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Required monthly post for Pharyngula
Jun. 7th, 2008 07:50 pmActually, I've made three posts since May 10th, but they were friends-only and thus don't count. I suppose my last post *might* have shown up in PZ's RSS feed since I let it go 24 hours before friends-locking it (because it says potentially-objectionable things about my boss and I would like to keep this job).
Dr. Myers writes:
Only a palaeocon would believe that the Bible is "What God knows" and therefore that whatever isn't in the Bible are "things God doesn't know". So North America was a surprise to God?
Also, it is ridiculous to assert that Genesis "could have been written like this" when the video contains phrases like "four thousand millennia". There simply was no way in Ancient Hebrew to say such a thing. Even during the Roman period, the largest number that had a name was "myriadoi" (meaning "ten thousand" or "zillion") so any span of time longer than 10,000 years was inexpressible. Hillel (1st century AD, founder of modern Judaism) supposedly said something like "The days of creation were God's days. Each of God's days is like 10,000 years of human time." Since "10,000 years" was the longest span of time with a name, what Hillel said was basically "a zillion years for each Genesis day", which was as close as he could get given that the word "billion" didn't exist yet.
Yes, there's still the problem with darkness-before-light in the Genesis timeline, but something's gotta give when God's Hyperdimensional Word gets filtered through the minds of 3½-dimensional human prophets, whose ability to predict what will happen 20 years into the future is laughably bad yet some of them claim they know Evolution is false and humans and chimps couldn't have had a common ancestor only 5 million years ago because "that's not enough time".
Dr. Myers writes:
Now here's something cool: somebody has tried putting the actual creation story as revealed by modern physics into the same kind of portentous, simple language that even a Mesopotamian goat-herder could understand, the point being that if a god had chosen to tell primitive people how the universe came to be, he/she/it could have done so in just as awe-inspiring a way as the false myths we've got. (Video Link)
To which I replied:Only a palaeocon would believe that the Bible is "What God knows" and therefore that whatever isn't in the Bible are "things God doesn't know". So North America was a surprise to God?
Also, it is ridiculous to assert that Genesis "could have been written like this" when the video contains phrases like "four thousand millennia". There simply was no way in Ancient Hebrew to say such a thing. Even during the Roman period, the largest number that had a name was "myriadoi" (meaning "ten thousand" or "zillion") so any span of time longer than 10,000 years was inexpressible. Hillel (1st century AD, founder of modern Judaism) supposedly said something like "The days of creation were God's days. Each of God's days is like 10,000 years of human time." Since "10,000 years" was the longest span of time with a name, what Hillel said was basically "a zillion years for each Genesis day", which was as close as he could get given that the word "billion" didn't exist yet.
Yes, there's still the problem with darkness-before-light in the Genesis timeline, but something's gotta give when God's Hyperdimensional Word gets filtered through the minds of 3½-dimensional human prophets, whose ability to predict what will happen 20 years into the future is laughably bad yet some of them claim they know Evolution is false and humans and chimps couldn't have had a common ancestor only 5 million years ago because "that's not enough time".
