Harry Bosch

Are you serious? Where is the evidence of a world wide flood? Why did the Chinese and Egyptians not notice the flood and they were building the wall and the prymids? Why were their Chinese before the flood and then Chinese after the flood?

Vicious Love

You know, "created" would have worked just as well in that parenthetical aside. Or instead of barah.

What? No. No, no, no, no, no. No. It's three words. shama'im ve'et ha'aretz. There's spaces and everything. It means "heavens and the earth". It's part of a line which means "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth". There's neither cause nor room for interpretation.

improvius

Ok. So how many specific technological advancements can you list that were discovered as a direct result of biblical research?

Rhaedas

We've covered this ground before...even avoiding the issue that those dimensions couldn't hold very many animals, even if they were in some type of suspended animation, neither ark would float on its own for 40 minutes, regardless of what material its made of. It would either break apart or capsize in still waters, and waves in a storm of Flood intensity? Ha.

And how did Noah cut and drill such tough material with what he would have had on hand?

Too many problems, but as a bronze age fireside tale it's okay.

Constant Mews

I'm sorry, but this demonstrates such an appalling ignorance of medieval and renaissance history that I cannot let it go. This is one hundred percent false. Western science as such began with the rediscovery of the Greek and Roman scientists - particularly the works of Aristotle - and the various works of the Muslim scientists who had expanded on them. Religion held science back from flourishing for centuries, and it was only when the church began to fail as a social control mechanism that what we understand as Western Science came unto its own.

Another completely idiotic statement. One could make a good argument that Qu'ran is far more useful as a scientific work than the Bible; I can only presume you make these remarks in ignorance of the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Analects.False. The Bible is full of myth, invalid history, and a certain amount of invention. That entire bit of legend about the Flood, for example. Not only did it not happen, it can be easily demonstrated not to have happened.You don't even know what gopher wood is; it has never been conclusively identified. The ark would have sank under the conditions of such a flood.

And we can prove that the flood did not happen. Please don't embarrass Christians - of which I am one - by these nonsensical distortions of science.

The Evil One

Well, there is some room; as I indicated above, according to every account I've read, the Hebrew does not map dirtectly to the nice straightforward finite past tense of the English; I have seen "in the beginning when God was creating..." and "in the beginning of God's creating..." suggested as more faithful renderings.

That said, though, the wiggle room thus created does absolutely nothing to help Calvin's Catarrh's case. (say that 10 times fast).

But that's more BCH territory than E/C and I'm sure the Hebrew speakers there have a better idea about this than I do based on random half-remembered readings.

Vicious Love

Got a citation for that? Because I'm going to go out on a limb and call it pure apologist nonsense.

I don't even need a citation for this one. Whoever suggested it clearly flunked Hebrew or, in all likelihood, never learned Hebrew and simply made shit up to support his interpretation of Genesis.

That it does not. Not that any amount of wiggle room could accommodate a global flood.

Meh. I've had tongue twistier.

That'd be me. And it's only my lack of formal Biblical education and the slim possibility that I'm completely oblivious to this fundamental difference between Biblical Hebrew and contemporary Hebrew that's preventing from denouncing both of the above interpretations as utter bullshit, instead of just the latter.

The Evil One

As a matter of fact, I do: Young's Literal Translation of the Bible translates it thus. The other formulation was an attempt I read somewhere to render the sense of the tenses that Young uses in a more fluent English.

You may be right that it's incorrect, but whether correct or incorrect it's quite the opposite of apologetics. If the verb in that first clause is not "created" in a finite tense, then the next clause "the earth was waste and void" implies a pre-existing empty earth not created by God - exactly the opposite to the way the modern Christian wants to view the creation.



Well I know nothing; but I was always under the (possibly incorrect) impression that Young knew a reasonable amount. Happy to be corrected on this though as it is very far from my area.

ericmurphy

I challenge you to find anywhere in the Bible, let alone in Genesis, let alone in Genesis 1, that in more than the most superficial way imaginable is in any way remotely similar to the scientific method. I can give you a quick outline of the scientific method if you like, and I guarantee you that you can produce nothing anywhere in the Bible that even resembles it. A passage that says, "pay attention to the world around you" is not something you can "model" the scientific method after.

I can think of nothing in the first two chapters of Genesis that even remotely resemble reality. I challenge you to find anything there that maps in any but the most superficial way imaginable to the real birth of the universe. Explain to me how you get the events immediately subsequent to the Planck time out of Genesis.

Calvin's Catarrh

The chinese sailed the indian ocean with 400' wooden vessels, that used no metal strapping. But the ark wasn't even a sailing ship, it was a floating box with no rudder, and it didn't even have to float in the ocean.