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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, some people think everything was created in 7 days and even say fossils are a hoax.

All ideas die. The best way to respond to ignorant ideas is to ignore them, and give new life to the better ideas. There is a subtle but important difference between attacking ignorance and calmly speaking truth in its presence.

This is not true. Ideas may die, but they may become immortal and spread like a virus. This is completely irrespective of how true or false in actuality an idea is...

With time dilation it could have been 7 days depending on the observer and their reference frame.

Some guy from MIT calculated that once with general relativity. Also, ancient writings describe the fluidity of time, which we can now measure:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/optoelect...

That is an impressive amount of mental gymnastics

I mean, the sun wasn't created until the 4th day...

Is this an episode of Ancient Aliens?

Young earth creationism, while it exists, is probably rarer than people think. Notably, it is not orthodoxy in the most widespread forms of either Christianity, Islam or Judaism. It’s probably about as common a belief as the flat earth thing.

I see more people saying "if you don't believe in easy abiogenesis, you must be a creationist". That's also invalid.

Taken literary its dumb for sure.

However, its far from inconceivable - 7 days could actually be 7*10^n something and intelligent design was proven to be possible (we humans created live viruses in a lab from raw materials as one example, almost 20 years ago).

Simulation theory (i.e. Matrix) is another possible option. It even has highest probability to be true.

Taken symbolically it's also dumb. How can it not be?

This is a ancient document written to be taken as truth yet the writer decides instead of just writing everything out plainly decides to make everything cryptic and to be taken not literally.

The writer was so dumb that instead of writing 7*10^n days which he CLEARLY knew he instead wrote 7 days and fooled a bunch of people. It goes to show that even god isn't perfect and probably accidentally picked someone who didn't have much going on upstairs if you catch my drift.

My buddy told me that all of this stuff is just excuses people make to reconcile the science and reality with the fact that they've been worshipping an ancient misguided document for most of their lives. I told him he better wise up because that kind of thinking leads to getting burned in hell.

No guys it's just that sometimes god chooses a vessel to convey his information and that vessel is sometimes not too bright. That's all.

> intelligent design was proven to be possible (we humans created live viruses in a lab from raw materials as one example, almost 20 years ago).

At that point you’re just kicking the can down the road; where’d the designer come from?

If everything has to come from somewhere, then the first cause of all other things must be an uncaused thing, otherwise we have an infinite recursion of things and thus nothing existing at all.

I reckon it's just an infinite recursion and that we don't really exist. I mean think about it this way - the combined probability of everything happening as it did to lead up to you being exactly who you are is so astronomically small. If something was that unlikely to happen then maybe it didn't.

That is not how probability works. Most improbable things happen, like you being hit by failing airplane, or bacteria surviving inside predator bacteria. It only needs to happen once.

Depends on the question. If we talk about origin of life as we know it, you don't have to go recursive really .

The amount of time is not only the problem.

The timeline of events described for each day doesn't add up, and the time scale changes very randomly.

For the biblical creation narrative to be compatible with evidence, most of the creation should have been astronomical events and then life should have only appeared at the end of the week.

However, in the bible the last day is spent resting.

I think the main thrust of the argument is that we were created, not necessarily the peculiar details found in Genesis. It's odd to focus on specifics of a religious text written millennia ago.

It's not that odd, when it's reasonable to imagine that an intelligence which creates life would communicate with that life. Genesis and the rest of Judeo-Christian scripture are a compelling candidate for an externally facilitated communiqué, because of their unlikely history, outstanding philology and uncanny foresight

Imo, there's a very big difference between the creation story found in the Pentateuch and Jesus' teachings in the New Testament. As a Christian I, of course, believe both, but I think that the details of the former are much fuzzier than the latter. So questions like "did God really spend 6 days making the Universe?" are theological red herrings. The point of the Bible is to be reconciled with God through accepting Christ as the one Son of God that died for our sins, was resurrected three days later, and ascended to Heaven. The details of Genesis are certainly interesting theologically, but vigorous debate on them (was God describing evolution? does one day represent a billion years?) isn't particularly interesting spiritually, nor does it really help me reconcile my fallen and sinful nature.

So your solution is to fulfill yourself spiritually rather than question the veracity of what you're taught?

You desire to reconcile your fallen and sinful nature but your interest is only theological meaning that inconsistent details which may indicate that the documents are completely false are irrelevant because it isn't interesting spiritually.

As a christian my self, the internal and external consistency of the stories matter because a single inconsistency means that I am using a false document to feed my soul polluting it with illusions and lies. If the bible really is a made up document and I've been delusion-ally feeding myself lies for years I would need to stop immediately. I only want only the truth, you should too.

The other thing is, you need to stay unbiased during this "trial of faith." If someone presents to you information that actually definitively proves the bible to be untrue then you must be unbiased and change your conclusions logically on the fly. So far no one has yet presented me with such information and I remain christian at heart.

Well yeah, Genesis is obvious poetry. But that's an entirely different domain of expertise than biology and drives at an entirely different point than the posted article. Attempting to conflate the two seems contrived.

It's fine to have an axe to grind, but let that motivate you to seek more (and cut down less).

Poetry has bits of truth in it too.

Very much so, yes. My only point is that treating a poem as a recipe should not be expected to be terribly productive :)

Simulation theory and intelligent design are equivalent.

The alternative is meaningless randomness.

They are not equivalent. Simulation is one variant of iD.

There’s nothing here to say it wasn’t. Further, how can you be sure the universe wasn’t created as it appeared last Thursday and everything since has simply been some higher dimension’s cellular automata set up with that as its initial state and an update algorithm encoding what we call “physics”?

The fact of the matter is that the existential question cannot be answered with any degree of certainty, so to accept any single explanation as truth while ridiculing valid competitors (all that cannot be disproven) is a close minded approach.

> There’s nothing here to say it wasn’t. Further, how can you be sure the universe wasn’t created as it appeared last Thursday and everything since has simply been some higher dimension’s cellular automata set up with that as its initial state and an update algorithm encoding what we call “physics”?

> The fact of the matter is that the existential question cannot be answered with any degree of certainty, so to accept any single explanation as truth while ridiculing valid competitors (all that cannot be disproven) is a close minded approach.

I also cannot be sure that reality exists at all, I could be imagining everything, including the mobile phone I am entering this reply into, the HN site, and the notional user that closed the comment I am replying to.

Cogito ergo sum, but everything else is negotiable (possibly only with myself).

There are any number of variants, including Matrix-like scenarios where some or all people are brains-in-a-jar, simulated, or meat-puppets, and most of them are unfalsifiable.

Reproducible empirical evidence is, ultimately, the tool we have to work with, which as far as I can tell, seems to have brought us pretty far already (YMMV, assuming that "Y" even exists), and I'm not going to discard it based on an argument that is basically aaequivalent to "The fossil record could have been created by God to test our faith" (or "The fossil record could have been created by the Devil to lead us astray", pick your poison).

Assuming anything other than that reality exists and can be meaningfully investigated with the tools at our disposal doesn't lead anywhere useful (or for that matter, interesting). We don't have to be certain of this proposition, we just have to be certain that it is falsifiable (all it would take would be one glimpse behind the curtain) and that the unfalsifiable alternatives are pointless wanking almost by definition.

You could claim we are living in a simulation and our current reality was created yesterday from a backup but that's purely speculation.

There are alternatives to speculation: science. That is what I prefer.

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