Re: (Tears) Fads and Fallacies by Martin Gardner

On Fri, 17 May 2024 11:35:20 +0100, Robert Carnegie
<rja.carnegie@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/05/2024 04:28, John Savard wrote:

This reminds me of something I came across...
 
While at one point, the Bible does speak of God hanging the Earth
"upon nothing", in many places it makes statements that can only be
understood on the basis of the notion of a flat Earth, surmounted by a
solid dome on which we see lights both stationary (except for sidereal
rotation) and moving.
 
At one point, it's even noted that God, instead of creating it in its
hemispherical shape, apparently created a flat sheet of material which
He then beat into shape as a human would beat brass.
 
Since it can be proven that the Earth is not flat, Answers in Genesis
is at pains to deny Biblical scholarship and claim that no, the Bible
says no such thing.
 
John Savard

>
God may know how the universe works,
but a lot of people who wrote in the
bible clearly don't.
>
I'm not sure if the pieces would fit
together, and it's not a project that
I'm eager to do, and on the other hand
it may be already done; anyway, I have
an idea that Noah's flood story plus
some other bible statements about
God curating the world could be brought
together in a just-so story that the
sea goes out and in from the shore
because it is trying to flood the land
again and God holds it back.
>
Except that tsunamis happen.  Publicly,
catastrophically, and in recent times.
So God is not in fact preventing that.
>
But I can't point right now to bible verses
which say unambiguously that he has promised
to do so.
>
I can point to God not creating plants that
live in water, presumably because the author
of that part of Genesis didn't know or think
about that.

Ah, you caught that!

Pursuing the theory which I encountered in reading Robert Graves --
that the day-by-day creation is actually about asserting that the God
of Israel actually did all the stuff other "gods" were said to have
done (that is, is a missionary tract for monotheism) [1], it could
also be that none of the "gods" had created sea plants so there was no
need to ascribe them explicitly to the God of Israel. The first
statement, after all, is normally taken to mean that God created
everything. And did it out of nothing.

[1] For the early bits, where the item created /was/ a "god", the
point was that these "gods" were created as ordinary things and not
"gods" at all.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"