Merry Christmas Eve.
You wrote:
> So how come Luke 3:36 has an extra fellow, Cainan, in the Genealogy who is
> not in Genesis.
I categorize the inconsistencies (along with mispellings of names) as
inconsequential errors. I doubt they add up to too long a span of
years though. If there were huge gaps, then why was there an attempt
to give time spans? I would see such gaps as consequential.
> That depends upon how one defines history. It is not unambiguous that the
> plants were created before the sun.
I think this is ambiguous. Is Genesis 1:14-19 the creation of the sun,
or the establishment of its rule over day and night? I don't want to
speculate about cloud cover, etc, but maybe there is something there
I don't understand immediately because I am being eisegetical.
light and dark (say and night) were created earlier ... or were those
metaphors for something else?
> It is not unambiguous that whales were
> created with the fish, yet whales are not found in the earliest rocks with
> fish.
The great sea monsters are not necessarily whales. Whales are not monsters.
Perhaps He refers to Leviathan (the fire-breathing sea monster in Job)?
Dave writes:
> The existence of phase spaces gets you out of the problem you describe.
I don't know that you can get such specific interventions out of that
to create conception in the midst of barrenness, healing where none
is expected, as well as all the serendipitous experiences that I attribute
to God each day.
I reasoned things out like this. When I stand before Him, I have a lot of
small things to thank Him for as well as the big things. I have trouble
imagining Him saying: no Dave. I didn't `arrange' for Joe to come along
when you were stuck in the mud. That was just a coincidence. I have a
very long list of such specific things that I am grateful for, that He
will be spending a lot of time explaining that He was `with me' in
a metaphorical sense, and my perception of that was largely due to
coincidence. It is the enumerable small things that I have trouble
believing you could obtain through tweaking the initial conditions.
Plus there are all the events in the historical books that are
specified as: it was a turn of events from the Lord. I don't see
how you could generate these from initial conditions either.
--Dave