A great interview with this loony here:
http://www.metro.co.uk/fame/intervie...&in_page_id=11
Unusually a tabloid journo actually gets a bit skeptical with him:
"You say the second ‘Let there be light…’ refers to the evolution of the eye but you edited out the rest of the line, which clearly refers to the Sun, Moon and stars. There’s no mention in Genesis of the evolution of the eye.
Um, OK. I’ll probably have a look at this in more detail again. "
"it’s the strongest evidence for the existence of God I’ve come across. I’m not sure how you would describe it.
Flawed.
Well, that’s an opinion and that’s something I’m interested in. "
Parker does go on to diss creationism so he's not totally hatstand, but then spoils it slightly by promoting religion over atheism for no logical reason.
There are a few amusing comments now:
Thank you so much Graeme Green! I hope Dr Parker fails to sell a single copy and is treated for his dementia.
- Marc Watson, newcastle upon tyne, uk
And more in the paper copy of today's Metro:
Graeme Green managed to pull Dr Parker's new book apart in 60 seconds flat. I may now have to get a copy just for entertainment value.
- Anthony, Manchester
This isn't the first time that I've noticed a less woo attitude from The Metro than you get from most tabloids.
That's the great thing about the Bible, it's so flexible!
Yes ... tear out the requisite number of pages and they can be used block most small draughts.Originally Posted by Mulder
What best-selling book from the last two or three years could his possibly resemble from the front cover?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Genesis-Enig...9559004&sr=1-1
Anything to do with the Bible, even if it is against it, always seems to sell well. Whatever you think of the author, he knows his market.
The thing I find interesting in Genesis is that if you leave out the God aspect, it is pretty accurate in the order of events. I mean someone a very long time ago sat down and figured a lot of stuff out way a head of Darwin. I don't mean a God, I mean some person. I think that's pretty impressive.
Maybe Darwin got some of his ideas for theories from the bible?
You mean the universe first, then plants, then animals, then people? Seems to me to be a predictable way of thinking.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...r=1&version=31
So, Genesis says that "vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it" was produced and then " lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth."1 Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds." And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.
14 And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
So plants and stuff were created before the sun and the moon?
I don't think so.
I agree that it is fairly impressive for some Bronze Age priests to have come up with this stuff, but as chaggle points out it isn't entirely accurate, just closer than, say, the Norse mythology.
Darwin came from a Christian family and was familiar with the Bible, but I don't think it would be reasonable to imply that "Darwinism" came from the Bible, it was far more about overturning previous ideas than copying them.
So, Tony, you think it was predictable for ancient man to predict that life evolved from the sea before on land? I have to be honest, I'd never have figured that out with it real investigation. And if they really investigated, and then wrote it down then it's kinda scientific isn't?
Haggie: I think we both know that light was created before the plants etc. You are referring to the second 'let there be light'. So you are being a little unfair. The planets came later to 'divide' the day from night and to create the seasons. Wink. I'm just musing.
Bob: I'm not implying he deliberately copied ideas from the bible. But if he was introduced to the bible at an early age it could have been lodged in his sub-conscious, couldn't it?
Last edited by Balloonbasket; 7th August 2009 at 01:55 PM.
I've heard that theory a lot. Does it really stack up?
Here's the order from the bible
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 Now the earth was [a] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
6 And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
9 And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear." And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters he called "seas." And God saw that it was good.
11 Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds." And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.
14 And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
20 And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." 21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth." 23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.
24 And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, [b] and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
29 Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food." And it was so. 31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.
2 By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested [a] from all his work. 3 And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
Here's the order of things from Genesis 1
Day 1: Heavens, Earth, Water, Light
Day 2: Sky
Day 3: Land And Sea - terrestrial plants
Day 4: Sun moon and stars
Day 5: Sea Creatures and Birds
Day 6: Land Animals, Man
So when did these things actually happen.
Day 1
Heavens
Well it depends what you mean by the heavens, if you mean God's home, the place where angels live and where good people go when they die, then if you ask me that never happened. BUt we agreed to take God out of it and just look at the order of events. So we can ignore it.
Or
We can say this refers to creating the universe. Science's best guess is that this happened 13.7 billion years ago. So we can give full marks to the goat hearder for getting that right. (Not many marks on offer for such an easy question though)
Earth
Well apparently this cooled from molten rock around 4.5 Billion years ago. Radiometric dating on the oldest earth rocks place them at about 3.9 billion years old but the earth's sytem of plate techtonics means that our crust is contantly being remolten and regenerated. Moon rocks and asteroids which are thought to have coolled at the same time as the earth started cooling place this date at 4.5 billion years ago.
Water
It's just stated that we have water. The limiting factor for the first water in the universe would be oxygen. Immediately after the big bang it was too hot even for atoms to form, but when they did. It was mainly only hydrogen with some small amounts of helium, lithium and berylium. No oxygen. For water to be created we first need oxygen and that forms in the core of stars late in thier life cycle. Of course oxygen in the core of a star is going to be in the form of a plasma it isn't going to bind with hydrogen to create water. FOr that to happen this stuff needs to be redistributed. It appears that these early stars were huge, burnign brigh with short lifecycles. The first novas were within the first billion years after the big bang.
Light
First light would have been straight away after the big bang Hot photons everywhere. We can still see it. Though it's been hugely redshifted, as the cosmic microwave backround. The light that makes up this pattern - is 13.7 billion years old.
Day 2
Sky
Never Happened. We've go on Day 1 mention of water being everywhere and God making a gap in it so that there's water up in heaven and water covering the earth but a gap in between. Science just has no equivalent for this happening. If we go above the sky we just don#t find the heavens to be flooded. Not now and as we can tell it's never been tha case.
Day 3
Land and Sea
Again, as far as we know this didn't happen. There doesn't appear to have been any time at whihc the surface of the earth was completely covered with water. There may however have been a time when there was no liquid water on the earth. How the earth got it's water is still a contentious issue but ti might have been from comets during the a late heavy bombardment starting 4.1 Billion Years ago and lasting til 3.8 billion years ago.
Terrestrial Plants
Agian this depends what you mean by plants. Single cells algea formed a scum, on the land maybe 1.2 billion years ago but it wasn't intil about 500 million years ago that terrestrial plants appeared.
Day 4
Sun
Our miodels have the Sun formmong beofre the planets start to cool. The Cooling of the planets was ab out 4.5 billion years ago from radiometric dating. That puts the sun forming at 4.57 billion years ago
Moon
As we've already stated, the moon started to cool 4.5 billion years ago. There's been some debate about whether it was originally part of the earth and was ejected after some early blobby impact of whether ti formed elsewhere and was captured. If the latter then the date of capture is more relavent to when it appeared in the sky. However bad news for those who'd want to place the appearance of the Moon after the appearand of terrestrial plants. The current concensus appears to be that the moon was ejected from the earth in a giant impact before both started to cool so we're stuck with the moon havign been there for at least 4.5 billion years
Stars
These are though to have formed about 100 million years after the Big Bang, so 13.6 billion years ago.
Day 5
Sea Creatures
Make the waters teem with living creatures. Sounds like we're talking here about the cambrian explosion. 600 million years ago. If we look 900 million years ago we find the evolution of multicellularity, Collonies of single celled creatures becoming structured individuals. Some of these structure are sponges, which date from 800 million years ago, by 700 million years ago we get some small flatworms swimming about but there's these, jellyfish but not much too much variety in sea creatures unitl 600 million years ago when all the major body shapes we see today and a whole lot of freaky otherness get tried out.
Birds
Birds evolved from feathered dinosaurs in a gradual process, it's sometimes tricky to find a demarcation point where their lineage stops being dinosaur and becomes bird instead, it all becomes a matter of definition. Traditionally Archaeopteryx has been thought of as the first bird and she lived around 150 million years ago
Day 6
Land animals.
The first creatures to collonise the land may have been in the form of slugs around 510 million years ago. We have trails. These were followed by myriapods (like centipedes and millipedes) from 430 million years ago. Our first ancestor to set foot (or lobed fin) on land may have been Tikaalik some 375 million years ago.
Man
Again no fixed demarkation point. We split with Chimps some 5 to 7 million years ago. The first modern man - homo sapiens sapiens is generally accepted to date from 200 thousand years ago.
So a recap of the order in the bible
Day 1: Heavens, Earth, Water, Light
Day 2: Sky
Day 3: Land And Sea - terrestrial plants
Day 4: Sun moon and stars
Day 5: Sea Creatures and Birds Day 6: Land Animals, Man
I won't necessarily hold the bible authors to the order they mention stuff within a particluar day.
The currently understood order from science
Heavens and Sky unclear
Light 13.7 bya
Stars 13.6 bya
Water 12.7 bya
Sun 4.57 bya
Earth and Moon 4.5 bya
Land And Sea 4.1 bya
Sea Creatures 600 mya
terrestrial plants 500 mya
Land Animals 430 mya
Birds 150 myaMan 0.2 mya
So it's not a bad guess from our primitive goat herder. Putting birds after land animals was an indisputable goof, likewise having the earth before stars is another one. There'sa few that can be squeezed in by appologists. The bible has plants before sea creatures. If we count the first plants on land as the fist time a single celled photosynthesizing algea dried clung to a rock one billion years ago that was indeed before the first sea creature on the proviso that we use a double standard and only count multicellular sea creatures the earliest of which were 900 million years ago. Unfortunately theres no reasonable way to squeeze the sun and moon and stars in between these two dates.
But we tend to be rather snooty towards our ancestors. They're not really any more stupid than us, they just didn't have the internet. The scribes of 4,000 years ago were no more likely to think that sea creatures came before the sea than any reasonably intelligent person today.
The limited accuracy they did manage can easily be explained by a combination of them not actually being stupid and a not unexpected amount of luck in their guesswork. We certainly don't need to resort to divine intervention in order to explain it. Whihc is a good thing because if we were to assume divine inspiration for this order of event how come a God made such glaring mistakes?
Then what you make of Genesis 2 is up to you. Are the events at the begining supposed to happen after Day 7 or is it a recap like we see at the begining of a new episode: "Previously on CSI: Jehovah"
Adam and Eve 4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens- 5 and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth [b] and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth [c] and there was no man to work the ground, 6 but streams [d] came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground- 7 the LORD God formed the man [e] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
8 Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. 9 And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. 11 The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin [f] and onyx are also there.) 13 The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. [g] 14 The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
18 The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."
19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. 20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
But for Adam [h] no suitable helper was found. 21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs [i] and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib [j] he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
23 The man said,
"This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called 'woman, [k] '
for she was taken out of man."
24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
Because we get a slightly different order here
earth
heavens
streams
man
plants
trees
beasts
birds
woman
And this one is very very wrong...
Last edited by Matt; 7th August 2009 at 04:48 PM.
Just a quickie cos i'm still reading your post, and I won't be able to remember everything. Err, water above the earth? Science does establish this by confirming water on other plantets. I'm not saying this is what the bible is referring to but it's a fact, isn't it?
And I think you read your Genesis incorrectly. God did make the 'fowl' before the land animals. So that is only a 'goof' on your part.
Back to reading your post. wink.
If we are to believe God was the inspiration behind this etc......thought we were leaving God out of it? Just because you guys decided i'm a theist, or troll, (gee, i almost forgot theists aren't human) doesn't make me one. I just appreciate everyone's opinion, and this kind of thinking got my thread moved. lol. What does that say about the mentality of atheists?, or is it just sceptics?, or b.....? hmmm, better hush with the truth now.
Last edited by Balloonbasket; 7th August 2009 at 07:26 PM.
I didn't say that - and anyway, as Matt has pointed out, there are significant anomalies within Genesis. I'm not aware that it deals with evolution anywhere, though.
I think it is natural for early man to have considered that mankind was the top of the tree (don't people always think they are the best?), and they didn't need to be geniuses to work out that if carnivores ate herbivores, herbivores must have come first and harbivores must have found something ready to eat, so plants had to come before that.
You ever heard of a Trifid? (Not sure I spelt that right?) That's a plant that ate dinosaurs, so maybe dinosaurs came first? lol.
Seriously, i'm not saying anyone on here is wrong. I'm just learning as I go. And you people do have a lot to teach. It's just maybe the way some express themselves. Err, not meaning you.
Oh, and, Matt. Thanks for the cut and paste job. Not meaning to upset you or anyone else on here. I'm sure you know more about the bible than me. I do find the site interesting as it covers subjects i like and hopefully we'll all get on together? (One way or another , lol.)
Last edited by Balloonbasket; 7th August 2009 at 08:29 PM.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks