From: riggs@descartes.tec.army.mil (Bill Riggs)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Agnostics and Athiests
Date: 31 Jul 92 17:40:29 GMT
Followup-To: sci.skeptic,talk.religion.misc
Distribution: na
Organization: LNK Corporation, Riverdale, MD



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In article <780@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tdat.teradata.com (Stanley Friesen) writes:
>In article <1182@tecsun1.etl.army.mil> riggs@descartes.tec.army.mil (Bill Riggs) writes:
>|
>|	Since the Bible gives specific figures on ages and dates,
>
>Not really, it just mentions events, some of which can be dated by
>external means.
>
>|and once
>|upon a time there was a monk who was industrious, and could add and
>|subtract, the figure of the Creation happening about 4000 B.C. was
>|derived.
>
>And deriving the apparent dates of the stuff early in Genesis is *not*
>just a simple matter of adding and subtracting.  It is a difficult job
>of correlating various seperate narratives, and then tying them to datable
>events mentioned in the Bible.  And *Bishop* (not monk) Ussher was *not*
>the only person to attempt this.  And everyone who did it got a different
>answer.  His Grace never did intend for his calculations to be taken as
>'gospel'; he thought of them as an investigation into an open problem,
>not a final solution.  It was thier inclusion in one widely used English
>translation of the Bible that gave this one man's calculations thier
>current widespread reputation as 'biblical'.

	Well, it is refreshing to get a response like this, from someone who
seems to understand the problem and can enunciate it clearly. I defer to
your wisdom on the difficulty of coming up with precise numbers from the
text. One quibble: I am not at all sure that (was it Bishop) Ussher is the
original source of the calculation. It seems to me that the dating business 
was done by a Gregorian monk, and I would have to go do some research to
spit out a name and a date in which this allegedly occured.

>
>(The good bishop used the ascension of Nebuchednezer (?sp) as his datable
>external event).
>
>|We can avoid this conclusion by certain theological formulations
>|and rational deductions about the accuracy of the source data, but
>|regretably, this defeats the fundamentalist assertion that every
>|word in the King James Version is unfailing true.
>
>Anyone who says this is a fool.  It is reasonable (even if extreme)
>to believe that every word of the original Hebrew/Greek is literally true,
>but to treat such an early translation as such is patently bogus.

	I would certainly agree that the original languauge texts have
less inherent distortion in them...it is often difficult linguistically
to correctly translate word-for-word into another language, especially
into English, which has many, many more words than Greek. As we go back
to the original language text, we often find all kinds of insights
(if we weren't so skeptical, we might even call them "truths") that
got washed out in the process. 

	But it is a bit more difficult to screw up dates and numbers.
A diiferent calculation might shed some better light on the level of
understanding of the people who wrote the books of the Bible, which
is no small accomplishment, but it will not be likely to successfully
reconcile the religious and scientific communities to each other's
mutual satisfaction. So we are still stuck either being considered
unscientific, or irreligious, whether we like it or not.

	Bill R.

	"My opinions do not represent those of my employer or any
government agency."


-- 
Bill R.
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