Sphere...........circle.............what's the difference?
Don't play basketball or frisbee much, do you?
may said:
Consider also this poetic description of the earths water cycle, recorded some 3,000 years ago: "All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again." (Ecclesiastes 1:7, New International Version) Yes, the Creator of the universe is also the Author of the Bible.
May,
First, how do you know you're not reading too much into your quote? At first glance, it doesn't say anything about rainfall. Since even in ancient times, it was recognized that some streams have underground springs as their source (and since, IIRC, some ancient people thought that there was a great subterranean ocean), why must the writer have meant that "the place the streams come from" is the sky and the clouds, and not underground?
Second, if a passage that seems to suggest what we now know is true can be considered "evidence" for the Bible's divine authorship, what can we conclude by passages that suggest things we now know to be false? Consider 1 Kings 7:23-26, describing the cauldron, or "molten sea", in the Temple of Solomon (NIV - emphasis mine):
He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. Below the rim, gourds encircled it - ten to a cubit. The gourds were cast in two rows in one piece with the Sea. The Sea stood on twelve bulls, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east. The Sea rested on top of them, and their hindquarters were toward the center. It was a handbreadth in thickness, and its rim was like the rim of a cup, like a lily blossom. It held two thousand baths. (NIV)
As we hopefully all remember from our elementary school math classes, the circumference of a circle can be calculated as follows:
C = (pi) D (where C is the circumference and D is the diameter)
Solving for pi, we get:
pi = C / D
and plugging in the values above, we get:
pi = (30 cubits) / (10 cubits) = 3.000000
Now... we know that pi is not exactly 3 (it's 3.14159265359.... etc.). You would expect a circle 10 cubits in diameter to have a circumference of 31.4159 cubits. Even if you rounded off to the nearest cubit, you'd get 31, not 30.
If we can conclude from your passage that God wrote the Bible, what can we conclude from 1 Kings? That God is bad at math? That God
didn't write the Bible?
