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Oh hey, me too. Except for the god bit. I just stopped moping, got off my lazy arse and went job hunting.
God got me a job editing Derek Jarman's home movies.
See God arranged that the cheap ass art college I went to was still using 8mm film and 'hand' editing it. God made me anti-social so I was more than willing to spend days on my own in a darkroom cutting and splicing tiny, tiny, film by hand. Plus being a student I usually had a hang-over and all the other options were kinda noisy or in brightly lit rooms.
Later, even though I already had a job God knew it was bad for me (record company, London, early 80s....:eek:) so God infected Derek Jarman with A.I.D.S making him want to sort out his 'stuff' before he died but he couldn't find anyone who could edit 8mm film even though he searched all over Wardour St (home of London film industry). Then, one day, a frustrated Derek spotted a friend of his, a musician, heading into Trident Studios so went with him so he had someone to listen to him ranting.
God made it so Derek swished into the offices of Some Bizarre Records loudly declaiming 'is there no-one in this benighted land who can edit 8mm filmmmm!' only to have a 19 year old baby dyke from Ireland say 'I can'.
God made it so a teenage Irish lesbian spent the next 9 months looking at film of penis' (penii??). Penii of all shapes and all colours...
God, it was fascinating, disturbing and very very amusing.
But what a strange thing for a God to arrange...
True Story...apart from the bits about God.0 -
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Unfortunately I haven't been able to respond to comments for the last few days with work commitments so apologies to anyone who feels that I'm raking over old ground but there are one or two points I'd like to address.If the Lord can feed a whole nation for 40 years in the Desert then I think feeding animals for six months would be a trivial task for him to accomplish.
It should be trivial but it would also be by the standards of your mythology, miraculous. Considering that the Pentateuch is an edited work compiled from a number of different sources, it is odd that the editors would give special mention to such a miraculous event twice (Exodus 16, Numbers 11) and then fail to mention the same act when it is even more relevant to the story in Genesis 8. Like I said to JC, stop reading things into the text that aren't there.However given that, can anyone explain to me how -
If we all evolved from some single-celled organism that spontaneously developed from some 'primordial soup', where did we get the genetic material for all forms of life on earth today? Even giving millions of years to do so.
Further more could you explain where the initial information in the original strands of DNA came from?
There are two caveats here related to your questions.
Firstly, there are two separate and independent questions here. One, the increase in genetic information is related to evolution and how the mechanism of biological evolution proceeds. The other relates to the origin of said information which is a topic referred to as abiogenesis.
The second caveat is that for this topic to be meaningful then you need to define your understanding of "information" in a biological context. What do you mean by all the "information" for life on earth.
Now, to address your second question first. The short answer is we don't really know how life originated. It's not that we have no idea, we have in fact got several well-supported hypotheses. The problem is that we have no way of travelling back in time 3.8 billion years to figure out which possible method of generating life is the correct one. It's like being faced with a murder victim who has been cremated. You can theorise based on circumstantial evidence whether the victim was shot, stabbed, suffocated etc. but you have no real way of determining which possible method was the actual one. The topic of abiogenesis is long, complicated and involves a serious amount of scientific understanding to digest so let me know if you want to go through it in detail and we can cover it in another post. In the meantime, this article might give you an idea of the scope of the problem involved.
Now, to get on to your first question, the increase in genetic information from simple-celled life forms to humans. So, how can genetic information increase? Well it's rather straightforward. The process of biological evolution relies on two processes. Mutation and natural selection. Mutation is the process by which, either during reproduction or the life cycle of an organism, random changes are introduced into an organism's genetic blueprint. Natural selection is the complementary process which filters these changes, favouring ones which confer a survival or attractiveness benefit for the parent organism and weeding out those which are harmful.
Before we get into more detail, a little primer on your genome for those who don't know. Your genetic blueprint, your genome is like a book. This book is organised into 23 chapters which are called chromosomes (well actually chromosomal pairs). Each chapter is composed of lots of short stories called genes. Each story is made up of paragraphs. Some of these paragraphs are made up of text relevant to the story, we call these exons. Others are just ads, which we call introns. Each paragraph is made up of words called codons. Finally these words are made up of three letters called bases. The language of the book is written in an alphabet comprised of just four letters, A,C,T,G.
There are three ways in which we can see how mutation and natural selection increase genetic information, analogy, example and mathematics.
The best analogy for how genetic information is increased is the development of language. The English language is composed of just 26 letters. When the first English language dictionary "A Table Alphabeticall" was published in 1604, it contained 2543 words. By comparison, the current dictionary contains 171,476 words with approximately 4000 new words being added every year. Like twerking, for example. However this voluminous change is achieved by combining the same 26 letters in new combinations or finding new uses for existing ones. Similarly, the increase in genetic information is created by combining the four letters in new combinations driven by random change. Evolution (in scenarios like the evolution of the eye) proceeds by making incremental changes with each intermediate stage conferring benefit to the user. So in a way, it is like those puzzles you get in a newspaper where you change one letter each time. Like this:
SWORD
SWORE
SHORE
SHARE
PHARE
PHASE
At each stage, a new, properly defined word is formed by changing just one letter so that the final word bears no resemblance to the first.
OK, time for an example. The best example of mutation increasing biological information is a process known as gene duplication. In this process, a gene is accidentally copied twice into an organism. This process should be familiar to most people. When this process occurs on a larger scale, i.e. an extra copy of an entire chromosome, it manifests as Down's syndrome. However, on the scale of a gene the process can be quite beneficial. In this case, the second copy of the gene is freed from selective pressure. Because it is no longer integral to the functioning of its host, it experience a much higher mutation rate without affecting the parent organism. Therefore the genetic information within the second gene can be wildly recombined resulting in new functions. One prominent example of this is the development of nylon-eating bacteria. In this case a combination of gene duplication and frameshift mutation allowed a strain of Flavobacterium to acquire the ability to digest a synthetic material like nylon.
Finally, let's look at the mathematics of information.
Our method for quantifiying information in biological systems or any other field is information theory.
Information theory was devised by a scientist working at Bell Labs called Claude Shannon. In fact Dembski claimed to base his work on that of Shannon even though he got eveything wrong.
Shannon defined information initially as a probability. For example, a message Xi has the probability p(Xi). So if you asked someone their birthday, assigning the value of Xi to 1st January would yield p(Xi) of 0.003.
Shannon then formalised this postulate by defining the information content of a stream as its entropy given by:
so for p(x) = 0 and p(x) = 1, the function has a value of 0.
Now, we'll take a biological example to show how mutation leads to an increase in information.
Let's start with a population of 1000 individuals. 500 of these individuals (which we'll call group A) have a gene with the codon CAG and 500 (which we'll call group
with the codon CCC. So p(A) = 0.5 and p(B) = 0.5. Therefore, H = -(0.5*log2(0.5) - 0.5*log2(0.5)) = 1.000.
Now in the next generation, group A remains unchanged. However, in group B, thanks to a random mutation, there are 499 individuals with codon CCC and 1 mutant with CCG. Therefore, the sum of entropies is now:
p(CAG) * log2(p(CAG)) = 0.50000
p(CCC) * log2(p(CCC)) = 0.50044
p(CCG) * log2(p(CCG)) = 0.00997
So now, H = -(0.50000 + 0.50044 + 0.00997) = 1.01041
Therefore the information has increased thanks to this mutation.By why is that?
If we are just the result of genetic mutations and random disasters then where did this whole sense of morality come from?
Why does anyone have the right to decide what is right or wrong?
Science can and does give us an insight into how we have developed and continue to develop our moral compass. Morality is a function of social behaviour and communal existence. There is a significant body of research regarding the evolution of morality. I have posted some links for you below, some books as primers and some peer-reviewed research as well:
Books
The Origins of Virtue
Adaptation and Natural Selection
The Moral Landscape
Research
The evolution of reciprocal altruism
Fairness vs. reason in the ultimatum game
Five rules for the evolution of cooperation
The evolution of the golden rule
Volunteering as Red Queen mechanism in public goods gamesisn't gravity a law not a theory?
Well, it's both. A law is a simple statement relating the causal factors of a phenomenon. This is why we can state the law of gravity mathematically:
The law allows us to see how gravity works, what factors influence gravity and to what degree. However, nothing in the law explains why gravity works. That's what a theory is for. A theory is an explanatory framework which encompasses observations and laws. It is the highest level of confidence science can attain.Can you explain why there is so little Moon Dust?
The lunar surface is exposed to direct sunlight, and strong ultraviolet light and x-rays can destroy the surface layers of exposed rock and reduce them to dust at a rate of a few then-thousandths of an inch per year. But even this minute amount during the age of the moon could be sufficient to form a layer several miles deep. But turns out this is not the case.
There is only a few thousand years worth of dust found.
You seem to have gotten this hoary old creationist claim completely ass backwards.
This claim dates back to Henry Morris, one of the founders of ICR. In a book called Scientific Creationism back in 1974. It claims that the influx of meteorite dust measured on earth does not tally with the amount of moon dust meaning that the moon must be young.
The claim is based on a single and now long-refuted measurement:
"The best measurements have been made by Hans Pettersson, who obtained the figure of 14 million tons per year"
However it has been known since the time Morris' book was published that Pettersson's estimate was vastly overstated. One of the most recent figures published in 1996 shows Pettersson's estimate to be overstated by a factor of a factor of 12.
Luminous efficiency based on photographic observations of the Lost City fireball and implications for the influx of interplanetary bodies onto Earth.
So the actual data poses no problem for an old moon.He rode the waves.
Are you kidding me?
I just wanted to quote this to draw attention to its monumental stupidity.
So let me get this straight. A boat which would probably have buckled under its own hull stresses given that cypress only has a tensile strength of 3.5MPa is somehow going to survive the rogue waves capable of destroying ships much bigger than the ark built from materials 10,000 times stronger than those used to build the ark. Sometimes the stupid in your posts astound even me.Question for you guys?
The bible told us the world was a sphere long before man discovered the world was a sphere and believed it to be flat.
How did the chaps know at the time of writing it the world was round?
Umm, no it doesn't.
In Isaiah 40:22:
"He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in."
the word for circle used is the word:
ח֣וּג
This word means a flat circle and is used in this meaning in Proverbs 8:27:
"I was there when he set the heavens in place,when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep"
Had the author intended to mean sphere then he would have used the word:
כַּדּ֕וּר
as in Isaiah 22:18:
"He will roll you up tightly like a ball and throw you into a large country. There you will die and there your splendid chariots will remain— you disgrace to your master’s house!"
Secondly, the scholarly consensus is that the book of Isaiah was constructed in three parts. The first part, Proto-Isaiah (Chapters 1-39) is attributed to Isaiah albeit with some expansions written in the 7th century BCE. However, the passage above is from the Deutero-Isaiah portion (Chapters 40-55) which is attributed to an anonymous author writing in the 6th century BCE near the end of the Babylonian captivity.
This creates a problem for your assertion since the passage was written at a time when the Greeks had formulated the concept of a spherical earth.
Thirdly, it's not as if the evidence for a spherical earth wasn't available to people of the time. The biggest pieces of evidence which convinced Greek thinkers of a spherical earth are something that anyone can confirm for themselves. First of all, the Greeks noticed that ships returning from afar appeared over the horizon mast first which wouldn't have happened on a flat earth. Secondly, the Pole star appears higher in the sky as you travel further north which wouldn't happen if the earth was flat. Thirdly, lunar eclipses (which the Greeks realised were caused by the earth passing in front of the moon) were always circular which wouldn't happen if the earth was a flat disc. Clearly no divine inspiration is required.
Finally, the quote from Isaiah itself doesn't help your argument. It describes the sky being stretched out over the circle of the earth as if it were a tent. This alone indicates that the author was referring to a flat earth.This is a mistranslation - what it actually says if you go back to studying the hebrew, that if a man has consented sexual relations with a women then he should marry that women.
Again, no.
This is not a mistranslation. The current NASB translation of the verse:
"“If a man finds a girl who is a virgin, who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her and they are discovered, then the man who lay with her shall give to the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall become his wife because he has violated her; he cannot divorce her all his days."
is admittedly more accurate semantically than the NIV version:
"If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives."
but the same lack of consent is present in both verses. In Hebrew the verse:
כִּֽי־יִמְצָ֣א אִ֗ישׁ [נַעַר כ] (נַעֲרָ֤ה ק) בְתוּלָה֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר לֹא־אֹרָ֔שָׂה וּתְפָשָׂ֖הּ וְשָׁכַ֣ב עִמָּ֑הּ וְנִמְצָֽאוּ׃
contains the word:
וּתְפָשָׂ֖הּ
which translates as "lays hold of" or "seizes". This immediately destroys any idea of consent. The word above is used in other places in the Old Testament too:
"Then it will be when you have seized the city, that you shall set the city on fire. You shall do it according to the word of the LORD. See, I have commanded you."
Joshua 8:8
Saul went on one side of the mountain, and David and his men on the other side of the mountain; and David was hurrying to get away from Saul, for Saul and his men were surrounding David and his men to seize them.
1 Samuel 3:26
"When you besiege a city a long time, to make war against it in order to capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by swinging an axe against them; for you may eat from them, and you shall not cut them down. For is the tree of the field a man, that it should be besieged by you?
Deuteronomy 20:19
The word is always used in the sense of taking something that is not yours. Thus combined with the mention of intercourse in the original phrase the clear intent of the passage is rape.What on the surface is humorous but on a deeper level sad about this thread is that both the religious posts and the majority of the irreligious posts suffer from the same lack of contextual understanding of pre modern texts such as the bible. Reading and interpreting the bible literally is largely a recent phenomena, and for some strange reason those that are most passionate about their religious belief or lack of belief fall into the same metaphysical trap.
In the ancient world of Mesopotamia and later in Greece, there were two ways of approaching truth, Plato's logos and mythos. Logos was based on external observation and had to be consistent with the outside world, while mythos tried to make sense of the internal world or the human condition. The two were always kept separate and mythos could not be interpreted in terms of objective reality but was an attempt to find meaning to existence.
As to the common question of which parts of the bible or any ancient mythology should be read literally and which parts read metaphorically, I would say the sophisticated answer is that all should be regarded as mythos. Not the modern meaning of myth which means untrue, but the search for meaning and values in society, like any human society in history, struggling with the paradoxes of the human condition. Undoubtedly there were floods in Mesopotamia in ancient history, and likely there was one mega flood which led to the bible flood myth, but the mythos is not the truth of the flood story, it is the search for meaning in why a God would send a flood, or a plague, or a war, or whatever.
Modern societies are shaped by the huge advancements in logos since the scientific revolution (with mixed results for humanity) and mythos has not just been discredited but regarded as ancient logos, something ancient philosophers would scoff at. Regarding mythos as logos leads not just to bad science from creationists but more tragically also bad religion. Life is filled with joys and sorrows, happiness and despair, but when we are faced with tragedy and grief, reason and science have absolutely nothing to offer. The only solace from despair humans have found in history is in mythos, in the rituals and beliefs of religion.
For anyone interested in exploring these themes further I would recommend the writings of Karen Armstrong, despised equally by fundamentalist Christians and New Atheists so a perfect antidote for this thread
I agree with you about a literal reading of the Bible. However, I would point out two things.
Firstly, the bulk of this thread has not been driven by atheists reading the bible literally but rather taking JC to task for his creationist claims which are based on a literal reading of the Bible.
Secondly, while a strict literal reading of the Bible is wrong, a strict interpretation of the Bible as mythos is equally wrong. It falls foul of the same hasty generalisation that the fundamentalists are guilty of. It is possible using proper scholarship and drawing on such fields as philosophy, classics, history, archaeology and literature to discern with some confidence which passages and books were intended as mythos and which were intended as logos. For example, Job is a book which is definitively mythical. The central reason for even telling the story is to deliver a theological message about the virtue of faith in the face of adversity. However, a story like Joshua is better interpreted as a historical account albeit one with mythical overtones relying heavily on religious symbology. Even in the New Testament, while much of the gospels are taken up with the mythos-heavy backstory of Jesus, the entire point of the biography of Jesus is to talk up the historical importance of Jesus as the son of God.Pherekydes wrote: »So how old is our planet?
/should be worth waiting for...
In case I forget, since you asked, the earth if 4.54 +/- 0.05 billion years.0 -
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Unfortunately I haven't been able to respond to comments for the last few days with work commitments so apologies to anyone who feels that I'm raking over old ground but there are one or two points I'd like to address.
It should be trivial but it would also be by the standards of your mythology, miraculous. Considering that the Pentateuch is an edited work compiled from a number of different sources, it is odd that the editors would give special mention to such a miraculous event twice (Exodus 16, Numbers 11) and then fail to mention the same act when it is even more relevant to the story in Genesis 8. Like I said to JC, stop reading things into the text that aren't there.
There are two caveats here related to your questions.
Firstly, there are two separate and independent questions here. One, the increase in genetic information is related to evolution and how the mechanism of biological evolution proceeds. The other relates to the origin of said information which is a topic referred to as abiogenesis.
The second caveat is that for this topic to be meaningful then you need to define your understanding of "information" in a biological context. What do you mean by all the "information" for life on earth.
Now, to address your second question first. The short answer is we don't really know how life originated. It's not that we have no idea, we have in fact got several well-supported hypotheses. The problem is that we have no way of travelling back in time 3.8 billion years to figure out which possible method of generating life is the correct one. It's like being faced with a murder victim who has been cremated. You can theorise based on circumstantial evidence whether the victim was shot, stabbed, suffocated etc. but you have no real way of determining which possible method was the actual one. The topic of abiogenesis is long, complicated and involves a serious amount of scientific understanding to digest so let me know if you want to go through it in detail and we can cover it in another post. In the meantime, this article might give you an idea of the scope of the problem involved.
Now, to get on to your first question, the increase in genetic information from simple-celled life forms to humans. So, how can genetic information increase? Well it's rather straightforward. The process of biological evolution relies on two processes. Mutation and natural selection. Mutation is the process by which, either during reproduction or the life cycle of an organism, random changes are introduced into an organism's genetic blueprint. Natural selection is the complementary process which filters these changes, favouring ones which confer a survival or attractiveness benefit for the parent organism and weeding out those which are harmful.
Before we get into more detail, a little primer on your genome for those who don't know. Your genetic blueprint, your genome is like a book. This book is organised into 23 chapters which are called chromosomes (well actually chromosomal pairs). Each chapter is composed of lots of short stories called genes. Each story is made up of paragraphs. Some of these paragraphs are made up of text relevant to the story, we call these exons. Others are just ads, which we call introns. Each paragraph is made up of words called codons. Finally these words are made up of three letters called bases. The language of the book is written in an alphabet comprised of just four letters, A,C,T,G.
There are three ways in which we can see how mutation and natural selection increase genetic information, analogy, example and mathematics.
The best analogy for how genetic information is increased is the development of language. The English language is composed of just 26 letters. When the first English language dictionary "A Table Alphabeticall" was published in 1604, it contained 2543 words. By comparison, the current dictionary contains 171,476 words with approximately 4000 new words being added every year. Like twerking, for example. However this voluminous change is achieved by combining the same 26 letters in new combinations or finding new uses for existing ones. Similarly, the increase in genetic information is created by combining the four letters in new combinations driven by random change. Evolution (in scenarios like the evolution of the eye) proceeds by making incremental changes with each intermediate stage conferring benefit to the user. So in a way, it is like those puzzles you get in a newspaper where you change one letter each time. Like this:
SWORD
SWORE
SHORE
SHARE
PHARE
PHASE
At each stage, a new, properly defined word is formed by changing just one letter so that the final word bears no resemblance to the first.
OK, time for an example. The best example of mutation increasing biological information is a process known as gene duplication. In this process, a gene is accidentally copied twice into an organism. This process should be familiar to most people. When this process occurs on a larger scale, i.e. an extra copy of an entire chromosome, it manifests as Down's syndrome. However, on the scale of a gene the process can be quite beneficial. In this case, the second copy of the gene is freed from selective pressure. Because it is no longer integral to the functioning of its host, it experience a much higher mutation rate without affecting the parent organism. Therefore the genetic information within the second gene can be wildly recombined resulting in new functions. One prominent example of this is the development of nylon-eating bacteria. In this case a combination of gene duplication and frameshift mutation allowed a strain of Flavobacterium to acquire the ability to digest a synthetic material like nylon.
Finally, let's look at the mathematics of information.
Our method for quantifiying information in biological systems or any other field is information theory.
Information theory was devised by a scientist working at Bell Labs called Claude Shannon. In fact Dembski claimed to base his work on that of Shannon even though he got eveything wrong.
Shannon defined information initially as a probability. For example, a message Xi has the probability p(Xi). So if you asked someone their birthday, assigning the value of Xi to 1st January would yield p(Xi) of 0.003.
Shannon then formalised this postulate by defining the information content of a stream as its entropy given by:
so for p(x) = 0 and p(x) = 1, the function has a value of 0.
Now, we'll take a biological example to show how mutation leads to an increase in information.
Let's start with a population of 1000 individuals. 500 of these individuals (which we'll call group A) have a gene with the codon CAG and 500 (which we'll call group with the codon CCC. So p(A) = 0.5 and p(B) = 0.5. Therefore, H = -(0.5*log2(0.5) - 0.5*log2(0.5)) = 1.000.
Now in the next generation, group A remains unchanged. However, in group B, thanks to a random mutation, there are 499 individuals with codon CCC and 1 mutant with CCG. Therefore, the sum of entropies is now:
p(CAG) * log2(p(CAG)) = 0.50000
p(CCC) * log2(p(CCC)) = 0.50044
p(CCG) * log2(p(CCG)) = 0.00997
So now, H = -(0.50000 + 0.50044 + 0.00997) = 1.01041
Therefore the information has increased thanks to this mutation.
Science can and does give us an insight into how we have developed and continue to develop our moral compass. Morality is a function of social behaviour and communal existence. There is a significant body of research regarding the evolution of morality. I have posted some links for you below, some books as primers and some peer-reviewed research as well:
Books
The Origins of Virtue
Adaptation and Natural Selection
The Moral Landscape
Research
The evolution of reciprocal altruism
Fairness vs. reason in the ultimatum game
Five rules for the evolution of cooperation
The evolution of the golden rule
Volunteering as Red Queen mechanism in public goods games
Well, it's both. A law is a simple statement relating the causal factors of a phenomenon. This is why we can state the law of gravity mathematically:
The law allows us to see how gravity works, what factors influence gravity and to what degree. However, nothing in the law explains why gravity works. That's what a theory is for. A theory is an explanatory framework which encompasses observations and laws. It is the highest level of confidence science can attain.
You seem to have gotten this hoary old creationist claim completely ass backwards.
This claim dates back to Henry Morris, one of the founders of ICR. In a book called Scientific Creationism back in 1974. It claims that the influx of meteorite dust measured on earth does not tally with the amount of moon dust meaning that the moon must be young.
The claim is based on a single and now long-refuted measurement:
"The best measurements have been made by Hans Pettersson, who obtained the figure of 14 million tons per year"
However it has been known since the time Morris' book was published that Pettersson's estimate was vastly overstated. One of the most recent figures published in 1996 shows Pettersson's estimate to be overstated by a factor of a factor of 12.
Luminous efficiency based on photographic observations of the Lost City fireball and implications for the influx of interplanetary bodies onto Earth.
So the actual data poses no problem for an old moon.
Are you kidding me?
I just wanted to quote this to draw attention to its monumental stupidity.
So let me get this straight. A boat which would probably have buckled under its own hull stresses given that cypress only has a tensile strength of 3.5MPa is somehow going to survive the rogue waves capable of destroying ships much bigger than the ark built from materials 10,000 times stronger than those used to build the ark. Sometimes the stupid in your posts astound even me.
Umm, no it doesn't.
In Isaiah 40:22:
"He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in."
the word for circle used is the word:
ח֣וּג
This word means a flat circle and is used in this meaning in Proverbs 8:27:
"I was there when he set the heavens in place,when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep"
Had the author intended to mean sphere then he would have used the word:
כַּדּ֕וּר
as in Isaiah 22:18:
"He will roll you up tightly like a ball and throw you into a large country. There you will die and there your splendid chariots will remain— you disgrace to your master’s house!"
Secondly, the scholarly consensus is that the book of Isaiah was constructed in three parts. The first part, Proto-Isaiah (Chapters 1-39) is attributed to Isaiah albeit with some expansions written in the 7th century BCE. However, the passage above is from the Deutero-Isaiah portion (Chapters 40-55) which is attributed to an anonymous author writing in the 6th century BCE near the end of the Babylonian captivity.
This creates a problem for your assertion since the passage was written at a time when the Greeks had formulated the concept of a spherical earth.
Thirdly, it's not as if the evidence for a spherical earth wasn't available to people of the time. The biggest pieces of evidence which convinced Greek thinkers of a spherical earth are something that anyone can confirm for themselves. First of all, the Greeks noticed that ships returning from afar appeared over the horizon mast first which wouldn't have happened on a flat earth. Secondly, the Pole star appears higher in the sky as you travel further north which wouldn't happen if the earth was flat. Thirdly, lunar eclipses (which the Greeks realised were caused by the earth passing in front of the moon) were always circular which wouldn't happen if the earth was a flat disc. Clearly no divine inspiration is required.
Finally, the quote from Isaiah itself doesn't help your argument. It describes the sky being stretched out over the circle of the earth as if it were a tent. This alone indicates that the author was referring to a flat earth.
Again, no.
This is not a mistranslation. The current NASB translation of the verse:
"“If a man finds a girl who is a virgin, who is not engaged, and seizes her and lies with her and they are discovered, then the man who lay with her shall give to the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall become his wife because he has violated her; he cannot divorce her all his days."
is admittedly more accurate semantically than the NIV version:
"If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives."
but the same lack of consent is present in both verses. In Hebrew the verse:
כִּֽי־יִמְצָ֣א אִ֗ישׁ [נַעַר כ] (נַעֲרָ֤ה ק) בְתוּלָה֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר לֹא־אֹרָ֔שָׂה וּתְפָשָׂ֖הּ וְשָׁכַ֣ב עִמָּ֑הּ וְנִמְצָֽאוּ׃
contains the word:
וּתְפָשָׂ֖הּ
which translates as "lays hold of" or "seizes". This immediately destroys any idea of consent. The word above is used in other places in the Old Testament too:
"Then it will be when you have seized the city, that you shall set the city on fire. You shall do it according to the word of the LORD. See, I have commanded you."
Joshua 8:8
Saul went on one side of the mountain, and David and his men on the other side of the mountain; and David was hurrying to get away from Saul, for Saul and his men were surrounding David and his men to seize them.
1 Samuel 3:26
"When you besiege a city a long time, to make war against it in order to capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by swinging an axe against them; for you may eat from them, and you shall not cut them down. For is the tree of the field a man, that it should be besieged by you?
Deuteronomy 20:19
The word is always used in the sense of taking something that is not yours. Thus combined with the mention of intercourse in the original phrase the clear intent of the passage is rape.
I agree with you about a literal reading of the Bible. However, I would point out two things.
Firstly, the bulk of this thread has not been driven by atheists reading the bible literally but rather taking JC to task for his creationist claims which are based on a literal reading of the Bible.
Secondly, while a strict literal reading of the Bible is wrong, a strict interpretation of the Bible as mythos is equally wrong. It falls foul of the same hasty generalisation that the fundamentalists are guilty of. It is possible using proper scholarship and drawing on such fields as philosophy, classics, history, archaeology and literature to discern with some confidence which passages and books were intended as mythos and which were intended as logos. For example, Job is a book which is definitively mythical. The central reason for even telling the story is to deliver a theological message about the virtue of faith in the face of adversity. However, a story like Joshua is better interpreted as a historical account albeit one with mythical overtones relying heavily on religious symbology. Even in the New Testament, while much of the gospels are taken up with the mythos-heavy backstory of Jesus, the entire point of the biography of Jesus is to talk up the historical importance of Jesus as the son of God.
In case I forget, since you asked, the earth if 4.54 +/- 0.05 billion years.
I platonically love you.0
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