samedi 28 septembre 2019

Correction from Yesterday


Creation vs. Evolution : Bricks at Göbekli Tepe or Close? · Is this too modest in my expectations? Bricks revisited · Correction from Yesterday · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Jericho and Babel Contemporary?

Here is verse 3 again:

And each one said to his neighbour: Come, let us make brick, and bake them with fire. And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar.

It does not just say they planned it ("each said to his neighbour"), it says they had it.

Why is this a problem?

Well, I believe in Biblical inerrancy, I consider Göbekli Tepe and surrounding area as a very good candidate for Babel, and no fire-baked bricks have been found there, even less fire baked bricks with a mortar of bitumen.

But if I have already interpreted the tower as a rocket and waters above the firmament as not just water molecules but also hydrogen molecules, why not bricks as rammed earth?

If Nimrod has a clumsy project for a space rocket, in Moses' time the idea even of such technology had been lost to the general public.

If waters above the firmament is not just H2O but also H2, in Moses' time chemistry was not a thing and the words he could use would have been either air or water, and since H2 is a gas such that, if you mix it with air (specifically O2 part of it) and add a spark you get water, which makes water the more appropriate word of the available ones.

But earth, mud, soil were clearly words available in Hebrew and a certain discussion about Raqiya indicates that so is the description "rammed". Hence, Hebrew in Moses' time should theoretically have a word or phrase for rammed earth, distinct from bricks and distinct from bricks baked with fire.

So, if bricks can degrade over millennia of humidity so as to look like rammed earth, that would be one possibility, but it's not a very likely one.

My best hunch is still, someone may find baked bricks in the area (and for the carbon dated or archaeologically layered era), even if they haven't done so yet, as far as we have been told./HGL

vendredi 27 septembre 2019

Is this too modest in my expectations? Bricks revisited


Creation vs. Evolution : Bricks at Göbekli Tepe or Close? · Is this too modest in my expectations? Bricks revisited · Correction from Yesterday · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Jericho and Babel Contemporary?

[Update : Bad idea at the end, see correction from next day]

And each one said to his neighbour: Come, let us make brick, and bake them with fire. And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar.

I was asking the other day, what about bricks for stone and bitumen for mortar in Göbekli Tepe?

Here is a little wikipedian trail, but rammed earth might still be too little for brick to be verified, especially bricks baked with fire.

The Urfa man, also known as the Balıklıgöl statue, is an ancient anthropomorphological statue found in excavations in Balıklıgöl near Urfa, in the geographical area of Upper Mesopotamia, in the southeast of modern Turkey.[1][2] It is dated circa 9000 BC to the period of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, and is considered as "the oldest naturalistic life-sized sculpture of a human".[3] It is considered as contemporaneous with the sites of Göbekli Tepe (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A/B) and Nevalı Çori (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B).[4]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urfa_Man

Ah, Urfa is after all in "Upper Mesopotamia" and therefore in Mesopotamia, a k a Shinar. It is 80 km East of the Euphrates river.

Now, a little further down we see the locations:

The statue was found during construction work, and the exact location of the find has not been properly recorded, but it may be coming from the nearby Pre-Pottery Neolithic A site of Urfa Yeni-Yol.[1] This is not far from other known Pre-Pottery Neolithic A sites around Urfa: Göbekli Tepe (about 10 kilometers), Gürcütepe.[1] It is reported that it was discovered in 1993 on Yeni Yol street in Balıklıgöl, at the same location where a Pre-Pottery Neolithic site was investigated from 1997.[5]


So, I wanted to look up Gürcütepe.

Gürcütepe is a Neolithic site on the southeastern outskirts of Şanlıurfa in Turkey, consisting of four very shallow tells along Sirrin Stream that flows from Şanlıurfa. All four hills are now covered by modern buildings, so they are no longer recognizable. In the late 1990s a German archaeological team under the direction of Klaus Schmidt carried out soundings on all four hills and made extensive excavations on the second hill seen from the east.

Originally it was assumed that the four hills were settled in a specific time sequence, that one of these settlement phases would coincide with the nearby Gobekli Tepe. However, the excavations have indicated that all four hills were settled during the PPNB period; the easternmost hill is from the later PPNC period.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCrc%C3%BCtepe

So, when was PPNB (pre-pottery neolithic B)?

Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) is part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, a Neolithic culture centered in upper Mesopotamia, dating to c. 10,800 – c. 8,500 years ago, that is, 8,800–6,500 BCE.[1] It was typed by Kathleen Kenyon during her archaeological excavations at Jericho in the West Bank.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Pottery_Neolithic_B

A bit later than Göbekli Tepe, then, starts about when GT ends.

But if we get back to Gürcütepe and then look at the German text of "same article" (on wiki, each subject has its own article in each language, even if a language has an article starting out as translation from another one, it is subsequently modified by wikipedians on that language) ...

Er besteht aus vier sehr flachen Tells entlang eines Baches, der von Şanlıurfa aus in die Harran-Ebene fließt. Alle vier Hügel sind heute moderner überbaut und nicht mehr zu erkennen. Ende der 1990er Jahre wurden von einem deutschen Archäologenteam unter Leitung von Klaus Schmidt auf allen vier Hügeln Sondagen und auf dem von Osten aus gesehen zweiten Hügel auch flächige Ausgrabungen vorgenommen. Alle vier Hügel waren während des PPNB, nur der östlichste Hügel auch in PPNC besiedelt. Es wurden Stampflehmgebäude mit Raumunterteilung neben größeren Gemeinschaftsbauten gefunden.


And what does Stampflehmgebäude mean?

Rammed earth, also known as taipa[1] in Portuguese, tapial or tapia in Spanish, pisé (de terre) in French, and hangtu (Chinese: 夯土; pinyin: hāngtǔ), is a technique for constructing foundations, floors, and walls using natural raw materials such as earth, chalk, lime, or gravel.[2] It is an ancient method that has been revived recently as a sustainable building material used in a technique of natural building.

Rammed earth is simple to manufacture, non-combustible, thermally massive, strong, and durable. However, structures such as walls can be laborious to construct of rammed earth without machinery, e. g., powered tampers, and they are susceptible to water damage if inadequately protected or maintained.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rammed_earth

Not identic to baked bricks ... but could baked bricks deteriorate over time to look like rammed earth? Or shall one rather say that one needs to look further till one finds what archaeologists would recognise as baked brick?

Does Biblical Hebrew have a phrase for rammed earth? Could fire have been used on top of ramming? I'm, so far, at a loss.

Obviously, rammed earth and baked bricks have some qualities in common and perhaps baked bricks was not a success at first, so they used rammed earth instead eventually - only succeeding later.

Mixing things with the earth could involve bitumen? Not sure.

Oh, one thing more. Urfa near Euphrates is 396.12 km or 246.14 miles nearly due West of Mossul - where Niniveh is. On the Tigris.

And he was a stout hunter before the Lord. Hence came a proverb: Even as Nemrod the stout hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babylon, and Arach, and Achad, and Chalanne in the land of Sennaar. Out of that land came forth Assur, and built Ninive, and the streets of the city, and Chale.

37°13′23″N 38°55′21″E = Göbekli Tepe
36°21′34″N 43°09′10″E = Nineveh (as archaeologists have identified it)

That's it for today on this blog./HG

jeudi 26 septembre 2019

When are Dogs From?


Tomorrow's article on CMI (1600 hours here was midnight in Australia), has this long discussion:

Creationist modelling of the origins of Canis lupus familiaris—ancestry, timing, and biogeography
by Cody J. Guitard | This article is from
Journal of Creation 32(2):20–28, August 2018
https://creation.com/dog-origins


Most points are valid, however, as to when there are dogs and domesticated such can on my view be achieved by a shortcut.

  • 1) We take evolution based or uniformitarian carbon dates (carbon dates only, but here these are provided)
  • 2) We check this on my carbon tables for correspondence
  • 3) and this gives in the present case:

    while dog-like fossils have been dated to as early as 31,700 years ago.23 Recent evolutionary research indicates that initial dog-wolf divergence in particular occurred somewhere within 27,000–40,000 years ago, though domestication may only have taken place thousands of years later, probably at numerous independent times and geographical locations.24 It is widely accepted that domestication had occurred by the time of the Agricultural Revolution around 10,000 years ago by evolutionary estimates.


This means early to late parts of Noah's post-Flood remaining lifespan./HGL

jeudi 19 septembre 2019

Benno Zuiddam's View of Catholicism and Creationism


Benno Zuiddam's View of Catholicism and Creationism · First World History · Is Dei Verbum a Young Earth Creationist Document? · Ambiguous Sentence Found · For Those who Do Take Vatican II as a Valid Council

Note, he is a Calvinist. This doesn't mean he is not an Academic (it would have meant so Under* Stephen Tempier, I presume).

Here is his paper for CMI:

Roman Catholic confusion on creation
Benno Zuiddam | JOURNAL OF CREATION 32(2) 2018
https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j32_2/j32_2_91-95.pdf


* The French spell check treast several English words as proper names, like occurring in enterprise names. I only noticed way later./HGL

lundi 16 septembre 2019

Peer Review as Brand Creation (Link, CMI)


Here is an article by CMI:

Creationism, Science and Peer Review
Published: 2 February 2008 (GMT+10)
https://creation.com/creationism-science-and-peer-review


It involves a great quote:

But unbeknownst to the media, the journals at the top got there because of herd behavior by researchers, not because they are better than lower-tier journals at vetting research quality. Here’s why: Researchers submit their best work to the top journals, which can therefore afford to maintain their prestige by rejecting, not publishing, many high quality papers. That’s brand creation—not science. Most of their editorial effort goes into deciding which submitted papers are sufficiently newsworthy. Anonymous peer review by jealous competitors has its merits, but it has a tendency to select for fashionable if relatively unoriginal and inoffensive papers … although these reports often do not substantively advance scientific knowledge, and many subsequently are invalidated.


Cited as from:

Stossel, T., Mere Magazines, The Wall Street Journal, 30 December 2005.

dimanche 8 septembre 2019

Infighting? Because Fact First.


You look at the latest five posts prior to this one, four are adressed to CMI as disagreements, and one is adressed in general to Christians disagreeing with our common premise of Biblical inerrancy.

Only once you scroll past this, you get to a non-polemic (within Christendom, though polemic as against Uniformitarians, most of which are non-Christians or very loosely Christian) article, namely Scandinavian Stone Age Within Biblical History with my Table.

Facts are concerned with things, where curious people demand technical solutions to technical problems, if any. And in a world very dominated by Uniformitarians who believe Big Bang, Galaxies, Heliocentrism for each star that has planets, "including ours", Millions and Billions of Years, Abiogenesis by chemical processes, evolution of all things alive (or very few and minute exceptions) from one Last Universal Common Ancestor, common to bees and bananas, and humanisation by degrees involving tool use as being as important or more than language and morals, much of the other story, the one that used to dominate Christendom, will at first glance look problematic.

Or, the few times when we actually have a very non-problematic case, where the Uniformitarian one is admittedly immediately problematic (like origin of life and of language), we are up against a variety of people who claim to have solutions - even if they differ as much as ours.

This means, once we get into details, we get to areas where the Bible cannot be overturned, but needs to be supplemented by other observations, for the curious, and these areas are obviously open for disagreements.

Wishing to make it clear, both CMI and I, both Ken Ham and Kent Hovind, actually do believe Biblical inerrancy is a factual truth.

We are not stating Global Flood merely as an enumerative example of a Biblical inerrance merely adopted as rhetoric exaggeration for accepting Biblical values, which in turn may be a solemn rhetorical way of saying one adopts values current among people who used to believe Bible or OT part of Bible, perhaps also including the Qoran.

We do not value the Flood of Noah as a rhetorical point only (it is one also), we value the story of its happening as factual information. Hence technical solutions on "where in geological column" to put limit between Flood and post-Flood layers.

We do not value Biblical chronology as merely a resumé on "information got passed down from Adam" (though that happened too), but Genesis 4, 5 and 11 give lists of important intermediaries very much overlapping with each other in lifespans (the latter point is less evident in Genesis 4). This means, a chronology where either Adam has to be put as not first man or the intermediaries between him and Abraham are vastly inflated in number, most anonymous and the named ones usually not overlapping, is a complete nono. Hence technical solutions on which Bible text is correct on Chronology and on how Uniformitarian chronologies are to be explained in their inflation of ancient times before us.

We disagree, because on one very important point we agree : "Biblical values" are not enough. The Bible isn't true like Silmarillion is true or Lord of the Rings is true, namely only in morals. The Bible is true like the multiplication table or - better still, since not a priori but empiric - like the periodic table of Mendeleiev is true. As fact, first.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris XI
XIII Sunday after Pentecost
and Nativity of the Blessed Virgin
8.IX.2019

samedi 7 septembre 2019

Old Policy


Maintaining Creationist Integrity
A response to Kent Hovind
by Carl Wieland, Ken Ham and Jonathan Sarfati
Originally published 11 October 2002
updated 16 December 2002 and 2 August 2006
https://creation.com/maintaining-creationist-integrity-response-to-kent-hovind


Here is the pertinent one:

... Note that we most definitely recommend/support some ministries that are not our own, but do not do so for others. We would not, for instance, be able to recommend people who do all or some of the following:

  • 1) Persistently use discredited or false arguments, with an unwillingness to correct when the weaknesses are pointed out, and more disturbingly, often fail to understand the reasoning involved.
  • 2) Persistently link (in at least some way) creationism with other matters which are of a dubious or ‘fringe’ nature, which have no direct bearing on creation issues but threaten to damage the creation movement by association. E.g.: Geocentrism, fraudulent archaeological claims of Wyatt/Gray, etc.
  • 3) Fail to have acceptable standards of accountability in terms of truly independent boards.
  • 4) Fail to submit their claims to the normal peer review processes that have arisen/been set up within creationism, i.e., peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Creation, CRSQ, etc.


Well, as to number 2) I would be "guilty as charged" if it truly were a fault.

Geocentrism links to Creationism as follows:

  • 1) With Geocentrism, no guaranteed parallax is involved in the phenomenon so known, meaning no trigonometry gives "distance to nearest stars", meaning we have a very simple answer to Distant Starlight problem. CMI is otherwise very readable, but has convoluted answers to it, one of which would contradict the obvious meaning of the Bible, all stars created after Earth was created, not just their light reaching Earth after then.
  • 2) With Geocentrism, no problem as to why Earth was not orbitting anything for three days and started orbitting Sun on day 4 (without Bible mentioning it).
  • 3) With Geocentrism, the same argument from design can be made as St. Thomas did (and Calvin repeated, whatever that is worth).
  • 4) If Geocentrism takes angelic movers of celestial bodies, including Sun and stars, which I think it does, no problem for such an angel to also obey God in sending Earth more cosmic radiation just after Flood, which involves three results:

    • i) shortening of lifespans
    • ij) production of the cold of the ice age
    • iij) a more rapid than now production of C14 in the atmosphere (I already counted, if C14 started rising at Flood, from initial near 5 pmC, which is more than I think now for Flood year, and the production was consistently the modern one, as well as the decay, we would now be only at 45 pmC, not 100, which gives mathematical conundra as to more recent dates, and this is presuming the Flood was as far back as 2957 BC, so Ussherists need even more rapid C14 production than I do).


  • 5) Like a literal and perfect Eden, Geocentrism ties in with corporality of Resurrection bodies and therefore of the place where blessed souls now and risen bodies henceforth can adore risen and ascended Jesus.
  • 6) Like Young Earth Creationism, Geocentrism ties in with literal Biblical facthood of a passage (Joshua 10:12,13)
  • 7) Like Young Earth Creationism with real creatio ex nihilo and in instanti and with miraculous abiogenesis (see Satan as witness to creation and his words in Matthew and Luke 4 about turning stones to bread), Geocentrism (for Joshua 10:12) ties in with understanding of miracles, as miracle workers adressing what needs miraculous change of normal behaviour and not something else.
  • 8) Like Young Earth Creationism, Geocentrism meets no real obstacle in really operational science, which deals with what can be observed hic et nunc, where Millions and Billions of Years are about the past, not observable in the present, Heliocentrism and Acentrism are about the distant, not observable here (unlike Round Earth which actually can be observed on Earth, piece by piece).
  • 9) Like Young Earth Creationism, Geocentrism has Patristic support.


I know too little of Wyatt and Gray to know if their archaeology is fraudulent or not, but I do know that "hard sciences" are attacking CMI for frauds as well, and I suspect Wyatt and Gray can have been picked on because archaeology is not Carl Wieland's field at all, since it is not a natural science.

Or, if the problem is Wyatt points to Mount Chudi instead of Greater Mount Ararat, I would support that. Mount Chudi as the landing place and Göbekli Tepe, nearly due West of it, crossing from Mountains of Ararat to the land of Shinar where there is a plain around Harran, as Babel. Only problem, so far, lack of bricks with bitumen as mortar on that site.

Point one, I do not know from case to case who is failing to understand whose reasoning.

Points three and four, I am an individual writer and as such cannot have an independent board, and as to peer review, I am willing to submit blog links for scrutinity, but they have so far not been accepted. Note, I believe first and foremost in post-publishing peer review.

Would it perhaps be time to re-evalue the policies here alluded to?

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris XI
St. Nemorius of Troyes
7.IX.2019

mardi 3 septembre 2019

Corporality of Resurrection Body


Does CMI deal with end times? / Well, both yes and no!
by Gary Bates, Lita Cosner | Published: 3 September 2019 (GMT+10)
https://creation.com/end-times


When people think of heaven and our resurrected state, many imagine an ethereal or ghost-like spiritual realm where we’ll all sit on clouds and play harps. However, that fails to appreciate God’s purpose in creating the earth to be a perfect home for humanity, and that fails to appreciate God’s plan to restore the original lost paradise. ... That’s why the Resurrection of Christ is so important—He was raised with a glorified physical body—the same sort of body that we will receive (1 Corinthians 15).

Some people think that when Paul refers to a ‘spiritual body’ in 1 Corinthians 15:44, this means that we will have a non-physical body. However, this misunderstands what Paul means. When Paul talks about ‘earthly’ and ‘spiritual’ bodies, he isn’t referring to what the bodies are composed of, but of what motivates and drives the desires of the different bodies.

Another misconception some people have is that in the Resurrection we will not experience time. But as creatures, we have a beginning in time, and we will remain ‘time-bound’ even in the resurrection. Think about it—we will experience events one after another, so even though it’s not certain how we will measure time in the context of an eternal existence, we will experience time. Only God is outside of time. When we look forward to worshipping and singing to God, for example, music involves timekeeping. If we are walking from one gate to another in the New Jerusalem, it will take time to travel there.


Gary, Lita, I highly endorse all of this.

Howoever, if I may recommend you a few corrolaries.

  • Our Lord's Resurrection body is numerically identic, while qualitatively different, from what His body was before dying on Calvary. This means, He still has the wounds from Calvary to show the Father, and He also still has the Blessed Virgin Mary as Mother. Is it probable He left His mother in the grave? Church Tradition (Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Miaphysite both Copt and Armenian, Nestorian) says no, She was raised to Heaven after Her earthly life was finished. In the Kingdom of Judah, the mother of the King is Queen. Just in case you are thinking of Jeremiah 44 several verses or Jeremiah 7:18, if you were giving your mother a present and some crook were claiming it for himself or herself, would you not be angry at that person and anyone agreeing? Well, Ishtar is a demon, therefore worse than a crook, and also a slut. So, if God intended His Mother to be the real Queen of Heaven, Jeremiah 44 is perfectly explicable in the light of this.

  • Christ's Body is still there, seated on a throne in Heaven (habitually, perhaps not 24/24), and so it can be bilocated to presence where external appearances of bread or wine is seen as visible signs of it. I've talked to Evangelicals who say "no, it can't, Christ was resumed in the Godhead and there is no longer any physical body present anywhere" - glad you disagree on this objection to Catholic views of the Eucharist (to which the still present wound marks are also relevant, Apocalypse 5:6 are to be conferred with "sacrifice of the Mass").

  • Since Christ's Body is and our risen bodies will be in definite places, Heaven has to be a place.

    This goes against the idea of 13.8 billion lightyears from one limit of visible space to another, and agrees with Empyraean Heaven being just beyond, just above the sphere of the fix stars. Which is easier to show plausible with Geocentrism.


Many of the Protestants who would disagree on these points are by now also disagreeing with corporality of Resurrection Bodies, and therefore you disagree with them.

Oh by the way, when I am basically suggesting a Catholic conversion, I do not mean "Pope Francis" at least from his so far record of non-Catholicity.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Neuilly Plaisance
Pope St. Pius X
3.IX.2019