Moishe3rd wrote: Many Jews, including some rabbis, hold that the universe is 5,763 years old.
So do many Christians, the geneology drek started with Archbishop Usher from the Catholic church around 1650.
Quote:The view of the scientific community - that the universe is roughly 15 billion years old, give or take a couple billion - is dismissed in one of two ways. The first approach is to say that the science is faulty. Even the scientists will readily admit that science is constantly improving itself, and today's conventional wisdom becomes tomorrow's superstition.
Today's superstitious religious beliefs become tomorrow's metaphors and priorities on the "to revise" list.
For example the religious attempts to date the earth through the scriptures has been so daft as to even try to do it by the minute.
The father of this date-the-earth-using-geneology-in-scriptures approach (Archbishop Usher) went so far as to name Sunday, October 23rd, 4004, beginning at sunset of the 22nd as the specific time of creation.
Of course this religious belief was obviously flawed, the inexact nature of days alone make the math not add up even if all the spectacular brainfarts on the way to that proclamation were true.
I'm going to address this earth age question yet again. I think monger already has in this thread but judging by the spectacular deposits to come it didn't sink in.
Ok, first of all this "dismiss science" is really all your going to be left with, as your other ways around science's contradiction of the Bible's clear aging of the earth is problematic because of the Bible itself combined with science, so you'll ultimately just have to ignore science with those two routes.
So before I carp those old ploys you use next a word on this one.
"Dismiss science" is really one of the more silly aspects of Christianity. Dismissing it as flawed and citing examples of science correcting itself and revising its positions is ironic because it's an example of science showing a lot more interest in truth than the fundamentalist religious folk.
Sincerely, you would be better off taking the route of so many who cling to primitive beliefs and attempting to incorporate science itself into it.
It'd work like this, you incorporate evolution. Claim it's God's MO or somesuch.
While it smacks of revisionism and compromise it's a lot less ugly than the basis "dismiss science" line of defense that many religious folk have against scientific progress and discovery that are increasingly incompatible with primitive belief systems.
Quote:The second approach is to say that G-d created the universe looking old.
It's not just looks you know, there are things indicative of aging beyond just "looking" full grown.
But let's have fun. Did God also make light travel faster for a wee bit for no reason at all except to provide refuge for those who dismiss science? Because when he made the stars less than 7000 years ago (according to the scriptures) he'd have had to do something like that or the universe would be very small.
Of course, you can just dismiss the science behind the evaluation of the waves of light and distancing too if you want. Like I said, all these superstitions will ultimately just have to dismiss science and knowledge.
Here's a good rhetorical argument in case you need it. It's daft but judging from these other ideas that isn't a problem for ya. ;-)
"If scientists can't even agree on how tall Mount Everest is you expect me to take their word on the distance of stars?"
Quote:There is, however, another approach: the scientists are right (or at least close), and Scripture is being misinterpreted. It should be noted from the outset that the six days of Creation Week cannot possibly be literal 24-hour days, because the Sun wasn't created until the fourth day (Genesis 1:14-19), and there cannot be literal evenings and mornings as we know them without the Sun.
This is one of the oldest attempts to reconcile these primitive beliefs with science.
When science started making these dated beliefs look absurd people started coming up with these kinds of revisionist positions.
Before science made creation look idiotic the days were taken literally, but when knowledge starts making superstition look bad superstition must evolve because the adherents were getting laughed at too much.
So evolve it does, or at least tries cause that's a dirty word for many of the superstitious folk and we get attempts to employ the ambiguity of language and claim that the "days" are metaphors for "eons".
This resonates with some of the more gullible religious folk, as the scriptures have long had metaphor ascribed to many parts of it. Why shouldn't metaphor be a patch for when it's demonstratably false?
Well maybe it can work elsewhere, but you'll still have to resort to "dismiss science" here.
This is an old argument that theists with intellectual fancies tend to come and use only once here, and since we've been there and done that I'll quote from the exchange I had with Maliagar:'
Craven de Kere wrote:As to your assertion that the days could be symbolic of greater time periods this is a famously refuted move in the history of this debate. The "grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself" that God created predates both the sun, signs, seasons, "the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly" etc etc.
If the time frame were much more than a day the separation of these ecosystems would not survive under the laws of nature of God's creation. Take your pick.
That is why that line of defense has long been abandoned by most scholarly theists in favor of increasingly ambiguous arguments.
The vague "intelligent design" line of belief is currently the most defensible position theists maintain.
Bringing these famously refuted arguments to the table can be embarassing, but hey, you are least provide options.
Unfortunately they are all equally embarassing, if not equally infamous with famous refutation.
I haven't the patience to go through all the ones you include below, you really do collate a lot of alternatives to science and reality, I like the one you include that moves the eons approach to Adam and Eve (that's as far as I got) and not creation. It's a nice evolution when the old arguments get refuted.
Thing is, the moving of the goal posts and the struggle to revise these holes in the scriptures are kinda transparent. It shows that the constant is obdurate belief and what has to be dismissed will be dismissed and what has to be revised will be revised... except for the primitive belief system, that stays.
