Summations Only

Three different time words are used in this chapter - because ancient people did not have a unified view of time.
eth is the Hebrew for event time and is used 32 times in this chapter. Event time is observed - you react to presently happening events when you play ball.
olam is the word of long time, time that is not now present. Olam is the kind of time that only exists in our minds.Ancient people, including the biblical authors did not have a unified concept of time. You could not run out of time, because only events existed, not time. For example, the first Roman calendar sometimes had 20 days in a month and sometimes 35. (See Plutarch) Why? The months were not measuring time, they were merely markers for the passing of cyclical events. A new month only happened when you SAW the new moon. If it was raining, you had a longer month. The first Roman calendar only had only 10 months. Can you see the Latin numerals in the following months? Septermber 7, October 8, November 9, December 10. Januarius and Februarius did not exist because months without agricultural activity had no meaning. The first Roman king (Numa) added the names for these months. In societies that used cyclical calendars, men adjusted their activities to fit the pulse of nature. They did not run their lives with symbolical representations of linear time - because linear time had not yet been invented. Their earth history was about change. They saw change in the very places modern people see constants.This is why claims that the universe is 6,000 linear years or that the bible is wrong because we measure 13 billion years are both efforts to twist the words of the Bible to fit a concept of time that is foreign to the authors. Moses could no more have imagined a 24 hour day than he could visualize a cell phone.

Nope. Measuring space, time, energy, and mass are all real things in the real world. The fact that you have to deny reality in order to cling to creationism shows just how weak creationism really is.Scientists have defined time as:"the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom"
Second - WikipediaThe second is based on a very real occurence in the very real world.Tell you what. Why don't you tell us what observations we should make with Supernova 1987a if the speed of light has been constant for the last 200,000 years.

That's what measurement is: counting the markers. We measure the age of a tree by counting the rings. We measure the speed of something by counting the number of heartbeats that it takes to move a certain distance. Your contempt for the Bible authors is noted.Of course, Moses did (as the traditional author of Genesis) go to considerable trouble to establish the orderly passage and measurement of time, right in Chapter 1.

So if it rained on the day of the new moon, and for the next few days, the Romans would see a new moon 35 days after the previous one, because it would wait to be a new moon until Romans had looked at it ... and as it always rains on exactly the same days each year in Italy, this meant that certain months were always 35 days long.The 20 day months, of course, were caused by those "early new moons" we hear so little about.

By this logic, would blind people be immortal?

Moses did not mention time. The translation of beryshit as in the beginning was not what the word meant before Augustine came up with his notion that time exists. It simply means first in order, first in rank or importance. The sequence and duration are recorded - but there is no reference to time, per se. The fact that durations are not linear is clearly stated because God formed the Sun, Moon and stars out of the things created on day One and continued to place them in the spreading place (raqiya). Raqiya is the noun form of the verb to spread out.The most powerful evidence for a biblical creation is how galaxies started out as naked globs of tohu bohu stuff and intrinsically grew, the stars accelerating outward, spreading out as the atomic clocks also accelerated. Look and glorify the God who will make foolish the wise of this age, the scientists. Look!

Science used to be called philosophy. It was the search for certain knowledge. Just because science has bastardized itself from the nineteeth century onward from its honest beginnings, does not mean it is more correct than its original state.

......And if the duration of the periods of the ground state of cesium133 changed......?How on earth would you know??????

I have no idea what you mean by that. Bald lie. I do not state they were as if I were stating a fact. All I am saying is that it is possible. Nice claim, but you have not made your case. That is because there would not NECESSARILY be changes in distant starlight. You have not gone through all the possible variations in constants and the possibility that we do not know the very foundations of space, energy and matter, particularly the nature of space itself. ...Only in the mind that wishes it to be so. That is because we don't believe something just because an atheist tells us to believe it. Didn't your mom tell you it's wrong to lie?Edited by foreveryoung, : No reason given.

Why would this even be relevant? The second was not defined in that way until recently. Let's not confuse stable units with stable or changing lengths or physical constants.In any event, the problem I see with your changing constants is that you want most stuff to have continued pretty much as normal, but allowing a few things in the Bible that don't correspond with current observations and physics to be correct. If you want to convince anyone that such a thing is possible, the best way to do that would be to provide a set of constants and to explain how it would work. Cherry picking just a couple constants and leaving us to consider the rest won't cut it. I suspect that at least some of the changed constants arguments will be contradictory. That is, you'll want the mass of a proton (for example) to be large for one reason and smaller for a different one.The other problem is that we have observational evidence that some of the constants have not changed to hundreds of thousands of years, and in some cases hundreds of millions of years.

You would know because change leaves evidence.It's possible to imagine a universe where the physical laws are different, but it would not be THIS universe.AbE:See Message 5, Message 12, Message 20, Message 41, Message 48, Message 59, Message 125 and Message 141.Edited by jar, : add AbE links.

See my previous post on the constancy of constants. Short answer: it would leave traces, which we've looked for and they aren't there. Note that just because you don't know something that doesn't mean nobody knows that something.

Until you have read and understood the papers I listed in Message 144 you do not have a meaningful opinion on the subject.{ABE}You have no idea of what possible variations have been considered. We've provided plenty of evidence and, as a typical creationist, you've refused to look at it.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

By looking at distant starlight. Changes in the ground state requires changes in fundamental forces which will be seen in how distant stars behave. We would also see differences in the isotopes produced in the Oklo Reactors. How on Earth you ask? How astute. The evidence is right inside of the Earth.

There was a study IIRC (remember I'm old and so often forget things)...(where was I? )... (oh yea)... about two years ago out of Cambridge and one of the Australian universities that did show very slight changes to the electromotive force in a few far different galaxies. I'm not sure about any follow up studies.The point is we can look and science has looked for evidence of changes. Changes leave evidence. And IIRC the changes they did find were only of the magnitude of a few parts per million.And none of that has any relevance to the Earth and during its history.