Re: [asa] Rudwick does it again (back to Adam)

"Surely there were many folks who mulled over the reasons for observing the "sinking" of ships as they move far from the shoreline...."

This is not as obvious as you imply. I visit the ocean regularly and have never noticed "sinking of ships." For one thing, by the time ships are just a few miles away, they look so small you'd be hard put to identify any apparent "sinking." This would be especially true of ancient ships, which looked small even close up. After five miles or so most people wouldn't even notice them. Apparent diminution in size would be interpreted as resulting from distance, not "sinking." Where I live there are big islands about 30 miles out to sea, and they don't appear to have "sunk" at all. You just can't see enough naked-eye detail at those distances to judge.

In short, ships are effectively out of sight before they would appear to "sink," and hills on distant shorelines don't appear to have "sunk" at all; hence no such simple observation of Earth's curvature.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Jim Armstrong<mailto:jarmstro@qwest.net>
  To: ASA<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 6:28 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Rudwick does it again (back to Adam)

  I'm not sure about what "common sense" might look like in the time, particularly among those familiar with the seas. With the horizon on a body of water a mere 13 miles (as I recall) away, and the existence of fishing boats and extended boat travel in the era, it absolutely could not be unknown that there was something at least curve-ish or even dome-ish to the shape of the surface of large bodies of water. Think about it. Surely there were many folks who mulled over the reasons for observing the "sinking" of ships as they move far from the shoreline, while the crew and passengers experienced no sinking at all. While I would not go so far as to assert that there was anything like a widespread popular understanding of a spherical earth, there must have been some thought about how to explain that non-flat behavior or the very familiar seas extending from their shorelines. The most common of sailors on the more significant seas would surely be hard to disabuse of the idea of a perfectly flat ocean. That said, it is admittedly still a leap to extend such speculations to a spherical earth.

  Or so it seemeth to me. JimA

  Dehler, Bernie wrote:
Hi Michael-

Are you suggesting that it was possible for reasonable people at the time of Moses to think that the Earth was shaped as a ball (not flat)? Why would they think such a thing, as it goes against common sense? We know better because of technology.

..Bernie

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Roberts [mailto:michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk<mailto:michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk>]
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 3:12 PM
To: Dehler, Bernie; asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
Subject: Re: [asa] Rudwick does it again (back to Adam)

I dont think we really know what people at the time of Moses thought. If
David Fouts is right (OT prof at Bryan) as he argued in an article in the
Journal of the Evangelical Theolo Society in about 1999 on exaggeration of
numbers in the OT, both of ages and census. He claimed this was common
practice and why the OT writers did this. It is accommodation worthy of
Seely! (and me!) The logic of his position is of course to do the same to
the 6 days.....

My impression is that people of OT times were more open than we might think,
but there is no research

Michael
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dehler, Bernie" <bernie.dehler@intel.com><mailto:bernie.dehler@intel.com>
To: <asa@calvin.edu><mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 9:46 PM
Subject: RE: [asa] Rudwick does it again (back to Adam)

The point is that the church fathers already started down a path of not
taking the Bible literally, unlike those at the time of Moses. Science was
awakening.

YEC's don't accept a flat earth- but surprisingly, some still go for a
firmament. They think there's a canopy of frozen water out there in space
beyond the planets and stars that we see.

..Bernie

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu<mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu> [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu<mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu>] On
Behalf Of gordon brown
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 1:24 PM
To: asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
Subject: RE: [asa] Rudwick does it again (back to Adam)

Bernie,

When I try to think of ways in which the science of the early church
fathers differed from that of the writers of the Old Testament, the shape
of the earth is the first thing that comes to my mind. The church fathers
should have known that it was spherical, and we assume that the OT writers
accepted a flat earth, which is consistent with their phraseology. However
that was not a factor in the questions that some fathers raised concerning
solar days in Genesis 1 and the Flood being global. Do you know of any YEC
teachings that are due to taking flat earth phraseology literally?

Gordon Brown (ASA member)

On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, Dehler, Bernie wrote:

  The church fathers had a degree of science. For example, they probably
knew the Earth wasn't flat, unlike the person who wrote Genesis and the
original audience for Genesis?

..Bernie

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu<mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu> [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu<mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu>] On
Behalf Of gordon brown
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2008 6:23 PM
To: asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
Subject: RE: [asa] Rudwick does it again (back to Adam)

On Fri, 15 Aug 2008, Dehler, Bernie wrote:

    What do the church fathers have to do with it? My point is that Genesis
was written by an ancient Jew, and the ancient Jews mostly took it
literal because it was the "science of the day." Most modern thinkers
don't take it literally now. Obviously there's a grey zone of transition
between the ancients and the modern. The church fathers are in a
transition point, I think.

..Bernie

      Bernie,

The point is that the church fathers were not influenced by modern
science. When they asked how there could be a solar day with no sun or
noted that wind does not lower sea level, the science they were using was
exactly the same as was known to the author of Genesis.

When YECs claim that interpretations contrary to theirs occurred only
after the rise of modern science, they are simply making assumptions
without doing the research. That also applies to others who don't question
this YEC claim.

Gordon Brown (ASA member)

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Received on Tue Aug 19 07:36:48 2008