There are plenty of things God “might have done,” But this sort of thing is neither scientific nor scriptural.
As a kid growing up in Texas, my Methodist church basically just squared the creation myth as metaphor. “What is the length of a day to god?” Essentially equating the scientific explanations, as simply the way god did it. So there wasn’t really any controversy about learning about evolution and the age of the universe.
I was a closet atheist, but never realized there was much controversy about evolution until I was in high school and terminally online.
I grew up the same, mostly because allowing so much as not literal means and easier time for a pastor that also does car upholstery part time to sell any concept. Literalism is pretty demanding a a position.
The literalist interpretation was seen as extreme until maybe 20 years ago. I was shocked to learn about how many denominations are going in for it now. But maybe that’s just the internet showing me parts of the world I hadn’t seen before.
Yeah, sadly that same chill Methodist church I grew up in has since slipped down into that literalist BS. When the United Methodist Church changed its stance to allow LGBTQ+ membership, clergy, and marriages in 2024, they decided to split off and just be an independent Methodist church.
Yea, Catholics and Mainline Protestants like Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians etc are like this. Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest, was one of the figures responsible for the big bang theory
Methodists are pretty chill from what I’ve seen.
It’s the same logic as God burying dinosaur bones 6000 years ago to test our faith.
One of my shining moments as an atheist was leading a coworker to realize that the above reasoning was bullshit.
She was already part way there just by asking me about it, I just answered her questions until she arrived at the right conclusion.
That claim always pissed me off. Like, what kind of god would actively attempt to trick people and be worth worshipping.
The story of Job is a great showcase of God being a cunt.
“He devil, you want to see how much I can ruin this guy’s life before he hates me?”
I remember in high school when the principal came into class one day and said how that’s his favorite story from the bible. That shit’s fucked up
Guys… Youre trying to apply physics/logic to a supposedly all power deity. Just say the world was just created as is last Thursday or something in its current state. Like if your going to make shit up you don’t have to make it so complicated. It’s all BS anyway…
This is why I’m agnostic - it’s basically impossible to either confirm or deny the existence of a higher power, but I don’t believe in any particular gods or anything
Im largely the same. Im generally a non believer and my sense of spirituality is not tied to any deities, but I don’t know that they’re not out there so in vwry particular cases I still practife some amount of worship. Mainly at funerals.
i think i became a little stupider after reading that
That’s crazy talk. Obviously the light from distant stars was created in transit to fool heathen astronomers, just like the fossils of prehistoric creatures were implanted on Earth, to fool paleontologists.
No no no, fossils come from the great flood, from the Bible. At least, that’s what creationists use as an argument in debates…
As for star light: yes, that’s right.
Which I guess means carbon dating isn’t real. Which I guess means our entire understanding of chemistry is wrong. Only possible explanation.
You think god is so stupid that she didn’t pre age those bones so that they appear older than they are using carbon dating?
Ah, good to know, thank you
It’s obviously a race condition in the simulation software. The stars database is loaded before the c constant.
This will be patched in a future update, however current simulation will need a data wipe for the updated behaviour to show.
When you’re trying to look at science but the delusion won’t get out of the way.
Is there even anything in Genesis to suggest that the ‘days’ were 24h long? I could see it being meant metaphorically…
No mention of an eighth day in that story - we’re still in the “god rested” day!
Genesis is full of absolute nonsense
The bible is just early fantasy fiction
“No, that wasn’t a metaphor! The Bible is literal truth!”
“What about ‘The land shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with Me,’ or ‘But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind,’ or ‘Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.’?”
“Those parts were metaphorical!”
Imma be real with you. If you show me a cool thing you made in a couple days, and your “days” aren’t 24h long… That’s just sad
On the other hand, show me a universe you made, and I’ll be impressed!
I grew up catholic and was sent to catholic school and this is what we were taught. That the creation story is metaphor, the catholic church believes God used the big bang and evolution to create the world and people, ect.
Wanna know a secret… God didn’t even write that part. God’s version has him at a kmart in Toledo, Iowa buying the entire universe on a Saturday in 1997, at which point he installed it, but it did take several days because it was football season, but it was less than a week no matter what anyone else says.
That’s a more popular justification now, but there’s definitely no textual defense of it, they’re just reinterpreting around the scientific consensus. How often do you expect a book to define the term “day” before moving on? It was almost certainly written and intended to be treated literally.
So I grew up around creationists. When I presented this idea, the only attempt at a justification I heard was something like “in the original Hebrew the word for a literal day was used, that’s how we know creation happened in literal 6 days”
Which baffled me enough to shut me up, so that guy probably thinks he convinced me.
Well duh, if they meant metaphorical day, they should have used the hebrew word for metaphorical days.
/s
Which baffled me enough to shut me up, so that guy probably thinks he convinced me.
This seems to happen to me more frequently these days. Sometimes a person will say something so absurd that it just stops me in my tracks and I’m sure they think it means they “won”
There is “old earth creationism” which works along those lines. But creationists are “literalists,” which actually means they believe a specific interpretation of the text taught to them by their pastor.
Really, you’d think that most anyone reading the texts would realize that Genesis 1 and 2 were mutually contradicting…
Or just a matter of perspective. If “God” was just a programmer who could explain the difference between how long we spent writing code, running the software, and the simulation actual perspective difference.
Ask the Dwarf Fortress.
Or Puscifer.
Analysis of the light from SN1987A suggests this has not happened. By observing light traversing two paths to reach earth, we can work out how far away the supernova is without relying on a particular value of c, and then work out what c must be out there.
This still makes some assumptions on the speed of light, but it would have to vary in a very specific way to give this same effect.
Imagine all the cosmic background radiation and starlight of 4 billion years, as measured in the outer universe, landing on Earth in a time-dilated period of only 7 days. Earth would be cooked. By my calculation, the surface of the Earth would get up to 1900 Kelvin.
I mean that or just pre-calculate it and place the light at the same time you place the stars
But precalculating is just waste of resources when you are building a pure procedural universe.
I doubt that’s really a consideration when you are literally God
Well, obviously he isn’t a literal god since he made mistakes and retcons and had to rest afterwards.
So it’s always been a programmer joke from the “beginning”?"
Eh, this god is lazy. They even had to rest a whole day.
Procedural, law based world generation is the trademark of a lazy and experienced god.
Story with that premise:
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/50558/the-great-erectus-and-faun
And they had to reset the simulation at least once because of all the bad behaviors.
Or I un-…
I was homeschooled for most of K-12, and all my peers were crazy fundies. I have so many stories.
If you’re home schooled, wouldn’t those peers be your siblings?
I collect that kind of stuff for fun + have some exposure to Christian education communities.
Were you doing ACE? Those workbooks should be illegal.
Not ACE specifically. I actually hadn’t heard of ACE until you mentioned it.
Most of my peers did some combination of Abeka and Saxon curricula, with a smattering of whatever TF the annual “homeschool convention” had available to sell. And yes, the “science” curriculum always had at least one chapter on how stupid “mainstream scientists” are for believing the universe is more than 6,000 years old. (And some books were nothing but that stretched to the length of a text book.) And those chapters loved to quote Ken Ham and shit. My parents were in some ways less fundie than most of my peers, and they told me to skip that chapter. Lol.
I did ACE. The (barely) fat kid was named Pudge. WTF. Looking back on it now, the educational parts were actually pretty good in places but everything else on top of it was pretty bad
the educational parts were actually pretty good
It’s just workbooks that you do independently and grade yourself, right? All of that seems like it’s what we’d call low “depth of knowledge.” Multiple choice questions and just memorizing facts.
Have there ever been any stars or planets, that we see in the night sky, just disappear? I always wondered if that has happened during the last 4,000 years or so of celestial observation. When I was a kid I was told that some stars are so far away that they were dead but the light we are receiving from them is still continuing to arrive as starlight. Have we seen that dead star light wink out? I know the universe is very old and the last 4,000 years was just a blink of an eye, but I’m curious if anyone knows if this has happened.
Chinese were very diligent skywatchers and catalogued much history, there was record of a “guest star” supernova being witnessed before the star blinked out of existence. And recently astronomers observed a star in Andromeda collapse into a black hole.
Thanks!
That’s what supernova are.
Other stars like our own will eventually, in about 5 billion years, become a red giant and then a white dwarf, but will take hundreds of billions of years to cool to the point where they no longer emit light, so none of them have had enough time for that to happen yet.
I get the definition and extrapolation, but I was wondering if any observable phenomena has occurred. Thanks.
If you’re asking whether any supernova have occurred, then yes, they have.
If you’re asking whether humans have seen a supernova, then yes also - the most famous is probably SN 1006, which was the brightest stellar object ever seen by humans, brighter than venus in the sky, and was recorded in the year 1006 by many different societies. There have been several others documented over the last 1000 years.
In addition, which might be more what you’re asking, there have been stars, or at least light sources that look like stars, which have simply appeared and vanished again within a matter of minutes or hours, and their disappearances are often left poorly explained - they could be supernova that for some reason didn’t go nova, or something else entirely. There’s a project called VASCO (Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observation):
Thanks for this! Yes, I was asking if there were any observable (something humans have seen) phenomenon.
There should be a list somewhere of so-called scientists who, in their personal lives, believe in extraordinary things with zero evidence.
They should not be allowed to call themselves scientists anymore
