Willtor wrote:
For me, once I tried to think of what the world would have looked like to someone back then, without our current scientific understanding, the fact that most Bibles clearly and repeatedly describe us as living on a flat earth under a hard, bowl shaped dome with little lights in it made a lot of sense (that's what the world looks like, after all). This especially made sense of the otherwise perplexing "waters above" line.
In the bronze age, think of what a person saw that was big and blue, you saw the sky, of course, but you couldnt reach it to see what it was made of. You saw large lakes, and the ocean that were big and blue. You may have seen bird that was blue, or a bead or bauble, but the only things that were big and blue (especially things you saw out in nature, not made by humans), were water. From that, you look up and see the big, blue sky, and even though you cant touch it to check, its obvious that it is made of water. Why doesnt the water come crashing down, like any other water thrown up into the air? Well, God must have made a clear, hard dome to keep it there. This must have been as obvious as the observation that fires are hot and that rocks are hard. Similarly, it must have been obvious that the Earth is flat (go out and look if you arent sure) and that the sun went around the earth (go out and look if you arent sure).
To communicate to people in that situation, an omniscient God would naturally adopt language that spoke to their world, artfully written as a metaphor that could also fit the world after more was known. The waters above the firmament seems like an obvious observation of what, in nature, is big and blue.
With that, I see Genesis as an intentional metaphor, and there is no need for us to try to come up with convoluted, silly explanations for (or try to fervently ignore) the "waters above" line in Genesis. The idea of our universe in a vast ocean doesnt fit with the evidence from physics, where the calculations show that wed all be crunched in a massive black hole if the universe were a bubble in a vast ocean. Our current scientific view doesnt contradict simple math, while the universe in a vast ocean does. But that's OK, because God can have one written for one time, with the understanding that we'd be adult enough to understand a simple metaphor today.
Have a good day-
-Papias
For me, once I tried to think of what the world would have looked like to someone back then, without our current scientific understanding, the fact that most Bibles clearly and repeatedly describe us as living on a flat earth under a hard, bowl shaped dome with little lights in it made a lot of sense (that's what the world looks like, after all). This especially made sense of the otherwise perplexing "waters above" line.
In the bronze age, think of what a person saw that was big and blue, you saw the sky, of course, but you couldnt reach it to see what it was made of. You saw large lakes, and the ocean that were big and blue. You may have seen bird that was blue, or a bead or bauble, but the only things that were big and blue (especially things you saw out in nature, not made by humans), were water. From that, you look up and see the big, blue sky, and even though you cant touch it to check, its obvious that it is made of water. Why doesnt the water come crashing down, like any other water thrown up into the air? Well, God must have made a clear, hard dome to keep it there. This must have been as obvious as the observation that fires are hot and that rocks are hard. Similarly, it must have been obvious that the Earth is flat (go out and look if you arent sure) and that the sun went around the earth (go out and look if you arent sure).
To communicate to people in that situation, an omniscient God would naturally adopt language that spoke to their world, artfully written as a metaphor that could also fit the world after more was known. The waters above the firmament seems like an obvious observation of what, in nature, is big and blue.
With that, I see Genesis as an intentional metaphor, and there is no need for us to try to come up with convoluted, silly explanations for (or try to fervently ignore) the "waters above" line in Genesis. The idea of our universe in a vast ocean doesnt fit with the evidence from physics, where the calculations show that wed all be crunched in a massive black hole if the universe were a bubble in a vast ocean. Our current scientific view doesnt contradict simple math, while the universe in a vast ocean does. But that's OK, because God can have one written for one time, with the understanding that we'd be adult enough to understand a simple metaphor today.
Have a good day-
-Papias
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