Exactly. There is *internal* evidence for when they were written, often when the stories were originally told.
On top of that comes the archeological evidence, the historical evidence, the textual evidence, etc.
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The Four Dirty Secrets Against Darwin Evolution
- Thread starter Little Nipper
- Start date
On top of that comes the archeological evidence, the historical evidence, the textual evidence, etc.
TrueBeliever37
Well-Known Member
It's kind of difficult since you put the writings about 350-400 years after the men died. You can choose to believe they are forgeries if you want.
But I think the fact that the prophecy showed there would be 4 world kingdoms as in Daniel 2:40 and Daniel 7:24 should still have some weight. Because the Roman Empire (27 BCE) would still have been out in the future even giving the late dates you gave.
And then Daniel 2:44 lets us know the God of heaven would set up his kingdom in the time of those kings. Which he did during the Roman Empire. (The kingdom being his church.) The Messiah taught the kingdom was at hand. He suffered and died and established his kingdom.
Yes, the authorship is about 400 years after the events they claim to describe. That happens a lot in ancient writings. That doesn't make them 'forgeries', especially in the modern sense. It was common for people in the past to write texts and *attribute* them to previous famous people. often, they did this with a goal of saying what they *thought* the famous person would say. This was not considered to be wrong or dishonest.
And what evidence do you have that it was describing the Roman empire? At best there are vague to the point of meaninglessness. Once again, are there any *specific* prophesies that are clearly about what *you* interpret them to mean? Not ones that *can* be interpreted in many different ways and just happen to have something that sort of fits?
Maybe it was talking about Alexander's kingdom. Or maybe the kingdoms of Alexander's successors?
Once again, vague to the point of meaninglessness. Was this the kingdom you refer to? Or was it any of the others that had some sort of Jewish ruler?
Once again, a prophecy, to be a legitimate prophecy, needs to be clear, specific, and something that could not otherwise be predicted based on what was known when it was written. These are nowhere close to meeting any of these criteria.
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TrueBeliever37
Well-Known Member
All 4 kingdoms being dealt with are world kingdoms. The Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman. It's not vague at all. There have only been 4 world kingdoms.
If you say you received a message during a certain time, as is stated in these prophecies and it wasn't true. Then to me that would be a forgery or an out and out lie. Which I do not believe is the case.
Who do you think would have had the motive to make these changes to the text after the fact?
I see no possible interpretation of that which makes it true. The Babylonian kingdom didn't get outside of what we would consider the Middle East. The Medo-Persian empire was larger, but barely made it into the Mediterranean. The Greek kingdom of Alexander went from Greece over to India, but didn't last very long at all (and, again, didn't include much of the Mediterranean). It broke up into several separate kingdoms (yes, all Greek). The Roman encompassed the Mediterranean, but didn't extend even to modern day Iran.
So calling any of these a 'world' kingdom is a stretch in itself. But to say those have been the only ones of their size is also absolutely false. The Mongol empire encompassed far more than any of these, not to mention many more modern empires (Russian, English, Dutch, etc). And that doens't even get into the Chinese empires, which also covered a very large stretch of ground, nor does it include anything from the Western Hemisphere (Inca, Maya, etc).
Some people saw it as a writing of devotion. Some did it for propaganda purposes (this includes the priests). Historically, there has been no lack of people wanting to claim their ideas were shared by those more ancient.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
His reinterpretation of prophecies is what is to be expected from those that demand that the Bible is literally true. When a prophecy fails when it no longer fits the countries that it aims at then the Bible must have been talking about four nations in another sense the reason. It is so automatic that believers do not even realize that they are doing it. I have even seen the same with "Verses from the Quran" that turned out to be verses from the Bible, and when the interviewer owned up to his mistakes people flipflopped immediately. Or if you would like a more recent version Jimmy Kimmel demonstrated this with Trump supporters.
Which gets to the vagueness. Of you can always reinterpret the text to mean something different, then it is simply too vague to be a good prophecy.
The prophecies for kingdoms are to vague and generic. There are also the Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mongol, Celtic and at least nine African Kingdoms, some on the scale of the Middle East kingdoms. Some of the African Kingdoms had trade with China, Rome, Egypt and India
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YoursTrue
Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
It wouldn't be in the category of one fish (or "a" fish) but rather in the cladistic delineation classifying humans as having descended from fish. So then according to the theory, fish evolved to become humans.
Perhaps you could understand it better if by way of analogy you look at how the bible God evolved from amongst the earlier gods of Mesopotamia and their (Semitic) Canaanite counterparts.
And how [he] evolves in the bible
─ from [his] henotheistic origins ('Thou shall have no other gods before me' not the later 'I'm the only god')
─ to being, from around the time Isaiah was written and the end of the Babylonian captivity, the only god (not noticed by believers in other gods around the world, but you know what I mean)
─ then the Christian model hives off, with Paul renouncing the covenant of circumcision,
─ and in the 4th century the Christian god becoming triune, thus promoting Jesus and the Holy Ghost to God status
─ then the Christian church splits into East and West
─ then the Western church splits into Catholic and Protestant
─ then the Protestant churches split into countless grains of sand
and so on.
See? Gradual changes and new sub-species, and here and there a sudden major change, and in time you end up with new species of god.
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No, you are baiting with deceptive wording concerning science you are intentionally ignorant of.
YoursTrue
Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
The science itself says things like birds are dinosaurs. Nothing unusual then to say that humans are fish, birds are dinosaurs. According to the clades you believe in.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
Modern birds still have all the traits of theropod dinosaurs. That is if you count the genes that have been turned off, such as the genes that develop teeth. They are still in their genome and scientists have turned them back on for developing chicks. Those embryos were destroyed before they hatched.
Theropoda - Wikipedia
I disagree with the statement 'humans are fish.' Yes birds may be dinosaurs, but best be considered specifically as Therapod dinosaurs Careful of wording to feed the intentional ignorance of @YoursTrue.
I believe the bold is a misuse of the concept of clades in the sciences of evolution.
An "evolutionary clade" refers to a group of organisms that includes a single common ancestor and all of its descendants, essentially representing a distinct branch on the evolutionary tree, signifying a monophyletic group where all members share a common ancestry and are considered a unified evolutionary lineage; you can visualize a clade by thinking of "clipping a single branch" off a phylogenetic tree, where all organisms on that branch form a clade.
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Correct. And congratulations. It looks like you acquired a few related facts.
We don't say that humans are fish, but rather, descendants of fish. They are in the same clade - vertebrates, as well as all clades that vertebrates belong to such as animals and eukaryotes
Both being vertebrates, humans retain many anatomic qualities of fish, including cephalization (a head/mouth end and a tail/anus end), bilateral symmetry (left and right sides that are roughly mirror images), a nervous system including a brain and spinal cord, a closed circulation system, and an endoskeleton including a spinal column protecting the spinal cord.
There are also many cellular, embryological and biochemical commonalities due to a common ancestry.
But that's true of all vertebrates.
Unlike man, fish are cold-blooded, scaly, and obligate marine forms with gills and fins. Thus, these are different things.
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Pogo
Well-Known Member
And if you took this phylogenetic tree and named it according to what we call the topmost level you would call it popularly fish, it has some Latin name that few including me would remember. It would be a clade if we include the highlighted branch but some object to that because it interferes with their sense of worth or entitlement.
BTW, some Tuna are warm blooded and sharks don't have an actual backbone, the hare cartilage and the two groups to the extreme left don't even have that but we still call them fishes and so it is an appropriate if not technical name for the class that includes them all. Is a Coelacanth not a fish?
YoursTrue
Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
Obviously many would say that humans are descendants of fish. And despite your last sentence which is very reasonable about fish being cold blooded and so forth, many still figure/assume/project, etc. that humans descended biologically by means of chance from...fish. So now, again, despite any links from genetics among organisms of which scientists conclude lineage of the theory of evolution (regardless of no fossils to absolutely prove or show the transition) because of the wonderment of life itself, I conclude that there is more to it (life) than natural said forces at work. Even the words 'force' and 'work' implies something more than normal, as in extraordinary.
YoursTrue
Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
Again...some have said humans are fish, I guess those persons are not among the "we" you mention above.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
You miss the point as usual. By cladistics we are "fish". There was no change of kind in going from fish to land dwelling tetrapods. The difference per generation would be so small that you would not even notice it. A "change of kind" implies some sort of huge change in one generation and that never happens.
But the whole problem here is that you believe in magic, while your colloquists here largely understand the world in terms of science.
So the counterquestion to your refusal to accept evolution is, How does magic work? For example, what exactly was the process that occurred to bring the EM spectrum into existence when God said, "Let there be light" ?
And then we can move on to the technique that allows God to make animals, each complete with the traits they bear showing their evolutionary relationship to each other.
And then how to take some dust and turn it into a male human, with traits also showing the human's evolutionary relationship to the rest.
(One thing I've noticed in the past is that inerrant-biblists and other magic believers, if they respond to such questions, at all only ever do so with excuses not to answer the questions ─ yet they're fundamental to the claims they make. Do they not understand the implications of their own claims?)
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