The
Mises-Richenbach frequency theorem notes statistical probabilities of
an occurrence and pattern of events. One may use it in various ways,
such as in the likelihood that it wasn’t a rare footprint that was
captured of some individual wanderer. Instead it was probably one
step saved amid thousands of hominids that passed that way so long
ago.
The
location is one that people passing from a rising sea level may have
taken. It is believed a catastrophic flood filled the Mediterranean
Basin 5.3 million years ago. The dates have some wiggle-room of
course and are inexact. Even so the Mediterranean sea-floor garden of
Eden paradise may have begun filling slowly earlier than 5.3 million
years ago and gave way in a final surge. Truth filtered through time
and the fog of history may reappear in various ways the discerning
may piece together.
Hominids
living in the decreasing space of their paradise on the sea floor may
have moved increasingly toward an outcrop of and or a ridge line
leading to Crete. As the sea-floor space was filled with water more
people may have used the point of land that would eventually become
the present-day island of Trachilos.
Obviously
no one besides God could have known of those events and provided that
knowledge to Middle Eastern oral histories in the 5th
Millennium B.C.. It is interesting though that the most ancient
written human story; The Gilgamesh Epic
(that
is quite paradigmatically similar to the Biblical flood story and may
have been recapitulated y the ‘J’ writer of Genesis as
well as the writer of an equally aged Atrahasis
Epic that is another version.) has
Gilgamesh crossing the Mediterranean from Lebanon to Snappishness's
island. Wikipedia describes Utnapishtim as ‘”character in the
Epic of Gilgamesh who is tasked by Enki to abandon his worldly
possessions and create a giant ship to be called The Preserver of
Life.” Enki was the god of creation that
religious tradition.
One
obviously finds paradigmatic axis conicidence with the paradigm of
creation, judgment and eventual salvation in the histories. There is
much to think about.
Gilgamesh
journeys to meet the now-immortal Utnaphishtim after a perilous
journey up beyond the waters and over the mountains (Lebanon and
anti-Lebanon Mountains perhaps) past the scorpions people and the 12
double hours of absolute darkness to reach possibly Sidon where
Utnaphishtim's boatman take him on a journey far over what is
probably the Mediterranean Sea to the island of Utnaphishtim.
Gilgamesh is seeking immortality from Utnaphishtim, but fails
the prerequisite of staying awake for 6 days...instead Gilgamesh
falls asleep for six days.
God
issued light straight away in the first fraction of a second of
Creation. Then he worked six days. Consider how special relativity
relates to the creation early-in particular the 6 days of creation.
Gilgamesh
may have traveled to Trachilos.
The Protoevangelium-first
occurrence of the idea of redemption from the fall is said to occur
in the garden itself with the mention of the bruising of the head of
the serpent. The good news and covenant relationships grow
simultaneous with the experience of mankind.
Georges
Cuvier (1769-1832), the discoverer of the changes in fossil
depositions seeming to be mass extinctions which later came to be
called the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic thought that the
Biblical flood might have been the cause (ref. Evolutionary
Catastrophes by Vincent
Courtillot page 4).
Was
the cataclysmic flood that covered the world more than a regional
event within ancient Mesopotamian terminological and reference
criteria meaning the ancient Kingdom of Urartu transliterated as
Ararat by the Jews? Or was it a reference to one of the mass
extinctions of the natural historical record (99% of the species that
have existed on Earth are extinct presently), or to the cataclysmic
in filling flood of the Mediterranean Sea basin from the Atlantic?
“Genesis
9-11:12 King James Version "11And I will establish my covenant
with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters
of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the
earth.
12And
God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me
and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual
generations:”
One
year to God is for man 365,000 years
Patriarchal
life spans summed before flood literal conversion equals 6,719 years
Time
of Earth before flood with Petrine literal conversion 2,453, 235,000
years
2,453,235,000
years before Christ’s human birth is rather close to the
geological, scientific time scale hypothesis of the creation of life
on Earth in the Protozeroic era. The oldest life on Earth was
considered by evolutionary biologists perhaps to be cyanobacteria.
Its start is somewhat debatable and conjectural of course since there
isn’t a fossil record of it generally. Blue green algae are of a
fairly basic form. Multi-cellular life began perhaps 1.5 to two
billion years later.
Genesis and Geological Eras
It
is remarkable that so much of the controversy about the place of
natural selection in the parameters of Biblical Creationism and it’s
content about the origin of life has been around the debate of life
evolving, changing and so forth or created in finished forms, and
also about the debate upon the time order of creation as occurring
over a lengthy period of time or nearly all at once as it were over
six ‘days’. The indeterminacy of translation could easily be
applied to the controversy to point out that the time literals of
Genesis given were those that would be comprehensible to
4th millennium man, that
God has power that is beyond the normal context of human
understanding including that of present physicists and biologists,
and that the literal values of the time periods given may simply have
been representative such as geologists use to label a vast time
period such as Archaean,
Proterozoic, Precambrian, Paleozoic or Ediacaran.
Life
on Earth in the modern geophysical criterion is believed to have
begun 2600 million years ago in the oceans. For approximately two
billion years simple organism existed without multi-cellular
structures, which are believed to have formed about 600 million years
ago. 600 million years ago those multi-cellular organisms are
believed to have developed to the point of forming hard shells or
skeletons to be deposited in fossils. Paleontologists have worked on
interpreting the fossil record since.
Names
were given to the three primary era of life on the Earth that is
believed to have begun about 2600 million years ago with
non-multi-cellular life. The first era of multi-cellular life was
named the Paleozoic (540 -250 million years before present), the
second era with the rise of multi-cellular organism was named the
Mesozoic (250-65 million years before present), and the third era was
named the Cenozoic beginning 65 million years before the present.
It
is interesting to consider the mass extinctions that developed or
evolved during these era transitions, which is the primary
reason for drawing the lines, within Genesis paradigms and even New
Testament criteria.
Grudgingly
perhaps some literalists admit the world is not flat and that the Sun
does not circle around the Earth. Even so the recalcitrance of select
evangelicals to adopt relativity as a valid parameter when
interpreting Genesis can lead to some bad science and hermeneutic.
Genesis
chapter 1 verses 1-5
“1 In
the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And
the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon
the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of
the waters.
3 And
God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4 And
God saw the light, that it
was good: and God
divided the light from the darkness.
5 And
God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the
evening and the morning were the first day.”
Christians
should stipulate that God's power travels at least at the speed of
light. The famous twin's paradox used to explain time dilation in the
special theory of relativity can usefully be applied to the following
Genesis one parameters in order to show how many human days it would
take traveling at 25,000 m.p.h. to go as far as God could at the
speed of light in the same six days. to 5.785344×10¹²
miles traveling at c (the speed of light) for six days 33,323,581,440
years it would take traveling at 25,000 mph to travel 5.785344×10¹²
miles
That
is six days of creation for God would take approximately 33 billion
human years. Since I used the value of 25,000 for human rocket travel
without time dilation speed effects of greater than 1% and the number
might actually be somewhat higher I may have generated too high of
value for the human experience. It could perhaps be just a few
billion years.
God
however is eternal and in some way may configure dimensions to create
the complex appearance of energy and fields, space-time and form. His
power would be super-luminal of course because all space-time
coordinates and energized fields are contained within His being.
On
the end of the planet Earth and the atmosphere (heaven definition 1
of 3) the Apostle Peter wrote...
2
Peter chapter 3 verses 12-13 “12 Looking
for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the
heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt
with fervent heat?
13 Nevertheless
we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth,
wherein dwelleth righteousness.”
The
parameters of this description coincide with those astrophysicists
predict will end the existence of the Earth a few billion years from
the present when the sun reaches a red giant phase and will burn up
the Earth's atmosphere and everything on Earth-that is the Earth will
melt and dissolve.
A
new place to live wherein dwells righteousness-Jesus Christ-is a
place to look forward to not only for people living toward the end
times when or wherever but for Christians of any age. The kingdom of
God is a new 'land, Earth, realm etc.' regardless of its composition.
The kingdom of God is within you-a relativistic space-time where
place and spirit rather than time are juxtaposed.
I
considered the fact of day as a unit understood in the 2nd millennium
B.C. mostly referring to the period where the Earth turns one full
revolution (though the ancients didn’t know that the Earth rotated)
and from that point made an inference. I think God would work more
than 8 hours a day-maybe 10. Some people include night as part of day
of course. Though if someone said that it was 6 days walk to
village delta they may have meant walking all night too, or not. If
one wanted to walk at night and take that risk maybe village delta
was three days walk-one can't be sure about the specific use
sometimes. They might have meant just walking in the light
when lions weren't
prowling about.
I
should note a minor point before moving on to comment on the relation
of special relativity to the six days of creation. In Genesis 1 -5“In
the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.2 And
the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face
of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters.3 And
God said, Let there be light: and there was light.4 And
God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from
the darkness.5 And
God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the
evening and the morning were the first day.”
There
is an empty space evidently before light or anything else existed. In
contemporary cosmology though energy was created at T=0 light did not
emerge until the CMB scattering at 380 thousand years post time=0.
God
created the qualities that Einstein would later discover and name
special relativity too. How could he communicate ideas to people with
time scales beyond their ability to comprehend until very recently?
How would those ideas be expressed in works such as the Bible?
image credit: wikipedia- Trachilos is at the far right south side of Crete
