cicerone imposter wrote:Rex, You can question what the biblical historians say about the age of the earth all you wish. Your argument is with them, not me.
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Universe's 6,000th birthday ...
Tim Radford
Friday October 22, 2004
Guardian
Britain's geologists are about to celebrate the fact that the universe is exactly 6,000 years old.
At 6pm tonight at the Geological Society of London, scientists will raise their glasses to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, who in 1650 used the chronology of the Bible to calculate the precise date and moment of creation.
Working from the book of Genesis, and risking some speculation on the Hebrew calendar, he calculated that it began at 6pm on Saturday October 22, 4004 BC.
Actually, he put the date at October 23, and then pedantically realised that time must have begun the night before, because the Bible said that "the evening and the morning were the first day."
The geologists selected the anniversary for a day-long conference on some of the fakes, frauds and hoaxes that have plagued geological and palaeontological research for centuries. "It's not that we think Archbishop Ussher's date was a fraud," said Ted Nield, the society's communications officer. "It's just that it was spectacularly wrong."
Dr Nield conceded, too, that in toasting the archbishop's calculations the geologists were committing another error. More than 6,000 years have passed since 4004 BC. The symmetry is only apparent. The date is a mere numerological reflection. The real anniversary passed unnoticed, in 1997.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
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Since you disagree with 'them,' it's up to you to show us otherwise.
My argument is with you too if you repeat and use their date of the Bible as "authoritative".
As with anything, humans make the Bible more complicated than it is...
Some think that only the first five books of the Bible are God inspired some take it further to the prophets and stop there. But the only way to bring the Bible to present times and date it is to take the genealogies all the way from Genesis to the first century.
Well we know that the Genealogies clearly go back 4000 years before Christ and it has been 2000 years since Christ thus this is where you get your 6000 years timeline of your biblical scholars... True there is an unbroken genealogy that spans 4000 years in the Bible and it has been 2000 years since that genealogy ended with the Crucifixion of Christ.... Thus the Bible calls us "one" generation in Christ (Brothers and sisters of Christ in the family of God.) now and not part of the "generations" of the past...
Well problems arise in dating the Bible timeline when certain people reject the latter books. But if the writer of your articles rejected the latter books then they could have not have definitively arrived at the 6000 year date. So one must assume they took the later books of the Bible (Matthew, Luke) as a credible source of biblical genealogy.
This is important... IF you deny all books after the first five there is really only a few relative points that set the times of the old testament. Egypt is mentioned, Ur in Mesopotamia and many other cities place the old testament times back only a few thousand years. But this is by no means a stretch of the imagination, millions of years...
The Bible is clever, it tells of the beginning after the beginning... and not in the beginning. It conceals the very beginning until later. The beginning told in Genesis is from a human perspective. But later in the Bible, Ezekiel (rejected by some) tells of a first heaven and earth...
In between Genesis verse 1 and 2 is perhaps billions of years... Scholars have been looking for this span of time but it has alluded them. The earth "was" without form should have been translated the earth "became" without form. This became denotes "time". Lucifer was a snake in Eden not God's most beautiful angel. How did this happen "time"... Lucifer fell (over billions of years) The earth "became" without form and void and "darkness was on the face of the deep" (so it had form and was not empty before it became empty, dark and formless) and God said let there be light... this was the beginning of the first day of the next 6000 years... This does not mean there was not an earth before this or that there was not billions of years before this. This just denotes "time" before Eden...
The flavor of Genesis (the second heaven and earth) is not, God created this and that and God created the earth but, God was just revamping something that had been created in Genesis 1:1 (in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth) billions of years earlier. God did not "create" the body in Eden but he "formed" it from the dust of the ground which denotes time and evolution.
So in conclusion the Bible leaves an ample space of time before Adam and Eve for humans to evolve from the "dust of the ground" over millions of years between verse 1 and 2 of Genesis. It is just that about 6000 years ago God decided to "create" a spirit in humans and revamp the world... that corresponds to the first true civilizations.
In the seven days of Genesis, God only created one thing... "spirit" in humans.
Eden is not a physical creation but a spiritual creation...
...and the earth "became"...
Your scholars should pay closer attention to what the Bible actually says...
