Age Of The World

[monotheism]

monotheism:

According to the Torah the world was created 5760 years ago by the word of G-d.

MoonChild:

is this what you believe?

yes
we believe that the Creator created the world whole, so it appears much older

[IceTea]

And do you believe the earth and the man created at the same time?

[monotheism]

Well, the world and the various creatures who inhabit it was created in six days, as recounted in the Torah at the start. The first man, Adam, was created on the sixth day. He was the last creature created.

[Wanderer]

Originally posted by monotheism
Well, the world and the various creatures who inhabit it was created in six days, as recounted in the Torah at the start.


Too bad that all of the evidence points to an Earth with a history billions of years old. The danger of religious fables is that some people will actually continue believing them, no mater how much they conflict with real knowledge.




Originally posted by monotheism

The first man, Adam, was created on the sixth day. He was the last creature created.


So you summarily dismiss what Rabbis Raba and Loew did ?

[MoonChild]

Originally posted by monotheism
we believe that the Creator created the world whole, so it appears much older

Why would he do that? Creating geological strata, fossils of animals that never existed, strings of DNA that have no apparent purpose but that show a clear line of descent through species going back millions of years... it seems like a terribly complicated ruse "just" to fool us poor Humans who are SUPPOSED to be believers.

Why on earth would a loving God go to so much trouble to mislead us by "creating" mountains of evidence to contradict His holy books?

[Wanderer]

Originally posted by monotheism
we believe that the Creator created the world whole, so it appears much older

Did the Jews believe and promote this before the world was determined to be very, very old ?

Or is it, as I suspect, a recent development to explain away the physical facts that so overwhelmingly contradict the Jewish creation myth ?

[monotheism]

Too bad that all of the evidence points to an Earth with a history billions of years old. The danger of religious fables is that some people will actually continue believing them, no mater how much they conflict with real knowledge.

In reality, science today lays no claim to absolute knowledge, although that is still the common perception.

From a letter of Rabbi Schneersohn, a graduate of engineering at the Sorbonne:


What is even more surprising—and as yet I have not received any answer from those with whom I had occasion to speak on the matter—is that an apologetic attitude is completely out of harmony with the view of contemporary science. If a century ago, when scientists still spoke in terms of absolute truths, it was "understandable" why one who wished to adhere to his faith might have been embarrassed to challenge "scientific" claims, this is no longer the case in our day and age. Contemporary science no longer lays claim to absolutes; the principle of probability now reigns supreme, even in practical science as applied in common daily experiences. Certainly in such realms as the origin of the universe, the origin of life on earth, and the origin of the species, where theories are based on speculative extrapolation, and even more so in the realm of pure science, where everything is based on assumed premises (if we assume that, etc., then it follows, etc.)—scientists do not deal with certainties.

Need one remind our orthodox Jewish scientist, who still feels embarrassed about some "old fashioned" Torah truths, in the face of scientific HYPOTHESES, that Heisenberg's "principle of indeterminacy" has finally done away with the traditional scientific notion that cause and effect are mechanically linked, so that it is now quite unscientific to hold that one event is inevitably a consequence of another, but only most PROBABLE?

Most scientists have accepted this principle of uncertainty (enunciated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927) as being intrinsic to the whole universe. The 19th century dogmatic, mechanistic, and deterministic attitude of science is gone. The modern scientist no longer expects to find Truth in science. The current and universally accepted view of science itself is that science must reconcile itself to the idea that whatever progress it makes, it will always deal with probabilities; not with certainties or absolutes.


So you summarily dismiss what Rabbis Raba and Loew did ?

True.:) Of course, they also created--though not in the same way as by the Creator.

[Wanderer]

Originally posted by monotheism
In reality, science today lays no claim to absolute knowledge, although that is still the common perception.

Yes, but scientific explanations function extremely well without invoking any of a multitude of proposed intervening "spiritual" forces.

When I release my coffee cup from shoulder height I do not need to invoke spirits in order to make it fall. It happens and the reason it happens is being explained without resorting to the use of a variable to denote the efforts of spirits (unless the coffee cup contained brandy). Should the cup, when released, be "magically" suspended in the air by a spiritual invocation, in defiance of our scientific theories to explain why it should fall, then people such as I would have a reason to consider the effects of outside spiritual forces at work in the world.

Will you demonstrate with your coffee cup or mine ? Mine is always full.



Originally posted by monotheism

True.:) Of course, they also created--though not in the same way as the Creator.


Care to expand in this for our Islamic friends ? It's really very interesting.

[monotheism]

Originally posted by Wanderer
Care to expand in this for our Islamic friends ? It's really very interesting.

for starters: http://www.zalman.org/tanya/book-2/chap02.htm

[MoonChild]

Monotheism, you appear to be consistently mis-using the theory of relativity and the principle of uncertainty, applying it broadly to say that "you can never say that anything observed scientifically is correct".

At first I thought you were joking, but... now you seem to be using it as a defense against anything that contradicts your beliefs.

As in "the world must be 5700 years old because the Torah says so, therefore every scientific discipline which provides evidence to the contrary must be faulty".

If this is truly your position, would you be open to examining these disciplines rather than dismissing them out of hand?

[monotheism]

When did I dismiss those disciplines? They are valid, inasmuch as they attempt to explain observed phenomena with reasonable hypotheses, recognising all the while that new information may disprove their current theories.

I simply said that science cannot, and does not presume to make absolute statements. The scientific community, and those who wish to benefit from its discoveries, inasmuch as they are true to the principles of science, will follow this.

[MoonChild]

The letter that you posted (twice) is so plain WRONG about the principles it invokes that I was sure you posted it as a joke.

Specifically,

"Contemporary science no longer lays claim to absolutes"

This is untrue. We've got the Law of Gravity worked out quite well, thank you. As well, the orbits of the planets are "absolutely" KNOWN.

To go a little further with that thought, it's been measured very accurately how fast things in the universe are movign away from each other, and it's simple mathematics to determine from their current position, trajectory, and velocity that there was a common origin, and how long ago that was (much, much longer than 5700 years!).

Apologizing away these observable, measurable facts requires explaining why God would create an expanding universe in the middle of it's expansion, rather than starting at the beginning.

Occams Razor.

to be continued...

[MoonChild]

2+2 ALWAYS equals 4. Experiments measuring the physical laws - speed of light, strength of gravitational field, how much current will pass through a wire with "x" resistance, how much time it takes for a cesium atom to change states when an exact amount of energy is applied - these sorts of things are absolutely predictable and follow their physical laws quite obediently.

Quantum physics is very weird and wonderful, and does indeed involve uncertainty and probability. This may be inherent to the nature of things, or merely a measure of our current ignorance of what equations will reliably predict their behavior.

Leave probability in it's proper place. It's a measure of the "messiness" of life (meaning there are far too many variables to accurately generate an equation to predict something), or our ignorance of the real causative agents - NOT an admission by scientists that they know nothing :rolleyes:

If you didn't know this quite well, you wouldn't bother flipping the switch on your computer (but you do, knowing that unless there is a mechanical error, it will turn on and connect you to the world).
Nor would you bother putting your feet on the floor, because you'd have no reason to believe that gravity was working today.

In other words, get real :bored:

[MoonChild]

I agree with the point that scientific thought requires a continuously open mind - that measurements are prone to human error, that the biggest questions are huge puzzles to which we only have a few of the pieces.

an intellectually honest person will never close her mind to data which requires revising one's thoughts on how something works, or what happened in the past.

However, the concept the Monotheism stubbornly refuses to acknowledge is the one that drives scientific progress- that is, the burden of evidence. A whacky theory becomes accepted when a mountain of evidence points to it's being true, and conflicting evidence is either shown to be poorly collected, or used to modify and improved the theory.

The reality is, everywhere you look, in all disciplines of the physical sciences - there are literally "mountains" of evidence that point to the age of the earth as far greater than 5,700 years.

[Wanderer]

Originally posted by monotheism
They are valid, inasmuch as they attempt to explain observed phenomena with reasonable hypotheses, recognising all the while that new information may disprove their current theories.



You're right.

Disease might not be caused by microorganisms at all, but by daemons or imbalances in the 4 humours.

Perhaps wings do not generate lift. Perhaps angels and faith are sufficient to cause things to rise.

Perhaps it is only a coincidence that the pressure of a gas in a given volume decreases as the temperature drops.

Maybe inanimate objects do move by themselves - Note: this would explain the as yet unobserved apparent actions of my socks.

The Earth COULD be flat and balanced precariously on the back of a giant turtle.


The overwhelming evidence suggests otherwise. When you choose to ignore that evidence, or trivialize it, you are dishonestly trying to keep the world mysterious.

You are then choosing to stand at the border between a world of cause and effect and a world of superstition and unknowing. It is apparent which way you are facing.



So I suspect you must now admit, that you are not ABSOLUTELY sure that you are even Jewish.


:D