laughed at. Anything too advanced or revolutionary in science requires a leap of faith...
... at some point. Quote all the cerebral intellectual mental self handjobs you like. I have books of quotes and we can go all night. Many people have read books and are educated not just you. So you shouldn’t look down your nose at others who have differing opinions. No one has all the answers nor knows the future. Some elements of life always require faith- where we put our faith isn’t as important as what we do with it. Sciences without humanities are atrocities. The scientists in WW2 freezing pregnant women to death and transfusion animal blood to humans didn’t ask ethics questions- it was practical science. Like insects. Science opens amazing doors and is crucial to humanity, but it is not what being human is about. Looking for answers is basic to humanity. But you don’t want to discuss- you’ve made up your mind and decided no room for people living their own way exists. That- without moral backing- is how genocides are born. Thank you for proving my point.
@ spiderwoman That. It's nonsensical. A golden rule? Cool, that's popped up everywhere.... but all the other rules are tailored towards hygiene for tribes, village ethics, not fucking your livestock, and this one I love in particular: not worshiping false idols; that next tribe over will fucking murder you if they find you hiding with a funny shaped rock.
Because an all powerful god would be hampered when putting his all knowing message into a book. If the Bible were truly the word of a God, then it would be universally understood without any disagreements on interpretation - because the only interpretation would be the one said God intended.
I agree with your point, if a book was written by an all knowing being then it should be written in a way everyone understands, but the bible was translated by man and was written by man so it could only be written to the best of mans ability which means that it won’t be understood by everyone
To @spiderwoman’s point the message is only debated (no matter what the reason) because God didn’t prevent it from being debated. He could have been clear and enforced that clarity if He so chose. If He exists.
Wait @christopher148, why would it even need to be translated? If he really wants us to know exactly what he wants, then why doesn't he use all of that infinite power to make it universally understandable regardless of lanuage? If I recall correctly, there was just such a thing in Acts 2:1 where people were speaking every language at the same time. Could not this deity do the same with his most holy book that could very much have been called the most important book of all time?
Let me give you an example. I tell you that I have an open one million degree needle in my living room while we are one room over. If such a needle existed, then we could be certain that we'd be up in flames. As we are not in flames, we can safely say that the needle doesn't exist as described. That doesn't mean there isn't a needle, but it doesn't exist exactly as I described it. If a hypothesis says X exists, then if X doesn't exist then the hypothesis is flawed and we should find out where.
1/2 The language point is so crucial. It’s tough to communicate when the other person only has a rudimentary understanding and as a result, rudimentary language. It’s not exactly a language limitation. Like, the work ‘cosin’ exists for 4 year olds; it’s just too many other things and effort to get them to comprehended it.
God spends all the effort on getting us not to be quite so shitty to each other (because agency, otherwise why bother with a created being at all?). No time for astronomy or physics. It’d be nice to have a clearer understanding of reality and laws governing objects. I look around and I can’t disagree with the focus. What is more important?
2/3 If we exist and there’s an all-seeing, all-powerful being that exists, it must be intervention defeats the purpose of whatever plan there is. Otherwise, why would there be an individual (okay, millions of individuals throughout history) born into guaranteed suffering or painful victimhood? It can’t be that a creator doesn’t care. That’s not how real creators act on earth. It can’t be that this is a purpose, as how interesting could watching something suffer be, when you have the capacity to do anything? It’s boring watching things hurt and abusers are ridiculously predictable.
I disagree with the Christian 144,000 solution (of course) but it’s a logical conclusion. All of us reaching a state of blissful one-entity existence is logical, as of course it can’t be reached except through understanding reality, which can’t reached except through experience and thinking. Being reincarnated - taking the test over and over and over until you get it right - is also a logical conclusion.
3/3 Honestly, Occam’s razor kind leads to atheism. Some Jewish explanations make sense.
Anyway, yes, days. Here’s the thing - even if God did say “periods of time” or a more reasonable word, the translators might have changed it to “days” because it felt less likely to lead to questions. You can’t ever discount the gatekeepers making things easy on themselves.
We know the Bible as we know it was not written by an all powerful being but by people. So if we ask: “why have people do it?” Well... why have people do anything? Why have free will? If there’s no free will, why have punishments and dispense punishments for something that you programmed a machine to do? If humans are complex biological machines- why design us with the ability to fail at what we are desired to do? These aren’t even religious questions but ones debated by philosophers through history before and after many religions, and by those who claim no religion. Zen Buhdism uses the Koan, Nitzsche, Plato, The Bible...philosophy provides questions and puzzles to be pondered and individual humans provide answers. With or without religion that is the way of things. No one knows the “purpose” of humanity or life and how to balance that with happiness in an objective sense. We each are searching for our own questions and answers.
It's possible...
God made a slot of fixed time, and spent 3 such fixed times..then created Sun.. and made a day equal to that fixed time...
That's alllll...
Wasn't there something saying a day meant a significant period of time, so by day they didn't mean 24 hours literally? Cause a 24 hour day was created by the Egyptians and even then other cultures still use other ways to keep track of time.
No, he definitely had an answer (it took up, like, 10 minutes). I think it translated somewhere around to "no one is really sure, so everyone percieves it differently"
It's what many people call "Religious Babble". If you get asked something you have no answer for, then you should go and talk for a long time about different things that sound like they have meaning but actually mean nothing. There's absolutely nothing wrong with saying, "I don't really know why." I can respect someone who admits they don't have an answer more than I can for someone who pretends to know. My issue with religious people is that they always think they need an answer and that the answer couldn't possibly go against what they believe.
To give a basic example, one person may say that X is equal to ten. But then we analyze X and discover that it is an odd number. Rather than admitting they were mistaken and trying to find out what X really is, people have a tendency to say that "Well, how can *really* be sure that ten isn't an odd number?" This isn't just religious people of course, but a personal conviction that they couldn't possibly be wrong is common in religion.
If I implied that he was forcing it onto you, then I assure you that I didn't mean to. I just meant to describe how most people will speak something that has little do with the topic to make you forget what you said or to make you think you got your answer when in reality they avoided the question with fancy talk. It isn't something that only religious people do. Anyone who doesn't really want to answer the question does it. Politicians are famous for it to the point where it is a Monty Python Sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxRgaNb7Rr4
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.
Genesis 1:3-5 NKJV
https://bible.com/bible/114/gen.1.3-5.NKJV
Thank you Captain. It’s like a town hall debate. Extremists are extremists, intolerance is intolerance, and closed mindedness is closed mindedness. Discussing ones beliefs and sharing perspective respectfully is a great way to learn about others and come together. Militant insistence that anyone who doesn’t think like you is somehow lesser, or attacking the beliefs of others doesn’t need a flag or a holy book to be wrong, and being guilty of the same actions we condemn another for supposedly carrying out isn’t “better” or “more intelligent,” simply the opposite side of the same coin. Whatever we choose to believe- we don’t have the answers. Science changes every day, in a couple centuries we may not recognize it based off what we know now. So everyone is putting their faith in something regardless. If we let each other take the paths that call us, there’s room enough for all beliefs.
Dude, Genesis 1:1, in the beginning God created the heavens and Earth. First day. The earth talked about in day three (not day two) was dry land, or as it says 'a division between the seas.
“And the earth was without form” would be the next part. It’s the topic sentence. It then goes on to the play by play:
Day 1: Light and Darkness
Day 2: Seas and Sky
Day 3: Land and Vegetation
Day 4: Sun, Moon, Stars, etc.
This isn't quite right @tony007. The Earth described in the Bible is a flat disk with a dome over the top of it. This type of structure is better known as a firmament and is referenced several times. One of the earlier examples of this being described is when it speaks of Yahweh seperating the waters in Genesis 1:6. The firmament model (Which is also the model that was held by Hebrews at the time of the Bible's writing) believes that outside of the dome (Which would be space for us) was filled with water. This verse is talking about the creation of the dome. Further, the dome was unmoving. The Sun and Moon were placed inside of the dome and moved around on the glass dome. Here is a picture of the model described in the Bible: https://i.imgur.com/LSY3gdk.png
So, this firmament had no rotation because the Bible describes the Earth as being flat with no movement.
Actually the Earth is later described in Isaiah 40:22 as a sphere. The waters of the heavens described in Genesis chapter 1 was a very dense cloud cover that would've inhibited the light coming from an already existing sun and stars to reach the earth, which is where the "viewer" of the events of creation would have watched everything unfold. When the waters and waters are divided in verse 2 it would have allowed an expansion between the two, having a space of clear air in between.
Isaiah 40:22 describes the Earth as a circle: "He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth...". A circle is a two dimensional object or a flat object. A basketball is not a circle; it is a sphere. This verse is still describing the Earth in a way that defies the globe Earth and follows with the firmament.
There really isn’t much point to arguing tiny and insignificant details like that outside the context of what effect they may have on the theology of a religion. If we had opened a science textbook in the Hebrew world it would have given the same description as the Bible- so that isn’t a failing of religion, it would be like people in a few thousand years arguing over some revered text created in our time because it lists the speed of light in a vacuum as the absolute limit to speed in the universe and in 4046 every school child knows that speed is an illusion of the quantum continuum and how we perceive the passing of 5th dimensional events. It’s like arguing that Einstein’s whole body of work is wrong. Because some of his theories have been disproven. The fact that people thousands of years ago weren’t aware or ready to accept a concept, or that any work contains some errors, doesn’t invalidate everything about a work.
Actually 2 peter 3:8 uses a similar expression in the original Greek as to what was used in the original Hebrew in Genesis when it says 'day'. And it explains that a day is as to a thousand years. Basically the word the writer (Moses) used when he wrote Genesis didn't necessarily mean a 24 hour period. It was also used to indicate periods of time. In other parts of the Hebrew Bible the same word is used when talking about the period of time in which a specific person would have lived, or ruled in some cases.
There is indeed a decent debate here. Young Earth creationist belive that the Hebrew word used ("Yom") means a literal twenty-four hour day. Meanwhile, Old Earth Creationists believe that it means an unspecified amount of time. There really isn't a hard answer of this to my knowledge, and which one is true is usually determined by which one you'd prefer be true to most.
I think II Peter 3:8 was describing how God is outside of time. Like when we make a 5 minute video go slow motion, we can watch it for 10 minutes even though the people in the video only experienced 5 minutes. In that sense, God can spend an infinite amount of time (1000 often means an uncountable number) observing His creation, but we still perceive one 24-hour day.
My issue with describing God like that is that it is non sensical. If God exists outside of time, then he exists in no time. If he exists outside of reality, then he exists outside of reality. You can not exist outside of time because that would mean you don't exist. You can't exist outside of reality because then you aren't real. And if it is indeed a metaphor, then why is the all powerful perfect book using metaphors? How do we know when it is being metaphorical and when it is being literal? If we can't be sure, then how can we ever use anything in the Bible?
It is supernatural, and does not make sense to us, because we are constrained by this world we live in. God created the world we live in. He is not constrained by the same laws of physics and space-time as us. He is omnipresent, which means He is everywhere in the universe, and He can choose places and times to manifest his presence. It's as if someone is editing a video, and applying effects and changes to the footage, which involves scrubbing the time back and forth. The editor existed before the video was started and he will exist after it is finished, but the people inside the video view everything normally as if no scrubbing was done.
About the metaphors, I also struggle with what could be literal and what could be metaphorical. I have to trust in the Lord that His thoughts are higher than my thoughts, even if I don't know all the answers.
Ignore?! No parts of the bible should be ignored, because they all hold meaning in one form or another. If you are studying a specific aspect of the Bible then you might skip over the "boring" parts, but those parts are still valuable. For example, all the genealogies were recorded so they can give an accurate record of the age of humanity, and indirectly the age of creation.
Ignore. Every denomination ignores the parts of the Bible that don’t fit their narrative. A nice broad one is that the Bible specifically, not metaphorically, FORBIDS the wearing of clothes made with a mix of different fibers such as cotton and linen. Can I assume as someone who does not ignore anything in the Bible that you have no polyester blend in your closet?
It doesn’t have to be super natural. Any sufficiently advanced concept will seem like magic to someone who can’t understand it. We BARELY have a model for a theory of dimensional reality. We can BARELY conceive a fourth dimensional space using a “teaseract” as a representation. 0D is a single dot- a moment where all is in one place. 2D is a line made of infinite dots. 3D is space made of infinite lines. 4D is made of infinite planes of space- as best we can figure each moment in existence is just a physical location if you can navigate such a space. Beyond that things get crazy. It’s all theory presently- but scientific theory. If a being existed in such a higher dimension- wether you want to call them Devine or just alien- this being would have powers we cannot comprehend. They wouldn’t exactly exist beyond time- but to them time as we know it wouldn’t really exist. The best way we could hope to understand that would be that from our perspective they exist beyond time.
Imagine a microbe- an intelligent and sentient microbe. It couldn’t see you, or even be aware of what you are. It may be able to reduce your presence, it could feel and observe the effects of your actions, but you’d be a mystery to it. It couldn’t understand why you destroy all the microbes on your hands but not the ones in your intestines. It wouldn’t know why you had a house key even if it knew you had a key- and even then it wouldn’t know why you didn’t open every door with that key. Our world and existence would be completely foreign to it. If you were to communicate with that microbe how would you do it? You could theoretically genetically engineer it, or selectively breed it to be more able to understand. But you’d ultimately likely use methods it responded to naturally right? Intuitively? But who knows. Just saying- things are what they are. Life’s a mystery. The point of religion isn’t the mechanics but the exercise.
Step 1: don't look for logic in books that are 4,000 years old and say stupid shit like a dude lived in a whale's belly.
Step 2: Read an actual textbook
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit.
I think an all powerful deity is capable of making a temporary source of light other than the Sun
"he".... <_< I crack myself up hehe... force don't stop jammon.
Also, science 101 does not say that. Science 101 is that something doesn't exist unless you can demonstrate it. If you can demonstrate that it exists, then we have to assume that it does not. There is a quote that I love dearly, "The absence of reason to believe is reason to not believe."
Plus, the whole idea of not being able to understand God's ways is ridiculous. To even make that claim requires you to prove that there is a God and that this god has ways.
Science saves billions and shows that they have value. Theology finds an excuse to kill them all.
Let me give you an example. I tell you that I have an open one million degree needle in my living room while we are one room over. If such a needle existed, then we could be certain that we'd be up in flames. As we are not in flames, we can safely say that the needle doesn't exist as described. That doesn't mean there isn't a needle, but it doesn't exist exactly as I described it. If a hypothesis says X exists, then if X doesn't exist then the hypothesis is flawed and we should find out where.
God spends all the effort on getting us not to be quite so shitty to each other (because agency, otherwise why bother with a created being at all?). No time for astronomy or physics. It’d be nice to have a clearer understanding of reality and laws governing objects. I look around and I can’t disagree with the focus. What is more important?
I disagree with the Christian 144,000 solution (of course) but it’s a logical conclusion. All of us reaching a state of blissful one-entity existence is logical, as of course it can’t be reached except through understanding reality, which can’t reached except through experience and thinking. Being reincarnated - taking the test over and over and over until you get it right - is also a logical conclusion.
Anyway, yes, days. Here’s the thing - even if God did say “periods of time” or a more reasonable word, the translators might have changed it to “days” because it felt less likely to lead to questions. You can’t ever discount the gatekeepers making things easy on themselves.
God made a slot of fixed time, and spent 3 such fixed times..then created Sun.. and made a day equal to that fixed time...
That's alllll...
To give a basic example, one person may say that X is equal to ten. But then we analyze X and discover that it is an odd number. Rather than admitting they were mistaken and trying to find out what X really is, people have a tendency to say that "Well, how can *really* be sure that ten isn't an odd number?" This isn't just religious people of course, but a personal conviction that they couldn't possibly be wrong is common in religion.
Genesis 1:3-5 NKJV
https://bible.com/bible/114/gen.1.3-5.NKJV
Day 1: Light and Darkness
Day 2: Seas and Sky
Day 3: Land and Vegetation
Day 4: Sun, Moon, Stars, etc.
So, this firmament had no rotation because the Bible describes the Earth as being flat with no movement.
Step 2: Read an actual textbook
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit.