Response to WWGHA Post with Reply

You are absolutely right, you need to understand the culture and who the Bible was written too. You also need to remember that the Bible was not written like a science textbook.

a) Doesn't your belief in a 8-12,000 year old earth indicate however that YOU are approaching it as a textbook? Creation Science must be...... no?

b) Why is it theologically IMPERATIVE that the earth be young? What would happen theologically if it were very, very, old?

c) We agree it is not a science textbook. It however does identify itself as Truth spoken by God.

And that truth, provided to his very special Chosen People, complete with detail in the extreme in the science of worship (Deuteronomy reads like a manual for the handling of nuclear fuel), proceeds to give them a understanding of the world around them. "My Chosen People," it reads, "this is the truth about the universe you live in: the earth is fixed in place resting on pillars, it has corners and edges, the sun, moon and stars move around the earth, there is a dome of water that forms the limits of the sky, and I reside on top of it."

The folks in Babel believed this was science and began using the science to engineer a tool to go meet God. Any real science can be turned into useful tools. In fact you can know a scientific theory is true due to the things engineers make based on that science. The computer you are typing on proves the theory of Quantum Physics, from the semi-conductor processor to the polymer case. Two distinct engineering fields use the theory of evolution to create useful tools - genetic engineering and computer science - and both are predicably successful, thereby testing the theory daily and proving it to be reliable. For more on this read: http://denbeste.nu/essays/science.shtml

The "theory" (read: reliable enough to start making useful tools that better our lives) of YHWHian cosmology, proved to actually be "conjecture", and the great engineering feat of a tower to heaven failed. We have been looking for more reliable theories ever since. We have found Newtonian Mechanics and we fly. We found Quantum Mechanics and have this discussion, via a computer network created using a "genetic algorithm" based on Evolution[ary] Theory. And they work. Every time.

God could have easily describe an accurate cosmology. He did not. What do you do with that?