Is It Really About the Age of the Earth?

@ArishMell
Because it's the truth.

@GodSpeed63 I accept you believe it, but only as your personal belief.

What I find hard to believe is why believing in God means you have to take every story in the Bible as literal. It is a motley collection of ancient books by a motley collection of largely-unknown tribal priests and scribes, written over about 3000 years, but probably drawing on much older traditions. Including Zoroastrianism, from Persia and the nearest contemporary faith to the later Judaism in having only two deities, when all the other cultures around it invented complicated pantheisms. .

All the Bible says of any theological worth on the subject is that everything natural was created by God, which is fair enough. A lot of scientists are religious, though not all Christian as that is only one of many faiths. (I think you profess a belief based on Judaeo-Christianity, but no particular denomination.)

The anthology does not seriously try to explain how or when God did it, nor how it works.

Scriptural literalism effectively says it is wrong to try to understand the hows and whys, but gives no logical reason, or any reason, for that. It is basically anti-knowledge and theologically weak.

@ArishMell
Because every piece of Scripture in it is true.

@GodSpeed63 It is? No - you want to believe it is because it saves you having to think about God's work and appreciate its real magnitude and mystery, but some of the Bible's fables are so obviously absurd you know it can't all be true. They might be old myths the Hebrews held as folk-memories from earlier beliefs.

While other parts, especially of the Old Testament, were very likely written for what were really political reasons of their own time.

The OT itself is only a selection of old books, another selection and in a different order, form the Talmud, while other books known now only in parts, never made it into either anthology. The New Testament is a bit more focussed but was still written by people who wanted others to share their own religious beliefs.

All the Bible does, is define a belief in a deity, and in the context of its own society that started to coalesce at least 5000 years ago.

Thinking every word of the Bible (or any other ancient faith manual) is literally true is not serving its god(s), nor anything or anyone else. Literalism does attract a lot of people but still only a tiny minority of Christians. Even the Church of Rome, which kept learning as stagnant as you like for centuries, does not take the Bible literally - it even finally accepted Galileo Galilei was right after all!

@ArishMell
Why would God lie to His creation? What purpose would He have to lie to us?

@GodSpeed63 Since when have I accused God of being a liar?

You once (probably more than once) have pointed out you can believe in God without belonging to some formal denomination. I think I did agree with you.

You can also believe in God (should you choose to believe in any deity, of course) without believing most of the Bible, which was written by human beings - not deities, space-aliens or angels!


The Bible defines the Hebrew faith that gave rise to Judaeism, Christianity and even Islam, as worshipping a single deity - "God" - and gives a set of social principles it says are God's wishes.

That is all the Old Testament does of any real theological consequence.

Most of it is a selection from a large number of old texts, and probably not very faithfully translated and interpreted over the millennia since. However we cannot condemn it entirely because another selection of those books also provides the Talmud for its rightful heirs (the Jews); and also gives a flavour of its Bronze Age social context, so is interesting from that angle, provided you read it with an open mind.

The rest, of the Old Testament at least, collates a mish-mash of myths and fables probably adopted from older beliefs and some as barking mad as the neighbouring Greeks' divine soap-operas; but more usefully, parables that explain metaphorically the religion to its congregation, bits of ancient Hebrew history as they saw it - and quite likely pure propaganda.

That last because the many authors over a few centuries were assorted kings, priests and scribes trying to weld a bunch of tribes into a cohesive society under a single "official" religion, and to banish any previous religions.

If it quotes some prophet saying anything like "this is the word of God", well, of course it will. That is what those men wanted its readers to believe.

@ArishMell
By calling God's Word a fable. Understand this: the Word of God isn't a religious book as some suppose but a book full of man's history and God's righteousness protecting those who love Him. We call it God's Word because God wrote it and not man.

@GodSpeed63 Dont' twist my words.

I said clearly the Bible defines God - as far as that's humanly possible - as a creator, and how he should be respected and worshipped. Or feared: it was handy to describe a potentially wrathful god to help control the flock!

However it was written by MEN and you know that, but men who sincerely believed they were reflecting God's "word". Yes, they might have claimed divine inspiration but they didn't have an angel version of Amazon handing them a load of freshly written scrolls!

I did not say "God's word" is the fable. The fables are the stories wrapped around the theological bits - Jonah, talking snakes, Waterworld-style Floods and the like. If you strip away all those daft myths and legends that may have been carefully adapted from legends pre-dating Biblical times, and remove the Hebrew scribes' ideas of their own, rather self-righteous history, you could write the significant parts of the whole OT on a single scroll.

It would go like this:


Add a few, carefully vague and un-dated prophecies either of events bound to happen anyway because they have before, or which later followers might be able to twist to fit almost anything, and that's it.


I have often wondered if the OId Testament / Torah books, probably including those now known as the "Apocrypha", were to promote a "Year 0" mentality. That would explain devising the Genesis myth as the beginnings of a world of humanity knowing only ever the Judaic tradition, and fulminating against sacrifices, by Elders not wanting their congregations folk-remembering their ancestors' ways or following rival beliefs.

Those books were written by men for very human reasons even if they claimed Divine inspiration, in an era spanning some centuries, not by a remote God for its own pleasure!


As I said you can credibly believe in a creative, ubiquitous supernatural or supra-natural deity, and call it "God", pray to it and so one; but it is not credible to take literally every word of a bunch of priestly scribblings, beyond the pure statements of belief in that God and what it is said to expect of us.

@ArishMell
Let me ask you this: Do you think the accounts recorded in the Bible are true or fables?

@GodSpeed63 It's not a binay choice like that.

It is a mixture of possibly true, or at least based on true, semi-historical and biographical tales, statements of religious belief, and outright myths, but at least the latter were included to make a theological point. So the myths should be seen as parables, not merely "fairy stories" - at least I don't call God "the sky-fairy" as some on this august site do!.

Some fables we can see as pretty obviously absurd of course, but we have to be careful. We cannot think for people living in a fairly small area of what we now call the 'Middle East' 4000 and more years ago, and even the wildest tales might have seemed credible to those people, for whom they were really written. They were not written for whoever might be around in the Great Wide World in some incomprehensible future. After all, we cannot write now, for those who might be around in 5024.

Also much of contents has probably suffered from centuries of inaccurate translating and interpreting. I expect often by simply not knowing alternative meanings of words; but some might have been deliberate to fit the require dogma. Short of going back to the original books, if any survive, it is hard to know, some three to four millenia later. And what of the works not included - the so-called "Apocrypha"?

Other accounts cover the ancient Hebrews' own history and biographies as they saw them, so how accurate they really are is another matter. The chronology is probably all guessed at for a start. I don't think societies in the Bronze Age as theirs was, were too worried about counting years although as early agrarians, they did live by the seasons. They appeared to have marked longer time by generations - Fred son of Charlie son of... etc. I don't know their average life-span and their generations might have been shorter than our rough average of around twenty-five years.

Then there are the fully theological bits, the ones I find more credible, because they define the deity and how they saw it. This includes the Ten Commandments, but I don't believe in the original clay tablets having any mystical origin. It was easy and handy for Moses, credited with collating them, to say they did!

It is impossible to know how the writers arrived at their texts; but the religion seems to contain elements of the Hebrews' Persian ancestors who used the much older Zoroastrian faith. That was the major Persian system then, still exists and, I was surprised to learn, is respected in its home country (now the Islamic Republic of Iran) but is now very much a minority belief.

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The one Christian denomination that is thought, or it thinks itself, to follow the original Christian (new Testament) ideology is the Coptic Church, still clinging on in Egypt and a few other places. Despite persecution by followers of other faiths who cannot tolerate the existence of beliefs other than their own in the world. I do not know how it manages that, unless it has archives surviving from the 4th Century CE, when Christianity was formally developed from what hitherto was a minor Jewish sect started by the Apostles and their ilk.

The Greek Orthodox might be quite close to original, but added masses of incense and ceremony of its own, as did the Church of Rome. Jesus, and the Apostles, never needed all that perfume, robes and glitter!

...

It is easy to see how Judaism and its Christian off-shoot might have caught on in the surrounding Mediterranean lands, because most of the other religions of the time were based on fancy soap-opera pantheons who seemed only to demand lots of service from humans while giving little in return. Whereas the Abrahamic system offered a single, ineffable, unknowable god - God - that creates everything natural including we humans, and though rather demanding, cared about it all down to individual level... Unless we misbehave of course, then He's full of Wrathfulness and Smiting! Allegedly.

The brutal suppression by the Romans might even have strengthened the resolve of followers of this upstart new faith, but it is very likely it would have stayed a minor Jewish sect had the Romans not eventually converted to it and spread it across their European empire. There, the indigenous peoples carried it on after the Romans had all gone home.

Some while later along came Islam... and no new religions have been invented since, only sects of existing ones.

@ArishMell
You didn't answer my question.

@GodSpeed63 I did.

I just did not give you the childishly simple answer you wanted.

You asked an "either / or" question about something that is not a single one-of-two-choices way.

The Bible is not "either/or" because it is a mixture or much-translated, much edited books from many authors over several centuries, including a priestly set or caste trying to form a cohesive society among a bunch of tribes of long ancestries the books try to pretend did not exist.

So some accounts are bald statements of that particular society's religious belief, some are at least based on that society's own history, some are that society's laws given a religious framework, some are fables or myths of unknown origins but included to make theological points.