Creation vs. Evolution: avril 2023

vendredi 21 avril 2023

What Project?

lundi 17 avril 2023

Some Reactions to my Project · What Project?

One person declined when I discovered, I couldn't get an actual editorial assessment, even on reedsy without paying for it - and I don't have a card to pay with. But here are some other people declining. Motivations are given in order of frequency, not chronologically.

For all: reason for declining
For some: additional comments
For none: the signature, I leave them anonymous

a) My skills are not suitable to work on this project. X 8 For 5, Additional comments A) Thanks so much for thinking of me, Hans, but I feel out of my depth just reading your brief! I hope you can find an editor who specializes in nonfiction and perhaps the Christian market. Best of luck! NN B) Dear Hans, Thank you for getting in touch. I'm afraid this is beyond my area of expertise: I specialise in children's picture books, novelty and non-fiction. For the latter, I work on very young non-fiction projects, for children aged 0-12. I hope you are able to find a non-fiction specialist who is better suited to advise you on this proposal. Best wishes, NN C) Mr. Lundahl, Thank you for contacting me regarding your project, A Table for Biblical Carbon Dating. While your topic sounds interesting, it is way beyond my area of knowledge and expertise. I would not be able to give you a fair assessment as I can already tell it would be struggle for me to grasp and understand. I am sorry. I hope that you find someone that can help you with your project and that God blesses your work. Sincerely, NN D) Hello Hans, thank you for coming to me with this request. Unfortunately, I do not have much availability in the foreseeable future for taking on new projects. I suspect you would also be served better by someone with a stronger scientific background and vocabulary than what I could offer. I hope you are able to find the help you need from another editor here at Reedsy. All the best, NN E) Hello Hans, thank you for reaching out to me with your editing needs. I am a children's book editor, and I don't have the experience or skills needed to edit your book. I do wish you all the best with your project, though! Warmly, NN		b) The book is not in my area of interest. X 4 For 2, Additional comments F) Hi Hans Your book sounds really fascinating and I am very intrigued by verifying biblical claims. However professionally I have no experience with this type of book with the amount of stats and numbers it would entail to even really understand. And I’m not familiar with the market it would publish in to comment on whether it would be a viable product I wish you luck, however, with the book. Kind regards NN G) Hi Hans Your book sounds really fascinating and I am very intrigued by verifying biblical claims. However professionally I have no experience with this type of book with the amount of stats and numbers it would entail to even really understand. And I’m not familiar with the market it would publish in to comment on whether it would be a viable product I wish you luck, however, with the book. Kind regards NN

c) I cannot meet the client's deadline. d) I am currently unavailable to work on new projects.		e) The book is too early at this stage for my services. X 1 Additional comments H) At 3000 words the manuscript is quite brief, technical, and for an unknown publication venue in a genre (Christian literature) I have little interest

Last one first - I intended to write "3000 or more" but it was impossible. So, "3000" it was. But all reasons are not just either misunderstanding or personal. Here is a significant one:

"However professionally I have no experience with this type of book with the amount of stats and numbers it would entail to even really understand."

There are actually no statistics. There is one long table - or series of consecutive tables. That and another (perhaps more) would be the theoretical part. The applied part involves giving dates for different parts of archaeology, first the "normal" carbon date and then the reinterpretation according to my table.

The idea it would involve statistics is perhaps because of how calibrations are usually done now.

Let's take the carbon 14 calibration done for institutions in Cambridge, by Stuiver and Bekker. It is based on tree rings.

In order to be perfectly sure that tree rings dating for 750 BC carbon date as 550 BC (with tree rings considered the more certain), you need lots of tree rings both tree ring dated and carbon dated. You may need to show how many tree rings are anomalous as to their carbon dates or tree ring dates or both, for a particular "clinch" ... the thing is, my calibration is based on the Bible, and supposing I get the right matches for a given Biblical event (Genesis 14 with carbon dated reed mats from En Geddi being probably the easiest to guarantee 100 %) I rely on God's providence they give me the right carbon dates too.

For the Flood, many diverging carbon dates are proposed. CMI presents things "from the Flood" as carbon dating within a ball park of 20 000 to 50 000 BP - on such a coupling, I might want statistics, I don't have them, I have taken an easier road:

it's impossible that the atmosphere 5000 years ago was both giving 15 000 extra years as per 16.292 pmC original carbon 14 level, and 45 000 extra years as per 0.432 pmC original carbon 14 level;
therefore, lots of this is either older or younger than the Flood;
therefore, I pick an extinction event or two in the human family, which lands me with Flood carbon dated to 40 000 BP, now refined to 39 000 BP as per tephra of the Campi Flegrei mega-volcano explosion - and yes, mega-volcanos are as much "Flood" as extinction of only pre-Flood varieties of man.

For items other than Flood and Genesis 14, there is not much that statistics could add to what I do. I either picked the right correspondence or I didn't. The arguments would be more historic, textual and so on, than statistic.

The one mathematic confirmation I can give was also offered by Dr. Robert Carter for the genealogy of Genesis 11 - a nice curve of graduality. On my model, for some reason carbon 14 rises very slowly up to the Flood (probably in part bc the carbon 14 production was diluted by much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that got trapped at the Flood), then, the quick rise, from Flood to Fall of Troy, is gradual, doubly so - a) the carbon 14 levels are gradually higher; b) the production of carbon 14 gradually slowed down to the present level. From Flood to Babel, the rise is dependent on a 10 times faster production than now. From Jericho to Troy, it's only 2 or 3 times faster. Overall, it's 5 times faster.

I'll be back with another post giving links to the posts I used for the chapters, since the project is not likely to go forward too well via reedsy./HGL

samedi 15 avril 2023

Do Flood Stories Around the World Prove Oral Transmission Inaccurate?

Great Bishop of Geneva!: Does the Bible Say How Many Books It Has? · somewhere else: Not Hallucinations - Argument II · Creation vs. Evolution Do Flood Stories Around the World Prove Oral Transmission Inaccurate?

Lita Cosner made the point in an erroneous paper republished today on the collective blog of CMI:

Why did God give us a book?
by Lita Sanders, This article is from
Creation 37(4):16–17, October 2015
https://creation.com/why-book

Let's deal with this point before we go to the wider context:

God is associated more with the spoken word in Scripture than with the written word. So why inspire written documents? One very good reason is that written documents are less susceptible to ‘mutation’ over time.

Studies show that oral tradition, especially in societies with low literacy, is actually quite accurate, but as we can see with the Flood stories around the world, history passed down strictly orally has a tendency to change much faster than written documents.

The argument presupposes that Flood stories for instance of Norse Myth or of Mesopotamia started out as texts basically identic to the text of Genesis 6 to 9 and what we have is due to gradual mistakes in the transmission of one text. I disagree. The discrepancies are due to deliberate change.

For Norse Myth, I believe the source was a man known posthumously as Odin, falsely deified. I tentatively identify him with the Talmudic Yeshu, not the parts relating to Yeshu's execution, that would be blasphemous spoof on Our Lord, but the part when there is a disciple of Joshua ben Pekharia who is reprimanded by his master for being lustful (a characteristic the Norse myths certainly attribute to Odin, in a much less impressive way than Greeks attribute to Zeus) and who leaves him, who learns magic in Egypt, who founds an idolatrous sect (Judaism is here confusing the real idolatrous sect Odin founded among Swedes or more probably SWabians with Catholic Christianity, which is not idolatrous). When Odin's son Baldr had been killed in a battle, as we know from Saxo, he started an Osiris like worship of his son, and when he came to Uppsala - this may be legendary relocation for a locality within the then country of the Swabians - he starts out to make the former king there hallucinate*, and then goes on to initiate him into the secrets of "the true account" - that being Odin's own hotchpotch of Judaism, Khemetism or Egyptian Paganism, Zuism-Caldanism or Mesopotamian Paganism** and his own selectiveness.

The salient feature of the Norse Flood myth is, 1) only giants are killed in the Flood, 2) and men are created only after it. This is because the Flood is the blood of Ymir, father of the giants, and after it, the three brothers who killed him use his carcass to create the world. Well, ou world created from the carcass of a monster, that's Enuma Elish all over.***

Here, Odin can have chosen this approach to state the gods who made the flood happen are friendly to men, they only killed giants. That giants were killed in the Flood is true. Odin would have known that from Genesis 6. Do we have any evidence that Odin knew the Hebrew Bible? Yes, his Havamal, which we have in Old Norse, but which he would have given in Proto-Norse, a different language, if at all, is pretty close to Qohelet. And Jackson Crawford or a friend of his actually reconstructed stanzas from Havamal into the language form they would have had in Proto-Norse, and it is still metric - which is an argument for the poem having been around since Odin's days.

So, Odin has a clear theological agenda (of deception) in the changes given to the Flood story. So had the Babylonians. In the Hebrew story, one and the same God is concerned with both punishing men for misdeeds done to each other and saving a small family that was both innocent of misdeeds and clean from overly paranoia of getting exposed to them - perhaps because they were in a remote location, safe in the wilderness, while building the Ark° - by contrast, the flood waters and the salvation of one man with his household come from different gods in the Mesopotamian story. Enlil, god of justice and order is annoyed by men being many and loud, he gets a headache and decides the Flood in a tantrum. Enki, formerly shaper of man, and a trickster, his brother, decides, behind his back, to save Utnapishtim. That false theology is the main point of the Babylonian discrepancy from the Hebrew story. A subsidiary point is, Mesopotamians lived in a mostly inland culture and the description of the Ark became hard°° to comprehend, it was deliberately exchanged for an erroneous description of a coracle, but one of giant proportions. Odin who accessed both the Hebrew and the Babylonian descriptions refrained from describing the vessel on which Bergelmer (a giant) saved himself and his wife.

Hence, no, the various Flood stories do not prove that oral transmission, within one and the same culture and intended fidelity to original authors, would tend to change the text.

A change in theology or wider culture would provoke deliberate fiddling with the text, but oral transmission as such would not radically change it. Why is this relevant?

Lita Cosner is stating God gave us only a book and not an infallible oral tradition. This is a deliberate distancing from the Catholic view of how God reveals Himself to us, by Scripture and Tradition, preserved and faithfully exposed by the Magisterium. So, here is what she has to say on that:

But out of all the media through which God might have given us His revelation, why did He choose a written medium? Why didn’t He inspire an oral tradition that was passed down from generation to generation? Or some sort of visual medium other than text?

In fact, God gave us both. God spoke to His disciples on the road to Emmaus, to His disciples (12, 72, 500) during the forty days of the Easter Season before the Pentecost Novena, and to His disciples (12, 72, crowds) during the 3 and a half years of His public ministry. And also to St. Paul, by revelations. He did not intend for this teaching to be lost.

And I will ask the Father, and he shall give you another Paraclete, that he may abide with you for ever. ... But the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I shall have said to you. (John 14:16 and 26)

And the eleven disciples went into Galilee, unto the mountain where Jesus had appointed them. And seeing him they adored: but some doubted. And Jesus coming, spoke to them, saying: All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. (Matthew 28:16 to 20)

Therefore, brethren, stand fast; and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word, or by our epistle. (2 Thessalonians 2:14)

No indication anywhere that the oral tradition should cease. As to the visual medium, the Cross and the Shroud and Sudarium and the Holy Grave and the textile relics of Our Lady (She left veil and belt behind them) and the relics of apostles ...

So that even there were brought from his body to the sick, handkerchiefs and aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the wicked spirits went out of them. (Acts of Apostles 19:12)

... and so much veneration for their bodies, that the Jews intended to deprive the Christians of the relics°°° of St. Polycarp under the pretext of saving them from worshipping that body instead of Jesus.

So, oral tradition, visual non-written medium, collection of books - in fact, God gave us all three of them. Not just one.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Satruday of Easter Octave
15.IV.2023

Footnotes:

* Every hallucination that either Saxo or Snorri attribute to Odin's "magic arts" is compatible with what a hypnotist can produce - not in the light hypnosis I sometimes use to compensate sleep loss, but in states "deeper down" on the Aron scale.
** I have written a series of comparisons showing how Norse Myth owes more to recorded Ancient Near East mythologies, than to any supposed and only reconstructed Indo-European mythologic influence.
*** Sumerian continued to be used into the 1st C BC and Akkadian into the 1st C AD, as learned languages. Eastern Turkish Edessa (aka Urfa, which some, me included, identify as Ur Kasdim) would in those days have been a centre of Babylonian pagan learning, and has been a centre of Esotericism since the official religion of the region became Christian or later other Monotheistic.
° 2 Peter 2:5 calls Noe a "preacher of righteousness" or "of justice" - which means he exposed his own person, when so preaching. He can still have had his family in a safe place.
°° I would say, the Bible also gives one example of substituting comprehensible words for such that would not be comprehensible - a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven (Genesis 11:4) can be understood by an ancient but not primevally post-Flood culture as what we would call a skyscraper, I think the immediate post-Flood culture was trying a hand at rocketry - the difference is, the words as I quoted them would be a very accurate description of a three step rocket. God's words in verse 6 of the chapter contain no "unless" or "lest" and promise success for the project - sth finally given when Apollo V took off at Cape Canaveral.
°°° Relics refers both to bodily remains and to textiles having touched the saint or God Himself, when it comes to the Shroud, Sudarium and Cross.

jeudi 13 avril 2023

Will Natural Law Only Keep the Solar System in Place?

Newton and Laplace seem to have thought so.

For Laplace, we have the famous anecdote, Napoleon seemed to have gathered from Newton that when planetary orbits get out of hand (by natural processes, no doubt), God or angels shoved them back into the right place and speed for the solar system to go on.

Laplace, according to the anecdote, answered "I do not find this hypothesis necessary" ...

For Newton, we have some news (real or fake news) that he agreed with Laplace (whether the anecdote itself was real or fake news).

As a classic example of GOTG, unbelievers bring up Isaac Newton, who supposedly invoked the direct Hand of God, in ad hoc fashion, whenever he could not explain some aspect of planetary motion. Meyer actually re-examined Newton’s Principia and found this to be untrue. It turns out to be a rationalistic legend. Newton did invoke God in a providential sense, but never as a gap-filler. As Meyer explains:

“Third, though Newton affirmed these powers of God, he did not postulate occasional, special, or singular acts of God in place of a law-like description of planetary motion or to remedy irregularities in the laws of nature or to fix an unstable planetary system. Newton thought that God was responsible on an ongoing basis for the mathematical regularities evident in nature, not fixing irregularities or rectifying instabilities [emphasis in original]” (p. 429; see also p. 518).

CMI : The existence of specified information in the universe points to a creator God
Journal of Creation 36(1):26–29, April 2022
https://creation.com/review-return-of-the-god-hypothesis-meyer

(A review of: Return of the God Hypothesis: Three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe by Stephen C. Meyer, Harper One, New York, 2021, reviewed by John Woodmorappe)

Let's see his background ...

In 1981, Meyer graduated from Whitworth College before being employed at Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) in Dallas from November 1981 to December 1985.[6] Meyer then took up a scholarship from the Rotary Club of Dallas to study at Cambridge University, where he earned a Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy in history and the philosophy of science in 1991.[7] His dissertation was entitled "Of Clues and Causes: A Methodological Interpretation of Origin-of-Life Research".[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_C._Meyer

And the reviewer's ...

John decided to major in both geology and biology because of the pivotal role of these two disciplines in the study of origins. He ended up with a BA in Biology, a BA in Geology, and an MA in Geology. Woodmorappe is constantly learning new things on his own, and conducting scientific research. He now has numerous publications, including the following three books:

https://creation.com/john-woodmorappe

Oops ... neither of them is an astronomer ...

What exactly is the kind of instability Newton is at least purported to have said needed occasional direct action from God? The kind of instability that Napoleon is at least purported to have understood Newton as considering?

After a video from NASA, with water droplets dancing around electrically charged knitting needles ...

[ISS] Don Petit, Science Off The Sphere - Water Droplets Orbiting Charged Knitting Needle
Space Videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyRv8bNDvq4

I concluded that even the "two body problem" (Earth and Moon excluding consideration of the Sun, Earth-Moon - as one body - and Sun excluding consideration of other planets) would involve an instability, which would make the Heliocentric Newtonian system unstable in much less than 4.5 billion years. I came up with an expression of it here, before a debate with "Darael" made me reconsider using this argument, in the comments under it:

New blog on the kid : Newtonianly speaking, Can Earth Still Orbit Sun After 4.5 Billion Years?
http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2017/01/newtonianly-speaking-can-earth-still.html

After this debate, I cling to two remnants of it, as disproving Heliocentrism in the long run:

what about the many-body problem?
it's not just earth that loses atmosphere, but the Sun loses mass as well.

These points, as I recall, and for the second, as I saw when checking, Darael chose not to argue about. In other words, I could still have a point.

What Newton possibly would have been thinking of is the many-body problem.

The orbital mechanics of a two-body problem are at least slightly affected by the presence of even a third clearly distinct body (Earth, Moon and Sun are not a three-body problem, since Earth and Moon function as one body in relation to the Sun - but Earth, Jupiter, Sun, that's a three-body problem).

When Earth supposedly orbits the Sun, Earth is obviously affected by the gravitation from the Sun. And the Sun, very much less, by the gravitation from Earth. But the orbit of Earth on a given side of the Sun (for instance the Virgo side back in early March) is also affected by whether Jupiter is at the moment:

on the same side of the Sun as Earth, outside Earth, obviously, like Jupiter in Virgo while Sun is in Pisces
on the other side of the Sun than Earth, like Jupiter and Sun both in Pisces
at an angle from the line Earth to Sun, like Sun in Pisces and Jupiter neither Pisces nor Virgo.

Neither Newton nor Laplace had computers. It seems some Chinese researchers did a computer modelling testing the many-body programme. Their verdict was, it could be stable or instable, depending on initial conditions.

But it is arguable, the astronomers not knowing all the factors, that the Chinese researchers couldn't put all the factors into the computer programme.

If by any chance the Heliocentric system, functioning Newtonianly, on Newtonian principles, is after all stable, that would make the Solar System a great illustration of the watchmaker analogy, by Paley. After seeing Testify (Erik Manning's youtube), I'd consider Paley is better off in Gospel apologetics. However, St. Thomas made another analogy than the watchmaker about God. It's like God was both the perfect Fender and the perfect Tommaso Zillio, if we take electric guitars as the instrument. Or God was both the perfect harpmaker and the perfect harpist. The latter - i e God's continuous acts of for instance turning the Universe (below Empyrean Heaven) around Earth - is what St. Thomas based his arguments for God on.

With the watchmaker analogy, one asks, perhaps - "has the watchmaker died or lost interest?" - which is Deism.
With the instrument builder and instrumentalist analogy, it is obvious God is in charge. Which He is according to Christianity.

One should not be bashful when someone speaks of "God of the Gaps fallacy" - in Aristotle, there is no such thing, and in later logic, also not, it was only added as a propaganda stunt by Evolutionists - Nietzsche and a Scottish Free Church Minister, Henry Drummond. Both were heavily biassed against Classic Theism. However, while Heliocentrism of Newtonian mechanism might be possible with Classic Theism, not just as possible for God, but rather therefore also a possible interpretation of what we have, with Classic Theism, there is no necessity for Heliocentrism of Newtonian mechanism, which is not the preferrable thing in epistemology.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Easter Week Thursday
13.IV.2023

samedi 1 avril 2023

Does Sapiens Need an Answer?

I am talking about a book by Yuval Noah Hariri.

It so happens, Mr. Wells once wrote a book called The Outline of History. Gilbert Keith Chesterton basically wrote The Everlasting Man to answer it.

I have taken the liberty once or twice of borrowing the excellent phrase about an Outline of History; though this study of a special truth and a special error can of course claim no sort of comparison with the rich and many-sided encyclopedia of history. for which that name was chosen. And yet there is a certain reason in the reference: and a sense in which the one thing touches and even cuts across the other. For the story of the world as told by Mr. Wells could here only be criticised as an outline. And, strangely enough, it seems to me that it is only wrong as an outline. It is admirable as an accumulation of history; it is splendid as a store-house or treasure of history; it is a fascinating disquisition on history; it is most attractive as an amplification of history; but it is quite false as an outline of history. The one thing that seems to me quite wrong about it is the outline; the sort of outline that can really be a single line, like that which makes all the difference between a caricature of the profile of Mr. Winston Churchill and of Sir Alfred Mond. In simple and homely language, I mean the things that stick out; the things that make the simplicity of a silhouette. I think the proportions are wrong; the proportions of what is certain as compared with what is uncertain, of what played a great part as compared with what played a smaller part, of what is ordinary and what is extraordinary, of what really lies level with an average and what stands out as an exception.

He clearly was not impressed by Wells' outline as an outline:

For we do indeed require, in Mr. Wells's phrase, an outline of history. But we may venture to say, in Mr. Mantalini's phrase, that this evolutionary history has no outline or is a demd* outline. But, above all, it illustrates what I mean by saying that the more we really look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one.

I suppose Wells found a successor in Hariri. Who'll take up Chesterton's mantle?

Any suggestions?/HGL

PS, a side-note quiz : is Genesis 9 a pro-slavery text? (Click the link for solution).

* For the editors at Project Gutenberg, "demd" or "demned" is an euphemism for, since sloppy pronunciation of "damned" - it's not a spelling mistake on Chesterton's part, C. S. Lewis reuses it in the dialogue of uncle Andrew Ketterley in The Magician's Nephew. A painter like Chesterton (a carreere he gave up around the time he took up writing) would not have spelled "dimmed" in any other way than "dimmed" - and "dimmed" is anyway for colours and brightness, not for outlines, the corresponding for outlines would be "blurred" - and unfortunately, the outline of history given by Wells was not blurred, but basically damned, as in damnable, proceeding from ideologies of damned spirits and damned men, and leading men to damnation ... and Chesterton was polite enough to his friend to use only "demd" instead of "damned" ...

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