Creation of the Earth v.s. creation of man

actually, i said more than 7000 years old. that's different than 7000 bc by 2000 years. but chinese writing has been found that dates close to 7000 bc.

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אָרַח

Okay, why on Earth must we find the oldest writings in order to date the existance of human beings? Shouldn't a fossil or two do the trick?Second, even if God had created the Earth, and then man five days later, why should we bother with such a small difference? I mean,why care about the five day difference of two events which most likely never took place?I'd say the lack of evidence that God created all things in a mere six days should prove to most of us that, for this part anyway, the Bible lacks accuracy.TrékThis message has been edited by Trékuhrid, 12/31/2005 05:10 AM

As simple as your argument is conveyed, we cannot do that because some people do not accept the idea of carbon dating as being accurate. Which is why when we start checking out the oldest writing is how some of us date humans.Though to be truthful we could probably date humans by other things as well like pottery and stuff instead of writing because pottery has been around longer then writing.

But how do we date the writings? Any dating method that gave a date prior to one accepted by Biblical literalists would be said to be "inaccurate".Furthermore, have not human beings been around much longer than our writing? I mean, seriously, accepting the date of the earliest writings as the date of the earliest human beings, is somewhat like accepting the date of the Declaration of Independence as the date of the first colonies in America.And yes, we could use pottery and what not, but that would just show us the earliest pottery. Also, how would we date the pottery? I thought carbon dating was used on those sort of things to establish a general date.Why not when searching for the earliest human beings, don't we actually look at the human beings themselves?Trék

should. you have to remember, creationists don't believe in that sort of thing. fossils were just put there to trick us.my point about earlier writing was kind of a facetious one. it's like a three year old claiming that nothing existed before they were born, and me pointing out that i've been in college longer than that. me being in college is a subset of the years of my life, which is a subset of this millenium, which is a subset of human history, which is a subset of the history of the earth. claiming that set that contains all others is a certain size can easily be refuted by showing that one subset is larger than the supposed size.

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אָרַח

internally, from the last date of change (by means of anachronism). for instance, we can date genesis to about 900-600 bc, in it's final version. EARLIEST dates are harder.externally, from the oldest copy we have, or oldest mention in another sources. for instance, we can date genesis's oldest known copy to about 200 bc. exactly. much of the earliest writing is pottery. the sumerians wrote on clay tablets. carbon dating is only for organic matterial. besides, pottery is fired, which i'm pretty sure messes c-14 up. pottery is used as a guideline for dates. we know which periods and cultures in history made certain kinds of pottery based on where and when we find them. then when that piece of pottery is found elsewhere, we have a good stab when the site was occupied, and by whom. seems a little circular, i know. but it's not the only method of determining a date, and it's generally confirmed.

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אָרַח

I'm not sure what you are saying about the dating of Genesis, since 900 BC is further back than 200 BC, but I understand the rest.Trék

You forgot to use the little green arrowed reply button at the bottom of the post you mean to be answering.That means we can't tell who "you" is in your post and that person may not know you have replied (there is an optional notification sent if you use the LGRB). Others can't follow the thread of conversation so easily either.Thanks.

Oh, okay. I've never seen that on a forum before. I be sure to use it next time .Thanks,
Trék

Basically i think what Arachophilia is point out is that you can date Genesis to aproximately 900 B.C. due to place errors mentioned in the text.An example of this would be any history textbook that labeled San Jose as the current capital of the state of California. Since San Jose was the capital 1850-1854 the history book would then have to be written at latest in 1854.Similiarly i think genesis would be dated to 900 B.C. because of the name of cities that were present at that time frame.

other evidence (histories etc) lets us know that genesis was part of a translation (lxx) done from about 300-200 bc. our oldest fragment of genesis from the lxx is about 1st century bc. so we KNOW, point of fact, that genesis was compiled prior to that point.internal textual evidence points to a date between 900 and 600 bc for at least one source. other sources might be older, and some anachronisms might be later redaction. but there's no real way to tell.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 01-04-2006 04:31 AM

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well, not exactly. we could conclude that the source the author was looking at was written between 1850 and 1854. the author might have been writing afterward, but just unaware (and stupid?) but certainly not before.it's worse with books that editted together. so we could have a book of short stories, one of which takes places in the capital of californian, san jose. the book itself might have been compiled three days ago, but the short story was evidently written after about 1850.the bible is a compiled book.

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