yeah, but it could mean anything? it could mean the period of time it takes for a monkey to remove the skin of a banana, it could be slutbimwallawalladango, it could mean 1.21 giggawatts - Great Scott!!!. i'm not really arguing with you here; you're reconciling your religious beliefs and science in a way that makes sense to you. in that sense, you can meld your religious beliefs to whatever system of beliefs conflicts with it; which i suppose is fine. it just strikes me as making it a little less useful i suppose. but if it works for you, then i say go for it.

I think there has been a misunderstanding, here.

The argument I just gave you for the age of the earth is not my argument! I do not think that the Earth is 6000 years old. I was only explaining to you why it is that creationists think the Earth is only 6000 years old despite how that number is not explicitly mentioned in the Bible, as per your question posed in the first sentence of your post.

If you want a response to your theory that time moves differently for God than for mortal man, that may very well be so but time is still measured in mortal units in the Bible. So, when the Old Testament claims that Adam lived for 900 years, even if those 900 years went by slowly (or quickly, whatever you believe) for God, 900 years still went by. That's the whole point of units of measurement; so that we may measure things regardless of the perceptions of the observer. Consider it a gift from God...

Problems:
1. As I understand it, the genealogies may well have skipped steps, due to an ambivalency in one of the words. If I recall correctly (and I probably don't), the same word means 'is the father of' and 'is the ancestor of'.

2. Sure, the timeline works out okay if each day in Genesis is a billion years. Unfortunately, the Bible says each day is to the Lord as a thousand years (and, actually, I'm not even sure off hand it says that). Moreover, the time frame is wrong. Land mammals haven't been around for the last billion years, I'm pretty sure.

The silly part is, as I'm sure I've said here before, the first chapter of Genesis was being interpreted metaphorically as long ago as St. Augustine. The fundamentalist interpretation of the passage as referring to literal 24 hour days is a modern invention.

I completely agree.

If someone's reason is, "because I do", then I have to question why they take me to task over my own, thought-out, belief. Also as Toaster said, I don't think He wants us to be sheeple, or else He would have just made us sheeple- it's really as simple as that.

All notions of creationism vs. evolution aside, I don't understand how anyone can disagree with the age of the planet stated by scientists, as multiple different methods of scientific measurement have yielded the same answer on the age of the planet.

I wonder why those who believe in "6,000 years" see fit to chant prove it to the scientific community when "science", not "religion", is the methodical, testable theory- whose tests all currently stand together.

Of course, Believing that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old instead of 6,000 years old has nothing to do with believing in God, it just requires that you once again look at the Bible as a book that is meant to teach through stories and lessons, not a manual to be followed literally.

Here's a question for the "6,000 years" people- if you truly believe God made the Earth, how much different to God do you think it is for Him to make a planet by blinking its entirety into existence, or make a planet by creating the right conditions in the universe for a planet to form? Why do you insist He created man, when He could just as easily have created the first single-celled organisms, kicking off an evolutionary process which would naturally yield all the plants and animals He planned it would? Why argue that He spawned entire planets at will- maybe the "Big Bang" really DID happen, and he's the one who created that?

The point is, there's no reason to believe God micro-managed every last blade of grass on the planet just because the Bible says He created the Earth. Yes, I also believe He created the Earth- but by creating the right conditions that would ultimately form our existence.

No, land mammals didnt exist a billion years ago, but there is an order to the story, first the earth, then plants, sea creatures, and then mammals and humans. It doesnt say mammals, I think it says cattle, but there is a simplistic evolution of events. Plants, Animals, Humans....

I dont recall the Bible saying each day is to the Lord as a thousand years, but I do recall the day to a year. If it can be a year or a thousand then why not a billion???

Perhaps God did create a single celled organism which carried the genetic code that would eventually evolve into an untold multitude of life forms. Even if that organism was brought here by a comet it just makes the story that much more interesting. The whole galaxy may have been seeded that way, but where did the original organism come from??? Science hasnt been able to replicate life, only manipulate it.

I never said it was your argument, but you're acting as if all-- Or even the majority-- Of Christians believe the earth is only 6,000 years old. It's been generally accepted that the story of the creation is anecdotal. The beliefs of the minority doesn't constitute the beliefs of the majority.

the current estimated age of the universie is 13.7 billion years. so maybe one day is 2.28 billion years. or maybe as pigglet said, one day to god is sour cream. i used the term apologetics in my previous post because that is what trying to reconcile your faith in the bible with the world outside the bible is (at least to my knowledge, correct me if i'm wrong!).

the big problem with this entire topic, imho, is that you are trying to say that 1 god day could equal 'x' human years. but why go that extra step? why not just say that to get where we are today, it has taken 'x' years (13.7 billion in this case). why does god have to be involved? because if you're going to try to reconcile the scientifically determined age of the universe with '6 days', then you also have to reconicle where that dome of water went (gen. 1.6), etc. why are you so sure that your god is the correct god? how can you be sure that it isn't vishnu or odin or any of the number of other gods that didn't have such good marketing in the western world? maybe the god that created the universe simply set things in motion and left? or maybe god never existed. is it more likely that moses and noah and jesus and many other biblical characters existed as described or is it possible that most of these characters are mixtures of real people and previously existing mythology from that region (hint: look to sumerian mythology and you find a lot of similarities dating back before judiasm).

i realize that this is possibly a bit off-topic, but i think the discussion of believing in a book for an explanation of the age of and creation method of the earth versus current (and evolving) scientific knowledge calls into question the credibility of both sets of evidence. as toaster126 and analog mention earlier in the thread, the why of what you believe is more important to than what you believe. and i personally can't understand why anyone would choose to believe something so specific as the bible when all other evidence really seems to point in other directions.

I'm so sorry if a possible explaination of the 6 days of creation bothers you so! And Yes, you are way off-topic with most of your post. Perhaps you should read some of my other posts before making such huge assumptions. 13.7 billion huh??? And 4.6 billion for the Earth??? All that amounts to, is the latest best guess by scientists. Thats all, an educated guess. The Earth may be 3 billion or 6, the universe may be 100 billion....the current best guess isnt always correct.

Dude. Calm down. Seriously.

Everyone else in this thread is participating with good expression of opinions that don't include yelling at others in a disrespectful way. Your tone and overall decorum could cause this otherwise pleasant debate into a yelling match, and we don't want that. So let's keep in mind how we express our opinions, and if they can be expressed without berating others for theirs.

- analog.

I am calm, who's yelling??? Berating others??? I missed that.....

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geez. you don't need to be snarky. the explanation you gave doesn't bother me. it just doesn't make any sense. you're trying to reconcile your beliefs with reality. and that's all well and good. but maybe you wouldn't have to if you didn't take the stories of illiterate goatherders as fact rather than story.

the earth, to the best of our current knowledge, is 4.6 billion years. the universe is 13.7 billion. most likely, those numbers will get refined in the years to come, but they're not going to be far off from what we currently believe. the nice thing about science is that there's no problem with updating our level of knowledge and refining our information. there is no need for apologetics.

i think politicophile sums up what i want to say much better than i would be able to.

Thank you. If I may get side-tracked for a moment of speculation, I suspect that the fundamentalist interpretation stems from how easily accessible the written bible is today. Not that easy access to the bible is a bad thing - quite the contrary - but having a physical book, with the text written in stone such that it is, makes it very easy to consider it the end-all and be-all, even when concerning metaphorical stories which run contrary to modern knowledge. This is the best explanation I can come up with for why literal interpretations are so vehemently defended today when metaphorical interpretations have been prevalent for such a long time.
Again, an important point. I've mentioned the concept of "two books" before in Tilted Philosophy - that is, that the divine is revealed through nature just as much as it can be revealed through scripture, and thus, the "book of nature" must necessarily not contradict how we read scripture. When there is a contradiction, one is being misunderstood. Increasingly, as science progresses, that misunderstanding falls on our reading of scripture rather than our understanding of nature. Another way to look at it is that nature's primary revelation is of god the creator, whereas scripture's primary revelation is of god the redeemer. We wouldn't expect nature to tell us how god redeems, and we shouldn't expect scripture to reveal to us how god creates.
You are right to point out that our current best guesses are not necessarily exactly correct. In fact, very very very few things in science are ever considered to be exactly correct, and scientists are pretty careful to acknowledge this fact. However, we're a lot more sure than you let on in the above statement. We're not talking about a range of 3-6 billion years old for the age of the earth. The range science has determined for the age of the earth - with a good degree of confidence - is between 4.467 and 4.667 billion years. While not exact, that's pretty damn precise.

As has been touched upon already, there is a significant problem with the "god day = ? man years" argument for biblical interpretation (which, to fit in with modern scientific knowledge, would be written as "1 god day = 1.64 billion man years" if we're to use the lower limit estimation for the age of the universe, which is ~11.5 billion years)...

For one, the order of creation is incorrect. Reading the account, it works under the assumption that the Earth already exists within the void of space on day 1 (there can't be a day or night without a planet's horizon for a star to rise and set over). Then we get to the second day, which has already been dealt with: where'd the dome of water go? On the third day, vegetation was created. Interesting since a large number of plants rely on insects for pollination, and living creatures do not exist yet. If a day = 1.64 billion years, those plants would have died out rather quickly. Then we get to the fourth day - and my favorite. Apparently, the earth was created *before* it had a star to orbit around. An amusing concept since planets are created from debris caught in the gravitation pull of stars. I don't think I need to continue.

Secondly, there's the issue of the timeline itself. Setting aside the fact the order of creation makes no sense, neither do the intervals. Using the 11.5 billion year old universe and 1 day = 1.64 billion years concept, here's what a more accurate telling would look like (to see a relatively accurate timeline of creation for yourself, click here. Warning: it is a very large image.):

Day 1 - The universe is created
Day 2 - God rested
Day 3 - God rested
Day 4 - The sun is created
Day 5 - The earth is created, as is the first life in single-celled organisms
Day 6 - The moon is created
Day 7 - This is God's busy day. He procrastinated the whole week and now only has a day to finish his project! So, he stays up the whole time and works hard. He creates plants and insects. He creates and destroys the dinosaurs in about 3.5 god hours, all so we can have pretty fossils to look at. He then starts working on the rise of mammalian creatures, barely finishing his project of creation in time by creating the first humans at 11:59:52pm

As you can see, it's quite a bit of a stretch to say that the "1 god day = ? man years" concept allows the biblical creation story and what we know through science to "coexist almost peacefully."

I don't want to get (re-) involved in the whole literal versus anecdotal thing, but I do want to respond to something.

I just wanted to say that this isn't necessarily true. It is the prevailing theory among many, but it's most definitely not set in stone. Currently, Vega is one of a few stars with an observed dust cloud surrounding it, indicating a possible planet formation.

Anyway, it would be possible, in theory, for a 'planet' to form in the absence of a star. Of course, you'd expect it to go shooting off into outer space somewhere until it was caught by an object with a gravitational pull larger than it's own...

Anyway... Sorry for the tangent. Carry on.

True enough, there have been some recent discoveries which indicate the possibility. However, I don't think there is any evidence that the earth may have been created that way. The rest of my post still holds true.

Key word....Educated

Oh boy....I am not trying to reconcile my beliefs. You must show me the post where I say I believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible. For the record, I don't. That's why I thought if you checked my other posts you might come to this conclusion. The idea that the days of creation might be representative of a longer period of time was already mentioned in this thread, before I did. There's nothing to explain, except that the day for a year principle is in the Bible, and according to the theory of relativity, if you travel near the speed of light, a day may pass for you while a year goes by on Earth. There's a scientific basis if that helps. I am not conflicted in any way by my beliefs, I accept the Bible for what it is, and science for what it is.

saying that one god day = 'x' human years, which you say might be the case in previous posts, is reconciling your beliefs with observable reality. if the bible says that one god day = 1000 years, then for you to say it's a different number is reconciling your beliefs. trying to explain away the difference between biblical accounts and scientific accounts by bringing up relativity, is using apologetics to trying and reconcile your beliefs.

you may be playing devils advocate. if you are, then i think you're doing a fine job.

Whatever you say dude, but I'm not reconciling anything. Its perfectly logical to assume that those days arent actual days, since the Earth is ancient in the extreme. At least I can post an original thought, a passing thought but still, at least it doesnt sound like it came straight out of Wikepedia. Minds are like parachutes, they work best when open.

This may help you understand.....maybe...the word 'yom' in the original Hebrew text was translated as 'Solar Day', but there are 56 other choices. One of the other possibilities of the 56 choices was, 'an unimaginably long period of time'. Which makes much more sense, but it wasnt translated that way...to bad. I'm sure that many such mistakes were made, so lets all learn Hebrew and then we can discuss this from the original text only.

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*Hops up and down and screams madly for you to read the Bible*

Why take any of it literally?

Why does this even matter? The bible was written by man. Who really cares if God took 6 days or milenia to create the world.

The Bible is just man's interpretation of these things.

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As I've said before, this is because of the health risks associated with eating shellfish and pork. The multiweave deal, I really dont get. I am allergic to wool, so perhaps the ancient israelites were too!:) Its Possible!:)

Yes, I'm aware of what the Old Testament says. Are you aware of what the New Testament says?

Acts 11: 5 - 8

il, i'm guessing at your interpretation of that bit, but in the event that my guess is correct, i don't think that's the only interpretation. could it not also mean that God could take anything, cleanse it, and lo - man should consider it cleansed? i mean, this stuff descended from heaven and all - that's not some ordinary pulled from the sea shellfish, no?

:love: :love:

Hey, Dave:thumbsup:

Isn't God supposed to be unchanging? The New Testament makes him into a flip-flopper.

Most creationist can't even arrive at a concise age of the Earth. The common "6000 years" figure is based on the rough estimates of an Irish archbishop in the 17th century who cobbled together a timeline based on woefully incomplete geneological accounts in the Christian bible. Any real biblical support for this number is virtually nonexistent.

It's a magic number, and not all that different from the arbitrary numbers assigned to the age of creation in various other religious myths. There aren't very many serious theologians who take this figure seriously. Biblical literalism is largely an American Baptist phenomena, and is considered to be contradictory and even heretical by mainstream Christian scholars.

Given that young-earth creationists are incorrect in nearly all manners of science, history, and even theology, I'll never understand why their position is given any real consideration at all.

The mass extinction that occurred during the Cretaceous really isn't even the largest mass extinction on record. The event led to the extinction of around 70% of the organisms existing at the time. There is a great deal of evidence demonstrating that many marine and early mammalian organisms did in fact go extinct during this period. Planktonic organisms suffered especially heavy losses, as well as several species of birds, marsupials, and placentals (the common ancestor of most modern mammals.)

The K-T extinction was widespread, but rather patchy in terms of which organisms were most effected. Organisms that were largely dependent on photosynthesis were obviously effected the most by the amount of dust and debris hurled into the atmosphere by the impact event. This in turn affected the organisms whose food chain depended on other photosynthesising organisms. Omnivores and insectivores appear to have been the biggest winners in the K-T extinction being that they were able to sustain a healthy diet despite the widespread destruction. Most small mammals survived on insects, larvae, worms, snails, etc., which themselves survived largely on decaying organic matter.

The ocean-dwelling survivors also appear to have survived largely by switching to detritus feeding. If the water column was your habitat and you relied heavily on phytoplankton, you were pretty much screwed.

Size was also a big issue. The smaller the organism, the more suited it was for survival in the harsh conditions caused by the impact event. As near as modern paleontologists and paleozoologists can tell, nothing larger than a modern house cat survived. Huge, lumbering dinosaurs that required a hefty amount of caloric intake to survive obviously wouldn't fair to well in an environment where their primary food chain was essentially blown away by a giant meteor. Some small predatory dinosaurs probably did survive the end of the Cretaceous, but it appears that their ecosystem changed so drastically that they were unable to sustain a viable breeding population.

God told me to post this:

As little rats might
we hung around for awhile
and then we diverged