At 11:30 PM 11/02/02 -0500, Walter Hicks wrote:
>A YEC advocates non of the above. He simply takes the Bible at face
>value and discounts any science that disagrees with it. It just replaces
>your hokey science with it's own hokey science.
>
>I still think that a respectful interchange could bring fruit, where the
>other approach fails. Are we after fruit or thorns?
>
>But what do I know :-)?
>
>Walt
God talks in Creation as well.
Reading the Bible at "face value" for a 21st century scientist means as
well, that one should recognize the type of writing, and the reason God
said certain things at certain times. That is a study in itself.
I do not believe, that God tried to fool us when he used evolution, and
showed us how evolution is still going on. I notice, that these theses I
repeated a couple of times have not been answered.
Also, no one replied to my examples of how the word that we read as "day"
in our translations sometimes, maybe often is used, for eras, or very long
time periods. Some examples may even be given in English.
Nobody answered the argument I used to show that the use of numbers (and
words) in the early bible is not the same as the way we use numbers. That
may partly be due to copying, but it shows as well that the Bible was not
written by a 21st century scientist. For example the measurements of the
city of Jericho were about 80 by 240 meter as excavations show. The army
that had to take Jericho was said to be 600.000 men, who had to walk around
the town. Try to calculate how long that would take, and how many men had
to walk abreast, especially on the last day when they had to do it seven
times. Besides, how could a small town even dare to withstand such a
power. The question here is now: what does that mean for us? I don't want
to make anybody doubt the Bible, but I do think that we cannot read the
Bible in front of us, without taking into account that copyists,
translators etc. have made errors. My uncle (when writing about the
El-Amarna tablets) suggested that some errors may have been made
intentionally because some of the original documents could not be
read. For other numbers he has no explanation, but suggested in this case
that the word translated as 1000 may have meant "family".
We must accept the fact, that we do not read the bible correctly, but that
God meant to tell us something, so we have to study and keep on studying.
God gave us the Bible and God gave us His Creation. That gives us a lot to
study thoroughly.
Jan de K.
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