Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Panpsychist · 11-29-2007, 06:56 AM

This thread is about the story of the creation of the world in genesis and how it complies, or not, with the modern scientific description of these same events. I will be based on the Hebrew text, in the standard accepted Masoretic text.

Against this story one needs to put the scientific one. There is, unfortunately, no authoritive text. I will use the text of NOVA. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/universe.html

Quote:

Originally Posted by NOVA

A fraction of a second after the big bang: The universe begun with a vast explosion that generated space and time and created all matter and energy in the universe. Exactly what triggered this sudden expansion remains a mystery. Astronomers believe it involved a ruanway process called inflation, in which a peculiar type of energy that existed in the vaccum of space was suddenly mobilized. The inflationary expansion ended only when this energy was transformed into more familiar forms of matter and energy.

One second after the big bang: After inflation ended in the first tiny faction of a second, the universe continued to expand but not nearly so quickly. As the universe cooled, the most basic forces of nature emerged: first gravity, then the strong force, which holds the nuclei of atoms together, followed by the weak and electromagnetic forces. In its first second of exisence, the universe was made up of fundamental particules, including quarks, electrons, photons, and neutrinos. Protons and neutrons then began to form.

Three minutes after the big bang: In the next few minutes, the unvierse as we know it took shape. Already incomprehensibly large, its protons and neutrons came together to form the nuclei of simple elements. That the universe remains largely made up of these elements - hydrogen and helium - is considered strong evidence of the validity of the big-bang model.

500,000 years after the big bang: For the next 300,000 to 500,000 years or so, the universe remained an enormous cloud of hot expanding gas. When this gas has cooled to a critical threshold, electrons were able to combine with hydrogen and helium nuclei. Photons no longer scattered, but rushed outward. We can still see the photons emitted from this period, but time and distance have shifted them into microwave wavelengths. Today, this cosmic microwave background radiation gives astronomers a window into the early universe.

Stars and galaxies appear when the unvierse was a billion years old, our sun and solar system some 5 billion years ago.

The above is actually inaccurate in some ways, but will do for now, for the purpose of comparing the first verses.

So let's start.

Quote:

Originally Posted by KJV

1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Masoretic

1 בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ. 7 השמים = המרחב שא�*ח�*ו מכ�*ים "היקום"; הארץ = כדור הארץ בראשית ברא = בתחילת בריאת- השמים והארץ �*בראו לפ�*י כן 2 והארץ היתה תהו ובהו וחשך על-פ�*י תהום ורוח אלהים מרחפת על-פ�*י המים. = וכדור הארץ היה שומם, חשוך ומכוסה במים 3 ויאמר אלהים יהי אור ויהי-אור. = אלהים ברא קרי�*ה מאירה ללא מקור אור 4 וירא אלהים את-האור כי-טוב ויבדל אלהים בין האור ובין החשך. = אלהים ראה שהאור ממלא את תכליתו... = ...ולכן אלהים יצר אזור שבו יש רק אור ואזור שבו יש רק חושך 5 ויקרא אלהים לאור יום ולחשך קרא לילה ויהי-ערב ויהי-בקר יום אחד.

This text is taken from
http://www.tora.us.fm/tnk1/prqim/t0101.htm#0
and includes some modern religous interpretations. It shows the extent to which they must twist the text to interpret it.

Now let me tell the scientific story in similar terms.

In the beginning, there was a singularity. And then the universe expanded, and the first matter formed, and the universe was an almost perfectly symmetric hot cosmic egg. Slowly matter, light, and so on fomed, but they were still all interwined together in the hot nearly-uniform gas that permeated all of space. The universe cooled down as it expanded, until it became transparant and darkness first appeared in between matter.

I have to go now, so I'll leave it at that for now.

Headache · 11-29-2007, 08:12 AM

The problems starts immediately:

Quote:

1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The Universe is approx 14 billion years old, the Earth approx 4.5 billion years old.

Quote:

2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Water came at a much later point in time. The earth did not have water for a billion or so years

Quote:

3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light

Light must have come before the earth since the Sun formed before the Earth, Earth was formed by leftover materials. Besides, there were stars forming around 500 million years after the Big Bang, 10 billion years before the Sun and the earth formed.

Bible & creation story == Total Bullshit!

Toto · 11-29-2007, 10:14 AM

Genesis Revisited by Michael Shermer

Quote:

In the beginning - specifically on October 23, 4004 BC, at noon - out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang, followed by cosmological inflation and an expanding universe. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He create Quarks and therefrom He created hydrogen atoms and thence He commanded the hydrogen atoms to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process to release energy in the form of light. And the light maker He called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing, so he created Earth. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

* * *

And God created the pongids and homonids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, the Bible, in one chapter He said He created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in another chapter He said he created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam's ribs. This caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created theologians to sort it out. ...

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