*warning*

[High Fidelity]

Is that a concession?

I concede to your insurmountable arrogance and to the fact that if I'm going to bang my head against a brick wall, I'll at least like the luxury of choosing the wall.

 

[Shocker]

I concede to your insurmountable arrogance and to the fact that if I'm going to bang my head against a brick wall, I'll at least like the luxury of choosing the wall.

Is it arrogant to claim that God controls our reality? And that we humans, though intelligent, could never understand how God does this?

Is it not written?

Isa_55:8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.

 

[Bible2]

Shocker said in post 18:

We can calculate Gravity, but we don't know what it is.

Isn't gravity a curvature of space-time?

Shocker said in post 18:

If you told me that man could control the weather, or that evolution was real, Id say that you don't believe scripture as much as you believe in men.

Do you believe that men can affect the weather by their putting forth of greenhouse gasses?

With regard to evolution, note that an old earth and evolution can be true without contradicting scriptural creationism. For evolution per se (random mutation and survival of the fittest) can coexist with miraculous creation, just as an automated process created by a human (e.g. a computer program which makes random, colorful pictures which can be seen as art) can coexist with that human sometimes performing a task himself directly (painting some pictures by hand). I.e., evolution per se can simply be a process created by God to allow new, adaptive species to arise naturally over time, and this process can coexist with God sometimes creating species miraculously.

Some people ask why would God wait millions of years for something to evolve from a one-celled organism, when he could just instantly create it? He could do that for the same reason that he has a human start out as a one-celled organism, a zygote in its mother's womb. He then has it only gradually develop through natural means into an embryo, and then into a fetus, and then a baby, a toddler, an adolescent, and an adult. And he has other animals develop gradually in a similar way. And he has plants start out as seeds. So it must give God pleasure to see organisms develop naturally over time, just as it must give him pleasure to also sometimes create plants and animals miraculously, instantaneously, already fully-formed, like he did in Genesis 1:11-13 and Genesis 1:20-27, during 3 of the 7 literal, 24-hour days of Genesis 1:3 to 2:4.

Creationism includes what could be called the double-gap theory, meaning that there could have been 2 different gaps of time in Genesis chapters 1-2, the 1st gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, and the 2nd gap between Genesis 2:4 and Genesis 2:5. Genesis 1:1 could have occurred some 4.5 billion years ago, when God first created the planet earth and its atmosphere (the 1st heaven, in which the birds fly: Genesis 1:20b). Between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, some 4.5 billion years could have occurred, in which God could have allowed his own created process of evolution to serve as a mechanism by which new species arose naturally on the earth. During those same 4.5 billion years, God could have also gone outside of evolution and created new species miraculously, whenever he wanted to (cf. punctuated equilibria).

Genesis 1:2 could refer to the condition of the earth only about 12,000 years ago (at the end of the Paleolithic period), after some cataclysm, such as a comet strike, had killed off all life on the planet (both evolved and miraculously created), and had submerged all land areas in water (comets contain huge amounts of water), and had ruined the atmosphere. The impact of the comet could have also knocked the earth out of its orbit around its original star, so that the earth was sent hurtling into the darkness of interstellar space as a "rogue planet" (astronomers estimate that rogue planets in our galaxy could outnumber the stars in our galaxy). Genesis 1:3 to 2:4 could then refer to God, over a period of 6 literal, 24-hour days (some 12,000 years ago, at the start of the Neolithic period), miraculously restoring to the earth light, a good atmosphere, dry land, and life, including a race of male and female homo sapiens sapiens, after God had miraculously restored land plants (Genesis 1:11-13) and land animals (Genesis 1:24-25) to the earth.

Then, only about 6,000 years ago, God miraculously created on the earth an individual male homo sapiens sapiens named Adam in an uninhabited desert land (Genesis 2:5-7; there, the original Hebrew word translated as "earth" can simply refer to a certain "land": e.g. Genesis 2:11). After that, God planted the plants of the local, Garden of Eden in that desert land (Genesis 2:8-9), and God placed Adam in that garden (Genesis 2:15). Then God miraculously created the animals of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:19). Then he created an individual female homo sapiens sapiens (Genesis 2:22) whom Adam named Eve (Genesis 3:20).

Because Adam was created only about 6,000 years ago (based on Biblical chronology), yet there are homo sapiens sapiens fossils said to be as old as about 200,000 years, God could have first created homo sapiens sapiens (or it could have evolved by God's created process of evolution) as far back as about 200,000 years. Also, all the different hominid forms the fossils of which long predate or are as old as the earliest fossils of homo sapiens sapiens, and which preceding or coexisting hominid forms we don't consider to have been fully human like us (such as homo sapiens neanderthalensis), could have all been created by God (or could have evolved by God's created process of evolution) over millions of years prior to the first appearance of homo sapiens sapiens on the earth.

And this doesn't even get into the possibly trillion other inhabited planets in the universe on which homo sapiens sapiens (or similar or far more advanced life-forms) could have been created by God (or could have evolved by God's created process of evolution) billions of years prior to the first appearance of homo sapiens sapiens on the earth. For the universe could be about 14 billion years old, and there are something like 100 billion different galaxies, each containing something like 100 billion different stars. So even if only one star out of every 10 billion stars has an inhabited planet, there would still be a trillion inhabited planets. And on most of these, God could have begun his miraculous work (and the work of his created process of evolution) billions of years prior to his beginning his miraculous work (and the work of his created process of evolution) on the earth.

*******

Shocker said in post 22:

Isa_55:8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.

1 Corinthians 2:16 For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.

 

[Interplanner]

Linguistically, there wouldn't be a gap between 1:1 and 2. 1:1 is a section heading. It is not action in the story. Cp. 5:1 and 36:1 and others.