You have a misunderstanding of the problems and evidence of dark matter: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/6488wb/i_dont_want_t...
How can you possibly even begin to explain that without dark matter?
[1] http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2006/08/21/dark-mat...
Seriously this is basic object permanence. We can see hidden things moving around by themselves. Dark matter is still there even when there's normal matter on top of it.
When the model is wrong, you build a new model. A bunch of weakly interacting particles is the new model.
Christian genesis: There was a garden of Eden, and a god.
Evidence: No garden of Eden, no evidence of angels or god, no reason those things would suddenly stop being apparent. Direct contradictory evidence that YHWH[1] was a minor god in the original jewish pantheon rather than an actual creator god.
Big Bang: The universe started for an unknown reason and rapidly expanded outward.
Evidence: The universe is visibly expanding outwards and formed in a way consistent with an explosion.
Did you think that the big bang theory was just something someone thought of, and then they looked for evidence? Evidence came first, then the big bang was proposed.
That's a really bad example to go to.
The tale of Eden follows a poem, and if you take both literally, then you end up with contradictions.
For why? Genre.
Neither were intended to be literal. They were designed to convey meaning.
> YHWH[1] was a minor god in the original jewish pantheon rather than an actual creator god.
Origins are highly disputed, but El seems to be the most likely title, who is the head of the Caananite pantheon, and influential enough to be remembered in Babylon. Not a minor deity.
I understand you were responding to a statement which sort of ignores the basic premises of science, but that doesn't mean your narrative should ignore a scholarly approach to documents whose origins predate writing.
Even Genesis has direct geographical references to it. It has directions. Calling it a metaphor is moving the goalposts. Ad reductio Abrahamic religion is simply that god made whatever we can't understand.
It's not like I'm saying the world wasn't made in seven days. I'm saying that god said we were kicked out of where we came from and would never be allowed back, and that place doesn't exist. I'm saying god says he talks to us and appears to us, and those things don't happen. The basic, central tenants of the bible aren't real. These are important things, not minutia.
>Origins are highly disputed, but El seems to be the most likely title, who is the head of the Caananite pantheon, and influential enough to be remembered in Babylon. Not a minor deity.
That's not true. The introduction of Yahweh to the Semetic religion was very visibly followed by a shift in personal names referencing El (eg Michael) to names referencing Yahweh. Yahweh was an individual, entirely separate god that aggressively replaced El, and El was relegated to an increasingly minor role. The thing called YHWH in 1200 BC is a 4th tier divine warrior, and the thing called YHWH now is a sole god.
Bare minimum, the Semetic religion was demonstrably polytheistic before it was monotheistic, and that alone massively undermines the bible.
Treating Genesis as a single book is insane. Its a collection of oral traditions. Multiple authours, genres, and hundreds of years separate each tale.
> geographical references to it. It has directions. Calling it a metaphor is moving the goalposts. Ad reductio Abrahamic religion is simply that god made whatever we can't understand.
Eden isn't a metaphor, its an allegory, using as its basis a common Mesopotamian myth, as was common at the time. Its origin lies in the story of Lilitu.
The directions to the Euphrates are in Babylonian and Egyptian myths too. It was an area considered symbolic of the spiritual world. You get similar directions to forests that never existed in Japanese myths.
And as a people, the Caananites, and their descendants, were incredibly symbolic. See Kabbalah's number system, and references to it throughout the Bible.
> The introduction of Yahweh to the Semetic religion was very visibly followed by a shift in personal names referencing El (eg Michael) to names referencing Yahweh.
Firstly, "Yahweh" was a best guess about an unspoken name that wasn't allowed to be written in complete form. We are fairly certain that guess was wrong, and the actual name was "Elohim". They're the same name, and yes, the same spelling. (We transliterate to English using sounds in this case).
El wasn't replaced, nor were his attributes. The Caananites set out to seize their promised land, backed by their warrior god.
> the thing called YHWH is a sole god.
Not to begin with, in Biblical record. Or commands such as:
> I am a jealous god, you will have no gods before me
Wouldn't make sense. Nor would the Caananites hospitality to those of the Ba'al religions.
The Biblical record shows this, and it doesn't undermine the record. The Psalms frequently reference belief in other gods.
The first reference to monotheism comes in the Davidic era, after Israel has been established, but it isn't entirely fixed, and instead is something that slowly took hold over a great deal of time.
Different scholars and theologians have different theories on the why of that.
> that alone massively undermines the bible.
I wasn't arguing for or against it. I was simply explaining a couple of documents in a large collection have different intended meaning than that which you gave it.
We don't simply lift out parts of Herodotus and think that we should take his mentions of Achilles literally.
The Bible is a collection of documents. The meaning ascribed to them doesn't exempt them from treating them as ancient documents.
I'm sure they seem insane to you, but no moreso than our ancient Greek records, or the Roman ones either.
>Firstly, "Yahweh" was a best guess about an unspoken name that wasn't allowed to be written in complete form. We are fairly certain that guess was wrong, and the actual name was "Elohim". They're the same name, and yes, the same spelling. (We transliterate to English using sounds in this case).
I have no idea where you're getting this from. They are quite different. Aleph lamed he yud mem vs. yud he waw he. There was heavy redaction in the 5th century BC in favor of "Elohim" but YHWH definitely existed first. Elohim in ugaritic originally meant "children of god" ie the pantheon under El, which Yahweh was a part of. Later, with the revisionist history, Elohim became "God of gods". What's more, YHWH is forbidden to speak aloud whereas elohim is not.
There was an outright movement as YHWH became more important and El became less important. It wasn't just a name change. They literally switched, and even after Yahweh became the most important god he still didn't fully absorb El's traits until later.
>Wouldn't make sense. Nor would the Caananites hospitality to those of the Ba'al religions. The Biblical record shows this, and it doesn't undermine the record. The Psalms frequently reference belief in other gods. The first reference to monotheism comes in the Davidic era, after Israel has been established, but it isn't entirely fixed, and instead is something that slowly took hold over a great deal of time. Different scholars and theologians have different theories on the why of that.
I dropped a "now", that was meant to say "the thing now called YHWH is a sole god". But even in Kings, Baal and others are no more than false idols eg Ahab, Jezebel and Elijah.
>The Bible is a collection of documents. The meaning ascribed to them doesn't exempt them from treating them as ancient documents.
I did not mean to imply that. Certainly it is not nothing. However it is not realistic evidence for a god any more than the Greek pantheon. We know that there are no gods on top of Olympus. The hyperbolic and contradicted aspects of the bible are likewise not real.
We'll, technically, Genesis starts with a universe filled with water, and science stars with a universe filled with hydrogen (that can be detected) and potentially other stuff that can't.
On the outside, both stories are the same and have gaping holes in their logic.
There is evidence supporting the existence of the Big Bang. There is no evidence supporting the existence of the Judeo-Christian God.
Maybe the term doesn't have a straightforward physical explanation but there's a long history of introducing math without any corresponding mechanistic explanation---this is what gravity itself was until general relativity, nothing more than an inexplicable inverse-square attractive force.
So new models like "dark matter" or "MOND" are all just different models that model observations better than prior theories but currently have the problem of being difficult to unify with the rest of theoretical physics.