Wasted Sapience

Do you think I could accurately pinpoint the year the Declaration of Independence was signed by looking back through my family history?

Atheos

That's also a bad example. The Judaeo/Christian bible:

• Describes a chronology of the 6 day creation myth
• Asserts that Adam, the first human being, was created on the 6th day.
• Specifies how old each man was when he "begat" his first son from Adam all the way to Jesus.

Therefore, a literalist reader would be confident that by merely doing a little math he could figure out what year the world was created.

Further, if you had reliable documentation regarding your family history, including ages of each generation when children were born, as well as an age at which one of your traceable ancestors was when the Declaration of Independence was signed then yes, you should be able to use simple math to arrive at a date at which the signing occurred.

I don't understand why you think it's absurd to use simple math to ascertain when the Judaeo-Christian bible implies the world was created. The text, read literally, has all the necessary information.

Malachi151

Well, this has to be taken with a grain of salt. There were people who held these other ideas, but that doesn't mean that they were widely held or understood by the majority of people.

I recommend the articles I linked, which are on evolution, but go over some the of primary source writings of the time on these issues.

I don't know exactly who said how old the earth was. For example, I don't know exactly what Aristotle thought on this subject, maybe someone else here does?

Nor do I know what every early Christian said on it, and surely there was a variety of opinion, but I do know that among the early Christians it was common to hear arguments against various established or accepted views that were held among the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, on a wide variety of subjects.

As GakuseiDon, Augustine had something to say about this, but his quote from Augustine actually highlights the problem. Augustine is concerned about the fact that so many Christians were quoting scriptures in opposition to established knowledge, and they were looking like fools for doing so.

But, the issue wasn't purely just quoting scriptures, a lot of the opposition was more philosophical as well. For example, there was Christian opposition to the idea of atoms because atomic concepts were championed by the Materialists, Epicurus and Democritus, etc., and atoms figured into their philosophical arguments against Providence.

So, because the Christians opposed any philosophy that denied Providence, they opposed the elements that they used to construct their arguments as well, and a art of that was the idea of atoms. Atoms, in essence, were a concept that was used by Materialists, and those were "bad people", so atoms had to be nonsense as well, etc.

Sven

Atheos addressed this much better than I could have.