Request for Question Clarification by
mathtalk-ga
on
16 Jul 2005 13:03 PDT
Hi, drclintjones-ga:
I thought I'd inquire what sort of Answer, if any at this point, might
interest you.
Your subject line, Creation vs Evolution - is the Bible credible?,
suggested to me quite a different Question than the criteria laid down
in the body of your post:
"1) I need to find as much scientific evidence/research backing up the
biblical story of Creation as possible...
"One good example of what I am looking for is Dr Carl Baugh's work in
the USA found here...[Welcome to CEM Online]"
When I looked at this site, which I think by any standard is more a
commercial offering than a work of scholarship, I found conflicting
indications of what you might want.
On a positive note there was this about Bible credibility (using
"mathematical" twice in short space of words!):
"This book will demonstrate that every chronological statement
contained in the Bible is consistent with all other chronological
statements. Author Floyd Nolen Jones carefully and thoroughly
investigates the chronological and mathematical facts of the Old
Testament, proving them to be accurate and reliable. This biblically
sound, scholarly, and easy-to-understand book will enlighten and
astound you with solutions to many questions Bible scholars have had
over the centuries. Its features include:
? Scriptural solutions to many biblical mathematical controversies
etc."
However that describes, not work by Dr. Carl Baugh, but rather a book
The Chronology of the Old Testament: Solving the Bible?s Most
Intriguing Mysteries by Dr. Floyd Nolen Jones.
What the CEM Website says (in part) about Dr. Baugh's work is:
"Dr. Carl Baugh, the museum?s Founder and Director, originally came to
Glen Rose, Texas to critically examine claims of human and dinosaur
co-habitation. He conducted extensive excavations along the Paluxy
River, with appropriate permission of the landowners. These original
excavations yielded human footprints among dinosaur footprints (see
the Director?s doctoral dissertation)."
Hence my confusion. While I can well imagine that mathematical
propositions, known to be eternally demonstrable, would lend
credibility to the Bible, it becomes with regard to Dr. Baugh's work a
matter of defending the Bible against the incredulous huckstering in
which such long-ago disproven claims find a haven.
Let's stop and ask ourselves if anyone has ever described a passage of
the Bible as depicting men and dinosaurs walking together? Chapter
and verse, anyone?
So, while I can imagine a distant chorus of Readers shouting "Ah, but
it proves that scientists are wrong!", I do not think the credibility
of the Bible is well served merely by denigrating scientists'
credibility. Indeed your request here is for "as much scientific
evidence/research backing up the biblical story of Creation as
possible".
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Item 0: Scientists say dinosaurs died "quickly" as such things go
about 65 million years ago, presumably in chronological juxtaposition
with the KT boundary event widely thought to an asteroid impact near
what is the Yucatan peninsula. In the scientific view Humankind
"evolutionarily diverged" from the other "great apes" only within the
past 4-10 million years. Human cultural attainments are so important
to its species characteristics that there is wide range for opinion
about when precisely we arrived at being "thoroughly modern". But the
distribution of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in our genetic
code points to various genetic bottleneck events within the past
200,000 years, that strongly support what is called the "modern
out-of-Africa" theory:
[Using DNA to Unravel Man's Ancient Origins]
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~allpoms/genetics4.html
which discusses the most recent common ancestor of all males ("Adam")
based on Y chromosome studies and the most recent common ancestor of
all females ("Eve") based on mitochondrial studies. It says in part:
"...the most recent ancestor of all males living today was a man who
lived in Africa around 59,000 years ago. The results came after
drawing up a genetic family tree of mankind by studying variations in
the Y-chromosome of 1,062 men in 22 geographical areas including
Pakistan, India, Cambodia, Laos, Australia, New Guinea, America, Mali,
Sudan, Ethiopia and Japan. Some modern-day men living in what is now
Sudan, Ethiopia and southern Africa are believed to be the closest
living descendants of the first humans left Africa 35,000-89,000 years
ago. It also concluded that the common matrilineal origin was some
80,000 years earlier, circa 140,000 BP (before the present)."
In other words "Eve" is more than twice as old as "Adam", or in "plain
language" that our female sexual ancestory is considerably more
diverse than our male sexual ancestory.
In a formal Answer, I could of course provide several scholarly
presentations on this material, though you can easily track some down
from the links on the article above. See for example the Wikipedia
article and references about this advanced subspecies of Homo sapiens,
believed to have been an "advanced speaker":
[Homo sapiens idaltu]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens_idaltu
Moreover closely-related species to us are thought by scientists to
have died out comparatively recently:
[Homo erectus -- died out in Asia some 25,000 years ago (??)]
http://www.the-scientist.com/news/20041005/01
Based on a study of the co-evolution of humans and head lice; disputed.
[Homo florensis -- died out on Indonesian island Flores < 18,000 years ago]
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/10/28/DWARF.TMP
Last year's discovery; widely accepted.
If you believe that birds are descendants of dinosaurs, and in some
remote sense very specialized dinosaurs in themselves, then I see no
reason you couldn't legitimately argue this evidence that humans and
dinosaurs "walked together". But if the aim is more that "science is
wrong", I fail to see how this helps the case for Bible credibility
one way or the other.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Item 1: When I read the beginning of the book of Genesis, I have the
impression that there are two accounts of Creation given there. Bible
scholarship tells us that the first "days of the week" account is from
a source known through other portions of the Torah/Pentateuch/books of
Moses as P (for priestly), and the second "Adam and Eve" account is
from a source known in a similar sense as J (after the Holy proper
name of G*d; takes too long right now to explain WHY).
As I told an Israeli colleague of mind, I cannot imagine that someone
with enough ingenuity to reconcile these two accounts could not
equally reconcile the scientific evidence with them, if they chose to
do so.
Please note that a widely broadcast Protestant fundamentalist
apocolytic doctrine holds that an entirely previous Creation of a
perfect world by G*d is concealed in the unspoken interlude between
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Gen. 1:1)
and "The earth was without form and void..." (Gen. 1:2). This
doctrine posits the creation and fall of the Angels, including Satan,
before the accounts we have now (asserting further G*d's plan for
redemption of the physical world through Jesus, a Son of Humankind).
So realistically I'll have to ask your Clarification of which Biblical
account of creation you have in mind. I consider myself a student of
such things, but I can't think of one that rises or falls with Fred
Flintstone and Dino taking a walk together. Possibly you have in mind
a "Young Earth" theory, some of which have proposed that evidenced of
times prior to a literal "week" of creation within the past 6,000
years or so is an illusion intentionally created by G*d or perhaps
Satan. As is obvious, if one can accept explanations on that basis,
there really shouldn't be any longing for "scientific" evidence, since
any incongruous facts are openly dismissed as illusions.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Item 2: Mathematics, on the other hand, seems to me an excellent
potential source of knowledge that enhances the credibility of the
Bible, specifically in connection with the accounts of creation we
find in Genesis. At least as we read these accounts today, from our
modern understanding of the physical world, both accounts stress the
occurrence of events within some finite past time/history of this
world we inhabit today. This may not seem at all remarkable, but it
is remarkable in a purely philosophical way. That is, there appears
to be no apriori logical reason why the physical universe should have
a finite age, a point carefully considered (if perhaps carelessly
presented) by Kant. So to find both Biblical accounts in something of
a striking agreement on what is certainly (up to the discovery of the
MBE and the general acceptance of some sort of Big Bang cosmology by
scientists) a major controversy, to me is a point in the favor of
Bible credibility that should be respected.
If this is truly the subject matter you are interested in, I'd be
honored to share what few mathematical gems I can think of to report
in this connection.
regards, mathtalk-ga
