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-> Interesting Discussions
mommy3b2c
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 Mon, Feb 16 2015, 1:14 pm
| DrMom wrote: | | What does this mean? This is exactly the subject under discussion -- asserting that you know this "for sure" doesn't prove anything. Or do I misunderstand what you are trying to say? |
I am actually not trying to prove anything. Just stating my belief. If the Torah says the world is 5000+ years old, then that's what I believe.
There has to be some explanation as to why dinosaurs look like their millions of years old. The reason could be:
A) each day of creation was actually 150 million years long
B) the world was created in an aged state
C) the bones are remnants of previous worlds
D) the mabul aged the world
E) any combination of the above
Regardless of the explanation, there is one, even if I don't understand it. Any of these explanations shows that the Torah and science do not contradict each other.
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cookiecutter
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 1:34 pm
| BlueRose52 wrote: | Sure, an all-powerful G-d could have created a world that looks older than it is, but it’s always baffled me that people take this idea seriously, since it undermines the very basis of knowing anything at all, ever. It’s saying that even though every bit of evidence tells us that Event A happened, we should accept that actually it was Event B that happened. Why? Because an all-powerful G-d can do anything.
Once you accept this idea as a possibility, why not use it anywhere? Next time your husband asks you why you didn’t do something, just respond with, “Yes, it looks like I didn’t do it, but really Hashem made it that way because He only wants it to look that way, even though I did!” Next time someone judges you for not being tznius enough, say, “Hashem only made the poskim think we’re supposed to do that, but really we don’t have to.” Next time someone’s caught embezzling money, they should say to the judge, “Your honor, it only looks like I committed a felony because G-d made it appear that way. But really it’s nothing like that at all.”
And when people look at you like you’re crazy, and say, “That doesn’t make any sense. Why in the world would G-d do that?” just tell them, “G-d is beyond our understanding, we can’t know why He does anything. But since He is all powerful, he obviously could have done this!” | I don't think this is what you meant, but you pinpointed exactly what God is. People talk about God as though it is a being or entity, but the way people perceive of God is as the absence of explicability. Why does water fall from the heavens? Why does it get dark at night and remain light during the day? Who put the oceans where they are and the stars where they are? How did the world begin? Why are we filled with wonder at the sight of a newborn baby or Niagara Falls? We can't explain it, so we abandon the inquiry and call it God. As science finds explanations for some of these things, we gradually adapt our descriptions of God to include new areas of wonder (why do good things happen to bad people? What is it about cancer, you know? What caused the Big Bang?) and push out the old ones.
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MagentaYenta
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 1:34 pm
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Positing that a day of creation could have been 150 million years leaves numerous gaps. Science has shown proto humans did not walk the earth with dinosaurs.
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cookiecutter
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 1:55 pm
I have some questions on this subject that nobody seems to ask.
1. IF the Torah had wanted to use a metaphor or poetic expression, what are its options?
2. On a similar note, imagine Maaseh Bereishis or some part of it was not meant to be taken literally, at least not literally in the modern sense (some evidence is forthcoming). Don't you ruin that by interpreting it literally?
3. Some evidence that it wasn't meant to be literal the way people read it in this thread:
-- The story makes no sense as a literal account, unless you ignore the parts that don't make sense. What is an "eitz hadaas"? Why does eating from it not make you a God, but does make you realize you're naked?
-- There are two different stories of how Man was created. Which is the real one?
-- Kayin built cities. But there were no people then. How did he build cities?
-- Where did the wives come from?
-- The early chapters of Bereishis clearly evince the intention to present an origin story not (simply) as a matter of history, but as a matter of narrative. Yaval and Yuval are described as the "fathers" of sheepherders and musicians. Are we required to believe that sheepherders and musicians are literally descended from them?
The point is that most of this argument is rooted in simple-mindedness and ignorance rather than intellect and sincere belief. Why does it help to say that "a day was a billion years"? Why does it help to say that scientists are dirty rotten liars? Neither of those responses "answer" anything. All those things do is re-fabricate difficult questions into other difficult questions that we haven't dwelt on yet, so that we can continue conveniently presenting what we characterize as belief - but which is just ignorance with another name.
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marina
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 2:32 pm
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Do those of you who believe the universe is 5000 years old also disagree with the speed of light? Because there are stars we see from billions of light years away, which means that those stars must have been there billions of years ago...
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marina
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 2:33 pm
| BlueRose52 wrote: | Sure, an all-powerful G-d could have created a world that looks older than it is, but it’s always baffled me that people take this idea seriously, since it undermines the very basis of knowing anything at all, ever. It’s saying that even though every bit of evidence tells us that Event A happened, we should accept that actually it was Event B that happened. Why? Because an all-powerful G-d can do anything.
Once you accept this idea as a possibility, why not use it anywhere? Next time your husband asks you why you didn’t do something, just respond with, “Yes, it looks like I didn’t do it, but really Hashem made it that way because He only wants it to look that way, even though I did!” Next time someone judges you for not being tznius enough, say, “Hashem only made the poskim think we’re supposed to do that, but really we don’t have to.” Next time someone’s caught embezzling money, they should say to the judge, “Your honor, it only looks like I committed a felony because G-d made it appear that way. But really it’s nothing like that at all.”
And when people look at you like you’re crazy, and say, “That doesn’t make any sense. Why in the world would G-d do that?” just tell them, “G-d is beyond our understanding, we can’t know why He does anything. But since He is all powerful, he obviously could have done this!” |
Exactly.
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marina
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 2:36 pm
| mamita wrote: | En mikra yotze midei pshuto
It is interesting that science is being taken as an absolute given whilst the Torah is questionable.
The study of science itself is anything but absolute.
The study of science is about taking a known quantity and trying to determine, based on available data how we got there and how this could affect us.
For example I have a number: 6.
How did we get the number 6? was it 2+2+2? 3+3? 10-4? etc etc. Theorizing its way back to the starting point. Science searches for as much data to coroborate its theories along the way.
The present quantity itself is not absolute . What is fact today in a few years or under different circumstances will present differently. This is very noticeable over the years of scientific study of the universe, genetics, health etc etc etc. Even as we have developed over the last 100 years and decades we can not know what we will discover to change the picture in the next decades. Human knowledge is far from all knowing. In fact the greater the research scientist the more he acknowledges human limitations.
Science at best can be defined as an educated theory or probability.
Now, back to the dinosaurs. Research scientists have long ceased accepting them as a scientific way of dating the universe. Scientifically to back a theory, you need proofs at various marks along the way.
So I have these billions of years old fossils. I need now fossils dating back a billion years and a few million years etc until some date of extinsion. And no such proofs were found. One theory relagated to the trash.
But we still have this quantity (fossils) and we are trying to track their history backwards.
Another theory, more scientifically acceptable, was that there was a majorly drastic atmspheric change that caused them to look so very different and aged.
The Noahide flood was not only a flood, tsunami etc. The entire universe ceased functioning as we know it. As it says , the sun , moon and stars ceased functioning etc. And therefore this very likely affected the dinosaur remains in an unnaturally extreme way. 'tampering' with them;)
The Torah on the other hand, begins at the starting point and builds up block by block until we arrive at our present quantity.
The above is not my own ideas. It is based on the works of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
The question remains if so :why is this not changed in the school textbooks accordingly?
I can not answer absolutely, I am not a decision maker;) However lets take into account that the fossils were a very exciting discovery that was very well advertised. 'proofs' negating the bible are a very precious commodity when having to face Superior responsibility. and of course who is making the big bucks out of this...
There are very many lies that abound as facts because it serves some peoples purpose. in medicine, politics, etc. The Most in-your-face one as Jews being the presentation of Israel as demonic killers of Arabs. That innumerable Europians and Americans sincerely believe. They saw it on the news.. BBC, NY times etc etc etc... |
So, just to be clear, scientists made up the idea of a world that is billions of years old as a way to present Jews badly and so people could avoid responsibility? is that your argument?
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marina
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 2:39 pm
| Quote: | | Science at best can be defined as an educated theory or probability. | And religion is what? At best, it is a story we tell ourselves to explain how we got here. It's not even an educated theory.
That's totally aside that your definition of science is totally off the wall.
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BlueRose52
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 2:39 pm
| cookiecutter wrote: | | There are two different stories of how Man was created. Which is the real one? |
Yup. To me, this detail has always been an incontrovertible demonstration that it's not meant to be taken literally. There are 2 totally contradictory narratives in the torah about creation. I'm not saying that there aren't ways to reconcile them, but there definitely aren't ways to reconcile them and keep to the LITERAL meaning of both of them!
(I should add, not that I know of.)
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BlueRose52
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 3:09 pm
| mommy2b2c wrote: | I am actually not trying to prove anything. Just stating my belief. If the Torah says the world is 5000+ years old, then that's what I believe.
There has to be some explanation as to why dinosaurs look like their millions of years old. The reason could be:
A) each day of creation was actually 150 million years long
B) the world was created in an aged state
C) the bones are remnants of previous worlds
D) the mabul aged the world
E) any combination of the above
Regardless of the explanation, there is one, even if I don't understand it. Any of these explanations shows that the Torah and science do not contradict each other. |
Can you clarify something for me? From what I gather, you believe the age of the universe to be 5775 years old because that's the number one gets from a literal understanding of the text, and presumably, you believe that one must take the text literally. However, proposing that each day of creation was actually millions of years long is very much NOT a literal understanding of the text.
So if you're ok with reading the text non-literally in that way, why do you insist that it must be read literally as indicating the world is only 5775 years old?
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mommy3b2c
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 3:17 pm
| BlueRose52 wrote: | Can you clarify something for me? From what I gather, you believe the age of the universe to be 5775 years old because that's the number one gets from a literal understanding of the text, and presumably, you believe that one must take the text literally. However, proposing that each day of creation was actually millions of years long is very much NOT a literal understanding of the text.
So if you're ok with reading the text non-literally in that way, why do you insist that it must be read literally as indicating the world is only 5775 years old? |
I believe that the world as we know it is 5775 years old. Starting from the sin of the eitz hadaas. I don't know what happened before that. And neither does anyone else, including scientists. They are just making educated guesses.
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amother
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 3:21 pm
I thought dinosaurs weren't real  just like dragons...
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BlueRose52
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 3:26 pm
| mommy2b2c wrote: | | I believe that the world as we know it is 5775 years old. Starting from the sin of the eitz hadaas. I don't know what happened before that. And neither does anyone else, including scientists. They are just making educated guesses. |
Huh? What do you mean nobody knows? Don't people who take the text literally know? The torah text tells us that there were 6 days before that happened, why would that be ignored?
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DrMom
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 3:29 pm
| marina wrote: | | Quote: | | Science at best can be defined as an educated theory or probability. | And religion is what? At best, it is a story we tell ourselves to explain how we got here. It's not even an educated theory.
That's totally aside that your definition of science is totally off the wall. |
As a trained scientist, I have to agree with marina on the bolded statement.
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perseverance613
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 3:30 pm
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What is there to explain? Dinosaur bones are bones...from dinosaurs. Ta-da!
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mille
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 3:35 pm
| marina wrote: | | Do those of you who believe the universe is 5000 years old also disagree with the speed of light? Because there are stars we see from billions of light years away, which means that those stars must have been there billions of years ago... |
I would imagine that the argument would be that God put the stars in those spots when he created the universe, and they only started moving away from each other/universe expanding after the stars themselves were created. Similar to the argument that the dinosaur bones were put into the earth as bones, no dinosaurs actually existed.
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marina
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 3:57 pm
| DrMom wrote: | | As a trained scientist, I have to agree with marina on the bolded statement. |
I don't understand what laws of nature must have been broken for us to agree.
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Scrabble123
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 4:00 pm
| marina wrote: | | I don't understand what laws of nature must have been broken for us to agree. |
Should I make a probable guess?
Dark matter pulled you two together 
Were you the one who abusively hugged me on page 2 for discussing time "travel?"
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marina
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 4:03 pm
| Scrabble123 wrote: | Should I make a probable guess?
Dark matter pulled you two together
Were you the one who abusively hugged me on page 2 for discussing time "travel?" |
no. But if you want a sanctimonious hug, I'm always here for you.
(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((hug))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
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PinkFridge
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Mon, Feb 16 2015, 4:41 pm
| cookiecutter wrote: | I have some questions on this subject that nobody seems to ask.
1. IF the Torah had wanted to use a metaphor or poetic expression, what are its options?
2. On a similar note, imagine Maaseh Bereishis or some part of it was not meant to be taken literally, at least not literally in the modern sense (some evidence is forthcoming). Don't you ruin that by interpreting it literally?
3. Some evidence that it wasn't meant to be literal the way people read it in this thread:
-- The story makes no sense as a literal account, unless you ignore the parts that don't make sense. What is an "eitz hadaas"? Why does eating from it not make you a God, but does make you realize you're naked? . |
It makes you look at nakedness differently.
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