Starlight and Time by Russell Humphreys.
Posted on 08/24/2015 7:30:54 AM PDT by fishtank
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“Who says that’s a “fundamental tenet”?”
Cosmologists. It’s even called “the Cosmological principle”, for pete’s sake, because it is so fundamental!
I keep telling folks that, but they’d rather eat glass than admit their pet theories are wrong...
God created evolution to give foolish humans something to argue about.
...or your measurements leading you to believe in the something existing are flawed
There was no Big Bang. There will be no Big Crunch.
Everything recycles. Particle/Hydrogen/Star/Higher Elements/Black hole/Evaporation as particles.
The Universe isn’t “expanding”, it’s just twisting and turning, occasionally/probably even circling back on itself.
Lots of things resolve themselves in theory and math once you give up on the whole Bang/Crunch thing.
You’re well behind the curve. We looked at the Universe, and saw that - in fact - the distribution is not uniform/homogeneous. The “Cosmological Principle” has been modified/replaced with the obvious notion that _perfect_ uniformity isn’t, and that tiny perturbations in the beginning were sensibly magnified into vast structures.
And contrary to the principle of “see? reality isn’t what you thought it should be, therefore God” doesn’t trump cosmology, it refines cosmology. The structures you’re pointing at to prove Man’s error & ignorance are the very same structures that destroy the “Young Earth” theory. You can’t point at a 5,000,000,000-light-year-wide structure and say it justifies a 10,000-year-old Universe; it may prove “the Cosmological Principle” wrong (yes, we know, and we’ve already improved our theories accordingly), it also proves the “Young Earth” theory wrong (no, you haven’t come up with a sensible theory reconciling the two).
Tonight, go look at the sky.
Tomorrow, explain to us how all that fits in a Universe 20,000 light-years wide.
Tomorrow night, go look at the sky again.
Wednesday, explain to us how big the Universe need be to fit all that stuff in it.
Thursday, go look at the Earth.
Friday, explain to us what all this stuff down here has been doing during the time all that stuff up there came to where it is now.
Next week, explain why everything wasn’t willed into existence by God 20 minutes before your explanation, and why Him doing so 10,000 years earlier was. (Hint: the Bible _doesn’t_ say “10,000 years”. It explained, in a couple pages, creation as best it could be understood by a goat-herder - which didn’t include saying it all started 6,000 years prior. Maybe your interpretation of what wasn’t said is wrong?)
[BTW: yes, I _do_ think God created it all - just in a way exceeding what a couple pounds of wet grey cells can comprehend. You don’t know everything; heck, you still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.]
Wonders beyond our understanding.
Amazing, wonderful, fantastic, amazing, ect. ect, ect.
HIS plan, Purpose, and Project.
Let us PRAISE HIM!
Legitimate question!
1. Historical accuracy: The Bible gives historical reference points, and archeology eventually backs it up with extra Biblical sources, e.g. King David, Sodom & Gomorrah, the Hittites, etc.
2. Manuscript evidence: The Bible is proven consistent historically, with ancient manuscripts agreeing with current ones >95% of the time, and we have numerous examples, e.g. The Dead Sea Scrolls.
3. Internal consistency
4. Agreement with PROVABLE science. The science (so called) of origins of the universe, life and man, are conjecture, and do a poor job fitting existing evidence. e.g the hydrological cycle, the circle of the Earth, the reasonableness of the dimensions of the ark, etc.
5. Human Nature: the Bible illustrates man, heroes and villains alike, in their sinful depravity (why did not the scribes omit David's adultery, or Ham's perversion, or Jacob's deceit?) And it still explains human nature.
6. Unchanging: Unlike the modern science of Origins, the Bible has asserted the same thing for 3.5 Millennnia. The "Big Bang" conjecture will eventually be discarded for some newer.
7. Fulfilled Prophecy: just on the birth, life and death of the Messiah in overwhelmingly convincing.
So, why do I believe it is EXACTLY what God told Moses?
A. The Bible attests that Jesus was born of a virgin, was sinless, was crucified, dead and buried, and rose on the 3rd day, according to the scriptures. The disciples all were martyred confessing this to be true (John survived only to be exiled), and they were in a position to verify these facts!
B. As such, I believe Jesus was the Son of God, and what he said and preached was reliably recorded in the Gospels. Manuscript evidence is overwhelming here, with >25,000 examples extant, more than ANY other historical document before 1600.
C. Jesus said
Matthew 5:18 "For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished."
The first 5 books of the Bible are known as the Pentateuch, or, Books of the Law. Jesus is here confirming the validity and accuracy of these books, which contains the aforementioned quotes regarding creation.
So, I ask you, why would you assert it is not a precise communication from God?
“We looked at the Universe, and saw that - in fact - the distribution is not uniform/homogeneous. The “Cosmological Principle” has been modified/replaced with the obvious notion that _perfect_ uniformity isn’t, and that tiny perturbations in the beginning were sensibly magnified into vast structures.”
Oh really? Got any citations that the Cosmological principle was “modified/replaced”? That would be pretty stunning if true, because, especially after Einstein, a whole lot of cosmology hinges on this very principle.
So, you are asserting that your knowledge and understanding far exceeds that of Moses? You may be confusing your access to Wikipedia and Astronomy magazine as knowledge, understanding and wisdom. It is a common myth of today that we confuse access to information with intelligence.
So there’s no actual evidence that God sat down at his desk and wrote the Bible, or recorded it in any way such as we do today like putting it in a memory chip, hard disk, or printing a hard copy?
Doesn’t the evidence show that it is actually a written recollection (by humans) of oral tradition?
Look up “spacetime foam” for starters.
Seems some wantonly overlook the “beyond our understanding” part.
Space is there, it’s big, and dismissing the obvious is silly. There is much we don’t understand, but that doesn’t justify the absurd (to wit: all that fitting in a cosmically tiny space).
I cannot imagine a sammich, my wife has to make one...
I also cannot imagine a country on this earth that would elect the current loser into the WH not only once, but twice. I am not imaginative enough I guess.
Yes, I assert a common schoolchild may know more about astronomy than Moses. He knew nothing of planets, stars, orbital mechanics, spectrum analysis, relativity (heck, I was rattling off “E=mc^2” in 3rd grade), redshift, etc. For the vast number of specks of light he did see, there were orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude more that he didn’t. For the movement of the night lights he saw, he didn’t know how to predict their movement accurate to millimeters & millennia.
What he DID understand is that God’s creation is far beyond his comprehension, and that a couple pages of goatherder-understandable text plus a genealogy does not prove the age of the Universe, and that said imputed age does not negate the reality of all we see and rationally interpret.
Sounds like you don’t have any citations.
Starlight and Time by Russell Humphreys.
5 seconds on Google with the phrase I gave you will give more citations than you can consume.
If you’re more interested in a “gotcha” than actually learning about post-cosmological-uniformity theories in light of comprehensive studies of large-scale astronomical structures, then I’m not going to do your research for you because you don’t want knowledge, you want to feel smug in your self-imputed wisdom (and I recall an old book that has some sharp words about that...).
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