Blocking out the Son

If you can't picture the world coming into being around the era of the Linear Pottery culture then you either have to accept a revised version of Christianity or give way completely.

It would be a harder task to unpick the work of historians and declare that the Lengyel culture came later or didn't exist in the form they portray than it would to accept the weight of their findings.The burden of countering every inconsistency is going to make the apologist's job ever more difficult, even if carbon dating back that far is inexact
Science does hold steady by using artifacts to do its aging, rather than relying on Word alone

It's Not the End of the World

The legends live to see their own construction

Even the dead could have made that deduction

No flash nor perishing of flesh

A subway flooded a stock market stopped

Sundry economies simultaneously drop

Shooters get less discriminate

Gene sis

26th October 4004BC may be a long time ago in human terms but is recent to the slow grind of the Earth and its changing scape. The Earth is 4.54 billion years old

The fact that the world on which we reside is four and a half billion years old strikes me as being more reassuring and awe-inspiring, both at the same time, than trying to imagine it bursting forth fully formed at the same time the bowl and the wheel are being created by Man

It's testament to our talent for myth weaving and our ability to adapt every naturally occuring phenomena into our own more recent experience. We can't really picture a rock sitting being worn away for aeons or a tree patiently growing while civilisations rise and collapse, so we invent a fantastic facsimile of our dwelling place, on in which we are front and centre to it all.

Over time we revise our myth making to take in more information, which is why there are many religious groups that accept evolution. And, like remnant flat earthers, creation scientists feel they have to defend the version where the whole shebang is created in a week, 6016 years ago, because it's intrinsic to the Truth of scripture.
Whether we want to see ourselves preoccupied on the outskirts of Eden with inventing various calendars is up to our individual sensibility but it does seem that the scriptural literalist will have to find a way of pushing those early Nile colonies a little further into the future in order that they don't get in the way while the heavens and the earth are being created.

Time gentlemen please

These are just some of the problems that those who insist on God's word have:

• the differing eras that various parts or aspects of Earth first appear is consistent with the chronology that you'd expect
• the fact that a river is nowhere near as old as the mountains it flows near puts lie to the Genesis account of creation, where things are done simultaneously (even allowing for a liberal interpretation of 'days')
• the timescale, well beyond normal human comprehension, is possible for an eternal being who is working on the supreme level; what are eons to one such as this? 
• but then what does that do to the scale of days, if they are at the very other end of the 24 hour conception of what a day is and still state that the deity did two things that appear to be on different 'days' on the same 'day'?
• does this mean that the Great Flood lasted something other than the forty days and forty nights we've been taught, and if so how (since it would have to scale up, way up to maintain the same definition it did for the Creation) did Noah and his family maintain the floating vessel filled with animals for an even longer period than the literal forty days?
• otherwise is there some clear code between the Creation and the Flood that explains that the definition of 'day' has now changed and to what extent?
• how can the phrasing in Genesis be made meaningful for those who appreciate the real scale and age of our planet?

Old Timer

It's like Biblical literalists live inside a bubble. I came across this site making the astounding conclusion that the Sahara is the oldest desert and is only 4000 years old

If the Earth is billions of years old, why is there not an older desert on the Earth? 

Why is the oldest desert on Earth only 4,000 years old? 


All one needs to do is put those words 'oldest desert' into Google and you'll discover that the oldest desert is not the Sahara and is millions of years older than the free Christian teaching would have.
Having endured arid or semi-arid conditions for roughly 55-80 million years, the Namib is also the oldest desert in the world.
The oldest freshwater lake is Lake Baikal which, like a lot of natural features appearing in this blog, has made a previous world beating appearance due to its size.
Lake Baikal formed somewhere 20-25 million years ago, during the Mesozoic
and the other lake making a second appearance, Earth's oldest super-clean water system reached in Lake Vostok; twenty million years old
The oldest ocean is the Panthalassa Ocean, 220 million years ago in the Triassic era
Finke River in the West Macdonnell Ranges near Alice Springs is the oldest river,  parts are believed to date back 340 million years, well before the time of dinosaurs.

The oldest mountain range is the Barberton Belt aka the Barberton Greenstone Belt. It's 3.5 billion years old
The oldest forest discovered is the Gilboa Forest, 350 million years old

More bigger

When I first began surveying the greatest of the world (as opposed to 'in the world'), I thought only that the largest of lakes and all of the seas would serve; that a puny pond is not likely to have anything of impressive scale.

But, while deciding the largest stream is too much like engaging in a pissing contest, Billabong Creek brooks no argument in capturing long waterways that are not rivers.

The largest mountains around the globe and the exceptional Alps and Himalayas are defined by their height above sea level. If you count height from the seabed, the tallest mountain is Mauna Kea. While Chimborazo is the farthest point from the Earth's centre.

The steepest hill in the world is in neighbouring New Zealand.

The world's lowest elevation not under seawater. Not the Dead Sea but the Bentley Subglacial Trench.