Re: Source Code for OS?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <3A82B6C5.964534CC@inetnebr.com>,
Roy and/or Janet Miller  <millers@inetnebr.com> wrote:
 
> 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.
 
OK, but from a scientific point of view, the Earth being created 25,000
years ago is just as problematic as the Earth created 6,000 years ago.
 
> Old earth creationists usually accept that the data demands an
> age in excess of 4 billion years. And then there are the theistic
> evolutionists....
 
Hey!  Why can't all you Christians agree on such stuff?  :-)))))
 
>> 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.
 
Most reasonable Christians nowadays follow that line: a "day" in Genesis
isn't necessarily 86,400 SI seconds, but more likely a very long era.
 
But Genesis have other inconsistencies.  For instance light arrived
before the Sun was created.  Now, since the Sun is our primary source
of light, providing us with some 99.999999% of all the natural light
we get, where did that pre-solar light come from?
 
>> 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.
 
Didn't the Old Testament also consider it a deadly sin to sleep with
your siblings?
 
> Over time, of course, mutations would enter in, and such activity
> would be dangerous to the offspring.
 
...but not particularly so over just 6,000 or 25,000 years though.
 
As a matter of fact, sexual propagation is much more powerful in
changing the genetic pool than waiting for a mutation and hoping that
it'll produce an individual capable of breeding.  That's why almost
all species on Earth propagate sexually, and those few which still
don't, e.g. amoebae, remain quite primitive.  And that's also how man
created his pets, his cattle and his crops: by controlled breeding,
nut by hoping for some mutation which might be favourable.
 
> 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.
 
Marrying your cousin is legal again though, at least here in Sweden.
 
> 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.
 
In-breeding often don't immediately produce individuals which are
ill.  To note those ill effects there must be in-breeding at a larger
scale and over several generations.  Some people believe the reason
Pharaonic Egypt collapsed was excessive in-breeding among the
pharaos, which creatd leaders which were ill and thus made bad
decisions.
 
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
e-mail:  pausch at saaf dot se   or    paul.schlyter at ausys dot se
WWW:     http://hotel04.ausys.se/pausch    http://welcome.to/pausch