From: tim@tim.ingr.com (Tim Anderson)
Subject: Re: Christian Bashing
Reply-To: uunet!ingr!b23a!tim!tim
Organization: Intergraph Corporation
<1992Apr9.134015.25029@b11.ingr.com> <1992Apr9.174950.11730@b11.ingr.com>
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 92 12:40:58 CDT

In article <1992Apr9.174950.11730@b11.ingr.com>, lhughes@b11.ingr.com (Lawrence
Hughes) writes:
In article <1992Apr9.134015.25029@b11.ingr.com>,
lester@naomi.NoSubdomain.NoDomain (Les Bartel) writes:

>> Can you point me to some sources that prove the Bible unreliable? 
>
>Easily - the bible claims that the world was created in 7 days. There is not,
>and never has been, enough energy in the entire universe to even create one
>planet (let alone a multitude of stars and galaxies) in such a short time.
>Also,
>we have strong evidence that the time between the first cooling of the newly
>formed earth and the first life was millions or billions of years, not a few
>days. You can always argue that the world was created instantly, with a
>miraculous avoidance of the laws of energy, and with the fossil (and geologic)
>record intact (to make us doubt?), or even the old chestnut about the word
>"day" being a loose translation, but I don't buy any of those. Nor do you need
>to. All the other evidence of geologic and planetary timelines correlate just
>fine. 

I have no idea how this all started, but I have to put in a couple of words
for the Christians (since I am Christian myself):

	If there has never been enough energy in the entire universe to
	even create one planet in seven days - then what is your position
	on the evolution of the universe to its current state?
	
	If it's the Big Bang Theory, that alone was enough energy. 
	The theorists say that so much change occurred so rapidly
	that the evolution of the elements, etc. was measured in micro-
	seconds and even the theorists believe that elements started
	precipitating only seconds after it all started.  Of course, they
	have no idea about where all that energy came from to cause the
	Big Bang in the first place - what was there a T-minus 1 second?
	Don't tell me pure energy, because even energy has to come
	from somewhere -- at least that's what logic tells us.  
	Oh this theory also has some pretty big
	holes from recent discoveries concerning the size of the universe and
	the distribution of stars and such, but that's another debate (it has
	a lot to do with the expansion of the universe and the gap that "should"
	exist between stars/galaxies based upon their distance from the supposed
	center of the Bang.)
	
	If it's the Steady State Theory, that theory has no concept of a 
	beginning of time (or at least one that could support the dissipation
	of energy into planets/stars/solar systems/galaxies).  In the Steady
	State Theory, there was all this energy, but again where did
	the energy come from and "what" caused the formation of all the
	planets/etc.  Did it just happen out of chance? The laws
	of thermodynamics could be used to refute that - the law of entropy.
	Even so, the energy - whereever it came from - should have
	been fairly evenly distributed and then began to clump up.  
	Therefore the stars/galaxies/etc should be fairly evenly distributed,
	but they're not. At least in our perceivable universe they're not.
	And gravity had very little to do with formation of any planet - 
	otherwise all of those little asteroids would start reforming into 
	another planet.
	
	From the standpoint of the existing "theories", at least Creation has
	an answer for how we got where we are today - 
	
	"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genisis 1:1)
	
	The line that is usually drawn between scientific theories and
	creation theories gets pretty fuzzy around the beginning of time
	because both rely on a belief of the unknown - one belief being
	of physical concepts and the other on spiritual concepts.
	
>
>Secondly, the bible makes a strong case for the world being only a little over
>4000 years old. There is VERY strong evidence of even HUMAN civilisation
>(Chinese and Egyptian) prior to this time - where were they supposed to have
>been? Again, you can argue the "day" or "year" really meant something else,
>or that the timelines were "poetic" rather than literal, or somesuch, and
>can't be crossreferenced. If so, phooey on you, you're welching.

All my references indicate the Bible makes a strong case for the world being
a little over 6000 years old (2000 years to Noah, 2000 years to Christ, 2000
years to today).  I assume you are only counting the 4000 years of recent
civilizations (since the Flood destroyed the ancient civilizations).  Even so,
I have yet to hear of any written historical account that can be definitively
identified as being over 4000 years old. Don't give me ANY carbon dating or
any other radioactive method of dating artifacts, because they make some
pretty drastic assumptions about how present day elements like Carbon-14 were
distributed amoung plant/animal tissues and other materials during a period
of time where no method of measuring these elements existed, much less any
way of recording it.  For instance, if I gave you a bone fragment to be carbon
dated and that bone fragment was only 1000 years old - the most accurate
method of dating could place the "age" at ~500-5000 years (a pretty wide gap).
If you said a particular bone fragment is ~20000 years old, you arrived at
that age from assuming that the fragment started off with today's level of
Carbon-14 and that Carbon-14 decays at a known rate and you have x amount
of Carbon-14 remaining, therefore the bone fragment is ~20000 years old
(give or take a few thousand because you weren't quite sure if the bone had
the same exact percentage of Carbon-14 to start with, but you assume it was
fairly close).  What's to say the environment has always had the 
same level's of Carbon-14 as it does today.  If you know Genisi very well,
you know that the pre-Deluge life span was over
600 years and the the earth was shrouded (according to the Bible) with an
expanse of water:

	"And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to
	separate water from water." So God made the expanse and separated
	the water under the expanse from the water above it." Gensis 1:6,7
	
	Note:
		Don't assume the "water above it" indicates cloud cover -
		according to the post-Deluge account of Noah - God gave
		a sign that He would never destroy the earth with water
		again - the rainbow.  If the "water above it" were just
		clouds, why weren't there rainbows before the Deluge?
	
This environment was a perfect environment without pestilence or disease.  It
could be assumed that after the Deluge, the earth was exposed all those
nasties it had once been shielded from (ie., cosmic radiation, UV light, etc.)
as then people started getting skin cancer, mutations of healthy bacteria,
etc. that has eventually led to what we have today -- a higher level of
Carbon-14 (which by the way can be formed by the bombardment of cosmic
radiation).  If the current level of Carbon-14 is higher today than it was
in the olden days - then all the dates would be significantly reduced - at
least that's what logic tells us.


>
>In the 1800's, someone (I forget who) went through your bible and found strong
>support for BOTH sides of every major issue of the day (slavery, imperialism,
>etc.) Can it really be literally true everywhere with that level of 
>contradiction? Sorry - there I go applying logic again... "We believe in ONE
>God: the father, the son, and the holy ghost. And the devil, and a bunch of
>angels, some saints, etc., etc. But just ONE god. It's a mystery." (well it
>certainly is to me....).

One God, one Father, one Son, and one Holy Spirit.  I think that's the whole
point about Christianity, it's not a mystery to us.  I thought about going
into a long discussion about why Jesus is both God and Man and what atonement
was, but I'll leave that for another time.

>
>THEY are right too? Merely believing in something (even for long periods of
>time) does not make it true.

Hear! Hear!  But does NOT believing in something (even for long periods of
time) make them NOT true?

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--
       ______________________________________________________________________
      /                                             /                       /
     /  Tim Anderson  ( uunet!ingr!b23a!tim!tim )  /  Shift to the left,   /
    /  Systems Product Marketing                  /  Shift to the right,  /
   /  Intergraph Corporation                     /  Push 'em, Pop 'em,   /
  /  Huntsville, Alabama  35807-4201            /  Byte, byte, byte !!! /
 /  Mailstop: LR23B4    Phone: (205) 730-8503  /                       /
/_____________________________________________/_______________________/
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