When God said day did he mean an actually 24hour day?

HI M,The word used for day in Genesis 1 is 'Yom', in the majority of cases it means a literal 24 hour day.One argument for a longer than 24 hour day is that the 7th day has not had an evening yet so we are still having the 7th day.I think the 24 hour day is literal, the authors of the bible weren't intelligent enough to be so abstract. They meant 24 hour day because that was what they knew from experience.There may be a problem with Genesis 2:4 of course, when everything is created in one day.Brian.

Hi CA,In regard to the Song of the Sea, everything in the song looks concrete to me, I see nothing abstract in it at all, it is written in language that is easy to understand, everyone reading it is perfectly aware of what the messages are.For example 'The horse and its rider he has hurled into the sea' concrete, literal undertsanding.and 'Pharaoh's chariots and his army he has hurled into the sea. The best of Pharaoh's officers are drowned in the Red Sea. The deep waters have covered them; they sank to the depths like a stone'.Nothing abstract there, could you give an example or two of what you think is abstract in the Song of the Sea?You would need to be a bit more specific on the pslams.On awareness of abstraction, I'd say that we would be looking at Renaissance Italy 1400-ish before abstarct concepts were becoming understood, anachronisms for example and an awareness of a sense of the past.The authors of the Bible wrote in concrete terms, our much superior intellect simply places abstract concepts onto ancient myths that isn't really there, a bit Kantian, but true nontheless. Of course it isn't every modern day reader who is capable of separating ideology from reality.Brian.

Hi CA, Hmm, very disapponted CA, I thought you were above that.Brian.PS, Don't waste your time replying.

Hi Mr. JackI base it on the written records that I work with.Of course my statement was a generalisation, and after I posted it I realised that my claim needs a bit of clarification.I would say that people had the 'capacity' for abstract thought, but it wasn't a general concern of the 'man in the street' 3000 years ago. There were of course, in the past, some intellectual giants such as Plato, Socrates, and Pythagoras (this would have been a better argument for CA than 'Sig Heil') but I was talking in general terms.On a basic level, there is more 'knowledge' around nowadays, humans 3000 years ago were more concerned with scratching a living from the land than they were worrying about the speed of light.I would say that human intelligence has evolved over time and is more evident in the general public.A few examples from historical texts illustrate this well.Look at the Donation of Constantine and how explicitly erroneous this is. The Donation was undisputed for 600 years before Valla (although Nicholas of Cusa had doubts before this)exposed it as a poor fake, it mentioend cities that weren't around in the early 4th century, it refered to Byzantium as a province whislt it was only a city then. Pre-Renaissance writers simply didn't have a concept of anachronism, literature is full of examples, Ricardino Malespini's Florentine History had Catiline going to Mass 20 years before Jesus was born.There is a medieval painting showing Moses in full English Knight's armour (sorry I forget the artist), myth passed as fact in the hagiographies of the saints and Erasmus as early as 1516, wrote a critical analysis of the lives of the saints he stated that ‘truth too has its power and cannot be matched by imitation. Who can tolerate the people who do not celebrate but rather contaminate the saints with their old wives tales, which are childish, ignorant, and absurd'Medieval writers and scholars had no real sense of causation either, they had no real interest in motives and causes of an event. Of course, there was an interest in motives and causes in the Middle-Ages, but they weren’t subjected to the same sort of scrutiny in medieval thought, causes simply weren’t seen as problematic or in need of any substantiation. They credited effect to all kinds of causes without understanding the need to justify the 'cause', basically this meant that if it was written down then it was true.I woud say that the rise of textual criticism was a major factor in the intellectual evolution of mankind and with the availabliy of excellent communications, the general intellectual capabilities of humans are now better than they were 3000 years ago.I would behappy to discuss this on another thread if you like, we may be too far off topic here.Brian.Sorry for the hurried post but I am at work right now.

Hi Bill, nice to speak to you again. I don’t like to disagree with you doc but I feel I have to here. I really don’t think people worry about the same things at all, some people may find things to worry about but they don’t compare to 3000 years ago.Look at the things that the average person would worry about 3000 years ago. Sanitation for a start, disease spread by poor sanitation caused countless deaths, it still does in certain areas of the world, but as we are talking about the ‘man in the street’, he really doesn’t worry about sanitation.Talking of disease, relatively speaking we are all a lot healthier nowadays, we don’t die from simple infections anymore, an abscess in a tooth could be lethal, now some penicillin and you are normally ok, and this goes for a variety of illnesses that were fatal 3000 years ago.Better farming methods means there less of a worry about feeding yourself, a poor harvest 3000 years ago could devastate a community.Lower infant mortality rates, people in developed countries are having fewer children, 3000 years ago they worried about having enough kids so that a few would survive to help with farm work or look after you when you were old.There are a lot more but you get the idea. That show is on cable here in Scotland, I watched it for 5 minutes one night and that was enough! I wonder how many of these examples on shows like this are actually set-ups, I know that they all won’t be, but these people who do not know the vice president’s name may be able to tell you a whole variety of things that you may not know. They may not know these answers because they aren’t that interested in the subject. I would have to disagree again. Free state education has at least equipped most people with basic academic skills. Sure you get morons in every society even Kent Hovind can read and write. I agree to a certain extent, I think some academic institutions have lowered their standards in the last 10-15 years. But these highly trained slaves still can regurgitate information and communicate it through written work or some other medium.I would maintain though that certain universities are keeping their standards, I know for a fact that you wouldn’t graduate from Glasgow University unless you produced good quality work. Some other uni’s in Scotland, which I wouldn’t like to name, are not as strict as they should be, but I would say that the ‘Ancients’ (universities) are doing their best to keep their reputations.Brian.