jckstraw72 wrote:This is the point that other posters have been trying to get across. It is not as simple as "true" or "false" - it all depends on the perspective from which the measurement is taken.
yes i understand that something appears to be a different size from farther away, but yet it is still actually one by one by one. my perception bc of a different viewpoint cannot change the properties of the cube.
But it changes how you measure it and how you experience it and how you describe it.
Exactly! Now transfer that understanding to the perception of time. The center of the universe, God's creation, is far away from earth and moving very fast. So to describe a period of time from that perspective would be different than to describe it while being on earth from an earth perspective.
And that is just the point. It is possible to understand both the Bible and science as true, even though they say different things, by examining perspective.
Exactly! Now transfer that understanding to the perception of time. The center of the universe, God's creation, is far away from earth and moving very fast. So to describe a period of time from that perspective would be different than to describe it while being on earth from an earth perspective.
And that is just the point. It is possible to understand both the Bible and science as true, even though they say different things, by examining perspective.
yes i understand your point. but it was God who told Moses how long creation was, it wasn't coming from a human perspective, but from God's absolute perspective, and he used the units of days bc those are the units of time that Moses knows. Moses surely understood what a year is as well, so had it been many many many years, God could have told Moses many many many years instead of saying days and confusing the whole matter.
i also think that talking about time as if it were the same as length, width, and height is just confusing the whole matter as well. i understand its the 4th dimension, but its clearly not the same as the others -- it is not a physical dimension as are the others. yes, an object seems smaller from farther away, but i really dont agree that if i watch a 30 minute TV show from really far away its somehow not 30 mins. like i said before, its not like time is a physical object with velocity that can appear different from different perspectives. the "speed" of time is however we choose to measure it.
from the wikipedia article on time:
One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence, and time itself is something that can be measured. This is the realist's view, to which Sir Isaac Newton subscribed.[1]
A contrasting view is that time is part of the fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number). In this structure, we sequence events, quantify the duration of events and the intervals between them, and compare the motions of objects. In this second view, time does not refer to any kind of entity that "flows", that objects "move through", or that is a "container" for events. This view is in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz[2] and Immanuel Kant,[3][4] in which time, rather than being an objective thing to be measured, is part of the mental measuring system. The question, perhaps overly simplified and allowing for no middle ground, is thus: is time a "real thing" that is "all around us", or is it nothing more than a way of speaking about and measuring events?
it seems to me that you ascribe to the first definition, and i the second. i find the first to be rather absurd.
You said: "it wasn't coming from a human perspective, but from God's absolute perspective"
That is exactly the point - It was six of GOD's days - not six of ours.
Also, I would say that my understanding of time is much closer to the second definition, and your arguments that time is absolute fit the first definition.
Cyprian,
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If Seth and Cain procreated with their own sisters to create the human race, as you claim, their offspring--including us-- would all have identical mitochondrial DNA in their cells, because mitochondrial DNA is inherited from our mothers. Modern biologists, like Brian Sykes at Oxford, have shown that--on the basis of mitochondrial DNA analysis-- most modern Europeans, for example, were descended from one of several different mothers, as described in his book [i]The Seven Daughters of Eve [/i] (and we're not talking about Protestant Fundamentalist pseudo-scientific garbage like Hovind or Morris, here, but quality scientific scholoarship.) How do you explain the multiple mothers evidence of modern science using your simplistic, literal interpretation of [i]Genesis[/i]?
Who were these 'giant" Demigods--similar to the Demigods of Hellenic mythology that was contemporaneous with the Torah--created by "the sons of God" through copulation with the "daughters of men"? Where did they live, and where is the evidence of their existence? There is an Orthodox tradition that Seth was the father of the "spiritual people," but who were these giant Demigods in anthropological history? And did God create what we call a "rainbow"--the refraction of sunlight through atmospheric water droplets--as a sign to Noah that He would not flood the world again? Or, conversely, is it possible that the ancient Hebrew text of [i]Genesis[/i] contains elements of myth and "just so" stories like the stories of other religions of the world--attempts to explain how things in the world came into existence?
There are two separate and somewhat different accounts of God's creation of man in [i]Genesis.[/i] The term "adamah"--"meaning from the earth"--is used to describe God's creation of humankind. And, of course, all life on earth originally came from the elements of the earth, with carbon as the basic elemental building block of organic molecules. Genesis does not talk about the hows and wherefors of evolution and the molecular biology which is the complex basis of all life, but simply describes God bringing life into existence from the elements of the earth. Adam, the [b]special creation[/b], described with the same Herbrew verb that was used only in reference to the original creation of the cosmos, was similarly brought into existence by God, like all mammals, from his mother's womb. After he was thus "created" by God, the Holy Spirit of God was breathed into him, as described by Genesis and St. Seraphim of Sarov, and he became the first formed man endowed with the Holy Spirit. In this state, he was placed in the mystical paradise of Eden for a time--a paradaisical state achieved since that time by some of the Orthodox saints, including St. Seraphim, himself, who fed bears from his hand in the forests of Sarov.
His surviving sons intermarried outside of the (lost) mystical paradise of Eden with the daughers of the adamah--the homo sapiens who had come into existence on the heels of the hominid homo erectus during the previous million years of earth history. That is why we modern homo sapiens, based on scientific analysis, do not all descend from a single woman, as the literal interpretation of [i]Genesis [/i]claims.