Posted on 06/17/2005 8:33:25 AM PDT by blam
Isaiah 40:22 says, "It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth..." The Earth, though, is not a circle, it is an oblate spheroid.
Doesn't God have the power to create?
Doesn't He have the authority to create in His own way?
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.
Words without knowledge just about sums you up.
True, that might be a problem if the original language had been modern English but Isaiah was written in ancient Hebrew. Strong defines the Hebrew word meaning circle, circuit or compass. You may disagree, but to me that sounds like a good approximation of oblate spheroid in an ancient language. I'm not sure how advanced the ancient Hebrews were in mathematics, but if the earth is a sphere and you head east on a constant latitude you will make a circuit or circle back where you started. If the earth is flat, you have no such circuit or circular path.
The first thing you should do before concluding that, is determine if ancient Hebrew had a word for ball or sphere or similar. If they do, then your interpretation is unlikely. If they didn't then your interpretation will carry more weight. As it is, it sounds like you're reaching.
Yeah, except for the variation he's suggesting, for all primates that have been so studied including humans, gorillas and chimps, it isn't true.
He is suggesting that the liklihood of a set of small bones being of the same sex as a set of larger bones are greater then the bones to be an average male and an average female.
If he were arguing that we don't have enough australopithicine and other pre-human bones to make a statistically valid case, he'd have an argument. The probablilities you describe depend on the relative location of the means of the two groups. And it is true that we are dealing in probabilities, not certainties, as always in statistics. But the argument he seems to be making is more of the "you can't rule it out beyond a reasonable doubt" variety, which plays well to reporters whose last science class was in grade school somewhere, but is specious as a scientific argument.
He is basically saying that you can't neccessarliy claim that smaller bones are a different sex by size along and you need other data.
But that is the biggest difference between the long bones of adult male and female in our species and all those that are closely related. (In humans, we also have differences in skull, jaw and pelvis, but these bones haven't survived well in the australopithicine fossil recor).
Science doesn't deal in certainties in the way that faith does. You follow the probabilities (and if you are honest, you join all the others in trying to prove yourself wrong and advance to the next idea).
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
...hmmmm.
And who's the infallible judge on how precise this approximation need be? As we know pi is a repeating decimal. The only perfect representation of pi would take an infinite number of decimal places. How many decimal places do you demand of God to meet your standard of preciseness? If the infinite God decided for this purpose that this, the correct approximation to an integer, was a close enough approximation, who are we to demand more? As Deuteronomy 6:16 states:
Ye shall not tempt the LORD your God
As Deuteronomy 6:16 states: Ye shall not tempt the LORD your GodYeah, and Deuteronomy also says the appropriate punishment for being a stubborn and rebellious son is to be stoned to death.
The law of the rebellious son was part of the penal code of Israel under the law of Moses. The Bible never applies this mankind as a whole. So if I were you, I wouldn't be worried about it being applied in our enlightened world today where juvenile delinquents terrorize their peers and society as a whole. And if you note the context of the verse, this isn't dealing with a little son who merely balks at eating his vegetables. There is a reference to the son as a drunkard. This appears to be like a hard version of the habitual criminal law that we in the West have. And you have to admit, this law was more effective than ours in eliminating a menace 2 society before he left a trail of mayhem and innocent blood.
The first thing you should do before concluding that, is determine if ancient Hebrew had a word for ball or sphere or similar. If they do, then your interpretation is unlikely. If they didn't then your interpretation will carry more weight. As it is, it sounds like you're reaching.
I've not found a Hebrew word for sphere. But even if there is one, the figure in this verse might have been meant to refer to the circuit around the spherical earth. And an advanced Biblical knowledge of the nature of the globe is indicated by Job 26:7 where the earth is said to "hang on nothing".
In an article in Mathematics Magazine about the never-ending fascination with the number pi, Dario Castellanos wrote: "This is a field of endeavor that has attracted some of the greatest minds of mankind.... the studious pursuer of the many curious and fascinating properties which surround this number will forever meet new results and new algorithms related to 'the mysterious and wonderful pi.'"
The law of the rebellious son was part of the penal code of Israel under the law of Moses. The Bible never applies this mankind as a whole.That may be so, but if the bible indeed is God's word, he thought stoning a son to death at least was (a non-enlightened god?) an appropriate punishment in Israel (relativism?).
I have no problem with that. I'm not going to second guess God. If it's the word of God, it is irrelevant whether we like it or not. We answer to God, not the other way around. It certainly sends a message that respect for one's parents is deemed important to God.
Repeating what you said but attributing those qualities to you is unprovoked? How could it be.
Accuracy to an integer would be 31. Saying it is 30 is a pretty large error for one whose eye is on the sparrow and can count the number of hairs on your head.
But the earth is neither a circle, circuit or compass. These are all two dimensional constructs, and they simply do not indicate a three-dementional object.
Further, in Isaiah, at Isiah 22:18, it states, "He will surely violently turn and toss thee like a ball into a large country: there shalt thou die, and there the chariots of thy glory shall be the shame of thy lord's house." So there was no reason for the author of Isaiah to use circle as an analogy for oblate spheroid, when there was a more apt analogy used in the same book, unless the author believed the earth was flat, or, at least, did not know that the earth was an oblate spheroid.
Further, other verses in the bible indicate a flat earth, or at least indicate a shape other than an oblate spheroid:
You may disagree, but to me that sounds like a good approximation of oblate spheroid in an ancient language.
I disagree. It sounds nothing like an oblate spheroid. Using the word for "ball", as in Isiah 22:18, would be a good approximation, but not the word for "circle." Taking the bible literally, it means a circle, not an oblate spheroid. Unless you don't think the bible should be read literally.
I'm not sure how advanced the ancient Hebrews were in mathematics, but if the earth is a sphere and you head east on a constant latitude you will make a circuit or circle back where you started. If the earth is flat, you have no such circuit or circular path.
Not true. If you have a flat earth, and walk a path that has a fixed curve, you will make a circle back to where you started.
Job is a highly poetic book. To complain of such a figure of speech in a poetic book when today we hear the term "the four corners of the earth" is really reaching. Do you suppose anybody today who speaks of traveling the four corners of the earth really believes the earth is flat?
You are right about the dream in Daniel. It was a figurative description of a vision. And as far as the vision with Christ and the mountain, I think that just about everyone has understood that there was a vision involved. For one thing,if you go up to Mt Carmel, the highest mountain in the region, in that day you were not going to see anything but various Roman provinces of Palestine and Syria. But I don't see what the problem is. An account of a vision on a mountain is a long way from saying the earth is flat.
And no matter what the disagreement on what the Hebrew word in Isaiah 40:22 exactly means, it seems pretty clear that it does not say that the world is flat.
There's a difference between error and imprecision. To be more precise in your language you should have said. "Saying it is 30 is pretty imprecise for one whose eye is on the sparrow and can count the number of hairs on head."
If God is too imprecise for you here, I think that is between you and God. As for me, the very fact that God choose not to be more precise here is telling me that in this particular case, preciseness beyond the approximation is not needed.
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