accuracy in the bible

[Scepticalguy]

Ok so im arguing with this annoying fundie on RF (reasonable faith) and he is listing what he claims are accuracies in the bible people could not have known at the time, here are a few try not to bust a gut:

The utube shows how planets are formed. In fact it points out that the earth had a "corner stone" around which all the rest of the "stones" continued to slam into one another.


Job 38
4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone
The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
its features stand out like those of a garment
..
when the dust becomes hard
and the clods of earth stick together?



This was not evident to scientist until the last 40 yrs. The "initial one" is simply put a cornerstone. That is the use of this term in the ancient world. A stone that things piled on to. They had no idea this was the way things happened unless they read Job.
So congratulations on your education.

And this:

Hebrews 11

3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command,(D) so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

Another dumb luck guess huh. A Jewish guy 2000 yrs ago knew what Einstein did not believe at first that the universe came out of nothing.

And more:

Your education continues:

Job 38
19 “What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
20 Can you take them to their places?



God points out to Job light and darkness has a physicality and location. They have locations and travel.
These are concepts just discovered. If fact darkness was just recently just thought of the absence of light. God points out to Job it is a physical thing. As it turns out the majority of the universe is made up of this stuff.
Did you know what God knew and told Job?
When did you know it? A few yrs ago?

And this:

Job 38

31 “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Astronomy-1360/Pleiades.htm

Most open star clusters, (and the Pleiades are one of the brightest and best in our
night sky), are certainly loosely gravitatonally bound.
And true, most constellation stars are not gravitationally
bound, but simply a line-of-sight arrangement as seen from
the Earth.





There is no way Job or anyone could have known about gravitational binding of constellation clusters.
Im sure you knew of these facts though.
You didn't just learn of these things did you?

[Lord Zentei]

If this guy is so incredibly fucking stupid and/or dishonest to think that the words "foundation" (an OBVIOUS analogy indicating the ancient belief that the Earth is flat**) and "cornerstone" are suggestive of the way planets form as discovered by modern science, let alone a remotely adequate summary thereof, then you're probably wasting your time. Nonetheless, the further points raised:

Another dumb luck guess huh. A Jewish guy 2000 yrs ago knew what Einstein did not believe at first that the universe came out of nothing.

And of course, that's missing the fact that modern science doesn't include "god" in theories as to how the universe formed. Neither is the "unseen" the same as "nothing", but never mind that, right?

God points out to Job light and darkness has a physicality and location. They have locations and travel.
These are concepts just discovered. If fact darkness was just recently just thought of the absence of light. God points out to Job it is a physical thing. As it turns out the majority of the universe is made up of this stuff.
Did you know what God knew and told Job?
When did you know it? A few yrs ago?

LMAO. "Dark matter" and "dark energy" are placeholder names for entities we can detect indirectly, but we don't yet understand fully, in part because they don't interact with light. They are only "dark" because they aren't illuminated. Darkness itself is not the same thing; that is indeed the absence of light.

Most open star clusters, (and the Pleiades are one of the brightest and best in our
night sky), are certainly loosely gravitatonally bound.
And true, most constellation stars are not gravitationally
bound, but simply a line-of-sight arrangement as seen from
the Earth.

So, he admits that they're bound by gravity, and not by chains.

There is no way Job or anyone could have known about gravitational binding of constellation clusters.
Im sure you knew of these facts though.
You didn't just learn of these things did you?

That is not what the passage says, though, is it? It speaks of the "chains of the Pleiades", that's nothing to suggest that the writer of Job knew about gravitational binding, as opposed to merely being a poetic description of the order of the universe. Show me anything to indicate that the ancient Hebrews knew anything resembling modern physics. And that takes more than creatively interpreted poetry, as anyone who has had to solve actual physics problems would know.

Yeah, this guy is a dishonest idiot with too much time on his hands.


EDIT:
** BTW: while the Bible is vague about the overall shape of the Earth, and at one point describes it being suspended over nothing at all at one point, it does speak of the "corners of the Earth" and the "pillars of the Earth" elsewhere: showing that it is a compilation of multiple documents, and not a single book at all. The ancient Greeks knew that the Earth was round, but then, they knew geometry and empirical natural philosophy.

[CJvR]

Considering how much mind numbing stupidity there is in the bible why argue these obscure points?

You could point out that the "cornerstone" of earth is molten iron so it would be poured rather than laid. But why does it matter? Science in the bible? It claims there was a global flood in historic time!!!

I don't even understand the Einstein rant.

Light is basically atoms dumping energy, darkness is just the absence of light. Neither live anywhere, although you could say that darkness resides at Kelvin Street number Zero and light everywhere else. But who cares? The Bible claim people lived inside a whale!!!

[CJvR]

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?

Not thay you laid any foundations but "I", or rather the atoms that makes up me, was present on Earth or in earthbound comets and asteroids.

Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!

Yes I do know. The availability of material, gravity and time.

On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone

It wasn't "set" on anything - Earth moves ( A fairly recent discovery ). Earth's orbit however is dependent on the mass of the sun and the mass and vectors of everything that made up Earth.

The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment

Actually it was molten mass of rock and iron without any particular features.

What is the way to the abode of light?

The bible claims light have an adress? Light is energy in the visible spectrum, it lives at c Avenue.

And where does darkness reside?

Darkness resides at Kelvin Street number Zero.

Can you take them to their places?

Sure, switch on a lightbulb.

Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?

If you try to chain a star the chains will melt! A star is a bit warm, not that the bible would know...

[Spoonist]

Since its à copy&spam thing why not just copy&spam back from one of the many sites listig biblical errors?

[Simon_Jester]

Or construct mock Bible passages via mad-libs methods and pull the same trick.

Given fifty thousand words of mystical poetry, I can find "evidence" for the author believing anything if I'm willing to contort the definition of words hard enough.

[Surlethe]

So if planetary formation is right there in Job plain as day, why didn't anybody actually figure it out until astronomers used secular reasoning in the nineteenth century? (The alternative, of course, is that he's really, really stretching to find 2 or 3 out of 32,000 verses that look like, when taken out of context, they might support modern theories of planetary formation, if interpreted in the correct light.)

[LadyTevar]

To be accurate, you first have to have an understanding of what you're arguing. This idiot doesn't, or he'd realize the Job scripture is the equivalent of a grandfather's "In snow, uphill both ways" story. It's an "I did this, I did that, I did this I did that, What did you DO?" rant, like you hear from every annoyed parent when their teenager is whiny.

[Korto]

It's not that at all. It's more like the self-justifications of an abusive parent. At the point where God is pointing out all the great things he's done, it's in response to Job wanting to know why he allows all the evil in the world, when he's all-powerful and all-knowing; a pretty damn good question.
It's like you've got the kid saying to his father "Hey, dad, why do you keep on hitting me? Why are you bashing mum? Why are you doing that?" and the father shouting back "I built this house, I put food on the table. Do YOU go out working every day? Did YOU pay for the clothes on your back?" All of which may be true, but IS NOT THE FUCKING POINT!

Really, if I was trying to convert someone to Christianity, Job would not be a book I would want to draw any attention to, and if I was Pope, I would seriously be holding a few secret chats as to whether it would be possible to re-write it a bit, or just make it go away altogether.

As for the OP, and the arguments therein, they sound to me like they may work decently on the uneducated, but for anyone with an education and an ability to think, no. Just, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[Irbis]

Eh, idiotic comparisons are the more useful to idiots the more vague they are, since then it doesn't take nearly as much effort to twist the words into required shape.

If you really want to debate him, then open the book of Genesis, and point out to him these was day and night before sky or Sun existed, while other planets don't exist and Moon shines on its own, then move two creation days later and point out birds and whales/dolphins, according to Bible, existed before first land creatures, which is absurd.

Oh, and ask him where we can find leviathans/dragons/witches/mages, all true according to Bible. I want to cast Fireball, dammit!

[Ryan Thunder]

Or construct mock Bible passages via mad-libs methods and pull the same trick.

Given fifty thousand words of mystical poetry, I can find "evidence" for the author believing anything if I'm willing to contort the definition of words hard enough.

I'm pretty sure somebody did exactly this with Moby Dick once in response to somebody doing it with the Bible.

[PeZook]

Frankly, you could selectively quote Shakespeare like that and get about the same level of predictive detail out of it, IE. useless babble only obvious to people who are actively seeking to confirm their preconceptions.

[Surlethe]

Again, an important test of whether verse Y predicts theory X is whether people who didn't know theory X read it from verse Y.

If you look at any useful scientific theory, the people who created it did so without knowing it in the first place. All they had was data and a partial knowledge of the ideas of the people who came before them. So if Job actually usefully, unambiguously predicts accretion disks and planetary formation from nebulae, then why didn't anybody who didn't already know about planetary formation learn about planetary formation from Job?

This is the same trick that cold readers use. They don't know anything, so by taking little steps and making ambiguous statements, they pull the story out of the person they're preying on and feed it back to them, and the people who are being read are so desperate for something, anything, to reconnect them to their lost loved one that they eat it up. Same thing here. There's actually nothing in Job that implies planetary formation. Instead, people are so desperate for the Bible to be scientifically relevant, they're looking at verses and reading their own knowledge into them. This is why it's important to ask, If I didn't know any of this already, would this verse tell it to me?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Isn't this the same kind of crap people like to credit Nostradamus with?

[Surlethe]

And the Quran and Edgar Cayce and the Old Testament prophets and horoscopes and on and on ...

[Alerik the Fortunate]

One word: eisegesis.

[Surlethe]

One word: eisegesis.

Yeah, that's what I said.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Though the Muslim apologists I've read put the Christians to shame with the level of detail they read into verses which have very obvious meanings unrelated to supposed science. They make it seem like you can derive quantum gravity from any given line of Arabic poetry.