Oddbean

God told us how he did it. I take Him at His word. When I was first reading Genesis 1, it seemed so strange that God went into what seemed to me the wordy, "It was evening and morning the first day." "It was evening and morning the second day." etc. Now I know why He said it that way. He knew that people were going to say that He created over billions of years and He wanted to make Himself perfectly clear. Yes, "Yom" (the Hebrew word for day) can mean an indeterminate period of time, but whenever it is used with a number, the word morning and/or the word evening, it always means a literal 24 hour day. He worded Genesis 1 to make sure you had to 100% ignore His words to believe anything else. There are also little details like the Earth being made before the Sun and stars (unlike in the Big Bang Theory) and plants being created before the sun (which works for 24 hours but not millions or billions of years. Scientists that believe in a literal 6 day creation have done a much better job of predicting what evidence we will find than those who believe in the Big Bang and billions of years. They've been saying the Big Bang is settled science for many decades, but they have to change it every couple of years to make it sort of match the evidence. The same is true of Darwinian Evolution (and its various spin-off forms of Evolution) The more science I study, the more I think the Big Bang and evolution are a religion and anti-science story telling. When I was in high school, a bunch of things didn't make sense, but I just assumed that there were things I didn't understand and the specialists had figured it all out. Then I found out that almost all scientists are specialists. They all assume someone else figured it all out (especially with evolution). The biochemists think the biologists figured out how life came to be. The biologists think the paleontologist figured out how life came to be and the paleontologists think the biochemists figured it out. The truth is that a cell is so complex and especially irreducibly complex that it is incomprehensible to believe life happened by chance.

Here is one neat thing about that to many implies that it had to be divinely inspired https://m.primal.net/Krcb.webp "This set of visualizations started as a collaboration between Christoph Römhild and myself. Christoph, a Lutheran Pastor, first emailed me in October of 2007. He described a data set he was putting together that defined textual cross references found in the Bible. He had already done considerable work visualizing the data before contacting me. Together, we struggled to find an elegant solution to render the data, more than 63,000 cross references in total. As work progressed, it became clear that an interactive visualization would be needed to properly explore the data, where users could zoom in and prune down the information to manageable levels. However, this was less interesting to us, as several Bible-exploration programs existed that offered similar functionality (and much more). Instead we set our sights on the other end of the spectrum –- something more beautiful than functional. At the same time, we wanted something that honored and revealed the complexity of the data at every level –- as one leans in, smaller details should become visible. This ultimately led us to the multi-colored arc diagram you see below. The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc – the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect. As well as being stunningly beautiful as an image (which is what they were aiming for), it wonderfully provides a sense of the bible’s internal integrity despite it’s palpable complexity. The 176 verses of Ps 119 stand at the centre point, as if it were a mirror creating a vast symmetry. What is especially striking is the number of lines that stretch all the way from Genesis to Revelation." https://markmeynell.wordpress.com/2010/01/08/a-stunning-visualization-of-the-bibles-63779-cross-references/