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Friday, May 15, 2020
Two Books that Share one BIG IDEA
Monday, May 11, 2020
The Flawed Premise of the Biologos Forum
Biologos has managed to alienate a lot of people, including Christians who affirm mainstream science's views on evolution. These are people who should be in their camp, and some of them once were. Considering the massive investment that our entire media and government has undertaken to sell macro-evolution, you would think they would have had more success than they have in their mission to get Christians to accept that God used evolution to form living things. After all, they are just trying to get Christians to move with a massive tide, not fight the tide.
I am not going to contend here today over the particulars of the evolution-creation controversy. You may know that to some degree I think it is a false conflict, but not in the manner that Biologos does. Rather I want to share publicly what they would not hear from me privately about some flaws in their premises which hinder their efforts to accomplish their high-sounding goals. If it gets back to them and they want to listen, then they will improve and maybe real dialogue, instead of what goes on in their forum now, will be possible.
Their mission, according to their own website, is.....
I have found that the forum as a whole is not seeking truth, as they fully believe they already have it. They are there to talk, and you are there to listen. Not listen to the answers to any questions you might have, but listen to what they have decided that you need to hear from them. Obviously, this posture is inconsistent with a goal of "humility", as well as "dialogue", be it gracious or any other kind. They say they want a dialogue but what they really want is a monologue to browbeat anyone who questions the current scientific status quo into conforming to it, regardless of legitimate questions on matters of evidence. The atmosphere there is ultra-conformist to whatever way current scientific opinion leans, even though that is supposed to change as new evidence comes in. Ultra-conformity to what is in vogue with the sub-culture you identify with isn't conducive to the last two lines of their mission statement above. Let's start there.
The example that finally drove this home, and induced me to ask to have my account deleted, was their response to my posting some of the work of Cambridge Professor Dr. William Bradshaw Amos. Obviously his credentials are impeccable. But he takes issue with one of the more recent cultural additions to the box called "what everyone knows is true because...science". He doesn't think that modern humans carry any appreciable (and maybe none at all) DNA due to introgression from Neanderthals. And he has some really sensible studies which strongly support his position. I posted one of them and asked people there to evaluate it.
Notice that this idea is no threat to the larger macro-evolutionary hypothesis. I am confident that Dr. Amos himself believes that humans evolved from a common ancestor with apes via natural means. IOW, he should be favorable to them overall in what they say their mission is. But even that rather inconsequential deviation from the party line was too much for them. Mostly they just didn't respond to it. One, more honest perhaps but not particularly conforming to the traits of their mission statement, informed me that since it was not peer-reviewed it wasn't worth commenting on.
This is a very common tactic that defenders of the status-quo use to avoid having to grapple with evidence. They hide behind "peer-review". And of course, ideas outside the mainstream tend not to get peer-reviewed, even when they come from well-qualified individuals like Dr. Amos. So it is a catch-22 and that's the way some people like it. I protested that the reason it wasn't peer-reviewed was because the viewers were biased against non-mainstream ideas, that his evidence was strong and deserved to be looked at, even without a stamp of approval from the gate-keepers. That sent him off on a tizzy about my questioning the motives of the scientific community, and how that was a violation of forum standards and he was going to run off and tell the moderators. No one there ever engaged on the evidence. They made it about other things, including my attitude. Which I will admit by this point was pretty testy.
Fortunately, it looks like Amos' paper is now close to being peer-reviewed, but he has been jerked around before where people have acted like they would publish and then didn't without explanation. I like to think that the noise some of us made had a little to do with his ideas getting a fair look after four years of trying.
But my main point here is that their forum rule which says 'motives can never be questioned' is contradictory to their mission statement. It doesn't fit with what scripture says about humans. That no one's motives can ever be questioned when this pattern occurs consistently indicates a very different view of humanity than the one I have. Scripture says that our righteousness is as filthy rags. Even our purest motives are tainted by sin. That the question of motives can never be raised therefore takes a position that this view of man is irrelevant to any discussion. It makes a mockery of our constant need for introspection, repentance, and improvement. It would be a waste of my time to participate in any group operating from such flawed premises.
Of course this can be taken to the other extreme. I have a policy against starting an analysis of a different idea by scrutinizing the motives of the person presenting it. Based on my own sorry nature I always assume that even the best motives of others are mixed. So instead of attempting to scrutinize their motives, I just try and evaluate their arguments. I figure if I want to scrutinize the motivational purity of anyone deeply enough I can always find an excuse to not hear what they are trying to say- but that would be me sealing myself off from ideas I don’t want to consider. IOW my own motive in doing that may be worse than whatever flaw in their motives I am using to shield myself from having to consider their ideas. Maybe that’s just me, but I doubt it.
So then we have a tension between two opposing ideas. The assumption that one's motives should never be questioned verses the impulse to evaluate the other party's motives rather than their evidence. Both extremes hinder progress. The truth is in the middle ground as it so often is. Again, I don't want to make it about their motives, I'd rather discuss the evidence, it is only when they will not engage on it that the reasonable thing to do is try and figure out why. And since that seems to be a no-no in their neck of the woods, it left me no further recourse on that forum.
The bottom line is that they do not come close to living up to the lofty ideals that the profess. They have rules on their forum which run counter to a scriptural view of humanity, never mind whether we evolved or not. They functionally don't agree with who scripture says we are now! They are incredibly uncompromising, which just makes their rhetoric about dialogue more irritating and hypocritical.
They may or may not improve. Certainly, they won't with if they take the view that only others need improvement! I am streamlining my life by getting out of as many internet echo-chambers as possible, even if by some chance they agree with me. If there is no dialogue, my time is much better spent elsewhere.
I am not going to contend here today over the particulars of the evolution-creation controversy. You may know that to some degree I think it is a false conflict, but not in the manner that Biologos does. Rather I want to share publicly what they would not hear from me privately about some flaws in their premises which hinder their efforts to accomplish their high-sounding goals. If it gets back to them and they want to listen, then they will improve and maybe real dialogue, instead of what goes on in their forum now, will be possible.
Their mission, according to their own website, is.....
We embrace the historical Christian faith, upholding the authority and inspiration of the Bible.Some would say that the first two sentences are mutually contradictory, but that's not even my complaint with them. After spending some time on their forum and seeing how it actually operates, I would direct their attention to the last two lines in their mission statement. They don't do those things, while constantly talking and posing like they do, and that's one real reason they are flailing away, despite their massive cultural and resource advantages.
We affirm evolutionary creation, recognizing God as Creator of all life over billions of years.
We seek truth, ever learning as we study the natural world and the Bible.
We strive for humility and gracious dialogue with those who hold other views.
I have found that the forum as a whole is not seeking truth, as they fully believe they already have it. They are there to talk, and you are there to listen. Not listen to the answers to any questions you might have, but listen to what they have decided that you need to hear from them. Obviously, this posture is inconsistent with a goal of "humility", as well as "dialogue", be it gracious or any other kind. They say they want a dialogue but what they really want is a monologue to browbeat anyone who questions the current scientific status quo into conforming to it, regardless of legitimate questions on matters of evidence. The atmosphere there is ultra-conformist to whatever way current scientific opinion leans, even though that is supposed to change as new evidence comes in. Ultra-conformity to what is in vogue with the sub-culture you identify with isn't conducive to the last two lines of their mission statement above. Let's start there.
The example that finally drove this home, and induced me to ask to have my account deleted, was their response to my posting some of the work of Cambridge Professor Dr. William Bradshaw Amos. Obviously his credentials are impeccable. But he takes issue with one of the more recent cultural additions to the box called "what everyone knows is true because...science". He doesn't think that modern humans carry any appreciable (and maybe none at all) DNA due to introgression from Neanderthals. And he has some really sensible studies which strongly support his position. I posted one of them and asked people there to evaluate it.
Notice that this idea is no threat to the larger macro-evolutionary hypothesis. I am confident that Dr. Amos himself believes that humans evolved from a common ancestor with apes via natural means. IOW, he should be favorable to them overall in what they say their mission is. But even that rather inconsequential deviation from the party line was too much for them. Mostly they just didn't respond to it. One, more honest perhaps but not particularly conforming to the traits of their mission statement, informed me that since it was not peer-reviewed it wasn't worth commenting on.
This is a very common tactic that defenders of the status-quo use to avoid having to grapple with evidence. They hide behind "peer-review". And of course, ideas outside the mainstream tend not to get peer-reviewed, even when they come from well-qualified individuals like Dr. Amos. So it is a catch-22 and that's the way some people like it. I protested that the reason it wasn't peer-reviewed was because the viewers were biased against non-mainstream ideas, that his evidence was strong and deserved to be looked at, even without a stamp of approval from the gate-keepers. That sent him off on a tizzy about my questioning the motives of the scientific community, and how that was a violation of forum standards and he was going to run off and tell the moderators. No one there ever engaged on the evidence. They made it about other things, including my attitude. Which I will admit by this point was pretty testy.
Fortunately, it looks like Amos' paper is now close to being peer-reviewed, but he has been jerked around before where people have acted like they would publish and then didn't without explanation. I like to think that the noise some of us made had a little to do with his ideas getting a fair look after four years of trying.
But my main point here is that their forum rule which says 'motives can never be questioned' is contradictory to their mission statement. It doesn't fit with what scripture says about humans. That no one's motives can ever be questioned when this pattern occurs consistently indicates a very different view of humanity than the one I have. Scripture says that our righteousness is as filthy rags. Even our purest motives are tainted by sin. That the question of motives can never be raised therefore takes a position that this view of man is irrelevant to any discussion. It makes a mockery of our constant need for introspection, repentance, and improvement. It would be a waste of my time to participate in any group operating from such flawed premises.
Of course this can be taken to the other extreme. I have a policy against starting an analysis of a different idea by scrutinizing the motives of the person presenting it. Based on my own sorry nature I always assume that even the best motives of others are mixed. So instead of attempting to scrutinize their motives, I just try and evaluate their arguments. I figure if I want to scrutinize the motivational purity of anyone deeply enough I can always find an excuse to not hear what they are trying to say- but that would be me sealing myself off from ideas I don’t want to consider. IOW my own motive in doing that may be worse than whatever flaw in their motives I am using to shield myself from having to consider their ideas. Maybe that’s just me, but I doubt it.
So then we have a tension between two opposing ideas. The assumption that one's motives should never be questioned verses the impulse to evaluate the other party's motives rather than their evidence. Both extremes hinder progress. The truth is in the middle ground as it so often is. Again, I don't want to make it about their motives, I'd rather discuss the evidence, it is only when they will not engage on it that the reasonable thing to do is try and figure out why. And since that seems to be a no-no in their neck of the woods, it left me no further recourse on that forum.
The bottom line is that they do not come close to living up to the lofty ideals that the profess. They have rules on their forum which run counter to a scriptural view of humanity, never mind whether we evolved or not. They functionally don't agree with who scripture says we are now! They are incredibly uncompromising, which just makes their rhetoric about dialogue more irritating and hypocritical.
They may or may not improve. Certainly, they won't with if they take the view that only others need improvement! I am streamlining my life by getting out of as many internet echo-chambers as possible, even if by some chance they agree with me. If there is no dialogue, my time is much better spent elsewhere.
Get the book.
Saturday, May 9, 2020
The Transmission of the Account of Adam
An important part of the Christ-Centered model for Early Genesis is a modified version of the Tablet Theory for the origin of these early accounts. That is, Moses edited the first chapters from a series of tablets he inherited from his ancestors. Thus, the discovery of other Ancient Near East (ANE) stories which pre-date Moses doesn't mean that the Israelites borrowed and adapted those stories from other cultures later. Instead, their ancestors came from the same region and retained their own independent accounts of what happened.
One question raised by this theory is whether the earliest accounts had a long oral transmission period. Since in the Christ-centered model Adam is a figure of Christ (Rom. 5:14) and not the sole male progenitor of the human race, Adam doesn't have to be extremely far back in time. There were already humans around when Adam was formed and placed in the garden. Still, Adam came along at least 6,000 years ago, and 12,000 might be closer to the mark when you consider that Ussherian Dating methods will give only minimum dates which are almost certainly too young. This raises questions about how the accounts could have been transmitted long before the known invention of writing able to carry a narrative of such detail and complexity. I am going to ultimately answer this question with a "Deus ex Machina you can believe in" (if you are a believer) because it is already a part of the text. It is something that people have missed on this question even though it is "hidden in plain sight." Skip to the end if you don't care to wade through my exploration of the issue.
This question applies in particular to the first two accounts in Genesis, that of the "Heavens and the Earth" and "Adam". Those are the accounts which would seem to be too old for written transmission. For the genealogy in chapter five (see this for commentary on number pattern) you would need only the name of the ancestor, the number of years until they started having sons, and the number of years they lived afterward. This is the sort of thing which could be committed to memory, but would also not require a full system of writing in order to record. People have recorded the amount of time which has gone by and how long their ancestors lived even without a complete written language. The account of Noah would be close enough in time to the known emergence of writing so as not to be an issue, though I place the flood somewhat earlier than the traditional dates.
The first account, basically chapter one and the first few verses of chapter two, is a candidate for a long oral transmission period. Not only is it short, and could possibly be sung, but there are stories with similar elements even in distant cultures which had no known contact with any ANE civilization. It may be that the account in chapter one pre-dates Adam!
Nevertheless, the account of Adam in chapters two through four isn't a good candidate for oral transmission. It is much longer, with many specific facts and great complexity. Therefore, most people consider that for the tablet theory to make sense, there would have to have been some sort of written language able to communicate narratives available to Adam or his near descendants. I am not one of those people if Adam was indeed formed a mere six thousand years ago for the folowing reason: If we are to take seriously the idea that the descendants of Adam had exceptional lifespans as stated in the text then oral transmission over two thousand years becomes a more reasonable proposition because it represents only three to five generations.
The end of the account in chapter four hints that it was compiled after the third generation after Adam for the line of Seth, but after the the seventh generation after the line of Cain. Of course Cain was older than Seth and that could explain one additional generation. The rest of the difference could be a result of disparity in life-spans between the line of Seth which stayed in the presence of the LORD until the flood, and that of Cain which was exiled from His presence. After the flood, the LORD wasn't regularly present with any group. This is when, according to the text, lifespans in the rest of the line of Adam dropped precipitously.
If Adam was formed 6,000 years ago and the account was compiled near the end of or just after the life of Enosh, then it was written roughly 4000-4,500 years ago. Narrative writing was unquestionably available at that time. We may consider 1,500 to 2,000 years a very long time for oral transmission to occur, but given the exceptional lifespans, this was simply a case of writing down a story you heard from your grandfather!
Yet as I mentioned earlier, there is reason to believe that the Ussherian date for Adam is a minimum date, and the life of Adam was much further back in time, perhaps even as much as twice as far back as his calculations showed. Thus Adam could have been formed as long as twelve thousand years ago. This would mean that the original accounts were compiled as long as 10,000 years ago - 8,000 B.C. A date of 6,000 B.C. may be a good median within the range of possible dates. These dates are well before any writing capable of producing such a narrative was available, so far as we know.
On the other hand, humans have been making symbols to communicate things for a long time. It turns out that the same thirty-two symbols were used in caves across Europe for almost 30,000 years.
This wasn't a true written language. It may have been more like a code, like the Hobo Code from the American Depression. The La Paseiga Inscription looks like an early (Ice Age) effort to string a series of symbols together into a larger meaning, but doesn't rise to the level of a true written language either. The point is that there was widespread use of symbols to communicate things for a very long time. It isn't inconceivable that one group took that principle further prior to the known development of writing.
The mainstream view is that true writing did not emerge until around 3200 B.C. in the Sumerian city of Uruk. Before that, there were just symbols for numbers and goods to be sold, so any writing from before this time could not tell a narrative. Contesting this are finds like the Dispilio Tablet and other evidence for something called "Vinca" or "Old European Script" from around 5000 B.C. It is believed that those Europeans had contact with either people from Anatolia or the Caucus region, which would connect more ancient writing to the area in which I believe Adam's near descendants lived. Still, it is unknown whether or not "Old European Script" was a true language. The debate goes back and forth and no one can translate inscriptions from it.
The first written word whose meaning we know is from Gobekli Tepe 11,000 years ago. The symbol for "God" in Luwian Hieroglyphics appears on a pillar there, along with those of several other words. That doesn't prove there was at that time a whole written language capable of relating a narrative though, because the symbol could have been adopted much later into a written language which doesn't show up in full bloom for many thousands of years. But it is astounding enough to think that the symbol for "God" and other words from 11,000 years ago shows up in a written language from less than 4,000 years ago. The meaning of those symbols was preserved for 7,000 years!
Despite these tantalizing hints, I can only conclude that the case has not yet been made that a written language of some kind existed 8-12 thousand years ago. But these facts also suggest that it isn't unreasonable to think that there could have been one. Yet there is another possibility which could apply to the question of transmission of these early accounts. This is the "Deus ex Machina you can believe in" that I mentioned earlier. And it has been staring us in the face all along. The text of early Genesis indicates that until chapter six, when He declared that He would not "strive with the men forever", that the LORD God routinely fellow-shipped with the line of Adam, sans those from Cain. This was what Cain was complaining about when he was being "driven from your presence" after he murdered Abel. Before the flood, it wasn't unusual for the person of God, in anthropogenic form, to walk with man. At least those men of Adam.
Thus the normal limitations which apply to oral transmission don't apply in this case. The story could have been transmitted from generation to generation, but there was also Someone present who lived through all of those generations who also knew the true and correct version of events. Noah didn't need to wonder if the account of Adam he had was distorted over time. The LORD God could clarify any issues, and tell it just the way that He wanted it told.
I therefore conclude that it is irrelevant to this question whether the near descendants of Adam had a written language. The normal limitations of oral transmission don't apply until one gets to Noah and his near descendants. At that point the objection becomes moot because true written language is either present, or in the case of the most distant date for the flood in my model, soon present.
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Tuesday, May 5, 2020
William Lane Craig Adopts a Flawed View of Scripture from Bible Scholars Who Have Lost Their Way
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Friday, April 24, 2020
On False Definitions of the Agnostic and Atheist Positions
UPDATE: There used to be a diagram here from an atheist group "ActOK.org". Rather than engage on my arguments they cut off my access to the diagram. That is their right I suppose, but it indicates they lack a good argument for the points I make. But what isn't OK is that "ActOK" also hijacked this page so that people who come here are re-directed to their page, and in my case a message saying "account suspended". A group called "ActOK" yet they act like that! Truly, those who reject the LORD reject reason as well!
Balderdash- why this diagram is misleading, though it pretends to clarify
The definition of atheism which atheists prefer, and have been able to finagle into the dictionaries (yes, they got it changed, check out Webster's 1828 edition on it) is....
I have found that almost all persons who claim to be atheists quickly move to an agnostic position in actual discourse. The latter position is at least somewhat intellectually defensible, and it is part of a little rhetorical dance that they do to, in their own minds, put the "burden of proof" on theists. But its not the position that goes with the label. They have to jump back and forth between two conflicting labels to pull off this rhetorical trick. They want to be in two mutually contradictory states at once in order to maintain the illusion. It is really hard to have honest and open dialogue with people who begin by muddying the waters like this. I have found they don't like to engage unless they get to define all the terms of the discussion so that they have a favored position before the dialogue even begins in earnest.Atheism - a lack of belief in God or gods.
The actual atheist position, not the agnostic position which most atheists I have met shift to when confronted with the irrationality of their true position, doesn't require all knowledge but it does require knowledge which is far beyond human capacity to know. One would have to know to a reasonable degree of certainty for example, that all claims by all persons of direct encounters with God or His angles are false either through deceit or mistake. This would include the claims of the New Testament. One would have to know to a reasonable degree of certainty that God isn't to be found anywhere not only in the vastness of this universe but in whatever realm lies beyond it.
That's not "all knowing" but it does arrogate the proponent to a level of knowledge which is wildly unbelievable. That's just part of why the position is foolish. I know the definition above is that which atheists prefer, but it is, like their real position, dishonest in the extreme. It deliberately confuses atheism with agnosticism. It is part of this ever-shifting vibration between two states at once that they wish to do in order to make their position appear like the rational one.
Here is the problem with the definition of atheist that they want to use: Someone might have a "lack of belief in God or gods" for two reasons. One is that they don't know if God or gods exist. That's an agnostic. Their definition for "atheist" also applies to agnostics, confusing the categories. The agnostic only knows that they don't know. Maybe someone else knows but they don't. They are only claiming a lack of knowledge for themselves, and unless they are claiming that the true evidence is unknowable, they do not possess either a negative or a positive conclusion on the question. The atheist goes beyond simply not knowing. The reason they "lack belief in God or gods" is because they believe they don't exist.. They have an opinion on the question. They have come to a conclusion. They think they know the answer, and their answer is in the negative. There is no rational evidence for the existence of God.
These days it is like trying to nail jello to a wall getting atheists to define their position in a way that isn't also applicable to agnosticism. This is the dishonesty that I and others complain about. Why do we have such difficulties in our dialogue? Many reasons, but one of the starting points is we can't even seem to get a straight answer out of them as to what their position entails.
These days it is like trying to nail jello to a wall getting atheists to define their position in a way that isn't also applicable to agnosticism. This is the dishonesty that I and others complain about. Why do we have such difficulties in our dialogue? Many reasons, but one of the starting points is we can't even seem to get a straight answer out of them as to what their position entails.
I have heard them reply with something like the following: "there's a separate label because they answer two different questions. Atheism/theism is about what you believe. Gnosticism/agnosticism is about what you know, or claim to know (or not know.)" That's the basis for the diagram at the top of this article. That such a diagram has even been concocted demonstrates the extreme lengths they will go to in order to make separate and unconnected categories of these things so that they may hop back and forth as needed to avoid being pinned down.
Perhaps you have spotted their sleight of hand? The chart is constructed so as to justify their definition of atheist. It does this by separating what you "believe" with "what you think you know" as separate categories rather than points along a spectrum. But given naturalist suppositions, how are these terms different in anything other than as points along the same spectrum? Only in a theistic context where "believe" means to "have faith in, trust" are they different things in kind, not just quantity. So then the Devil would be a "atheistic gnostic" in the sense that it knows that God exists but has no faith in Him. But under the definition in their chart, which uses the natural definition of "believe" for something that you think is true but with a lower level of confidence than what you know, the Devil would be a theistic gnostic. It both believes and knows that God is. The Apostle Paul would be in this same category with the Devil, which might give you some indication of how useless the table is except as a rhetorical trick to keep atheism superficially defensible and attempt to keep the "burden of proof" on the theist side!
Perhaps you have spotted their sleight of hand? The chart is constructed so as to justify their definition of atheist. It does this by separating what you "believe" with "what you think you know" as separate categories rather than points along a spectrum. But given naturalist suppositions, how are these terms different in anything other than as points along the same spectrum? Only in a theistic context where "believe" means to "have faith in, trust" are they different things in kind, not just quantity. So then the Devil would be a "atheistic gnostic" in the sense that it knows that God exists but has no faith in Him. But under the definition in their chart, which uses the natural definition of "believe" for something that you think is true but with a lower level of confidence than what you know, the Devil would be a theistic gnostic. It both believes and knows that God is. The Apostle Paul would be in this same category with the Devil, which might give you some indication of how useless the table is except as a rhetorical trick to keep atheism superficially defensible and attempt to keep the "burden of proof" on the theist side!
That's more intellectual chaos because in naturalistic terms (excluding the definition of "believe" that implies faith and trust in a religious sense) believing and knowing are in kind one and the same thing. They simply express varying levels of confidence. If there are no gods, nothing beyond nature, then all our truth is held provisionally with varying confidence levels which never reach 100%. In fact "knowing" is used loosely in the natural sciences. It is just something we believe very strongly is true. Atheists should not hop back and forth between a metaphysical definition of "know" and the more provisional version of knowing drawn from naturalism. The defense of this view of atheism and agnosticism leans on a metaphysical/religious view of knowing when they constantly deride the idea of the metaphysical and religion! I cry foul.
All of this hopping back and forth and twisting of words serves a purpose. Part of that purpose is so they can pretend that the "burden of proof" is on "the person making the positive claim". By pretending "believing" and "knowing" are different categories (in the natural sense) rather than a spectrum along a single category, naturalists can pretend that "atheists" and "agnostics" are also different categories rather than a spectrum along a single category. Everything must be fudged and confused and obfuscated lest the truth be shown too clearly: Both theists and atheists are making positive claims. They both take positions on the evidence. In the case of the theist, the evidence favors the existence of God, in the case of the atheist, the positive claim is that it is lacking (or that they are not rational, since if the evidence existed, it would be irrational of them not to accept it). The only position on the spectrum which truly doesn't make a positive claim is the agnostic (unless they are claiming that no one can know in which case they too are making a positive claim).
I have heard them say things like, "To me, the position that something doesn't exist seems like the most logical position to start with if nothing relevant is known."
Speaking of evidence that the scriptures are inspired by the one true God, this conclusion is a natural consequence of the Christ-centered model of early Genesis described in my book. Christ made an astounding claim, He said that Moses, who lived over a thousand years before Christ, wrote about Him! Obviously this claim could not be true unless Christ was God. Once you understand the Christ-centered model, it becomes clear that not only is Christ's claim true, but seeing the material through the lens of Christ also makes the narrative much less contentious with evidence from the natural sciences and history than the traditional view of the material does. If they demand evidence, we have it. Early Genesis is about the work and person of Christ.
Monday, April 13, 2020
I Remember When Fundamentalists Were Mocked for This...Monkeys Raft Atlantic!
I saw this article from Science Daily talking about a find of fossilized monkey teeth. The standard view of things has a problem because it is believed based on genetic and fossil evidence that old world monkeys and new world monkeys evolved from a common population in Africa with the split happening perhaps 34 million years ago. Problem: there was already an Atlantic Ocean back then. Almost as big as the one here now.
The answer to this mystery is proposed in the article in the link above...
The "Wallace Line" is a thing because animals can't even cross the straight between certain Indonesian Islands. Suggesting that monkeys and other things made repeated journey's over 900 miles of Atlantic ocean in the broiling sun with no fresh water on a mat of vegetation is preposterous. It is just as reasonable to believe that millions of years ago angels or aliens carried populations of monkeys from Africa to South America as part of some master-plan to guide life on this planet. This is just another example of how what we see in nature is not reasonably explained by what we see in nature!
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The book is really about the work of Christ in Genesis and not so much the "Creation-Evolution" debate which I believe the Christ-Centered model soars past. But still, I encourage you to buy the book.
The answer to this mystery is proposed in the article in the link above...
The monkeys are believed to have made the more than 900-mile trip on floating rafts of vegetation that broke off from coastlines, possibly during a storm.I can remember certain creationists proposing similar ideas about the dispersal of animals from the ark of Noah to far-flung places. They were ridiculed relentlessly. Not that I have a dog in that fight because the bible does not really teach that all land animals were on Noah's ark. Still, the idea that this proposal for monkey dispersal could be tossed out there so easily brings to mind a maxim for internet discussion: Remember, it's only ridiculous when creationists propose it!
"This is a completely unique discovery," said Erik Seiffert, the study's lead author and Professor of Clinical Integrative Anatomical Sciences at Keck School of Medicine of USC. "It shows that in addition to the New World monkeys and a group of rodents known as caviomorphs -- there is this third lineage of mammals that somehow made this very improbable transatlantic journey to get from Africa to South America."
The "Wallace Line" is a thing because animals can't even cross the straight between certain Indonesian Islands. Suggesting that monkeys and other things made repeated journey's over 900 miles of Atlantic ocean in the broiling sun with no fresh water on a mat of vegetation is preposterous. It is just as reasonable to believe that millions of years ago angels or aliens carried populations of monkeys from Africa to South America as part of some master-plan to guide life on this planet. This is just another example of how what we see in nature is not reasonably explained by what we see in nature!
***********
The book is really about the work of Christ in Genesis and not so much the "Creation-Evolution" debate which I believe the Christ-Centered model soars past. But still, I encourage you to buy the book.
Get the book.
Tuesday, April 7, 2020
Genesis Chapter Five Genealogy and the Strange Number Pattern
The problem: Skeptics use the patterns of years in the genealogies to dismiss the idea that these are actual events or accurate times. They imply that whoever wrote early Genesis manufactured the genealogies and their numbers to make some esoteric point, though I've never heard any reasonable explanations as to what that point might have been. One fellow I've been conversing with explained it like this when referring to the Genesis chapter five genealogy....
We want to be of more noble of spirit than those who try hard to not see truth, because our relationship to truth should be different once we have been saved. Our witness is that both the Living Word of God, who is Christ in whom we believe, and the written word, the Scriptures which speak of Him and reflect His glory, are true. I would not say that I am a "fundamentalist" per se, because that term has become hi-jacked by people who have different sins to repent of than the ones I have. Such as trying to make scripture fit to certain cultural norms as well as a very forced over-simplification in method of interpretation that scripture itself does not support. Call me a "neo-fundamentalist" if you like. My point is, just because those who are without faith dismiss and deny our valid numerical objections as, for example, "argument from incredulity" does not mean that we should stoop to that level. Are we not redeemed? Do we not live in the Truth, which is a Person? The fact is, this pattern of numbers is highly unusual. They don't appear as "random ages".
I would also say to those who put great stock in what has become known as "Critical Biblical Scholarship" that they need not adopt the naturalist premises which have infected today's seminaries in order to do "Critical Scholarship". I offer what is below as a modest example of how one can do a bit of "Critical Biblical Scholarship" without the dreadful premise that scripture isn't what Christ said that it is.
I want to make it clear that I am not saying that these numbers can be used to calculate times per the method of Bishop Ussher. It is my position that the narrative part of the text shows that Ussher's methods will derive dates that are too young. I don't want to get distracted by that now, but I don't want people who can't accept Ussher's dating to "turn off their ability to hear" what I am about to write because they can't accept some other assumptions about the text. Some people will have that same reaction to the idea that there were people who lived over five hundred years. That too is a separate issue which I discuss in my book. I ask that you suspend disbelief on those points, if you have any, in order to evaluate my hypothesis regarding the pattern of years in this genealogy.
First, I am adherent of a modified version of the Tablet Theory. It must be modified because critics have raised a couple of valid (and some invalid IMHO) critiques of the original theory. The modifications address those issues, though so far as I know those who believe they are experts have not evaluated the modified version (and thus I conclude they have no reasonable grounds to dismiss it). Moses didn't write early Genesis from a blank scroll. Rather, he had tablets passed down from his ancestors like Abraham, which told their stories. These accounts were ancient even in Abraham's day, though some portions, like the table of nations and the genealogies, were always understood to be a work in progress which were to be updated from time to time. The tablets were not in Hebrew, which has a later origin than the earliest accounts in Genesis. Moses had to translate them, perhaps from a language that most of his countrymen could no longer understand.
Is there a reasonable explanation why all of the dates would be in multiples of five, or multiples of five plus seven (please don't get hung up on the exception of Methusualah)? There is. Let's start with some things that we know.
1. The ancient Babylonians (with whom the ancestors of the Hebrews interacted strongly) like many other ancient cultures, had twelve thirty-day months in their year. So they had 360-day years. (Edit, or maybe not. At least at first. The Vedics started with a 360 day year which had 12 months of 30 days even as early as 7,000 B.C. It seems like the Babylonians emphasized lunar cycles, which would result in a 354 day lunar year. They added months every so often similar to what is described below to re-align the cycles of the sun and moon. Before their system was formalized, the number of days in the added months seems to have not been set, but was made what was needed to re-align the observations).
2. A lunar month varies in time by a few hours, but averages out to be 29.53 days.
3. A lunar year then, with twelve lunar cycles, would be approximately 354 days in length, with a fraction of a day remaining. Later some cultures made the year consist of six months of 29 days each and six months of 30 days each in recognition of this fact. This is a 354 day "lunar year".
4. A solar year is 364.2422 days.
5. The Hebrews considered that both the Sun and the Moon were given to regulate times and seasons and years.
6. Ancient cultures experimented with all sorts of systems to reconcile these time measuring systems.
***** EDIT: I am such a dunce. I do my thinking backwards, making things harder than they have to be. Instead of reconciling the text and the observations with something I constructed from scratch, I should have first done decent historical research about what the ancients did. If I had, I would have found they got to the same place I did, though maybe not by the same route I used.
Clearly, I am not a good historical scholar. But I have still resolved this issue when no one else did simply because most of the ones who are really good at it are presently using their gifts to try and convince people that early Genesis isn't historical narrative in any real sense. That's their focus. They are outdoing one another devising ways to, in their own estimation, poke holes in the narrative. That is now a crowded niche and the low-hanging fruit there has long since been plucked. I am trying to find ways to reconcile the text to a real and literal historical narrative, like Christ and the apostles thought it was, even if that requires people to see that what the narrative is saying is somewhat different than what they thought it was saying. So in evolutionary terms I am "exploiting an under-used niche" which means I can survive even without being very good at it. Hopefully, in time some of those real scholars crowded into the naysayer niche will get tired of fighting for share in a over-exploited area and start grabbing all this low-hanging fruit I am enjoying in the area of confirming that the text has historicity, but outside the traditional understanding of it.
Reading what I wrote immediately below will give you a good idea of how natural counting times in groups of five and seven years would be to them generally. I have added a section below (after some more study) which describes more precisely how I think this system was formed, and why it would be very natural to count time in groups of five year blocks, with an occasional seven year block thrown in.
*********END EDIT***
So these six facts together point to some problems the ancients had in tracking time. The 360 day years were nice and even and roughly correct. They were also a good "middle ground" between a lunar year and a true solar year. But they needed adjustments because each actual solar year was 4.24 days longer. If you failed to adjust then soon your Winter months would drift over into Summer months and vice versa. It wouldn't take long. In just ten years you would be 42.4 days, over a month, behind in your calendar in order to catch up to where the earth was in actual solar years. Or see it vice-versa if you like. The point is, an adjustment had to be made from time to time to keep the normative year in line with the movement of earth and Sun.
In terms of lunar years the problem is worse, because they are approximately 354 days long. So if you wanted to reconcile lunar years to your 360 day calendar you had to make another adjustment. That is just one issue. Matching them up with the actual solar year requires finding another 4.24 days somewhere.
One way to solve the problem of reconciling your 360 day calendar with a roughly 354 day lunar calendar is to group the 360 day "years" in batches of five. Each year your 360-day calendar ran six days ahead of your lunar calendar. But five time six is thirty, which is close to the 29.53 average lunar cycle. So every five 360-day years the two calendars could be lined up again with a small adjustment.
Let's call five 360-day cycles of time a "quin", Latin for "five". At the end of the quin your lunar cycle would be back in synch with the 360 day calendar, though every other quin you might have to declare the synchronization month to have only 29 days to line it up more closely.
It is difficult to believe that none of those near eastern cultures, who watched the sky with great skill, failed to notice this synchronization and had a term for it. This hypothesis has predictive power in that I postulate that such a term existed and may be found in the historical record. Perhaps that term, which I am calling "quin" here, became a unit of measure for large amounts of time- like the lifespan of long-lived patriarchs. So when Moses got his records, they did not say "Noah lived 500 years..." but they said "Noah lived 100 quin" which he translated into the proper number of years because they no longer used that system of calculation. The unit would mean nothing to the children of Israel.
This still leaves the mystery of why an occasional "7" would be added to these numbers. The mystery could be resolved simply by continuing our same train of thought. The "quin" might be enough for reconciling the lunar calendar to the 360-day calendar, but another measure was needed in order to adjust it to the actual solar cycle. Each solar year, the 360-day year would fall 4.2422 days further behind. At what point would it fall a month behind? You guessed it. 7 X 4.2422 days = 29.695 days. If every seven years they added a month into their calendar, it would "slow down" their 360-day calendar and give actual solar years a chance to "catch up", restoring the months to their proper seasons. I will call this unit of time a "septa", Greek for "seven".
Similar to the situation with the "quin" and the lunar calendar, you would occasionally have to adjust whether this once-every-seven-years added month had 29 or 30 days. Alternating evenly between 30 and 29 day months would add on average 29.5 days of "catching up" to where the Sun is in space, but what about that last approximately 0.2 days? Every seventh year your extra month would lose the difference between 29.5 and the actual number of "extra" solar days in seven years, 29.695 days as shown above. An easy rough solution would be to start with a thirty day month and then track your septas by fives. Every thirty-five years (fifth septa) you start over and have another 30-day month instead of alternating. So instead of 30-29-30-29-30 and then back to 29 you would start the sequence over and have 30-29-30-29-30 and then repeat the sequence starting with another 30. This would get you to 29.6 days, which is very close to the actual value, and we are using a span of years which is also divisible by five (35).
If you wanted to get even closer to the actual solar year, in addition to having back-to-back 30 day bonus months every thirty-five years (fifth septa) you would also add a bonus day on the bonus month of the seventh septa, or every 49 years, giving you a period of three septas in a row in which your bonus month is thirty days in length (years 35, 42, and 49). Doing these things would keep a 360-day calendar lined up with both the solar year and the lunar calendar with remarkable precision.
Does the length of time "49 years" ring a bell with anyone? Seven sevens? It should. What about the multiples of three? The third "bonus month" in a row to have thirty days comes on the 49th year - the end of which starts the year of Jubilee.
The critics are correct that the numbers are not random. But that doesn't mean the genealogies were made up either, not even for some "special purpose" that they can't fathom. Moses simply had documents that had genealogies measured in something like "quins" and "septas". The Egyptians had a 365 day year. It wasn't how his people looked at time anymore. He converted the units in his text to years. The reason the life spans were divisible by five is that he originally got them in a unit that was approximate to five of the units he was using, that's all. And if someone lived or became a father a little past a quin but not quite half-way into the quin, they described that by using a "septa". So someone who had a son at 77 might have been said to have began having sons after "fourteen quins and a septa". This is like the "cubit and a span" measure which was used to indicate things a little longer than a cubit. A quin would be like a cubit and a septa would be used like a "cubit and a span".
***********
UPDATE 4/8/20 So all of that between the asterisks was my first take on it. When I dove into the history a little more I found out there was indeed a 30-year cycle. Here is a link describing the Islamic calendar which has roots which go all the way back to the classic Babylonian calendar, as does the Hebrew calendar. It has a "30 year cycle" much like I described above except they formed it with a 19 year cycle added to an 11 year cycle. The Vedic calendar is actually closer to my results. That's because they started where I did, even before there was a "Babylon", with twelve thirty day months in their years. They also had a stage where there was a thirty year cycle composed of five year increments, just as I described. This far predated the classic Babylonian system. See the abstract here for details. In my book I do briefly postulate a connection between the descendants of Adam and the ancestors of the Vedic peoples. But as you will see there is also a more direct explanation.
A typical description of the classic (500 B. C.) Babylonian calendar and the system they used to align their lunar and solar years is as follows..
Did you notice in the 19 year cycle above the years that they added months are either separated by two years or three years? The differences in the years from the start are either 2 or 3. Year "3" is of course "3", from year three to year six is "3". From year six to year eight is "2". From year eight to year 11 is "3". From year eleven to year 14 is three. From year 14 to year 17 is three, but from year seventeen to year nineteen is "2". So 3-3-2-3-3-3-2, and then you start another cycle. Seven cycles of two or three, or four five year periods (at the end of the 19th year).
This arrangement suggests a predecessor to this system in which the years in which months were added on were on a recurring 2-3 basis. That is, the second year a short "month" was added with a number of days decided by the observations and three years later another longer month was added to the calendar. So for example, each year the lunar year is about 11 days shorter than the solar year. The first year they would let this slide, but the second year they would add a "short month". Then they would wait three years and add a "long month". To line them up the short month would have to be on average a bit over 22 days long. That is seven or eight days shorter than the other months. The long months on average would have to be about 33 days long. That is three or four days longer than the average. Once in a while you could make the added months a day or two longer to even things out.
That would be fine until you had more complex societies and it got more important to have the months close to the same length. Imagine contracts for leases or loans at interest when the months changed in length so much! It was fine for rural societies and planting crops, but not for mass commerce.
To get from a system like this to the classic Babylonian system which came later, instead of alternating the "2 years then 3 years" pattern you would need to "add more threes". You couldn't just add a month every three years, because that would result in a month that was consistently long. But alternating them evenly would leave you with months that were excessively short or long. But to get close to a 29 or 30 day month you would have to have a cycle where you divided by three more often than you divided by two. I propose that this became the basis for the Babylonian system. The original 2-3 cycle of five years was integrated into a longer cycle where the ratio of 2s and 3s was such as to allow the added months to be close in size to the other months, while keeping up with events in the sky. That meant a ratio of two "2s" and five "3s" in the 19 year cycle.
I am back to my original conclusion, though I got there by a slightly different route. It would be the most natural thing in the world for people in that region in 4,000 B.C. (around the time I think Noah lived) to compile a genealogy of long-lived persons with life-spans expressed in five-year cycles. The years in-between five year cycles would be imprecise, with a month added in years two and five, but the length of those added months would vary widely between them. The five year cycles consisted of a two year part and a three year part that was overall more consistent in length than individual years.
This would also explain the occasional use of a seven added to the multiples of five. Eight out of twenty-nine (neglecting the death of Methuselah) numbers in the Genesis five genealogy end in "7" or "2". This is 27.5% in the limited sample that we have.
I propose that if a patriarch made it to the three-year part of the cycle they went ahead and gave him credit for living to that "quinn", or five year period. We might do the same when we say that a man died in "1980" whether he died in January or December of that year. That is still the year he died. If a patriarch did not make it to the three year part of the cycle, it was said that he died in the two-year part of it, which was added to the previous five year cycle. This Moses translated as seven years.
What this would mean is that if a man died in any of the last three years of a given five-year cycle, or the last three of the following cycle, he would get credit for five or ten more years respectively. But if he died during the first two years of the second cycle, he would be given credit for seven years, the preceding five year cycle plus the first two years of the next. So the ratio of numbers ending with a seven in a table of such numbers would be on average 2/8. That is to say, 25% of the time the number for the life event would have a seven added onto the multiple of five. That fits very closely with the observed rate of 27.5% and thus I conclude the hypothesis is confirmed.
***************END OF UPDATE*********
I don't doubt that the names and numbers of the genealogies have meanings on many levels, because God is just that amazing. But that doesn't mean they were made up. That doesn't mean they aren't also history. It surely doesn't mean that Bible scholars should devote their considerable powers to spend all day imagining new ways to convince the masses that Genesis is all bunk as an accurate record of history. At best, that's a terrible waste, of any gifts they might have. And its so unnecessary. No matter what you have been told, the scriptures can be true, even as history. It may not be giving the narrative that many think it is, but it can be a true one none the less. The Christ-Centered model explains how...
Is it coincidence, that we have 29 numbers out 30 in the genealogy (exception = Methuselah, who died the year before the flood) which are multiples of 5 or seven plus a multiple of 5?He's referring to the numbers in the Masoretic text, but the Septuagint shows a similar pattern. With the exception of Methuselah the text shows a pattern which is extremely unlikely to occur by chance. Now when apologists present similar calculations to skeptics regarding the improbability of say, biogenesis via naturalistic means, or any one man fulfilling all of the prophecies which Christ did, I've noticed that they deny, dismiss, and find all sorts of empty excuses why our calculations mean nothing at all.
This means that all of the numbers end in 0,2,5,or 7, and none ends in 1,3,4,6,8 or 9. If the numbers were simply random ages, this would only occur with a probability of (0.4)^29 = 3 *10^-12;
i.e once in every three trillion genealogies.
We want to be of more noble of spirit than those who try hard to not see truth, because our relationship to truth should be different once we have been saved. Our witness is that both the Living Word of God, who is Christ in whom we believe, and the written word, the Scriptures which speak of Him and reflect His glory, are true. I would not say that I am a "fundamentalist" per se, because that term has become hi-jacked by people who have different sins to repent of than the ones I have. Such as trying to make scripture fit to certain cultural norms as well as a very forced over-simplification in method of interpretation that scripture itself does not support. Call me a "neo-fundamentalist" if you like. My point is, just because those who are without faith dismiss and deny our valid numerical objections as, for example, "argument from incredulity" does not mean that we should stoop to that level. Are we not redeemed? Do we not live in the Truth, which is a Person? The fact is, this pattern of numbers is highly unusual. They don't appear as "random ages".
I would also say to those who put great stock in what has become known as "Critical Biblical Scholarship" that they need not adopt the naturalist premises which have infected today's seminaries in order to do "Critical Scholarship". I offer what is below as a modest example of how one can do a bit of "Critical Biblical Scholarship" without the dreadful premise that scripture isn't what Christ said that it is.
I want to make it clear that I am not saying that these numbers can be used to calculate times per the method of Bishop Ussher. It is my position that the narrative part of the text shows that Ussher's methods will derive dates that are too young. I don't want to get distracted by that now, but I don't want people who can't accept Ussher's dating to "turn off their ability to hear" what I am about to write because they can't accept some other assumptions about the text. Some people will have that same reaction to the idea that there were people who lived over five hundred years. That too is a separate issue which I discuss in my book. I ask that you suspend disbelief on those points, if you have any, in order to evaluate my hypothesis regarding the pattern of years in this genealogy.
First, I am adherent of a modified version of the Tablet Theory. It must be modified because critics have raised a couple of valid (and some invalid IMHO) critiques of the original theory. The modifications address those issues, though so far as I know those who believe they are experts have not evaluated the modified version (and thus I conclude they have no reasonable grounds to dismiss it). Moses didn't write early Genesis from a blank scroll. Rather, he had tablets passed down from his ancestors like Abraham, which told their stories. These accounts were ancient even in Abraham's day, though some portions, like the table of nations and the genealogies, were always understood to be a work in progress which were to be updated from time to time. The tablets were not in Hebrew, which has a later origin than the earliest accounts in Genesis. Moses had to translate them, perhaps from a language that most of his countrymen could no longer understand.
Is there a reasonable explanation why all of the dates would be in multiples of five, or multiples of five plus seven (please don't get hung up on the exception of Methusualah)? There is. Let's start with some things that we know.
1. The ancient Babylonians (with whom the ancestors of the Hebrews interacted strongly) like many other ancient cultures, had twelve thirty-day months in their year. So they had 360-day years. (Edit, or maybe not. At least at first. The Vedics started with a 360 day year which had 12 months of 30 days even as early as 7,000 B.C. It seems like the Babylonians emphasized lunar cycles, which would result in a 354 day lunar year. They added months every so often similar to what is described below to re-align the cycles of the sun and moon. Before their system was formalized, the number of days in the added months seems to have not been set, but was made what was needed to re-align the observations).
2. A lunar month varies in time by a few hours, but averages out to be 29.53 days.
3. A lunar year then, with twelve lunar cycles, would be approximately 354 days in length, with a fraction of a day remaining. Later some cultures made the year consist of six months of 29 days each and six months of 30 days each in recognition of this fact. This is a 354 day "lunar year".
4. A solar year is 364.2422 days.
5. The Hebrews considered that both the Sun and the Moon were given to regulate times and seasons and years.
6. Ancient cultures experimented with all sorts of systems to reconcile these time measuring systems.
***** EDIT: I am such a dunce. I do my thinking backwards, making things harder than they have to be. Instead of reconciling the text and the observations with something I constructed from scratch, I should have first done decent historical research about what the ancients did. If I had, I would have found they got to the same place I did, though maybe not by the same route I used.
Clearly, I am not a good historical scholar. But I have still resolved this issue when no one else did simply because most of the ones who are really good at it are presently using their gifts to try and convince people that early Genesis isn't historical narrative in any real sense. That's their focus. They are outdoing one another devising ways to, in their own estimation, poke holes in the narrative. That is now a crowded niche and the low-hanging fruit there has long since been plucked. I am trying to find ways to reconcile the text to a real and literal historical narrative, like Christ and the apostles thought it was, even if that requires people to see that what the narrative is saying is somewhat different than what they thought it was saying. So in evolutionary terms I am "exploiting an under-used niche" which means I can survive even without being very good at it. Hopefully, in time some of those real scholars crowded into the naysayer niche will get tired of fighting for share in a over-exploited area and start grabbing all this low-hanging fruit I am enjoying in the area of confirming that the text has historicity, but outside the traditional understanding of it.
Reading what I wrote immediately below will give you a good idea of how natural counting times in groups of five and seven years would be to them generally. I have added a section below (after some more study) which describes more precisely how I think this system was formed, and why it would be very natural to count time in groups of five year blocks, with an occasional seven year block thrown in.
*********END EDIT***
So these six facts together point to some problems the ancients had in tracking time. The 360 day years were nice and even and roughly correct. They were also a good "middle ground" between a lunar year and a true solar year. But they needed adjustments because each actual solar year was 4.24 days longer. If you failed to adjust then soon your Winter months would drift over into Summer months and vice versa. It wouldn't take long. In just ten years you would be 42.4 days, over a month, behind in your calendar in order to catch up to where the earth was in actual solar years. Or see it vice-versa if you like. The point is, an adjustment had to be made from time to time to keep the normative year in line with the movement of earth and Sun.
In terms of lunar years the problem is worse, because they are approximately 354 days long. So if you wanted to reconcile lunar years to your 360 day calendar you had to make another adjustment. That is just one issue. Matching them up with the actual solar year requires finding another 4.24 days somewhere.
One way to solve the problem of reconciling your 360 day calendar with a roughly 354 day lunar calendar is to group the 360 day "years" in batches of five. Each year your 360-day calendar ran six days ahead of your lunar calendar. But five time six is thirty, which is close to the 29.53 average lunar cycle. So every five 360-day years the two calendars could be lined up again with a small adjustment.
Let's call five 360-day cycles of time a "quin", Latin for "five". At the end of the quin your lunar cycle would be back in synch with the 360 day calendar, though every other quin you might have to declare the synchronization month to have only 29 days to line it up more closely.
It is difficult to believe that none of those near eastern cultures, who watched the sky with great skill, failed to notice this synchronization and had a term for it. This hypothesis has predictive power in that I postulate that such a term existed and may be found in the historical record. Perhaps that term, which I am calling "quin" here, became a unit of measure for large amounts of time- like the lifespan of long-lived patriarchs. So when Moses got his records, they did not say "Noah lived 500 years..." but they said "Noah lived 100 quin" which he translated into the proper number of years because they no longer used that system of calculation. The unit would mean nothing to the children of Israel.
This still leaves the mystery of why an occasional "7" would be added to these numbers. The mystery could be resolved simply by continuing our same train of thought. The "quin" might be enough for reconciling the lunar calendar to the 360-day calendar, but another measure was needed in order to adjust it to the actual solar cycle. Each solar year, the 360-day year would fall 4.2422 days further behind. At what point would it fall a month behind? You guessed it. 7 X 4.2422 days = 29.695 days. If every seven years they added a month into their calendar, it would "slow down" their 360-day calendar and give actual solar years a chance to "catch up", restoring the months to their proper seasons. I will call this unit of time a "septa", Greek for "seven".
Similar to the situation with the "quin" and the lunar calendar, you would occasionally have to adjust whether this once-every-seven-years added month had 29 or 30 days. Alternating evenly between 30 and 29 day months would add on average 29.5 days of "catching up" to where the Sun is in space, but what about that last approximately 0.2 days? Every seventh year your extra month would lose the difference between 29.5 and the actual number of "extra" solar days in seven years, 29.695 days as shown above. An easy rough solution would be to start with a thirty day month and then track your septas by fives. Every thirty-five years (fifth septa) you start over and have another 30-day month instead of alternating. So instead of 30-29-30-29-30 and then back to 29 you would start the sequence over and have 30-29-30-29-30 and then repeat the sequence starting with another 30. This would get you to 29.6 days, which is very close to the actual value, and we are using a span of years which is also divisible by five (35).
If you wanted to get even closer to the actual solar year, in addition to having back-to-back 30 day bonus months every thirty-five years (fifth septa) you would also add a bonus day on the bonus month of the seventh septa, or every 49 years, giving you a period of three septas in a row in which your bonus month is thirty days in length (years 35, 42, and 49). Doing these things would keep a 360-day calendar lined up with both the solar year and the lunar calendar with remarkable precision.
Does the length of time "49 years" ring a bell with anyone? Seven sevens? It should. What about the multiples of three? The third "bonus month" in a row to have thirty days comes on the 49th year - the end of which starts the year of Jubilee.
The critics are correct that the numbers are not random. But that doesn't mean the genealogies were made up either, not even for some "special purpose" that they can't fathom. Moses simply had documents that had genealogies measured in something like "quins" and "septas". The Egyptians had a 365 day year. It wasn't how his people looked at time anymore. He converted the units in his text to years. The reason the life spans were divisible by five is that he originally got them in a unit that was approximate to five of the units he was using, that's all. And if someone lived or became a father a little past a quin but not quite half-way into the quin, they described that by using a "septa". So someone who had a son at 77 might have been said to have began having sons after "fourteen quins and a septa". This is like the "cubit and a span" measure which was used to indicate things a little longer than a cubit. A quin would be like a cubit and a septa would be used like a "cubit and a span".
***********
UPDATE 4/8/20 So all of that between the asterisks was my first take on it. When I dove into the history a little more I found out there was indeed a 30-year cycle. Here is a link describing the Islamic calendar which has roots which go all the way back to the classic Babylonian calendar, as does the Hebrew calendar. It has a "30 year cycle" much like I described above except they formed it with a 19 year cycle added to an 11 year cycle. The Vedic calendar is actually closer to my results. That's because they started where I did, even before there was a "Babylon", with twelve thirty day months in their years. They also had a stage where there was a thirty year cycle composed of five year increments, just as I described. This far predated the classic Babylonian system. See the abstract here for details. In my book I do briefly postulate a connection between the descendants of Adam and the ancestors of the Vedic peoples. But as you will see there is also a more direct explanation.
A typical description of the classic (500 B. C.) Babylonian calendar and the system they used to align their lunar and solar years is as follows..
"The Babylonian system that came to prevail throughout the Near East consisted of 12 basic months: Nisanu, Ayaru, Simanu, Du'uzu, Abu, Ululu, Tashritu, Arakhsamna, Kislimu, Tebetu, Shabatu, and Adaru. Every 19 solar years, or 235 lunar months, marked an entire luni-solar cycle, which required intercalation in years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19. In all but the seventeenth year, the added month was called Adaru II, but on the seventeenth year it was Ululu II."By a "19 year cycle" what they mean is that at the end of nineteen years the moon phases and sun all line up again. In other words, the cycle restarts every 20 years! And of course the 19 year cycle can be paired with an 11 year cycle to give a 30 year cycle anyway, and both 20 and 30 are evenly divisible by five. They "Babylonian system that came to prevail" after 500 B.C. didn't come from nowhere. It had precedent.
Did you notice in the 19 year cycle above the years that they added months are either separated by two years or three years? The differences in the years from the start are either 2 or 3. Year "3" is of course "3", from year three to year six is "3". From year six to year eight is "2". From year eight to year 11 is "3". From year eleven to year 14 is three. From year 14 to year 17 is three, but from year seventeen to year nineteen is "2". So 3-3-2-3-3-3-2, and then you start another cycle. Seven cycles of two or three, or four five year periods (at the end of the 19th year).
This arrangement suggests a predecessor to this system in which the years in which months were added on were on a recurring 2-3 basis. That is, the second year a short "month" was added with a number of days decided by the observations and three years later another longer month was added to the calendar. So for example, each year the lunar year is about 11 days shorter than the solar year. The first year they would let this slide, but the second year they would add a "short month". Then they would wait three years and add a "long month". To line them up the short month would have to be on average a bit over 22 days long. That is seven or eight days shorter than the other months. The long months on average would have to be about 33 days long. That is three or four days longer than the average. Once in a while you could make the added months a day or two longer to even things out.
That would be fine until you had more complex societies and it got more important to have the months close to the same length. Imagine contracts for leases or loans at interest when the months changed in length so much! It was fine for rural societies and planting crops, but not for mass commerce.
To get from a system like this to the classic Babylonian system which came later, instead of alternating the "2 years then 3 years" pattern you would need to "add more threes". You couldn't just add a month every three years, because that would result in a month that was consistently long. But alternating them evenly would leave you with months that were excessively short or long. But to get close to a 29 or 30 day month you would have to have a cycle where you divided by three more often than you divided by two. I propose that this became the basis for the Babylonian system. The original 2-3 cycle of five years was integrated into a longer cycle where the ratio of 2s and 3s was such as to allow the added months to be close in size to the other months, while keeping up with events in the sky. That meant a ratio of two "2s" and five "3s" in the 19 year cycle.
I am back to my original conclusion, though I got there by a slightly different route. It would be the most natural thing in the world for people in that region in 4,000 B.C. (around the time I think Noah lived) to compile a genealogy of long-lived persons with life-spans expressed in five-year cycles. The years in-between five year cycles would be imprecise, with a month added in years two and five, but the length of those added months would vary widely between them. The five year cycles consisted of a two year part and a three year part that was overall more consistent in length than individual years.
This would also explain the occasional use of a seven added to the multiples of five. Eight out of twenty-nine (neglecting the death of Methuselah) numbers in the Genesis five genealogy end in "7" or "2". This is 27.5% in the limited sample that we have.
I propose that if a patriarch made it to the three-year part of the cycle they went ahead and gave him credit for living to that "quinn", or five year period. We might do the same when we say that a man died in "1980" whether he died in January or December of that year. That is still the year he died. If a patriarch did not make it to the three year part of the cycle, it was said that he died in the two-year part of it, which was added to the previous five year cycle. This Moses translated as seven years.
What this would mean is that if a man died in any of the last three years of a given five-year cycle, or the last three of the following cycle, he would get credit for five or ten more years respectively. But if he died during the first two years of the second cycle, he would be given credit for seven years, the preceding five year cycle plus the first two years of the next. So the ratio of numbers ending with a seven in a table of such numbers would be on average 2/8. That is to say, 25% of the time the number for the life event would have a seven added onto the multiple of five. That fits very closely with the observed rate of 27.5% and thus I conclude the hypothesis is confirmed.
***************END OF UPDATE*********
I don't doubt that the names and numbers of the genealogies have meanings on many levels, because God is just that amazing. But that doesn't mean they were made up. That doesn't mean they aren't also history. It surely doesn't mean that Bible scholars should devote their considerable powers to spend all day imagining new ways to convince the masses that Genesis is all bunk as an accurate record of history. At best, that's a terrible waste, of any gifts they might have. And its so unnecessary. No matter what you have been told, the scriptures can be true, even as history. It may not be giving the narrative that many think it is, but it can be a true one none the less. The Christ-Centered model explains how...
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