Quote Originally Posted by Taichiliberal View Post
Some points of contention: you wrote, "...
Finally, we see a guy like "Bill Nye, the Science Guy", noted charlatan and moron, asserting that this parable is a scientific recounting of an actual event."
FYI: Nye has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Cornell. He also has six honorary doctorate degrees, including Ph.D.s in science from Goucher College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was on the team at the NASA and California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to design and create the MarsDial, a sundial and camera calibrator attached to the Mars Exploration Rover. So he's not a theologian nor an archeologist by training. But despite his TV flamboyance, he's hardly as you described, and his simple analysis of the topic at hand could NOT be discarded or refuted.
And you must remember, the current acceptance is that Moses existed during the Bronze Age .... about the same time as it's believed the pyramids of Egypt were constructed.
But I agree with you regarding local phenomena being interpreted as a "world" event.
Bill Nye has credentials. I have no doubt about that.
His credentials don't make the stupid stuff he says any less stupid. He is a passionate advocate of AGW Science and AGW Science is shown repeatedly to be erroneous and vaguely misleading.
With regard to science, whether we are talking about the Stone Age or the Bronze Age, your average man on the street was not in possession of the sort of educational foundation that would allow critical review of modern day astrophysics.
Assuming that Moses was "told" the story of creation, it is likely that his understandings would have influenced the transcription of of whatever it was he may have been told.
Even assuming that Moses was among the most educated in Egypt, the level of understanding of the cosmos at that point in Egypt was as much religious as scientific.
Anyway, the point is that the Book of Genesis, to me is interesting in how much it got right even though it got a whole bunch wrong.
As I understand it, the brightest light ever produced was the light that occurred in the moments following the Big Bang. I could be wrong.
As I watch lecture series on TV now that I'm retired, it is interesting how much is coming to light that seemed to me to be impossible, and yet, it is what it is.
Water, as one example, was "locked" in rocks that formed in the cooling from a molten blob blob orbiting the Sun that became Earth. The land and the sea were LITERALLY one, but were separated by the processes that formed the planet.
The Earth rotates and the night and day occurred. Plants grew and producing oxygen and then animals and then us.
Imagine telling a fourth grader the entire story of the creation of life on Earth starting from the Big Bang and working forward. No written power points or notes allowed.
What would be the take aways understood by that fourth grader? How would t hat fourth grader describe what he heard?
If you ever watched Tim Taylor trying to relay what he heard Wilson telling him as he revealed his new understandings to his long suffering Friends and family, the possibility of inaccurate interpretation is well demonstrated.
However, being wrong on the exact details does not make the entire message worthless. Things can be less than exact, but still be directionally helpful.
