Re: concordance & genesis (edited)

Paul Seely wrote (16 Dec 2003):
> Levy Bruhl talks about people who are "inhabitants of seashores." He says, in the Mortlock Islands. "… in reply to our question as to what land lay beyond these islands, the native drew a line to the west of them and explained in a very clear and simple way that yonder, beyond the Paloas Islands, the dome of the sky was too close to the earth to permit navigation; the utmost that could be done was to crawl along the ground or swim in the sea."…Among the Melanesians of the Loyalty Group, "to the mind of the Lifuan, the horizon was a tangible object at no great distance. Many of the natives thought that if they could only reach it they would be able to climb up to the sky." These statements implicitly reflect belief in a flat earth.
> The evidence, as the above examples show, is that people who live on a sea shore believe the earth is flat.

> The same thing is true of people who live on large plains. The Lakota Indians (Plains Indians) tell a story about the creation of the earth that is a typical "earth-diver" story with the earth being spread out upon the water. It is a flat earth, not a sphere. As Levy Briuhl said, "In North America, in Indian belief, the earth is a circular disc usually surrounded on all sides by water and the sky is a solid concave hemisphere coming down at the horizon to the level of the earth".
> The evidence is that people who live on a large plain also believe the earth is flat.

> As for the sophisticated cultures of the ancient Near East, including the Israelites, I have provided evidence in my "The Geographical Meaning of 'earth' and 'sea' in Genesis 1:10" that they all believed the earth was flat. <

PR: Ok, you provide evidence that there were at least some among those
peoples who believed the earth to be flat, whereas, apart from
Pythagoras and Eratosthenes, I don't have any evidence that there also
were some among them who didn't. This makes my argument somewhat weaker.
But notice, the two claims are not complementary statements, like "A"
and "not A". I never claimed that _all_ believed in a spherical earth,
and you cannot claim that _all_ believed in a flat one. Furthermore, the
claims are not symmetrical, in that you say that _they_ _could not_ know
the earth to be spherical, but I didn't claim they could. What I did
claim was that _God_, while inspiring one (or some) of his prophets to
write Scripture intended for all times, _could_ gently guide him to
avoid a formulation nailing him down on a flat earth (pun intended).

>>PR: I don't question the claim that there were many people in those days who believed in a flat earth, even some poets and historians ;-). The question is how reliable these sources are for proving that _all_ Greeks of those times did so. There even appear to be modern authors who claim all ancient Israelites believed the earth to be flat... Misinterpreting _the_ worldview of sophisticated ancient peoples is of course even easier than those of contemporary "primitive" peoples, with whom one at least can talk directly, if one has learned their languages thoroughly. <<

> PS: The problem with your approach is that you set aside all of the evidence falsifying your position and then appeal to rationalistic speculation to support your view. This is the same thing the YEC's do. Just because you and they can imagine a scenario where your theories will hold up is not the same thing as actually having evidence to support your theory. You can prove any idea no matter how absurd if imagination can be used as evidence.
> Where is the evidence that anyone before Pythagoras or more clearly Plato believed in a spherical earth? Being able to imagine that such people existed is not evidence, Without evidence you can claim no more than that you have a very nice private world.<

PR: You are claiming too much. You have not shown that I ignore
evidence, at least not after having been given it. But by comparing me
with YEC, you ignore lots of evidence about my worldview, approach and
motivation, which I have given many times on this list and in PSCF.
Please try to understand what I am saying, without imputing to me things
I haven't thought or said!

Peter

-- 
Dr. Peter Ruest, CH-3148 Lanzenhaeusern, Switzerland
<pruest@dplanet.ch> - Biochemistry - Creation and evolution
"..the work which God created to evolve it" (Genesis 2:3)