3DJay

Ask him when beer was invented.


Peace

David B

This link might be enough to establish a date before 6000 years.

Varves do that.

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/age.htm

ETA unless one hypothesises a putative god who is a deceiver, creating false evidence of age. Which makes it not worth worshipping, IMV.

David B

Chamaeleon

Sure thing! http://www.sumware.com/creation.html

Amedeo

Continuing with the Bible

As you and your friend read the Bible (The Old Testament), you should realize that its main content is a chronicle of the Jews (Judaeans) that goes the way back to the humans (Adam and Eve), whom Yahwh fashioned.

It is also the case, however, that the Elohim [of Genesis-1] are also their ancestral Gods. (I have indicated that Moses is the founder of enotheism or henotheism for the Judeans. He -- or his God, Yah -- commanded the worship of only one God. Therefore, the rabbinical interpretation of the two accounts of creation are such that there is one God by different names, wherefore the humans created by the Elohim are the very same humans (Adam and Eve) fashioned by Yaweh). This is an irrational interpretation, since Yah was a male God and did not fashion a man and a woman in his image; He fashioned Adam in his own image and then a woman half in the image of Adam, namely an assister to Adam without a penis.

The Hebrews or earliest Jews had two deities and two religions, and it becomes clear in the Bible, that the Elohim had divine sons. So, In Genesis, Chapter 6, we learn of the intercourses of the divine sons with the beautiful daughters of men (whether the men in question were ultimately the humans created by the Elohim or by Yah).

(In many English Bibles, "LORD" or "the Lord God" translates "Yahweh" or "Yah," and "GOD" translated either "Elohim" or "El.")

In those days, some thousands of years after Adam and Eve and their family, the Nephilim [the giants or "heroes of old"] were on the earth. And the sons of the Elohim married the daughters of men at their discretion. The Lord (Yah) was not pleased at all, and seeing the wickedness of men, he regretted their creation and was ready to wipe them ou. But one man, Noah, found favor with the Lord.

Thus, contrary to rabbinical interpretations, the Bible asserts the plurality of the Elohim and -- as in the case of the Ugaritic religion -- they had divine sons who, as in Greek and other mythologies -- consorted with humans. The nephilim or heroes of old were in fact called heroes by the Greeks, as they were of partially divine and partially human origin.

It is quite possible that in this particular chapter, the God/Elohim in question were not the ancestral or Canaanite Elohim but Gentile Elohim [Gods]. The Bible narrator may simply appropriate stories of consortation from cultures other than his own, but he makes such consortations the motive for Yahweh's causation of the flood and the destruction of practically all living things. The very tale of a flood may have been learned from the Sumerians, who wrote of it. By such foreign appropriations, the narrators instructed children about the life of Yah and the great ancestor, Noah.

Noah and family (and shipful of pairs of animals) are the second start of mankind. Let's look at the nations that were founded by the three sons of Noah: Shem, Ham (the father of Canaan -- which obviously did not exist beforehand... with the Elohimite pantheon we know of), and Japhet (whose country did not exist beforehand... with the heroes we know of).

Noah got drunk, and poor Ham happened to see his father naked, whereas his brother covered him. So, Canaan was cursed for ever (and this is how the Bible narrator explained the enmity to come between the Hebrews and the Canaanites), and Shem was blessed and endowed withn the power to make Canaan his slave. {So, the narration must have originated after the Hewbrews made incursions into Canaan and occupied the territory that will be called "Palestine" in Roman times.} It is thus that a modern reader of the whole Bible "discovers" its prophetic predictions. The truth of the matter is that tales such as the one about the drunken Noah and his sons was composed after certain social events had already taken place. (Thus the Bible is an anachronistic chronicle, not a history about events that happened.)

Gen. 11:1. "Now the whole world has one language and a common speech" until men moved eastward and settled in the plain of Sinar [in Babylonia]. Let's look at some of the nations that developed from the sons of Noah until the migration to those plains. (Obviously Genesis-11 was composed after the construction of the Tower of Babel in Sinar.) Genesis-10, the catalogue of the nations, was obviously narrated after their foundations.

<<The Hamites, the dynasty of Ham: Cush, Mizraim, Put and Canaan.
Cush begot the mighty Nimrod. The first centers of his kingdom were Babylon, Erech, Akkad, and Calneh in Shinar. From this land he went to Assyria.....
Mizraim was the father of....Casluhites (from whom the Philistines came)...
Canaan was the father of Sidon, Hittites, Jesubites, Amorites, ...
These are the sons of Ham by their clans and languages, in their territories and nations.>>

A blatant contradiction: Until the construction of the tower in Sinar in Babylonia (by men who had moved eastward [from Canaan, etc.], mankind had only one language. At the same time, each clan of the children of Canaan had their own language -- the languages which the Bible narrators had heard or or was familiar with.

The narrator must have heard of such nations and assumed that they had the same type of language: the children and grand-children of a household form clans which are biologically and culturally similar. So, there are only dialect differences between the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Jesubites, and the rest. There is no "confusion" of languages in the clans or nations of one household.

In truth, however, we know that for example Akkadian was a hybrid language of Arab-like language plus Sumeric [or "Mesopotamian"], whose existence is unsuspected by the Bible narrators. The same holds for Babylonian. Hittite is what we call an Indo-European language (in contradiction to the 18th century called "Semitic" languages... which are not really the languages of the Shemites). As far as we can tell, the Philistines were not a Canaanite or Shemtic people, and their language was Indo-European.

The historical peoples which were Biblically grouped under Ham were ethnically different: they had different biological, linguistic, and theistic backgrounds. By a slight of hand, the narrators invent a genealogy of MiddleEastern "nations" thereby falsifying their nature and depriving them of their own history.

[More to follow]

-Jay-

Kaabi, if your friend has this going-in position, you've got a steep hill to climb...

This, however, an interesting observation, and I find myself guardedly agreeing with Larsguy47 on this very specific observation (but I'll almost guarantee that I go a different direction with it than he would).

What Lars has actually done here is make an argument from ignorance - "I don't understand how <something> could be true, so it must be false." Of course, the inability of an individual to understand a concept has no bearing on whether or not the concept is true.

Here's the catch, though. If you're going to use a particular concept to try to prove your point, you have an obligation to understand it well enough to explain it and defend it. That doesn't mean that you have to have an alphabet soup of degrees after your name, but it does mean that you'll need to spend some time reading and learning about the relevant subject matter. Otherwise, you're expecting your friend to take what you say on faith and replace what s/he already takes on faith. See the problem? So dig into those links that hatsoff, RED, and others have provided. Have some fun and learn some things, maybe have your friend look at some of them. I think you'll find the discussions much more fruitful in the end.

regards,

NinJay

Amedeo

To make sense of the whole thing, start considering the Bible as the Book of Ancient Memories. It preserves the memory of names and events, all couched in a theistic/superlative/fabulous framework. It aggrandizes the People by making it the mainstream of humankind under the aegis of the Divine.

It can be placed in a historical framework; what its says of people and gods is good material for an ethnologist; and the events it recounts can be taken as alluding to some historical events (devoid of the attributed exclusivity and miraculouness)....

The Biblical world and its mankind starts in fully developed Agricultural/Metallurgical Times. The couple of millennia between Adam and Noah are Biblically filled with a catalogue of names. Now, if you eliminate the tale of the Flood as the tale of the end of life (except for the Noah family and his loaded ark), you may see the gap between Adam and Noah as the pre-history of the nations (and others) which are catalogued just before the erection of the Tower of Babel. The Bible narrators preserve no memory of the pre-history of the Hebrews (aside from names), Canaan, Akkad, etc. So, their chronicle of the Middle Eastern world really begins with the catalogued fully-formed nations (for which they invented a Judaic genealogy). And yet, the heroes (born of the sons of gods, and of human women) and the event of a great flood are memories of foreign origin.

The Tower of Babel episode may be based on tower building at a time prior to the exodus of Abraham and his band of Hebrews from the environs of "paradise," but the tale of the "confusion" in the language of the builders may come from a much more ancient memory: a commingling of languages that occurred in the pre-history of Canaan (the Hebrews included). It is likely to be a composite tale from two distant historical periods; as it stands, literally, it is worthless, except for those who believe that that tower was being built to reach the sky, God's abode, and that God stopped work by confusing their communication... as if a tower could not be built by mute signals! (The fable is too irrational for even the slighest possibility of being literally true. It's good only for infants who don't know anything about construction work, communication, scaling the skies, and so forth.)

In fact, in Babylonia there had been a commingling of languages, just as there had been one in Akkad [within our historical times] and there had been in the Levant much earlier. The Judaeans may have learned about historical Babylonian commingling of languages during captivities there ( 600-580 or so), which then the Jews interpreted in their own theological ways. [Like the Nazi-inflicted captivity of Jews, the Babylonian captivity affected only a minor percentage of Judaeans and none of the Galileans. The Americans and the Persians respectively liberated most of them.]

[to continue]

Dave Reed

I noticed you didn't mention any stats
on your friend. If this person has had
his "stone cold" beliefs for a very long
time, it will most likely be a tougher
sell, than if he recently came to his
current ideas. (The old dog new tricks
idea) Also, his general knowledge of the
Bible can work either pro or con in your
quest. For the most part, I do believe
the Bible, but when people start making
it say things that are just not there, I
prefer to use the book, plus a bit of
common sense as well. One of the easiest
things to disprove, (and it keeps coming
up over and over), is the age of the earth.
If you bombard this person with scientific
data, you may or may not succeed. Your
friend could be much more cooperative
if you use the Bible itself. How would you
like to present 2 Peter 3:8?

But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one
thing, that one day is with the Lord as a
thousand years, and a thousand years as
one day.

If your friend acknowledges that the Lord
had a hand in the scriptures, then this
verse alone should be enough to get him to
examine the difficulty of putting exact
dates on anything, particularly early
Genesis items. This is not the only thing
which works against early Genesis dating,
but it should get you started. Keep us
informed!

spamandham

The better approach is to ask him why he thinks the Bible is anything more than just a collection of ancient books of various genres, but with an overriding religious theme.

If you really want some scientific ammo, you could just point out that snakes and donkeys don't talk (OT), there are no magic sticks (like Elijah's), pigs don't commit suicide (NT), men don't rise from the dead (OT and NT), or walk on water (NT). These are extraordinary claims, and a collection of old books is simply not sufficient evidence.