Re: ANE cosmology; was : A profound disturbance found in Yak butter.

On 6/4/06, Robert Schneider <rjschn39@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
> "In the beginning God created a singularity of infinite density. Then God
> said, 'Let there be Bang, and let space--time come into existence.' And it
> was so. And a point the size of a needle with a density of 10 to the 90th
> power cubic centimeters appeared, with a temperature of 10 to the 32nd
> kelvins. And God said, "Let there be inflation.' And it was so. And the
> universe expanded beyond the first 10 x -43 of a second. Then, at 10 to
> the -10 of a second, God said, "Let radiation appear..." Now, in God's
> name,
> what Hebrew would make any sense whatsoever of that as the story of
> creation? Why would anybody pass such a creation story down orally for
> centuries until sometime in the very early first millenium BC someone
> began
> to write the oral stories down in Hebrew? The storyteller might as well be
> speaking a non-semetic language like Hittite; that wouldn't make any less
> sense.

Besides, God might well expect or know that we human beings, as we observe
the cosmos, might some day in a future distant from ours, offer a better
cosmological model and historical reconstruction than Big Bang. What then?

This post set me thinking quite some time after it was written, and I think
I am thinking along the same lines. If I am, then Glenn's question, which
he complains no one is prepared to answer, is perhaps unanswerable anyway.

As Robert points out, maybe one day the Big Bang will be superseded by a
different theory, or maybe one day Inflation will be seen as as laughably
wrong as we now see the concept of the solid hemispherical dome above the
flat earth in the Genesis narrative (I believe the Hebrew word is "raquia",
meaning "firmament").

So, in our current state of knowledge, we might wish that the creation
account was closer to what we now know - "raquia" is a silly concept that we
know is wrong - we _ believe_ Big Bang/inflation is right. But if Inflation
turns out to be just as wrong (just as the scientific concept of the aether
turned out to be wrong), then a 24th Century Glenn would ask the same
questions about the Genesis text "accomodated" to our 21st century science.

So herein lies the problem; we can say in a sacred text that God created
"all this", and that's a theological statement. But as soon as we attempt
to describe "all this" in plain language, then our own scientific knowledge
comes in to describe it, and all properly scientific theories have to be
falsifiable to be scientific, and therefore may turn out to be "wrong".

This doesn't answer Glenn's question as to how we distinguish between
Christian theology and Great Green Slug-ism, or Mormonism or whatever, but
it does, IMO, show that such a question may be unanswerable - certainly so
in terms of evaluating the scientific knowledge in an origins account. In
the end, it has to be a leap of faith & the Holy Spirit is involved. Yes,
I'm sure a Mormon would say that also.

A couple of quotes came to mind whilst thinking about this post. One from
T.S. Eliot (Ash Wednesday, I believe):

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

It seems to me that there is scientific knowledge (tells you there isn't a
solid dome above a flat earth), but reducing everything to that level loses
the wisdom encapsulated in Genesis 1: that God made it all.

Secondly, I think the opening of Psalm 19 shows that the proper acquisition
of knowledge comes from a contemplation of the heavens:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
       the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

 2 Day after day they pour forth speech;
       night after night they display knowledge.

I'm no expert on the correct interpretation of this Psalm, but could it not
be that contemplation of the Heavens gives rise to knowledge? In other
words we do science to get knowledge of how God's universe works.
This psalm also uses "raquia" for sky.
Received on Thu Jun 8 16:46:24 2006