Comments on: Giant Book of the Month Club

By: Matt McIrvin

Matt McIrvin — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 14:21:39 +0000

…Incidentally, various pages on talkorigins.org mention that the day-age approach was actually the most popular form of creationism among American religious fundamentalists before the late-20th-century resurgence of ICR-type Flood geology.

By: Matt McIrvin

Matt McIrvin — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 14:17:57 +0000

I don’t think the “day-age” approach (which indeed has a long history) is all that satisfactory as a means of reconciling Genesis and science; you still have to deal with all the details being different. The 19th and 20th-century day-age theorists tended not to believe in evolution.

By: Backword Dave

Backword Dave — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 12:31:53 +0000

Bad Jim; no he doesn’t. 6 X 8 = 42 (in base 13).

Douglas Adams insisted that he did not write jokes in base 13, of course.

By: Ginger Yellow

Ginger Yellow — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 11:53:23 +0000

The LRB review, and presumably the book it reviews, is really good for providing an international perspective on the history of geological time. Mainly because of Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, I’d grown up thinking it was pretty much Brits all the way along -Hutton, Lyell etc. It was refreshing to see the other side.

By: chris y

chris y — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 09:08:21 +0000

Jim, God prefers base π. This is a fundamental tenet of my faith and I will behead anybody who argues.

By: maidhc

maidhc — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 08:40:08 +0000

Does Biblically Correct Tours offer a round-the-world cruise? Or “to the edge and back”?

By: bad Jim

bad Jim — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 08:20:18 +0000

With respect to #10: I didn’t think that Kieran was old enough to remember that song. I’d curse him for putting it in my mind’s ear if it hadn’t evanesced in a moment.

Gould, in Questioning the Millennium, tells us that the 6,000 years thing (like Bishop Ussher’s chronology) derives from (@) the 6 days of creation, (ß) an offhand remark from Paul that a thousand years were but a day to God, and ((c)) a tradition that there would be exactly 6K years between the creation and the second coming.

Try as I might, I can’t convince myself that God prefers base 10.

By: Comet Jo

Comet Jo — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 06:39:34 +0000

Sorry—I meant to begin “So what Richard Fortey is saying is that the Bible really means “eras” when it says “days”?

By: rollo

rollo — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 05:48:13 +0000

Maybe the bible is a collection of myths, but then maybe myths aren’t just fairy tales.
In fact I’ll just say that straight out.
Myths aren’t just fairy tales.
In fact, even fairy tales aren’t just fairy tales.
Both myths and fairy tales are stories.
Stories in this culture at this time are entertainment, a trivial luxury.
Yet stories are the language of a culture, the way it speaks to itself. This culture has trivialized itself nearly to the point of extinction.
Myths are a place to store and carry the inexpressible. To communicate across generations things that can’t be compressed into homily and formula.
Or maybe they just were at one point in the ignorant primitive past, and maybe now we’re ready for the naked truth of existence unmediated by superstition and magical thinking.
Maybe this time the abyss will wink when we look into it.

By: roger

roger — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 05:40:09 +0000

I think he means work days, actually. Now, as we know, Jehovah lived in the Pre-Reagan era, and back then, in those factories where they made universes and such, the unions were so strong Jehovah probably put in a frenchy day – seven hours tops! Luckily, now that we have a flexible work force and an economy that has got government off its back, Gods have been farmed out to making universes in factories in China, and they put in 36 hour days. Productivity is going up, profits are going up, and the price of universes is going down. It makes me excited and Friedmanish inside.

By: Amy

Amy — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 04:21:50 +0000

I don’t think he has ever cared about civil liberties – he sees his

job as protecting us, not protecting our liberties.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 03:44:43 +0000

I’d guess that when Rusty says six days, he means six days.

By: Comet Jo

Comet Jo — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 03:16:36 +0000

So what Rusty Carter is saying is that the Bible really means “eras” when it says “days”? What exactly is the evidence for this? And what does “era” mean in a biblical context anyway: are biblical eras defined by the fossil fauna they contain? Frankly, the idea that the bible “really means” eras when it says days seems about as plausible as Velikovsky’s suggestion that the parting of the Red Sea was really caused by a planetary conjunction. Maybe the bible is a collection of myths and we shouldn’t think of uncovering its meaning as finding the real events to which it refers in a distorted fashion, but rather as understanding the conceptions of the world and human beings embodied in its narratives. I mean, nice to out-argue the fundamentalists, but should we really be pleased to do so with an argument which is as ignorant of social scientific understandings of religion as the fundamentalists are of natural scientific understandings of the physical world?

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 00:01:40 +0000

I don’t care what they say I can’t stay in a world without Belgium.

By: a crank’s progress » the Enlightenment: fun while it lasted

a crank’s progress » the Enlightenment: fun while it lasted — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 23:47:38 +0000

[...] Giant Book of the Month Club: I thought I’d mention Martin Rudwick’s new book, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution, a (very, very large) history of how scientists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries figured out that the earth was very, very old. Certainly much older than six thousand years. The problem of the age of the earth is a good one partly because because it’s so tangible, partly because it’s a good story (the French and English scientists are great, and Thomas Jefferson gets a look-in as well), and partly because it was solved more than two hundred years ago. [...]