Re: Source Code for OS?

[Roy and/or Janet Miller <millers@inetnebr.com>]

Paul Schlyter wrote:

>
> > There are two problems with your statement. The first shows that your
> > own understanding of Genesis is as flawed as those who believe the
> > universe is only 25,000 years old.
>
> Wasn't it some 6,000 years?  To the Jews, it's now year 5761, and
> they count their years from the "creation of the world" according to
> Genesis.  And over the years I've encountered a number of fundamental
> Christians who've seriously claimed the world is only some 6,000
> years old.

Young earth creationists usually acknowledge that the genealogies in the Bible
have gaps (some have known gaps - due to the fact that the Hebrew words
"father" and "begot" can be used to mean "ancestor" and "forefather". As a
result, they are often willing to say that the earth is up to 25,000 years old,
but not older. Old earth creationists usually accept that the data demands an
age in excess of 4 billion years. And then there are the theistic
evolutionists....

> One of them even published papers, where he attempted to
> "explain" how light could travel over billions of light years in only
> 6,000 years (his idea was that light travelled millions of times
> faster than now only a few thousand years ago, and then "slowed down"
> to the corrent light speed just when we became able to measure the
> speed of light).

I've seen some work in that area. I make two notes: 1) Many young earth
creationists are scientists trained by some of the leading universities in the
English speaking world, 2) Getting a "D" in high school physics, and an "A" in
college algebra, doesn't qualify me to judge  the merits or demerits of the
science of either side of the issue. Where I do know what I'm talking about,
however, I find that the Bible, understood from the perspective of the original
audience, doesn't demand the young earth position, but would still be true
whether the earth is 25,000 or 4 billion years old, because it isn't speaking
to those issues.

>
>
> From where did you get your figure 25,000 years?
>

<snip>

>
> BTW there is another serious problem with Genesis:
>
> First Adam appeared, then Eve appeared.  They got two sons, Kain and
> Abel.  Kain killed Abel.  Later they got a third son, Seth.
>
> Suddenly, out of nowhere, Kain and Seth have wives, with whom they get
> kids -- and out of that mankind grew.
>
> From where did the wives of Kain and Seth come ?  There were no other
> humans on Earth at that time, according to Genesis....

Well, Genesis 5:4 says that Adam and Eve had many sons and daughters.
Remembering that Genesis has a thematic development rather than a
chronological, we can't be sure when those other offspring were born. If you
grant that God did create Adam and Eve directly, pro-creation with siblings who
have no deponent genes would not be harmful to the offspring. Over time, of
course, mutations would enter in, and such activity would be dangerous to the
offspring. Abraham married his half sister, Isaac married his uncle's
granddaughter, and Jacob married his first cousin. Later, the Mosaic
legislation forbad such close unions.

Of course, I have a pure bred Kheeshond dog here, who's grandfather (or was it
her great-grandfather?) is also her father. She doesn't seem to have any
genetic difficulty.

Roy