GenesisNemesis

He asked for it. :devil:

RAFH

Well, then, put your model together and present your hypotheses and display your evidence, if you have any. Until you do, you are simply speculating, it doesn't even rise to the level of an assertion.

Iacchus

It's all about the space between your ears. Because this is all you've got were you to cut off the external inputs (from the five senses, that is) to your brain. All of sudden you find yourself immersed in the imaginary reality of your dreams. In which case "you" have to ask, am "I" a wholly imaginary creation that exists solely within my dreams? It certainly doesn't exist beyond its "sensations" of the outside world, does it? ... in other words "outside of the body." If so, then how do you tell if anything is "real," if all that exists between "you" and the outside world are the synapse firings of the brain? I honestly don't think you can answer that, unless you are willing to consider that there is more to the imagination than you would like to think ... as if it were a continuum unto its own, that is.

Iacchus

Please read the post directly above this. The fact is, "you" are nothing more than the by-product of your imagination. So, how can physicalism be anything other than what you believe it to be?

And is this one of those times when we're not supposed to take the Bible "literally?" Are these the only references you could find? I honestly don't see how you can interpret it this way. All it seems to suggest (to me) is that God established the heavens and the earth.

Oh, and let's take a look at the bottom verse ...

So, He "stretched out the heavens" and then "established the earth?" Hmm ... sounds very much to me like the Big Bang theory.

spamandham

How many heavens are involved in big bang theory?

Iacchus

Well, in this case it would seem to be referring to the celestial heavens ... which, is the universe itself.

GenesisNemesis

So, He "stretched out the Heavens" and then "established the Earth?" Hmm... sounds very much to me like setting up a solid firmament for which to "separate the waters from the waters." Unless you interpret that as the cosmic fabric which makes up our Universe. The verse, by the way, is way too vague to be describing the Big Bang Theory (which didn't even exist when Genesis was written.)

Smullyan-esque

"What goes up, must come down"

Hmm ... sounds very much like Newton's Law of Gravity.

Only if you have no clue about the details! How does "What goes up, must come down" relate to GMm/r^2?

Similarly, "Stretched out the heavens...and established the world" sounds NOTHING like the Big Bang theory! It only sounds similar to people who are profoundly ignorant of how much detail is in the science.

spamandham

Why would it seem that? The Bible clearly identifies multiple heavens, and the passage in question refers to all them, not just 1. The people who wrote it believed there were 3 levels of heaven. The first level is where the 'nonfixed' celestial objects lived, the 2nd was the dome of the 'fixed' objects, and the 3rd was where the highest gods lived. The very language surrounding gods is filled with references to the sky, because they literally believed gods lived in the sky - so do many theists even today.

That's why angels are depicted with wings (to travel back and forth), why ancient stories are filled with ladders to the sky, flying chariots, why Elijah and Jesus are both depicted as floating up into the sky (why else, were they taking a tour of the solar system or something?), etc, why even today, people lift their hands up and face upward during prayer, and expect to float off into the clouds at rapture. If god isn't imagined being there, what's the obsession with up?

The Genesis story is nothing more than a description of this belief system. It has nothing to do with the big bang.

Alf

Yep, that's what they all said when they wrote that verse first time!

Amazing, lacchus has just found that they knew about the big bang theory already in ancient palestine! Bronze age goat herders was appearantly very advanced in physics...

...or not. It sounds mistakenly similar to what their neighbouring cultures thought about the universe - a geocentric world.

Alf