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Old 06-20-2012, 06:31 AM
 
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"I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore."

I heard once that it is estimated that the total number of stars is equivalent to the grains of sand on the seashores.

How could the Bible writers have known this?
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Old 06-20-2012, 07:04 AM
 
Location: The Land of Oz.
267 posts, read 215,537 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by OzzyRules View Post
"I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore."

I heard once that it is estimated that the total number of stars is equivalent to the grains of sand on the seashores.

How could the Bible writers have known this?
How many is that?..........hahahaha
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Old 06-20-2012, 07:07 AM
 
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Originally Posted by Na'vi View Post
How many is that?..........hahahaha
Someone will have to do the counting. I have something else to do, so I can't.
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Old 06-20-2012, 07:15 AM
 
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Someone has figured out how many grains of sand are on the seashores. I suspect that whoever it was was probably a winner of one of those "guess the number of marbles in the glass bowl" drugstore contests when he was a kid.
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Old 06-20-2012, 07:24 AM
 
Location: The Land of Oz.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by OzzyRules View Post
Someone has figured out how many grains of sand are on the seashores. I suspect that whoever it was was probably a winner of one of those "guess the number of marbles in the glass bowl" drugstore contests when he was a kid.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
Christopher Hitchens
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Old 06-20-2012, 07:42 AM
 
Location: S. Wales.
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I think that is more appropriate to the 'Science proves the Bible' thread and a separate one strikes me as theist spamming. However as Navi saithed, the number of stars was compared metaphorically (1) to 'a lot', as it might be leaves in a forest or raindrops in a shower. It does not mean that the number of grains of beach sand 9which is of course constantly changing) is or was the exact number of stars in the universe which would of course be known only to God.

I have to concede that the unassisted eye would see an awful lot of stars but probably not as many as on a beach, whereas the number of stars in all the galaxies could convincingly be seem as in the ballpark area of all the sand grains of all the beaches. So a lucky hit could be passed off as more than human knowledge rather than a poetic conceit.

That argument would carry more weight if the Bible was not full of errors which either have to be retranslated to try to make them fit the science or, if that doesn't work, deny the science.


(1) 'metaphorically' - term applied to Bible -text when it looks wrong.
(2) 'scientifically proven true' - term applied to Bible - text when it looks even similar to being right.
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Old 06-20-2012, 07:49 AM
 
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Originally Posted by AREQUIPA View Post

(1) 'metaphorically' - term applied to Bible -text when it looks wrong.
(2) 'scientifically proven true' - term applied to Bible - text when it looks even similar to being right.
Language is more organic than some people try to make it. A word can have more than one meaning, regardless of it's (single) definition. The meaning of a word is always about the context and how it is used with other words.
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Old 06-20-2012, 08:21 AM
 
Location: NC
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Quote:
Originally Posted by OzzyRules View Post
"I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore."

I heard once that it is estimated that the total number of stars is equivalent to the grains of sand on the seashores.

How could the Bible writers have known this?
Both stars in the sky and sand on the seashore are illustrative ways of saying "a lot."

I doubt anyone can know exactly how many stars there are in the sky or how much sand there is on the seashore since the number is incredibly large and changes incredibly frequently. I also would suspect that due to these large numbers that are given to changing very frequently that they are actually NOT the same sum total number of stars in the sky as grains of sand on the seashores.

Besides that from the estimates we do have there are far more stars then grains of sand anyway. The number of stars is estimated at about 300 Sextillion or 300*10^21 and even if you use the old est it still isn't even close.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/...tillion-stars/

Number of grains of sand is not even close at about 7.5 quintillion or 7.5*10^18 est.

http://www.hawaii.edu/suremath/jsand.html

This is why I love simple observation, the same is true for the "Science proves the Bible" thread.

Last edited by Randomstudent; 06-20-2012 at 08:51 AM..
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Old 06-20-2012, 09:06 AM
 
Location: Brooklyn
40,049 posts, read 34,475,681 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by OzzyRules View Post
"I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore."

I heard once that it is estimated that the total number of stars is equivalent to the grains of sand on the seashores.

How could the Bible writers have known this?
How could they have known this? Come on, now; you could've asked a more challenging question than that! The answer is...they didn't. They were making an analogy.
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Old 06-20-2012, 09:11 AM
 
Location: Valencia, Spain
16,155 posts, read 12,793,827 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred314X View Post
The answer is...they didn't. They were making an analogy.
Simple for the thinking mind isn't it?!!
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