Bill Nye and Space Rocks

Creation vs. Evolution : Bill Nye Incompetent in Debate · somewhere else : Bill Nye on Historic Science · Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Bill Nye on Japanese Tradition · somewhere else : Bill Nye on ... Pantheism? Hegelianism? · Creation vs. Evolution : Bill Nye and Space Rocks

Same video.

39:19

"I have purchased a Martian meteorite. From a guy in Colorado who collects them."

It seems that the trade in relics is not of the past. Indeed, in the Roman Catholic discipline, there were some severe regulations against trading in the actual sense of the word. Though not always fully functioning. Bill said "purchased".

39:26

"When you go to Antarctica, and you find rocks on top of the ice, where did the rocks come from?"

Well, as amateur Flood geologist, I'd say, from rocks crashed miles and miles away by the Flood of Noah ...

39:30

"There are no mountains anywhere around. They came from space."

Well, if Bill is not a Flood geologist, that's probably his option .... reminds me a bit of von Däniken and Hancock : not explaining Homo sapiens genome or human culture by purely natural process, and not believing the Biblical versions, they go to - space. Where Nimrod arguably was trying to go./HGL

Bill Nye Incompetent in Debate

Creation vs. Evolution : Bill Nye Incompetent in Debate · somewhere else : Bill Nye on Historic Science · Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Bill Nye on Japanese Tradition · somewhere else : Bill Nye on ... Pantheism? Hegelianism? · Creation vs. Evolution : Bill Nye and Space Rocks

Watching

Bill Nye Tours the Ark Encounter with Ken Ham
Answers in Genesis | 14.III.2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPLRhVdNp5M

I am @ 18:21.

Bill Nye is making it tedious and awkward for Ken Ham, and for those listening, and in his rudeness he makes lots of assumptions on what Ken Ham's position is, and as I happen to know the positions fairly well, I can say in advance the assumptions are wrong on a few points.

Bill Nye is of course in a sense entitled to make provocative summaries to the one he's summarising, but in a debate that should serve a very precise goal, namely to either provoke a clarification or to show what the other person's basis looks like : either way the goal being a valid one depends on the debater listening to the actual points made.

This Science Guy is in fact not listening, when he has managed to provoke a clarification, he refuses to listen to it. Perhaps I'd be as impatient in oral debates, but that's one reason why I prefer internet ones.

In a debate over a week, sometimes a month, for each answer I give, I can pick apart the parts of the answer I was given, and I make a point of honour in answering each part. I missed out on one occasion lately, and then after the debate when I made a post of it, I told the other guy I was sorry I missed that.

Orally, Bill Nye hasn't the time to do that, and he is also not listening until the point gets actually made.

At climate change he did in fact hear him out sufficiently to hear Ken Ham saying he believes in climate change and that scientists differ on whether it is man made or not. But at historic and observational science, he never got any further in the analysis of Ken Ham's position than "if you come into a room and the window is open, you presume no one opened it because you didn't see it happen" which is not the case. It is more like "I don't presume I know who opened the window unless some other information tells me".

At exhibit of Greenland ice, Bill Nye pretends that the quick glaciation after the Flood is equal to a supernatural one.

To Ken Ham, that is. Hearing Ken Ham out on what he thinks is not his forte. @ 20:32 ... the subject is changed.

Now - I am not saying Bill Nye is incompetent in communication. This kind of refusal to take into account what an opponent is actually thinking and expressing and taking into account instead only his own parodic summary - sure, it makes him look bad in a debate situation, like the stays on the Ark tour with Ken Ham, but it pays off on other times when he's talking about Ken Ham to third party.

The one I am watching is 1 hour 57 minutes 5 seconds, uploaded by Answers in Genesis. There is another that is 1 hour 1 minute 17 seconds, with highlights, uploaded earlier, also by Answers in Genesis.

Now, PBS has one which is 1 minute 23 seconds. The Daily Conversation has one which is 4 minutes 39 seconds.

The top four on the search "bill nye the science guy ark tour youtube" are:

• Answers in Genesis 1 hour 57 minutes 5 seconds
• PBS 1 minute 23 seconds
• Answers in Genesis 1 hour 1 minute 17 seconds
• The Daily Conversation 4 minutes 39 seconds

I think this shows who is confident of coming off as a decent debater and who isn't.

Now, it should be added, on the first non-Answers in Genesis, the 1 minute 23 seconds are in fact just a clip from a film.

But I highly suspect the film is about the same length as either of the two Answers in Genesis releases or perhaps between the two in length, and dedicates only a portion to the Ark Tour.

I haven't seen the film, so I'll need to contact them. But the description is perfectly compatible with that film devoting to the Ark tour about one clip the length 4 minutes 39 seconds - described by The Daily Conversation as "Bill Nye Destroys Noah's Ark".

Sure, if your video team can cherrypick the best minutes of your performance, which Answers in Genesis didn't.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Georges Pompidou
St. Francis of Sales
29.I.2020

At 25:54 Bill Nye has shown incompetence in dendrochronology. Trees older than Ken Ham thinks the earth is? Yes. One can count tree rings? Yes. Both together, as he said them very close phrases to each other, as an explanatory follow up, no.

Old Tjikko in Sweden is dated to "older than creation" - 9000 years old, but by carbon dates, not by tree ring counts.

Tree ring counts can give a tree or two "older than Flood" - placing it at 4400 years ago, but not placing it 5000 years ago, as I do.

It is incorrect to conflate the two. The tree ring count can give an argument for LXX over Masoretic chronology, and the carbon date can be explained on there being lower carbon 14 levels after Babel than now./HGL

PPS, if Ken Ham is promoting more than one tree ring per year, partly it is because of the tree that would otherwise have survived the Flood. On his Masoretic Flood date, and on his assumption the Flood was everywhere uniformly so violent every tree was destroyed. So, the tree in question (one or two of the oldest ones in California) can have had one tree ring per year with a LXX date for the Flood even if all trees alive were destroyed by it./HGL

Babel, also to Georgia Purdom

Survival, Not Leisure, Georgia? · Babel, also to Georgia Purdom

Same video as previous:

Noah’s Ark and the Flood with Dr. Georgia Purdom @ 46:19
Answers in Genesis | 2.VII.2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ma-LP0UDtw&t=1847s

Minor quibble : she places Babel at c. 101 after Flood, I'd place it at 401 (or possibly, not quite improbably 529) after the Flood.

Major quibble : she is considering garbling of the Flood account as due to telephone game.

Now, the telephone game is very apt to illustrate what can happen when rumours spread on telephones, not by the link to one account going viral on the internet part of a smart phone, but on telephones, wall phones or smart phones.

A news seems urgent to spread to neighbours, it is retold orally in haste without any time to back-check, and therefore it is accumulating inaccuracies.

This is not how traditions over several generations change, since the transmission is so very different from the telephone game.

First of all, they did not go away from the eye-witness account, because they were not all in the business of transmitting it as formulated by Noah or his sons. Therefore, they did not all have it as early Evolutionists all had their Bibles in Protestant England.

Second, the transmission was made with such care that the telephone game cannot explain inaccuracies, they are from other sources:

• inadvertent conflations;
• conflations made by artistic liberty (like fan fictions on Incredible Hulk meeting Batman, when neither DC or Marvel Comics are authorising it - but in this case more like making Bob Banner and Bruce Wayne the same person);
• outright lies, by omission or addition or both;
• the one item which resembles telephone game, sth is incomprehensible and you try to restitute the original message.

Whether a conflation is inadvertent or deliberate art cannot always be known.

A lie would become a fair ingredient for political and religious reasons due to Nimrodian tyranny (on my view technolatrous, not idolatrous as in Hindoo like or Shinto like religions), and (later on) rise of idolatry. It would also become an ingredient when certain sins became fashionable or acceptable among certain peoples.

The Greek Flood account for instance includes a conflation with destruction of Sodom coupled with a probably very deliberate omission of the exact sin for which God judged Sodom.

• Deucalion and Pyrrha are an old couple who have no children descending from both of them - like Abraham and Sarah.
• Three "gods" come to them - like three angels to Abraham and Sarah
• They foretell a disaster to them - like the three to Abraham and two of them to Lot
• They rescue - like angels rescued Lot or like God rescued Noah.
• After the disaster, the couple has a trouble about repopulating - like daughters of Lot.

We can very well imagine a first stage where Greeks were asking "was it fire or water" and then a second one, in which the decision on water is made because the "fire" account says that a habit Hercules seems to have had with Iolaus was very displeasing to "the gods" ("or whatever") and as they were idolising Hercules, this was not good news for them.

Hence, the accumulation of Genesis 18-19 traits to an overtly mostly Genesis 6-9 story. Because one wanted deliberately to leave out the moral essence of Genesis 18-19 : monotheism, old childless woman miraculously getting pregnant by her husband in old age, and, most of all, condemnation of the last of the sins enumerated of Jerusalem and "her sister Sodom" in Ezechiel 16:49-50.

Condemning pride and inhospitality - sure, why not? But condemning gluttony, idleness and - well, the last of these sins, that didn't feel to well to those arguably already Hercules worshipping Greeks to whom we owe an account of Deucalion and Pyrrha which is found in very early (I think incomplete) versions or allusions in Homer and Hesiod, in 750 or 700 BC, near 5 centuries after Troy fell in 1179, by which time Hercules was already dead, which was 736 years after the Genesis 20 event, birth of Isaac, nine months after destruction of Sodom, which in turn was 1042 years after the Flood of Noah.

A bit like certain people want to use rainbows referring to diversity of kinds in Noah's Ark in a metaphoric sense that also doesn't quite match what we should conclude from the destruction of Sodom.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Pompidou Library
III:d Lord's Day after Epiphany
26.I.2020

Durupınar Alternative to Judi? Three Remarks

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Paulogia took on the Tower · Creation vs. Evolution : Changing the Text, NIV? · Durupınar Alternative to Judi? Three Remarks

• Direction in relation to Göbekli Tepe (if this is Babel) functions.
  
  39°26′26.3″N 44°14′05.3″E
  37°13′23″N 38°55′21″E
  
  2° 12' 40" from the North to the South.
  5° 18' 42" from East to West.
  
  There is still a predominance of east to west over north to south, if not quite as clear cut as with Mt Judi.
  
  
• Boat shape seems a bit suspicious, I have somewhat of a feeling a simple box may have been safer on very huge Flood waves than a boat shape inscribed in the box.
  
  
• There is a stele and there is petrified wood with some organic left from Durupınar. I do not know whether carbon dates have been made from remaining organic content of wood, or from anything from under the stele or close enough to its base to not be a later accretion. The real date 2957 BC would arguably give carbon dates much older, due to carbon 14 content being much lower back then.

Preliminary attitude : I tend to favour Mt Judi as traditionally given location./HGL

Survival, Not Leisure, Georgia?

Survival, Not Leisure, Georgia? · Babel, also to Georgia Purdom

With a rolling period of some seconds, I think being on the Ark would have been fairly soothing in moments when you had nothing to do.

And lying around the animals, well, that is how some people today heal from trauma.

Guess what, Mrs. Purdom, Noah and family had been through a lot of that!

For one, the other patriarchs' relevant sons were from say 230 years age or sth like that for Seth, but Noah's very relevant sons only came when he was 500. Sounds like someone like me getting children from now, when I didn't get any back at age 20./HGL

This in response to Georgia Purdom claiming (see title) on her video on the Ark./HGL

PS - even Lot got some leisure, if not very edifying one - getting soak drunk twice and laid twice (before realising his wife really was dead and he shouldn't have) is not too edifying, but it counts as leisure. It can partly have been as a punishment for lingering on in Sodom during the 20 years from Genesis 14 when an evil custom possibly from Sumerian Inanna priesthood was making its way to getting fashionable there./HGL

PPS, citing conclusion from an earlier work of mine:

So, unless I totally got the way of calculating radius of gyration wrong, the rolling period of the Ark, according to the formula given in wiki, would have been between 11.71 and 12.82 seconds. Recall that first sentence?

A passenger ship will typically have a long rolling period for comfort, perhaps 12 seconds while a tanker or freighter might have a rolling period of 6 to 8 seconds.

In other words, God saw to it, they were fairly comfy on the Ark, whenever the natural rolling period prevailed!

I counted on 24 English inches per cubit, with 18 or 20.4 English inches, the result may be different. Here is the link to that essay:

Creation vs. Evolution : Rolling Period of Ark?
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2018/08/rolling-period-of-ark.html

Did King Alfred Know the Psalms? Yes.

King Alfred of Wessex was in certain ways one of the models for Tolkien's Aragorn. He is also the model for the poem character Alfred of Wessex in The Ballad of the White Horse, which Tolkien had read.

At a rereading, he found it less good than he recalled, due to historic fairly gross inaccuracies. Which was of course not the point, Tolkien wrote exactly that kind of thing himself in Farmer Giles of Ham, or Goscinny in Asterix. We need not believe Vercingetorix had a daughter saved to one small village in Aremorica to enjoy Asterix, we need not believe Cole of Colchester descended from a man with a blunderbuss to enjoy Farmer Giles and we need not believe Alfred had Gaelic allies from Ireland (more like Brian Borumha on Ireland also had his fights with Vikings) in order to enjoy The Ballad of the White Horse.

Now, I have not actually read all of the poem of Chesterton yet. When my time was good, I had no access to it on internet, and there was no paper version of the text at hand, and when my internet access came, no time to read a new text that long. Worries offline and debates online ... nevertheless, I do know some of the poem's main content. Or perhaps, I read it just once, too little to actually get a grip on it. But here is a fourliner where Chesterton gives words to a tradition that King Alfred had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Uffingdon White Horse. Here are the words he gave Her:

Naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
save that the sky grows darker yet
and the sea rises higher.

And here are words from the same poem, often cited, and when I had cited them under a quote of above, it occurred to me, they were an echo of these words:

The High Tide, King Alfred said!
The High Tide and the turn!

How so?

Psalm 103: [6-9] The deep like a garment is its clothing: above the mountains shall the waters stand. At thy rebuke they shall flee: at the voice of thy thunder they shall fear. The mountains ascend, and the plains descend into the place which thou hast founded for them. Thou hast set a bound which they shall not pass over; neither shall they return to cover the earth.

The other relevant quote was actually Jeremiah 33:[25, 26] Thus saith the Lord: If I have not set my covenant between day and night, and laws to heaven and earth: Surely I will also cast off the seed of Jacob, and of David my servant, so as not to take any of his seed to be rulers of the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: for I will bring back their captivity, and will have mercy on them.

So, when the Blessed Virgin tells King Alfred (in Chesterton's poem) that the sea shall rise higher, he knows this can't go on for ever. He foresees there will be a high tide and the turn. And likewise, when she tells him the sky shall grow darker, he knows that cannot go on for ever either.

The real King Alfred is an example of how Catholicism all through the first millennium was very friendly to laymen reading the Bible. He translated 50 psalms which he required every ealdorman to know at least in Ænglisc - English he would have meant, while we would say Old English or Anglo-Saxon. He also translated Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (with some reflections on digestion added, he had a sensitive stomach) and a few more things.

The bound above which the waters shall not pass over was not set in Creation week, nor in fact directly after the Flood. Rather, first the waters fled "at God's rebuke", then mountains rose and plains descended during the ice age, then waters rose again at the end of the ice age, and then God set a limit for them.

This second rise of the waters, not a new deluge, may have been part of what Nimrod's men considered as a threat of a new deluge and a reason to get to heaven to avoid that, building a tower in disobedience, precisely as some imagine rocketry will serve to save humanity from a destroyed earth "to other planets out in space" which it also will not.

Nimrod should have trusted the promise of the rain bow. The new rise of waters had a high tide and a turn too.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bibl. Audoux
St. Timothy
24.I.2020

Apud Ephesum sancti Timothei, qui fuit discipulus beati Pauli Apostoli; atque, ab eodem Ephesi ordinatus Episcopus, ibi post multos pro Christo agones, cum Dianae immolantes argueret, lapidibus obrutus est, ac paulo post obdormivit in Domino.

Trent Horn Wrong

Important notice : my article refers to the two cited paragraphs on Trent Horn's podcast, the rest is rather sensible. Writing this after signing the article, and it's too important for a PPS. See also: New blog on the kid : Could Da Vinci Code be read by Mature Catholics? And what about Potter? https://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2020/01/could-da-vinci-code-be-read-by-mature.html

Citing two paragraphs:

I may do a podcast in the future on people at the Kolbe Center, who say that Catholics are obligated to believe in young earth creationism, which is not true. The Church does not oblige that. I would say the best evidence from science and the writings of the Church Fathers and what the Church teaches is that Catholics should not believe in young earth creationism and that the earth is 6,000 years old.

We should believe, as Pope Saint John Paul II said in his encyclical On Faith and Reason, that faith and reason are complementary. They don’t contradict each other. So if science tells us the universe is 13.7 billion years old, our faith does not contradict that scientific finding. We don’t have to entertain a conflict. Otherwise, if we do, Saint Augustine in his commentary on Genesis, he criticized Christians of his day who were arguing for a literal creation theory, saying that they become a mockery to non-Christians, claiming to be experts in astronomy and the sciences when they actually are not experts in these things.

Transscript from a podcast by Trent Horn, available here:

Fr. Ripperger, Harry Potter, and Healthy Skepticism
TRENT HORN • 9/5/2019
https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/fr-ripperger-harry-potter-and-healthy-skepticism

Analysed:

I may do a podcast in the future on people at the Kolbe Center, who say that Catholics are obligated to believe in young earth creationism, which is not true.

Technical on what texts are authoritative and what they really say.

Trent Horn accepting Vatican II as a real Council and Dei Verbum as one of the highest ranking if not the most highest ranking document of it might consider its § 3 as infallible. And it teaches young earth creationism.

It trumps Humani Generis, which was only an encyclical and anyway did not decide for or against considering Adam as having a biological but not moral ancestry that was not fully human.

It trumps the speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on November 22 1951, in which he considered the Earth as 5 billion years old.

It is much more clear than making some kind of advocacy against such obligation from other words in Dei Verbum like "revealed for our salvation" (is YEC salvation relevant?) or "genre" (if it features, have not read all of the document).

But for me as not accepting it and as considering Humani Generis ambiguity as being a sin against the faith comparable to Pope Honorius not allowing polemics against Monotheletism, my latest authorities as to Church law are things like the decisions of 1905 and 1909. Do not know of much between that and Pius XII's roughshod handling of it.

The Church does not oblige that.

The 1909 decision gives an open door to day-age theory, if it stays at that. While the consulter Fulcran Vigouroux is on record as previously having envisaged extending the timeline for Genesis 5 and 11 too, for one thing he had even back then decided that with present (1880's or 90's) evidence and taking a LXX timeline, that was not necessary, and for another, he did not repeat this potential licence in his capacity of consulter in 1909. So, the 1909 decision gives an open door to an old earth one might call "pure day age" - tampering with timeline of Genesis 1, but not of Genesis 5 or 11.

This one may agree that the Church does not forbid, unless Pope Michael has issued a decree since that removes this liberty. His Holiness is himself certainly not a proponent of day age.

However, an old earth position really thought through (and not just accepted by ignorance and laziness and half learning) these days, given that C14 dating is more, not less, reliable than geological strata or Ka-Ar dating, would imply extending the timeline radically for Genesis 5 or 11 or both. This extension is NOT provided for in the 1909 decision.

The "day age +" theory of old earth has as its most harsh problem that it throws a doubt on the historic accuracy of Genesis 3. In order to honour Our Lady, we need not only to identify Her with the woman of Genesis 3:15, we also need the text of God's words to the serpent to have been accurately transmitted from Adam to Moses. Since Genesis 5 and Genesis 11 deal with later events, if we cannot trust them, how can we trust Genesis 3 not to have been garbled prior to Moses?

And if you say "Moses was inspired when writing down Genesis 3, historic truth was miraculously restored or had been miraculously preserved among conditions very adverse to preserving history" - why not the same with Genesis 5 and 11? Though accepting it would certainly remove some of your motives for calling the conditions unideal for transmitting stories of Genesis 2 to 11 accurately.

On the other hand you can say "Genesis 5 and 11 are not salvation relevant, Genesis 3 is, therefore Genesis 3 was miraculously excepted from the process affecting Genesis 5 and 11" - why would we believe that? Why would God make the claims not directly pertaining to our salvation, but pertaining to our knowledge of those that pertain to salvation a non-inerrant claim, if He intends His word to have any inerrancy? And if Genesis 5 and 11 are not literally true, how would they help us to know the truth of salvation relevant Genesis 3?

For make no mistake, if Genesis 5 and 11 are historical fact, then this very much helps the credibility of Genesis 3 as historical fact too. I'll again cite Fr. George Leo Haydock on his last comment on Genesis 3:

Concerning the transactions of these early times, parents would no doubt be careful to instruct their children, by word of mouth, before any of the Scriptures were written; and Moses might derive much information from the same source, as a very few persons formed the chain of tradition, when they lived so many hundred years. Adam would converse with Mathusalem, who knew Sem, as the latter lived in the days of Abram. Isaac, Joseph, and Amram, the father of Moses, were contemporaries: so that seven persons might keep up the memory of things which had happened 2500 years before. But to entitle these accounts to absolute authority, the inspiration of God intervenes; and thus we are convinced, that no word of sacred writers can be questioned. H.

https://www.ecatholic2000.com/haydock/untitled-05.shtml#navPoint_6

Sure, he says, theoretically there would have been time enough to just potentially garble some minor detail of Genesis 3, but thanks to God's inspiration we know this is not so. But, before this, he states clearly, that we have a good purely natural expectation of Genesis 3 having been correctly preserved. The "minimal overlap" steps of transmission (which are not separated but completed by the other generations) are on purely natural grounds a fairly good security against involuntary and unintentional garbling of what Genesis 3 says. I might concur with Fulcran on LXX for Genesis 5 and 11 (on somewhat other grounds), this extends the minimal overlap steps somewhat but not very much. Connected to this is the next:

Its next harshest disaster in accepting "day age +" is, if we place Adam even near when he is on traditional time, but accept modern "scientific" dates for certain Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals and for certain people in Americas, you get a clear difficulty for all men descending from Adam as even only one of the ancestors in his time.

And if you place Adam and Eve at c. 30 000 or 40 000 BP, you may have a better case for pre-Columbian Americans and pre-Tasman Australians descending from them, but you have radically worsened the case for Genesis 3 being history.

Not to mention you would be very anti-Semitic about Jewish genealogies, since Matthew 1 gives 42 ancestors of 46 (or 41 of 45?), 91%, but this would imply sth like less than 20 % of the ancestors mentioned. Three in a row, and if my memory serves me, one later on, omitted for reason of condemnatio memoriae.

I would say the best evidence from science and the writings of the Church Fathers

It is easy to say the phrase "the best evidence from science and the writings of the Church Fathers" but precisely therefore, it doesn't guarantee you actually have accessed the founts of knowledge you are talking about.

and what the Church teaches

If you mean the Vatican II Sect in its present liturgy, you have a case. That precise case is also one, if I am right, for "John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis" not having been or being Popes, since the "unknown ages" version of Christmas Martyrology is at great odds with what I am saying and not just on behalf of very personal feelings, but for good objective reasons.

is that Catholics should not believe in young earth creationism and that the earth is 6,000 years old.

We have an ambiguity. Does he mean "should not" as I would say we should not believe "pure day age" even if 1909 decision may seem it is allowable? Or does he mean "must not" as I would say we must not believe "day age +"?

We should believe, as Pope Saint John Paul II said in his encyclical On Faith and Reason, that faith and reason are complementary.

Faith has a propositional content - "I believe in God Father Almighty" - but reason has not. Reason is the capacity that accepts or rejects the propositional content of the faith.

By claiming complementarity, Wojtyla was suggesting that "reason" too has propositional content. That "reason" refers to some kind of doctrine.

They don’t contradict each other.

Someone's reason will accept the Faith, someone else's reason will contradict the Faith. Unlike Faith, there is no such doctrine as "Reason".

And in the following he, or Trent Horn resuming him, or Trent Horn thinking on after him is in fact not speaking of reason, but of an activity which depends on reason in order to be healthy, namely science.

So if science tells us the universe is 13.7 billion years old, our faith does not contradict that scientific finding.

I could point out that the "if [then]" clause has an empty apodosis. It could be as formally true as a sentence beginning "if the moon is a blue cheese" ... but it would be empty.

Yes, faith does contradict anyone telling us that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, including a scientist, and no, it is not a scientific finding or at least not a legitimate one.

We don’t have to entertain a conflict. Otherwise, if we do, Saint Augustine in his commentary on Genesis, he criticized Christians of his day who were arguing for a literal creation theory,

Trent Horn seems to have read only one commentary by St. Augustine on Genesis, namely THE most quotemined quote of St. Augustine these days.

This one.

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics;

In fact, he has written three : De Genesi contra Manichaeos libri duo; De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber; De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim.

This is not apparent from the English wikipedian article on St. Augustine's works, as it has been garbled - The Chronicles of Narnia (Librum annalium Narnia) would seem to have another author, it would also not be "liber" / "librum" but "libri VII" but C. S. Lewis lived more than 1500 years later than St. Augustine - but the Polish page has been well preserved (and also gives the Latin titles).

It so happens, I have read City of God, and it so happens I have of De Genesis ad litteral libri XII read the first five books (or skipped some from 2:nd to 4th and then read 5) and into book 6. I happen to know from my reading in De Genesi ad Litteram Libri XII (which for some reason is not on Newadvent Patristics page!) that the liberties St. Augustine took with six days were the very opposite ones to the ones taken by Fulcran Vigoroux. St. Augustine thinks that creation in one single moment (not even divisible into microseconds as to itself) is sensible to assume, knowing God is all powerful and also bc of Genesis 2:4 and a mistranslated Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 18:1 (simul would have been near correct in St. Jerome's native everyday Latin, like "insimul" = "insieme" = "ensemble" - meaning "together" but this was different from the Latin of St. Augustine, who also replaced "iunctim" with something, but with something else - arguably "iuncti, iunctae, iuncta" like Spanish "juntos, juntas"). And to return to City of God, he both upholds literal truth of old ages attained (Adam dying at 930 etc.) and of short overall timeline, compared to such offered by some Pagans.

So, St. Augustine did not materially agree with you. He was in fact a Young Earth Creationist. However, he did also not formally agree with you.

Let's recall what Christians should not contradict, on his words, repeated:

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something ... and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience."

From expertise? Or from reason and experience?

I hold the theorem of Pythagoras to be certain from reason and experience, and dito with π being an irrational (but not a number). But it is obvious that "expertise" will hold lots more than the usual man as "certain from reason and experience".

saying that they become a mockery to non-Christians, claiming to be experts in astronomy and the sciences when they actually are not experts in these things.

I am sorry, but the translation is tendentious. Latin does not clearly distinguish nouns from adjectives. The noun "expert" is not one that can be attested for Latin of pre-modern times. The word "expertus" is an adjective and means "experienced".

In case you consider St. Augustine did want us to cave in to expertise on matters where our reason and experience are insufficient to by themselves conclude, rather than to the Bible, you are not just over relying on this mistranslation, but you are also contradicting the title of a certain work of his:

Contra academicos.

When searching, the ctrl+F gave me for "contra" 38 hits. St. Augustine was definitely a polemic. The title is also missing in the Newadvent site for Church Father writings, and it suggests that St. Augustine on the contrary thought it could be very well and dandy on occasions to contradict expertise.

By his time, the four schools of philosophy were dwindling to two, namely Plato an Aristotle. Plato is the one relevant for Academici in the classical sense, but both were together among the closest equivalents that the time of St. Augustine had to experts in the modern sense.

I give an alternative translation:

"saying that they become a mockery to non-Christians, claiming to be geeks in astronomy and the sciences when they actually are not very geeky in these things."

This covers both "experts" and "amateurs". And unlike the nouns "experts" it is actually correct. A geek has the experience of study in a subject he is geek in.

I am not an academic expert in carbon 14 dating, but I certainly am a geek in it and am not making myself a mockery by the fact of claiming to be so - except to those who refuse to look up my actual solutions, which is not a case of being a mockery by my behaviour, but of being so by someone else's unfounded rumour and prejudice.

Hans Georg Lundahl
St. Maur des Fossées
St. Agnes of Rome
21.I.2020

Link to Polish list of St. Augustine's works:

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzie%C5%82a_Augustyna_z_Hippony

PS, a fraudulent rumour about inter alia St. Augustine suggests that you don't have a Young Earth Creationist unity among Fathers - you do, and this should suggest a certain council to a man named Trent Horn. Recall "unanimem sensum patrum" or sth?/HGL

PPS, on reading the rest of the podcast's transscript - see the important notice above/HGL

Should we Trust Forensic Sciences? A Comparison

This is good, don't miss it, but not what I intended to copy here:
Man Fully Alive is the Glory of God, St. Irenaeus
https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/man-fully-alive-is-the-glory-of-god-st-irenaeus/

This is what I intended to share:

Slate : Jurisprudence : Pseudo-Science in the Witness Box
Dahlia Lithwick | 22.IV.2015
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/04/fbis-flawed-forensics-expert-testimony-hair-analysis-bite-marks-fingerprints-arson.amp

Two "Magic Wand" quotes

"When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so," Francis told the gathering, where he also dedicated a statue of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. God, Francis said, "created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment."

npr : Pope Says God Not 'A Magician, With A Magic Wand'
October 28, 2014, 11:18 AM : ET : SCOTT NEUMAN
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/10/28/359564982/pope-says-god-not-a-magician-with-a-magic-wand?t=1579003761279

"with a magic wand able to do everything"

What exactly has "magic wand" to do here?

Is / was he implying the normal word for word belief in Genesis 1 implies God "studied magic" under some higher and more powerful "energy"?

This may be how it may strike a non-believer of some types of Pantheistic belief systems, or Taoism, perhaps Kabbalism of certain types (Lurian?) and so on. A Buddhist reader might get this kind of concept from interpreting Genesis 1.

But this is not what the normal literal believer in Genesis means by God being able to do everything. Rather, God has this ability in and of Himself. Rather than drawing on the "Universe" as a source of "energy", He is Himself the source of the Universe. He therefore is able to do anything with the Universe He wants to do, precisely as a writer is able to do anything in a novel. Supposing Tolkien wanted to write a fantasy novel, no necessity in his mastery of words, pens, ink and paper forces him to write a realistic novel instead. And supposing God wanted to set the story started without wasting too many millions of years on the setting and also to include later on miracles in the story of our Universe which He created from nothing, He could and can do that too.

Putting in the "magic wand" is just an unnecessary and obfuscating piece of ridicule.

Now, here is another quote:

Well, it was the story we all learned in grammar school: Colorado river over tens of millions of years cut the Grand Canyon. Most geologists have jettisoned that idea. You can't imagine a canyon enduring that long with erosion. Time is not a magic wand that solves the geologic problems of the world.

Around 1:53 left of the video (2:08 - 1:48):

Is Genesis History
· October 22, 2019 ·
https://www.facebook.com/isgenesishistory/videos/p.2414750065435223/2414750065435223/?type=2&theater

I'll have to ask Del Tacket which scientist was saying this. But between Antipope Bergoglio and Del Tacket - give me Del Tacket for my money. If I had any ...

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Hilary of Poitiers
14.I.2020

Now, St. Hilary of Poitiers actually died on a 13.I - why do we feast him today?

I presume, because 13.I is Octave of Epiphany and as such the last day of Christmas, traditionally./HGL

Btw, take a look at this article or hear this podcast on the matter:

https://creation.com/a-remarkable-witness-to-creation-satan

https://creation.com/media-center/podcast/remarkable-witness-to-creation-satan

I think the "Pope" gave Satan a chuckle ... a "Catholic Pope" less good theologian than he?/HGL

How is Babel across non-Hebrew cultures?

First a little question some may consider unrelated. Can computer translation overcome the obstacle posed since Babel?

No.

The Atlantic : The Shallowness of Google Translate
Douglas Hofstadter | January 30, 2018
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-shallowness-of-google-translate/551570/

I'll cite for brevity the translation examples between French and English, for full story read the article, please!

Here is a sentence in English:

In their house, everything comes in pairs. There’s his car and her car, his towels and her towels, and his library and hers.

Here is the Google translate version:

Dans leur maison, tout vient en paires. Il y a sa voiture et sa voiture, ses serviettes et ses serviettes, sa bibliothèque et les siennes.

Here is the human translation:

Chez eux, ils ont tout en double. Il y a sa voiture à elle et sa voiture à lui, ses serviettes à elle et ses serviettes à lui, sa bibliothèque à elle et sa bibliothèque à lui.

Here is the Google translate version of that:

At home, they have everything in double. There is his own car and his own car, his own towels and his own towels, his own library and his own library.

In other words, Google translate is not capable of understanding information. Now there is one claim by the author I disagree with:

Let me hasten to say that a computer program certainly could, in principle, know what language is for, and could have ideas and memories and experiences, and could put them to use, but that’s not what Google Translate was designed to do. Such an ambition wasn’t even on its designers’ radar screens.

I don't think a computer could that. I think Douglas Hofstadter is unduly caving in to a logical consequence of materialism, which Google Translate is very apt to disappoint you on.

If we are basically only rearranged matter and yet we think, rearranged matter would at some point be able to think. Well, we aren't and it won't.

Google Translate isn’t familiar with such situations. Google Translate isn’t familiar with situations, period. It’s familiar solely with strings composed of words composed of letters.

Google translate is not familiar with strings composed of words composed of letters any more than a calculator is familiar with numbers and operations anymore than an abacus is familiar with adding and subtracting of numbers expressable as fives and units in couples for each either unitary digit or multiple of ten thereof. These things are what the machines in each case are used for, but only the users, not the machines, are in actual fact familiar with them.

Now, let's shift subject a bit and use Google translate for Chinese, Malay, Arabic and Japanese for me, thou, we, ye.

With Chinese I think the translation is correct, since ma and me once dreamt of Learning Chinese and "wo" and "ni" and plural ending "men" for either sticks out from my memories of the book. With the other three languages, the translation for "thou" and for "ye" is identical, making me think that maybe Malay and Japanese don't distinguish singular from plural you, but maybe rather it was Google Translate that wasn't programmed to make this translation.

The reason I used object form "me" instead of subject form "I" is, on a previous occasion, I had gotten "yishi" for "I" and I suspect Google Translate had taken "I" for the Roman numeral for "one", not for subjective form of "me". Anyway, I later saw sth hinting that "yishi" could be "one" and I thought I remembered "wo" - which seems to be correct from below. For Arabic I am nearly sure that different pronouns exist for singular and plural. This is why I marked the forms under "ye" with ? except for Chinese "nimen".

	me	thou	we	ye
Chinese	Wǒ	nǐ	wǒmen	nǐmen
Malay	saya	kamu	kita	kamu ?
Arabic	'ana	'ant	nahnu	'ant ?
Japanese	Watashi	anata	watashitachi	anata ?

Note, between these pronoun systems, should they be spoken in the same area (which is a known case for Chinese, Malay and one more language, forgot which one), there is no "conflict of interpretation".

No pronoun in one of these languages means the opposite in another of them.

There are at least two situations in which speakers of one language could borrow pronouns from another one : conflict of interpretation and the borrowing language being weak. Like Gaelic in an area where all the young speak English only.

Now, what do I mean by conflict of interpretation?

Suppose we allow language A and B to replace Chinese and the rest. Suppose we fill in with X, Y, Z and so on. And we'll even skip the plural.

	me	thou
A	X	Y
B	Y	Z

A word Y would mean "me" in one language and "thou" in the other. In a widely bilingual situation with rapid codeshifting this would lead to confusion.

I think both languages would be likely to compromise on a pronoun system like:

	me	thou
A & B	X	Z

Those who know my earlier work would know that this is how I think Indo-European pronouns and Finnish conjugation ended up with very similar forms. In other words, similarity of pronouns would not be a foolproof actual proof of a common ancestor. Those who disagree would typically consider Indo-European languages had a common ancestor with each other c. 4000 BC, and with Finno-Ugrian perhaps 10 000 BC.

If you allow humanity to have existed 100 000 years, perhaps all languages are ultimately related, that's Merrit Ruhlen's vision. An English Dictionary, forget if it was Oxford or Webster, offered 500 roots in the Proto-Indo-European stage and Ruhlen offers 32 from the Proto-Human one.

Obviously, on the Biblical timeline, there is no time for Khoisan and Aleutic to have a common ancestor.

On the Biblical timeline we also have another event, the split up of languages at God's judgement over Babel. If Babel was 2556 BC and earliest attested Indo-European languages are Hittite and Mycenaean Greek, and if we reduce earliest attestation of Hittite from 16th to 15th C. BC, by my carbon calibration, and similarily earliest documentation of Linear B, in which Mycenaean Greek is written, from 15th to 14th C. we have a bit more than 1000 years for "branches of Indo-European" (as they are called) to coalesce around certain common traits, including pronouns system, so my scenario is feasible.

But some would like extra-Biblical (including external to comments on the Bible, so it should be neither Jewish nor Christian nor Samarian to be truly extra-Biblical) confirmation for Babel, like we have plenty for the Flood.

Now we come at last to what I am offering to talk about.

No, outside Hebrew culture, we basically don't have that.

Egyptians presume Egyptian was the original language. If, as Herodotus reports, an Egyptian king named Psammetikos raised two children without language contact to find out if that was so, Wahibre Psamtik I was of the 26th Dynasty.

To earlier Egyptians, I presume, non-Egyptians spoke non-Egyptian languages as created by the chaos god (nearly devil) Seth.

Babylonian residents seem to have been intrigued by the practical diversity between Sumerian and Akkadian and other languages, but not to the point of either preserving Babel story or making up an alternative to accounty for this diversity in theory.

Greek version of table of nations has Hellen as son of Deucalion and Pyrrha - the Flood survivors, then his grandson Aegimius is speaking to Hercules, who himself descends from Perseus who was tenth generation after Inachus, who would seem to have been after the Flood. Either a chronological mix-up or Hellen, Dorus, Aegimius lived really long. But between Inachus and Perseus, you have the two brothers Danaus and Aegyptus. And no explanation is offered why Danaans speak Greek or why Aegyptians speak Egyptian.

In the Iliad, some place names in the Troad have double names : the Greek one is "in the speech of gods" while the Trojan name is "in the speech of men".

Similarily, for Hindoos, Sanskrit is the holy language uniting gods and men, and other languages are simply - debased Sanskrit. Hindoo speakers of Tamil want Dravidian to be related to Sanskrit.

Everyone is taking for granted the own language was before the others - which Hebrews do also, even if Genesis 11:1 doesn't spell this out, all cannot be right, but one might be - but offering no real explanation for the existence of other languages.

Hebrews (Christians and Jews alike) have a very different explanation, in the first part of Genesis 11.

It is so unique, even Muslims don't have it in the Quran, and they might differ on whether they accept it or not. The Quran as such only says Allah created different people with different languages - not specifying if this means in parallel with Adam and Eve or not.

Here** is a more full discussion:

Although not mentioned by name, the Quran has a story with similarities to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, although set in the Egypt of Moses: Pharaoh asks Haman to build him a stone (or clay) tower so that he can mount up to heaven and confront the God of Moses.[33]

Another story in Sura 2:102 mentions the name of Babil, but tells of when the two angels Harut and Marut taught magic to some people in Babylon and warned them that magic is a sin and that their teaching them magic is a test of faith.[34] A tale about Babil appears more fully in the writings of Yaqut (i, 448 f.) and the Lisān al-ʿArab [ar] (xiii. 72), but without the tower: mankind were swept together by winds into the plain that was afterward called "Babil", where they were assigned their separate languages by God, and were then scattered again in the same way. In the History of the Prophets and Kings by the 9th-century Muslim theologian al-Tabari, a fuller version is given: Nimrod has the tower built in Babil, God destroys it, and the language of mankind, formerly Syriac, is then confused into 72 languages. Another Muslim historian of the 13th century, Abu al-Fida relates the same story, adding that the patriarch Eber (an ancestor of Abraham) was allowed to keep the original tongue, Hebrew in this case, because he would not partake in the building.[24]

Although variations similar to the biblical narrative of the Tower of Babel exist within Islamic tradition, the central theme of God separating humankind on the basis of language is alien to Islam according to the author Yahiya Emerick. In Islamic belief, he argues, God created nations to know each other and not to be separated.

So, no Tower of Babel in the Quran, but diverse ... retellings of the story without the actual point ... outside it and by diverse authors.

Still, Egyptian, Babylonian, Pagan Greek and Islamic traditions, all of which are non-Biblical, even is Islam shadows the Bible a bit more closely, all of them presume a universal Flood, and it is recent (except for Hindoos, who transposed the Rama story from after Flood and after Mahabharata to back before Mahabharata and the Flood even earlier). This plus awareness of the diversity of languages should push to explaining a radical and short spanned diversification of languages.

Only the Hebrew story (and a near plagiarism of it in Lisān al-ʿArab) actually explicitly has it. So, non-Hebrew traditions actually only indirectly confirm the Tower of Babel, by confirming the Flood and its recency, like the timeframe required for Ruhlen's scenario isn't available.

Obviously, with some linguistic experience and sophistication, this should push the Hebrew story, therefore either Christianity or Judaism, forward quite a bit, or both, even, until Henoch and Elijah come to convert the Jews.

However, linguistic sophistication may be rarer than what as a linguist one might like to think.

Confer this from an early thinker on "computer linguistics", cited in the article I just started this essay with:

When I first got interested in the subject, in the mid-1970s, I ran across a letter written in 1947 by the mathematician Warren Weaver, an early machine-translation advocate, to Norbert Wiener, a key figure in cybernetics, in which Weaver made this curious claim, today quite famous:

When I look at an article in Russian, I say, “This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.”

Some years later he offered a different viewpoint: “No reasonable person thinks that a machine translation can ever achieve elegance and style. Pushkin need not shudder.”

While Wiener changed his mind because he tried to find solutions and it didn't work all that well, or even when it worked at its best, it didn't work as he thought it would work, many don't try to find any solutions and are really stuck in that attitude : any language not one's own is a coded version of one's own.

I am afraid some people in Russia might be so optimistic on Google Translate that they imagine they can judge the merits of my writing from how it translates automatically by that machine translation.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Pompidou Library
Octave of Epiphany
13.I.2020

* It seems I was confused by a genealogy table that only outlined the ancestry of Greeks, here is a more full enumeration:

Hellen, Amphictyon, Orestheus, Candybus, Protogeneia, Pandora II, Thyia and Melantho are their children.
Aeolus, Dorus, Xuthus, Aetolus, Physcus, Aethlius, Graecus, Makednos, Magnes and Delphus are their grandsons.

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

** Tower of Babel : Islamic tration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel#Islamic_tradition

Changing the Text, NIV?

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Paulogia took on the Tower · Creation vs. Evolution : Changing the Text, NIV? · Durupınar Alternative to Judi? Three Remarks

Here we have a text:

11 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward,[a] they found a plain in Shinar[b] and settled there. [a] Or from the east; or in the east [b] That is, Babylonia Genesis 11 NIV on Biblegateway https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+11&version=NIV

Why would they want "eastward"?

Coordinates: 39°42.113′N 44°17.899′E [2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Ararat

Some consider Noah landed "on Mount Ararat" (Aghri Daghi) rather than less precisely "in the mountains of Ararat / Urartu / Armenia". This is where the 44°17.899′E coordinate comes in. Now, look at footnote b, "that is Babylonia", let's take Eridu, since some identify Tower of Babel with Ziggurat of Eridu, and since Eridu is clearly in Babylonia:

Coordinates 30°48′57″N 45°59′46″E
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eridu

So, if mankind or its élite left Noah's landing place and went to a plain where they built Babel, and if landing place was Mount Ararat and if Babel was at Eridu, they would have gone a bit less than two degrees eastward. And a bit less than nine degrees southward.

So, if you go two degrees eastward and nine degrees southward, you can resume the journey as "eastward"? Fine. Does the Hebrew say "eastward"? No.

Let's take a look.

The following is extracted from Hebrew interlinear Genesis 11
https://biblehub.com/interlinear/genesis/11.htm

way·hî		And had
ḵāl		all
hā·’ā·reṣ		the earth
śā·p̄āh		language
’e·ḥāṯ;		one
ū·ḏə·ḇā·rîm		and speach
’ă·ḥā·ḏîm.		one
way·hî		and it came to pass
bə·nā·sə·‘ām		as they journeyed
miq·qe·ḏem;		from the east
way·yim·ṣə·’ū		that they found
ḇiq·‘āh		a plain
bə·’e·reṣ		in the land
šin·‘ār		of Shinar

Can we be sure that "miq·qe·ḏem" means "from the east"? That would conflict with a journey from Mount Ararat to Eridu. Well, let's take Numbers 34. There we have "eastward" and we have "from the wilderness". We'll look at both. And one more word.

The context is God giving Israelites their land, and before anyone gets into a discussion on Zionism, I consider Palestinians as Israelites and more precisely Catholic Palestinians as covenant-keeping Israelites. But back to Numbers 34 verse 3.

The following is extracted from Hebrew interlinear Numbers 3
https://biblehub.com/interlinear/numbers/34.htm

wə·hā·yāh		And shall be
lā·ḵem		Your
pə·’aṯ-		border on
ne·ḡeḇ		the Negev
mim·miḏ·bar-		from the Wilderness
ṣin		of Zin
‘al-		along
yə·ḏê		the border
’ĕ·ḏō·wm;		of Edom
wə·hā·yāh		then shall extend
lā·ḵem		your
gə·ḇūl		border on
ne·ḡeḇ,		the Negev
miq·ṣêh		to the end
yām-		of Sea
ham·me·laḥ		the Salt
qê·ḏə·māh.		eastward

So, "eastward" is qê·ḏə·māh, not miq·qe·ḏem, while "from the Wilderness of Zin" is mim·miḏ·bar-sin. It would seem that the "mi + consonant doubling" preposition means "from".

On the other hand, we also have "miq·ṣêh" translated as "to the end". Could it be that the preposition is really "miq" and that consonant doubling after "mi" in the one case is because miq is followed by a q, and in the other because q+m become m+m?

I do not know, as I am not a Hebraist (meaning, I do not know Hebrew). But at least, a normal word for eastward would be qê·ḏə·māh rather than miq·qe·ḏem, and mi plus double consonant or miq (becoming mim before m) would mean from rather than to.

LXX and Vulgate both translate miq·qe·ḏem as "from the East".

Obviously, if the landing place is Mount Judi and Babel is Göbekli Tepe, we get a different picture.

Coordinates: 37°22′10″N 42°20′39″E
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Judi

Coordinates: 37°13′23″N 38°55′21″E
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe

OK, 9 minutes North to South (that's 1/6 - 1/7 of a degree) and 3° (degrees) 25' (minutes) 18" (seconds) East to West, I think that would qualify as "from the East". The classic translation. Not the one favoured by NIV.

And if Shinar is all Mesopotamia rather than just South or Lower Mesopotamia aka Babylonia, there is no problem placing it in Göbekli Tepe (or Gobbling Turkey, as a friend of mine used to mock my position).

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Pompidou
St. Lucian of Beauvais
and Companions, martyrs
8.I.2020

Bellovaci, in Galliis, sanctorum Martyrum Luciani Presbyteri, Maximiani et Juliani. Horum duo ultimi a persecutoribus gladio perempti sunt; beatus autem Lucianus, qui, una cum sancto Dionysio, in Galliam venerat, et ipse, post nimiam caedem, cum Christi nomen viva voce confiteri non timuisset, priorum sententiam excepit.

I'll have to ask a Latinist about "excepit" too ...

How do We Know the Events of Genesis 3?

To Protestants, it can be a bit bewildering that many Catholics these days (and if they are laymen, not shepherds, I'm not automatically calling them fallen off) at the same time do believe Evolution and also do believe the events in Genesis 3 are true at a level close enough to factually and historically true.

Among Anglicans or Lutherans you would have a majority (at least over here in Europe, with heavy Evolutionist indictrination in the schools) who believe Evolution and who conclude that while Genesis 3 is in a sense a "true myth" we would need to reflect on what Genesis 3 really means, or if it could perhaps be even a false one. And you have a minority (who are perhaps closer to even in US) who consider Genesis 3 historically true and Genesis 1 at some level scientifically and historically accurate.

But among Catholics you have this bewildering phenomenon, we will always cite Genesis 3 to defend what some guys would call "Mariolatry" but some of us will still believe in Evolution which at a close analysis is not quite compatible with Genesis 3.

We know God spoke to Moses - Christ did not contradict the Pharisees when they said this, so we as Christians know that too. But we do not know, it is in fact rather improbable, that God dictated certain events to Moses about Joseph or about Job when he wrote Genesis and wrote or validated Job, when it was so much easier for Moses to simply research among the traditions and manuscripts, a bit like how St. Luke, while not denying verbal inspiration, certainly denied dictation as mode of it, when he said:

Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a narration of the things that have been accomplished among us; According as they have delivered them unto us, who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word: It seemed good to me also, having diligently attained to all things from the beginning, to write to thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, That thou mayest know the verity of those words in which thou hast been instructed. Luke 1:1-4

As Moses speaking of Joseph would not have said "among us" he would have said "among our ancestors" or "among our fathers".

On the other hand, Adam and Eve were not eyewitnesses to any creation days previous to day 6 and even Adam had missed the (first?) creation of land animals (whether God created extra exemplars or the Hebrew is translatable as God presenting animals to Adam which He had created previously). Here we are free to believe a tradition saying the six days were shown Moses on Sinai. Perhaps we Catholics are not even quite free patristically speaking not to believe this tradition. Some tradition is universal among Church Fathers, some is not, only the former is strictly binding, as is the Bible.

But for the Genesis 2 account of day six seen at close hand, we would have the account of Adam. For the blessing - which God inspired Moses to transfer from their account to the six days' account - we would also have their account. And from Genesis 3 on, everything that happens, happens before human witnesses who remain among us. Possible exception for the coming down of God to see the city and the tower, where it may not have been a visible theophany and may have taken a prophet to know God was there and why He did it.

However, traditionally speaking, this belief in Genesis 3 - 50 being handed down history, as witnessed by men, goes with a belief that is very strictly Young Earth Creationist. This model fits us faithful Catholics, but it is somewhat uneasy to apply for Catholics accepting compromise. And especially if the compromise is neither gap theory nor day age theory, but involves longer ages between Adam and Moses. And therefore after Adam.

Some have adopted the "true myth" attitude to Genesis 1 to 11. But this is awkward to fit with the complete confidence in Genesis 3 we need for things like equating St. Elisabeth's "thou and the fruit of thy womb" with God's "the woman and her seed".

So, basically, I find Catholic evolution acceptors go into some kind of ... "cognitive dissonance" about this.

Let's see one valiant attempt for this:

Every Hammontree in the United States is apparently descended from Jonathan and Mary. They are the Adam and Eve of the Hammontree race, and illustrate how a large and various population may be descended from one couple without being descended from only one couple.

"The O'Floinn" or "TOF" for short footnotes this with:

Adam and Eve. Doctrine requires belief only that every human being now living is descended from Adam. It does not require belief that every human being is descended only from Adam.

The TOF Spot : James Hammontree
Tuesday July 4 2017
https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2017/07/james-hammontree.html

In the evolutionist scheme, Americas were peopled in sometime between 20 000 and 13 000 BP. And post-Columbian colonisation is not so thorough that every Amerindian now alive would certainly descend from Adam through European colonisers. Besides, the condemnation of pre-Adamism (in the sense of pre-Adamites still being around) came when some Spaniards were trying to make it out Indians had to be beasts, they couldn't descend from Adam and Eve, they couldn't be the image of God. Racist? Extremely. Comprehensible? Perhaps so, when Spaniards saw Indians sacrifice their own children to horrible gods. But either way, the Catholic Church of the time would certainly not accept even a comprehensible racism taking such doctrinal conclusions, so historically the Papal condemnations of pre-Adamism certainly mean pre-Columbian population of Americas and Oceania already descended from Adam and Eve.

Moses lived from 1590 BC to 1470 BC, according to Roman martyrology which states Exodus was in 1510. Same Roman martyrology also states (and if I don't say "stated" it is because I consider the "Popes" who changed and endorsed the change to "unknown ages" as apostates and non-Popes) that the beginning and obviously six days from that creation of Adam and Eve was 5199 BC.

5199 - 1510 = 3689 years.

20 000 - 1510 = 18 490 years.

18 490 / 3689 = roughly speaking five times as long. This means, the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 would be missing 4/5 of the real genealogy. Even more, if we take into account that Mungo Woman has carbon dates to 25 000 years, and this makes up for my blunder of mixing a BP with a BC date.

It is not just a question on whether Genesis 3 could have been transmitted accurately for 16 490 years or even more, in societies that had neither cities nor writing, it is also a question of, in that case, knowing for a fact Genesis 5 and 11 were not transmitted correctly and this brings the question, why would we suppose Genesis 3, some of the very oldest matter, was?

I have so far not seen any coherent solution to this. One young Catholic (well, younger than I, he's in the twenties or thirties) considered Genesis 3 could have been revealed ... why would history be revealed rather than documented is one problem, but another one is, we don't have this kind of information on the origin of Genesis 3. In the absense of direct attestation for the very special mode of knowledge that a revelation granted by God to a specific man in his solitude from other men, we should not presume this mode of knowledge.*

Karl Keating was presented with the comment by Fr. George Leo Haydock on Genesis 3 and he told me he disagreed with Haydock. But he did not tell me what he agreed with instead.**

A Mejicano friend of mine who is also involved in apologetics against Protestantism and very obviously is using Genesis 3 (correctly so) to prove Mary is the perfect enemy of Satan along with Her divine Son, responded at first with not seeing any problem, only it was interesting, then when I pointed out there was one, he said "one cannot calculate God's time" and then I pointed out whatever be the case with creation days, Genesis 5 and 11 are clearly times of men, since human lifespans.***

One presumably practising Catholic in the South of France, Gabriel Audisio, when showing a piece of 16th C. palaeography, polemised against a Renaissance calculation of time from Creation to Flood (that is Genesis 5) by giving an own calculation that (by mathematic implication) has Seth's lifetime starting not when Adam was 130 or 230, but when he was 930, that is when he died. I pointed out it would be a very curious chronology for the Bourbons from birth of Henri IV to death of Louis XVI, supposing we didn't have AD dates for them, to add up the lifespans in total rather than lifespans up to birth of next in the family line (I don't say next in the line of kings, since twice the son and once even the grandson died before the succeeding king). Even with modern very much shorter lifespans, we would have a clear discrepancy.°

So, we have Catholics arguing Genesis 3 as to Marian implications and with the theory of knowledge presented to Haydock.°° We also have Catholics arguing Genesis 3 as to Marian implications but without any unified theory of knowledge as to how we know these events.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bibl. M. Audoux
Octave of Holy Innocents
4.I.2020

PS. I corrected html, so the emphasis by O'Floinn shows - it was in italic in the original, and when I used italics here, I forgot that the blockquote here puts all of the citation in italics. So now his emphasis is in underlined instead./HGL

* New blog on the kid : Quatre évolutionnistes rencontrés
https://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2019/06/quatre-evolutionnistes-rencontres.html

** This exchange was after I had already put a conversation or debate onto this post, and therefore does not figure on it:

HGL's F.B. writings : Karl Keating Disclaims Responsibility for Paris Archdiocese Having a Prejudice on YEC = Protestant, Claims he Never Said So
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2019/12/karl-keating-disclaims-responsibility.html

*** Carlos Salazar, obviously. Unlike Keating, I consider him a friend. Here we come:

HGL's F.B. writings : El tiempo de Génesis 5 y 11 no es incalculable
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2019/12/el-tiempo-de-genesis-5-y-11-no-es.html

° Correspondance de Hans Georg Lundahl : âge du monde avec Gabriel Audisio
https://correspondentia-ioannis-georgii.blogspot.com/2017/06/age-du-monde-avec-gabriel-audisio.html

°° Here is this comment:

Concerning the transactions of these early times, parents would no doubt be careful to instruct their children, by word of mouth, before any of the Scriptures were written; and Moses might derive much information from the same source, as a very few persons formed the chain of tradition, when they lived so many hundred years. Adam would converse with Mathusalem, who knew Sem, as the latter lived in the days of Abram. Isaac, Joseph, and Amram, the father of Moses, were contemporaries: so that seven persons might keep up the memory of things which had happened 2500 years before. But to entitle these accounts to absolute authority, the inspiration of God intervenes; and thus we are convinced, that no word of sacred writers can be questioned. H.

Haydock comment to Genesis 3
https://www.ecatholic2000.com/haydock/untitled-05.shtml#navPoint_6

For Those New to my Blog Here or to my Blogs

Mungo Woman and Homo Erectus · For Those New to my Blog Here or to my Blogs

It can be mentioned, when I give carbon dates for Mungo Woman in previous, I don't pretend or think these carbon dates are the actual dates, but I think their direction generally reflects them.

I just came across another explanation why her collagen seemed older than her bone apatite.

We suppose as I usually do carbon 14 level is rising, and we also suppose, as I think is reasonable, collagen replaces carbon quicker than bone apatite.

Well, I suppose her diet the last years had been richer in foods giving a slight reservoir effect, of some only 9.008 pmC instead of 17.951 pmC.

So, the extra years - ghost years due to carbon mirage - were 19900 instead of just 14200.

But, this means, I am counting on these dates prior to creation of the world to be precisely, in carbon, due to ghost years due to rising carbon content.

Here is one of the tables, where I am making these kind of precisions:

Creation vs. Evolution : Table for St Jerome as per Preliminary Conclusion
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2018/05/table-for-st-jerome-as-per-preliminary.html

One can also add, Tas (link see previous post) is arguably wrong on why Carbon 14 ratio is rising from a low level after the Flood:

Wrong dates are usually caused by assuming a wrong initial ₁₄C/₁₂C ratio, contamination or leaching. Samples from before the Flood, or from the early post-Flood period, give ages that are too old by tens of thousands of years. This is because the Flood buried lots of ₁₂C-rich plants and animals. This would result in a lower ₁₄C/₁₂C ratio, which is wrongly interpreted as great age.

I most definitely agree in early years after the Flood we have a lower ₁₄C/₁₂C ratio and that it is wrongly interpreted as great age.

But burying plants rich in ₁₂C would not immediately lower the ₁₄C/₁₂C ratio, if anything rather speed up the lifting of it. So, I disagree with Tas Walker (and behind him probably RATE project) on mechanism for lower ₁₄C/₁₂C ratio then than now or higher ₁₄C/₁₂C ratio now than then.

My own proposed mechanism involves speedier ₁₄C production after the Flood, and this mainly in order to give the Ice Age and also to hasten some mutations lowering human lifespans.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Ivry
Circumcision of the Lord
1.I.2020