The Implied Pre-Genesis Ice Age & It's Interesting Implications

Dear Buzsaw;I am very glad to see that you are thinking things over and seeing things in a new light, so often people are trapped by their preconceived ideas and are unable as a result to see or understand anything that contradicts those ideas. You are preceded in some of your ideas by Leander R. Pimenta who published a book called "Before the First Day" which describes a literal six days of creation starting with a preexisting earth. Here is a link to his book with a review that I wrote on it. Look Here: Edited by AdminJar to shorten url. Use the peek feature to see how it was done so you can help in the future. Thanks. Leander is ahead of you in some areas, and you are ahead of him in others.You are right of course that in the Bible ice could be called water, which it is. I see someone was challenging you on this point, to show a scripture where ice is called water, here is one. -- New Jerusalem with Apocrypha Job 38:30 "when the waters grow hard as stone and the surface of the deep congeals?"I use the same point on ice possibly being called water myself, in that at the time of the flood part of the earth was covered by water in the form of ice rather than liquid water. My answer for how the tallest mountains were covered by the 'waters'. but that being said, I do disagree with you on the earth being frozen at the start of the first day. As others have pointed out it would have been very hot and covered by high temperature steam like the planet Venus. Then as the temperature slowly dropped the steam would have condensed and fell as rain, while the raise formed the clouds, that is how I believe that the waters were divided. All of the evidence shows that the earth started hot and cooled, there is no evidence for the reverse. Major problem here, if there was no Sun, what were the planets orbiting? Without the Sun there would be no solar system to speak of, the planets if they existed without the Sun, would be pulled by gravity towards each other and you would have only one big gas giant of a planet. The mass of the sun had to exist to act as an anchor for the rest of the solar system to revolve around, otherwise you don't have a planetary system at all. The orbits of the planets, asteroids and comets, all indicate that they have been in their orbits for billions of years and have formed by coalesced from smaller objects. Just look at the asteroid field between earth and mars and the impact craters still present on may planets and moons including our own. The earth itself has many old craters that erosion hasn't completely wiped away yet.It is of course impossible for the Sun not to have existed until the fourth creative day, for on the third day you have liquid water and living planets on the earth. Without our Sun, all water would be frozen on the ground as would all the gases that make up our atmosphere. Only through receiving light and the resulting heating of the atmosphere is it possible to have an open ocean. Read the verse below again and think about where the sun and moon are said to be and the effect that there being there has.(Genesis 1:14)"Let luminaries come to be in the expanse of the heavens to make a division between the day and the night;"In the Bible 'heavens' can have two meanings, one is the universe, the other meaning that is the main one, is the atmosphere of the earth where the birds fly and clouds are. What happened here is that as the earth's atmosphere cooled, the sun and moon became visible from the surface of the earth. The surface of the earth is the only vantage point from which the effects of day and night are felt. If you were watching this from any other point in space, creation of the sun and moon would not give you a day and night effect, no more than our watching the slow rotation of our moon gives us a 28 day long day/night cycle. So the events in Genesis is told from the viewpoint of someone watching them while standing on the surface of the earth, which considering to who the account was written for, that makes perfect sense.If you consider that the viewpoint is from the surface of the earth, on day one it is dark because of the heavy Venus type atmosphere surrounding the earth. Then as it cools the atmosphere starts to rain out and progressively clear up until on day four the sun is clearly visible. The fact that the sun and moon are clearly visible on day four disproves the idea of a preflood canopy by the way since it would have been impossible for them to be seen through the amount of water contained in the flood.The other possibility that most people go with is that the Genesis account of creation is just a poetic story, and we should be careful not to read too much into the details. I disagree with that view, since the details we are told must be accurate considering the source, so I view it as more a matter of a problem of interpreting what we have been told, and remember that while the words are true, our interpretation of the those words may not be.Some have a problem fitting in an ice age, but it isn't a problem once you know that Adam was created towards the end of ice age which ended of course with the flood which was a direct result of the sudden melting of the ice age ice. I bring this up to show that you don't need to put an ice age before the first day, when it works much better ending on day 6 causing the flood.Sincerely Yours Wm Scott AndersonThis message has been edited by AdminJar, 03-16-2005 09:05 PM

Dear Buzsaw;Instead of arguing with you on this or that point that I disagree with you on in your last post, I though I would post on a point that I see some have been attacking you on, and I think you could be clearer on too, the length of the creative days.On the length of the creative days.The morning and evenings are beginning and endings, like the sun rising or setting on an empire or an age. The Genesis creation account is a simplified poetic story told to man in a earlier age. The fact that each creative day is described as having a morning and an evening does not in itself require that they be literal days. Remember many things in the Bible are told in signs that have larger meanings like the parables Jesus told. Sometimes you have think a bit to discover the answer, this is part of how things in the Bible were hidden by God. On the length of the creative days, each one had a morning and an evening, all but the seventh day. Each of the earlier days we are told ended, but not the seventh, the Bible indicates that it is still on going. At Genesis 2:3 the seventh day starts and is on going, being referred to in Hebrew chapter 4 as still going on. In fact the seventh day is believed to last at least until the end of Christ millennium reign, which would give it a minimum length of over 7,000 years. This is the reason some use the figure of 7,000 years for the length of each creative day, but that is based on two assumptions, first that all the creative days were the same length, second that the seventh day ends at the end of the millennium. Because I can not verify ether of these assumptions, I accept the possibility that the creative days may have covered much longer periods of time. If we look to the physical evidence, we find that it overwhelmingly points towards very long periods of time. I am distrustful of scientific dogmatic statements, so I did some checking on some things that are hard to mess up. One of those things is Dendrochronology, tree ring dating, which extends back over 10,000 years into the past. The thing to remember is that that is a unbroken record made up of a continuos line of over lapping trees, it doesn't include 'floating chronology' of fossil trees from earlier times that are not part of the continuos record. The fact that fossil tree rings do not match the pattern seen in the continuos record, shows that these trees record patches of earlier time. For example trees from the Jurassic reveal that there was time enough for great forests to grow, so the time of the dinosaurs was real, it was not some brief period before the flood. The same is true of other periods, fossil trees and plants are found showing the passage of time.A Second line of evidence I looked at was the pattern seen in fossil distribution around the world and the connection with rates of continental drift. What I found was that the patterns matched the movements of the continents, thus it was possible to use the rates of possible movement to estimate how long ago the animals had lived. Using the highest rates of movement seen today and even allowing for faster movement in the past, it is very apparent great lengths of time were involved in the creation of life on earth. While I am still doubtful about the accuracy of the timing of these pass events, it is apparent that they occurred and that they occurred very long ago.You may also want to consider that a literal 24 creative day would only work for the one narrow area of the globe that would happened to be in the right place for the dawn, all the other areas would be out of position anyway. The sun can only shine on one side of the earth at a time, thus when God said let there be light, half the surface of the earth will not see it until later. Then when evening comes, and the one area that was in the right position to see the dawn, sees the sun set, an other part of the surface is just seeing the sun rise and the day is already ending. If you travel around the world you cross the international dateline at which you pass from one day of the week into another. Since the earth is a globe, such a arbitrary line is unavoidable, and since the earth was round at creation too, there would of had to been one then too. So you have the situation that if the creative days were literal days of 24 hours each and followed local time, there would have been a place on the earth were you would have a line that you could set across which would have one day on one side and a different day on the other. The only way of avoiding this situation is to start and end each day earth wide at the same time regardless of local time. Which would mean that the morning and evening of each day is merely the beginning and ending respectively of each day. So when you look at it in detail, there is no way the morning and evening of each creative day could have been literal without raising illogical conundrums.Most important of all is clear scriptural evidence that the creative days are long periods of time rather than literal 24 hour long days. In the Bible, the term 'day' is used to refer to a period of time, it can refer to a literal day or it can refer to a much longer period of time or age. (Isaiah 13:9) "Look! The day of Jehovah itself is coming," (Jeremiah 11:4) "I commanded YOUR forefathers in the day of my bringing them out of the land of Egypt," (Ezekiel 21:29) "the wicked men whose day has come" (Exodus 10:6) "your fathers' fathers have not seen it from the day of their existing" (1 Samuel 7:2) "And it came about that from the day of the Ark's dwelling in Kiriath-jearim the days kept multiplying, so that they amounted to twenty years," (Psalm 110:3) "Your people will offer themselves willingly on the day of your military force." (2 Corinthians 6:2) "For he says: "In an acceptable time I heard you, and in a day of salvation I helped you." Look! Now is the especially acceptable time. Look! Now is the day of salvation." In each of these examples, the term day is used to refer to a time period much longer than 24 hours. But are the creative days literal or are they too references to longer time periods? An answer is found at (Genesis 2:4) "This is a history of the heavens and the earth in the time of their being created, in the day that Jehovah God made earth and heaven." here the six creative days and the untold time before the first day, are referred to as one day, which only makes sense if in referring to creation, long periods of time are referred to in the Genesis accounts of creation. Then one day, or long period of time, could equal six 'days' or periods of time, but there is no way one literal day can be equal in length to six literal days, so the only way this makes sense is if the Genesis creative days are of long unspecified lengths. The creative days are event related stages of time in the creation of life on our planet. The biblical term day is sometimes an open ended time period, to determine the length of each creative day, we would need to date when the events that happened on each day, occurred. The evidence found implies that the creative days were of varying lengths, with some being possibly billons of years long. If you consider that fact that life was progressively created over the length of these long periods of time, any perceived conflict with the fossil record disappears.Sincerely Yours; Wm Scott Anderson