David Gould

You have not answered the challenge that either there are too many stars to count or the universe is finite. The Bible cannot be true on both of these points.

As it must be false on one of them, that kinds of puts a dent in it being 'miraculous' in any sense of the word. Or were some of the writers inspired and others not? I guess we tell which ones were inspired by the ones that got things correct. But what if one writer gets something both correct and incorrect? Were they divinely inspired part of the time?

The Bible = the interpretation of the world of people in primitive cultures.

Sometimes they guessed correctly. I mean, with the stars thing either there are to many to count or you can count them. It's simply a guess which way even if it is imagery. The same with the universe being finite or infinite - it's got to be one or the other. 50% is not long odds, and they got one right and one wrong so they are right on the money for lucky guesses.

How can you possibly find this impressive?

Kosh

Yo, Gringo! Get your butt out of the city,
go up to the mountains wait till midnight,
then lie on your back. Away from the city lights,
there are mucho more than thousands of stars
visible to the naked eye. I'd venture to guess
in the millions. Even if it isn't, I've got
$100 here that says you can't give me an accurate
count of the ones visible to the naked eye.

OK, let's make it easy. Count for me just the
ones in the band of the "milky way".

PS... no calculators allowed.

Gringo

I live in rural West Virginia. I examine the sky sometimes, but I just don't see too many stars-- a few hundred at most. I can't make out the Milky Way. I wouldn't know if I saw it. According those Creationist websites(I recognize those dudes make lots of scientific errors), there is only 6,000 stars visible with the unaided eye.

The Resistance

Actually, back then the stars probably were too numerous for them to count anyway. Do you know what the sky looks like without modern day interference. It's really cool!

Vorkosigan

I admit we Christians have trouble explaining many of those verses, but yet the understanding of the vast number of stars as spoken of in Jeremiah is remarkable. If you think the writer just used stars for imagery, why did he do so? It seems unlikely that he would be so lucky as to understand that there were far too many stars to count

Such metaphors were common in ancient writings. All it says is that there were far too manys stars for Jeremiah too count. Not really a very remarkable statement, when you think about it.

Michael

Peez

The reason is that they are examples of the bible being just plain wrong.

Quote:

but yet the understanding of the vast number of stars as spoken of in Jeremiah is remarkable.

Are you joking? One look at the sky on a clear night away from the city would lead many people, without any divine guidance or special scientific insight, to the conclusion that the stars are "beyond count." Of course, such a conclusion would be (strictly speaking) wrong: we have no reason to believe that there are an infinite number (i.e. beyond count) of stars in the universe. Are you being deliberately obtuse? You want us to speculate on the imagery chosen by some writer from thousands of years ago? Why did Shakespear use the imagery he did? Do you think that my ignorance of the motives of some writer proves that he must have been writing literally? And, as already explained, even if taken literally, and them even if held to be true, this is no great insight. So you keep saying, but there is no reason to believe this. Why not compare them to the atoms in the earth? Everyone who has seen a beach knows that there are lots and lots ("beyond count") of grains of sand. How is this a miraculous insight? Take a good look at the sky one clear night out of the city, and try to count the stars. If the writer was taking into account "falling stars" in their estimate of the stars in the "heavens," then they were very, very ignorant about astronomy. Which is to say, a number that could be counted. You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Your presenting this as evidence of scientific foreknowledge in the bible shows just how lacking such foreknowledge is. This is not impressive at all, a five-year-old might come up with the idea that the stars are "uncountable." If the bible was truly inspired by some omniscient supernatural being (or beings), why doesn't it say something that primitive goatherders wouldn't know (like the bacterial theory of disease, now that would have been useful).

Peez

[ February 15, 2002: Message edited by: Peez ]</p>

Coragyps

And anyway, Gringo, you must be mistaken, as <a href="http://hometown.aol.com/silence004/" target="_blank">this site</a> "proves" that it's the Q'uran, not the Bible, that foretells all of modern science. (I haven't checked on the Bhagavad Gita yet.)

TheDiddleyMan

The creationists should be careful with this....The fact of the matter is that the Qur'an has the same kind of "evidence" of its scientific knowledge in it. For example the date a which the sex of a baby is supposedly "decided" is mentionned in it.

Check out <a href="http://www.it-is-truth.com" target="_blank">www.it-is-truth.com</a> and you get whole sections on the evidence for the Qur'an, similar to the evidence they (the creationists) are using for the Bible.

Anywho...

The DiddleyMan

TheDiddleyMan

oops...somebody already mentionned the Koran....

DMB

Even if there is a case to be made for saying that the earth is overpopulated by human beings, the number of descendants of Abraham is of a very different order of magnitude from the number of stars. If the former were of the order of magnitude of the latter, they couldn't be contained on the earth.