The Genesis One Code

Interesting stuff, but a little too easy to dismiss as quackery -- most people in the know will be immediately reminded of the "missing day in time" hoax.

It's not true, insofar as I can see. Firstly, I've been hearing this kind of stuff for my entire life (Such as some megacomputer figuring the 'Long day' from Joshua), but I've never seen *any* independent verification of any of it. Not a shard of proof that any of these tests actually happened.

Secondly: there is a HUGE history of fakery, forgery, and deliberate blind-eye turning in this sort of thing. For instance, we've all heard of the modern human footprints crossing dinosaur tracks in Texas, right? This is still commonly offered up as proof that the world is very young by creationists (I myself did it when I was a kid). What no one mentions is that (A) the human footprints were obviously carved by a hammer and chisel, (B) they're all 18 inches to two feet long, (C) they appear *ONLY* on land owned by a Jehovah's Witness guy who believed that all men were giants in the days prior to the flood and (D) they've been regarded as over-zealous fakes by every reputable Christian source for like 50 years. Still, they turn up disingenuously as 'proof' that evolution is a lie.

Thirdly: I think these kinds of arguments hurt the Christian cause more than help it. (For newcomers, I'm a Christian, and I do believe God made the universe, so don't take this the wrong way) The purpose of these kinds of things are to 'prove' that we're right and 'they're' wrong. Ignoring the obvious sin of using arguments you know are full of crap to convert people, the problem is that if someone believes because you convinced them of some hoo-hah involving the Canadarm, and then they find out that such a thing never happened, their faith has no foundation and it falls flat. They (likely) go away, not only disbelieving, but actually opposing believing since they were taken advantage of.

Finally, I think it's fundamentally misguided to try and *prove* the Biblical account of creation to be literally true. The most obvious reason is that beyond the fact that God made the universe, the account *isn't* literally true. As Neo pointed out, it was intended for Bronze Age people who really wouldn't get the whole monoblock/electron spin/coalescence of matter/universal gravitation thing, nor was it particularly relevant to their lives, nor to their salvation. It's an extended metaphor, and before anyone jumps on me about how there are no metaphors in the Bible, let me point out that (A) go read Psalms and (B) Paul openly admits to using them in his epistles. Also: I just don't find the creation of the universe all that important in a salvific sense. I mean, if something is of real importance to God, it tends to get a lot of screen time, right? Jesus gets four Gospels, and the Big Sermon is basically repeated twice. We get two full books - 80 chapters! - on health codes in the Old Testament. We get two (arguably three) books on wisdom (And again, if Job ain't metaphor, I don't know what is).

How much time does Creation get? Less than two chapters. Genesis 1:-2:3 and a variant recap from 2:4-:2.25. Total: 55 verses. In fact, 54 and a half verses. There's probably more stuff in the Bible about planting beans than there is on Creation.

How we got here (In a spiritual sense, not a scientific one) is less important than the fact that we *are* here. Whether or not our great grandpappy was a guy named Adam, or an Amoeba is less important than what we do with our lives now. What specific tools God used to make the universe is of no real importance, since we all agree He made it, and there's no point quibbling about minutia.

That's my take on it. It's an unpopular one.

>>I probably should have taken the time to transcribe the article, but again, was feeling like a wet noodle yesterday. For instance, "Complex life--most of the major amnimal phyla--appeared in a fairly rapid 'Cambrian explosion' about 530 million years ago, give or take 5 million years, according to fossil records. That was four hours into Day 6, according to Friedmann, 532 million years ago."<<

Nah, nah, nah, it's ok. All I meant was that these kinds of books are EXTREMELY tendentious. They start from an unverifiable assumption ("Let's divide the age of the universe by seven") and then they shoehorn observable facts into that arbitrary frame. Then they ignore or explain away things that don't fit. *ANYTHING* can be made to fit anything else if you're willing to squint and throw hokey numerology into it. (I can not *TELL* you how many interpretations of '666' I've heard over the years, none of which have any real basis in Hebrew, Greek, or Roman numerology, or anything valid.) It's like that stupid "Bible Code" book from a few years back ("Theomathics" or whatever), or pyramidology, or a (pretty good) Baha'I book I read some years ago that proved Baha'u'llah was foretold in the Bible and Koran based on numerology. If you accept the values the book gives to the numbers in question, then it's a pretty compelling argument, but there's *no* reason to accept the values given. They're arbitrary.

>>There was no mention of giants, or trying to supervene evolution--just a formula for making Biblical time and geologic time compatable.<<

No, no, I was just using that as an example of how some well-meaning doofus will deliberately fake something, and the fakery becomes a matter of faith for people down the road, which invariably comes back to bite us all in the butt.

I could find no actual *criticism* of this guy's book, nor anything about him on Wiki. His Amazon page is full of way-too-glowing, way-too-generic praise reviews, and the one critical one doesn't appear to have actually read the book. Doesn't sound particularly scholarly to me, and I'm not sure that 30 years in engineering really translates into a mastery of the biological sciences. I dunno, I just see a lot of red flags here that say "Propaganda."

>>The preferred interpretation of most documents is historical grammatical.<<

Yup. But see, that's really hard, and requires a lot of effort, even *IF* you don't go the whole nine yards and learn a dead language or two. There's a lot of historical research that goes into it, and the answers are not foregone conclusions. IE: you may not find what you expect to. I know. I've done it. A lot.

It's much easier to buy some hackjob by some 'let's make a buck off the gullible' con man, and convince people that *REALLY DIFFICULT* problems are really easy through doubletalk.

>>Well, I *do* think that trying is part of the thing. I mean, I started out as a Fundamentalist, went completely round the bend, and ended where I started with a much better (Non-fudamentalist) relationship with God, a better understanding of me, and, I think, a much better grasp on faith and theology and stuff. So I think 'trying to understand' is a big deal, but I think it's super-important to know that you're never gonna' get it, or at least not anywhere near all of it. But: "Seek and ye shall find" is pretty Biblical. (I've always liked the Gnostic addition to that from the gospel of Thomas: "He who finds shall be disturbed.")<<

Yeah, we're on the same page here. I'm not saying not to try to understand God. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying not to try to prove the existence of God, not to try to predict when the end times will come to pass or what will happen when they do or to cite all sorts of crazy crap that "proves" we're living in the end times right now. It isn't our business, the Bible says it isn't our business, and we are actually going against God's will to try and find out (exactly as you said). "No one knows the day or the hour, even the Son doesn't know" and all that.