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Forgetting about the Dark spirits and sophistry often used by creationists and Biblical literalists, not one single verse mentions anything specific about what's out there in the universe. Sure, it repeatedly talks about stars and "the heavens" in an ultra-generic way; one or two verses actually uses star names like Arcturus and the Pleiades.
Stars were nothing but points of light to these desert dwellers - in fact, no one knew what they were. Yet the star names we still recognize today are, more often than not, Arabic so obviously this region of the world was quite familiar with the night sky. However, the only knowledge that requires is to tilt your head up and look at the stars, a feat not too hard to accomplish in a time before air and light pollution that can make stargazing very difficult.
The Bible's knowledge of our natural world never once supercedes the knowledge a quasi-educated man in Egypt wouldn't have known. Egypt was quite sophisticated and knew more than we give them credit for.
However, I say "quasi"-educated since even a child of today knows more about our universe than well-educated adults living in those days.
As such, there is nothing in the Bible that would lead one to believe that the information therein is anything approaching the status of "divinely inspired" since it does not reveal any new knowledge other than things like "worship me or die" or "kill gays and witches" or "don't boil that goat in its mother's milk."
And the earth isn't "suspended." It's not as though the earth is attached to a string hanging from the ceiling or sitting on the top of a very tall scaffold. Even a sophmore in high school knows this but the average desert dweller of the Bronze Age would have no idea how the earth is situated in its environment. One might interpret "suspended" as meaning they knew the earth "floats" in space, but usually "suspended" means the object is being held aloft by another object and not floating independently. However, even if you interpret this as floating in space, so what? You know what they say about broken clocks. With all of the nonsense the Bible throws around willy-nilly, the law of averages ensures that the Biblical authors would get it half-right at least once.
Your dark spirit friend,
Sophia
Last edited by Shirina; 12-07-2013 at 07:56 AM..
Reason: Sophia wanted me to write this on her behalf as she only has spirit hands and can't type.
Off the top of my head we have the Star of Bethlehem** and John talking about
The Virgin whose feet were on the blood moon....Virgo on top of a lunar eclipse
as seen from Patmos.
I believe the stars were a huge thing these ancient people had to ponder!!!
Such clear nights, such hot summers outside...no TV...
** I highly recommend googling The Star of Bethlehem...where according to Kepler's
equation used by NASA...the sky as seen by the traveling Magi (700 miles from Babylon)
Is recreated...as is the hour of Christ's death...and the sky as seen by John in his later
exile to Patmos.
Think about the timeframe the bible was written. Planets werent even discovered until 500+ years after. How are the human writers of the bible supposed to know about the universe?
Someone else posted a graphic of the Hebrew conception of the universe. In simple terms, the sky was a dome anchored in the earth someplace, which had openings to let rain in and had stars and other objects fastened to it.
Yahweh missed a great opportunity to leave his calling card on this by including a tutorial in his book with a correct cosmology in it. If the Bible is divinely authored, then slavish catering to bronze age concepts and misinformation seems like an odd approach.
On the other hand if the Bible is not divinely inspired then we have exactly what one would expect: the best that primitive culture could produce at the time.
Amos 5:8 seems to be the biggest direct mention..
(Seek Him)...who made the Pliaedes and Orion...RSV, anyway.
Yes, and those are just constellations, patterns observed in the stars since ancient times. They don't reflect a knowledge that they are distant suns and that the patterns are coincidental and dependent on the location of the observer, etc.
One reason religion was, for centuries, loathe to accept (and thus indirectly legitimize) humanity's growing knowledge of cosmology based on empirical observations, is that it removed the earth from its intuitive place at the center of everything, which greatly reinforced the notion that life is all about man, man's specialness, and god's particular interest in man, down to what people eat, when they work, and what they do with their reproductive organs, and with whom.
The ancient's conceptualization of the human condition had humanity on a stage enacting a sort of drama or passion play, with god and the angels (fallen and otherwise) eagerly observing and influencing the action.
People who realize even a little that they are not center-stage are not so easy to control.
Lets be honest, as far as we know we are the only "intelligent" life form in the universe. Until proven otherwise the bible has been uncannily accurate. I know athiests hate that, but you cant prove it wrong...
Lets be honest, as far as we know we are the only "intelligent" life form in the universe. Until proven otherwise the bible has been uncannily accurate. I know atheists hate that, but you cant prove it wrong...
What has this got to do with the OP? We aren't talking about claims of other intelligent and self aware species. We're just talking about (in)accurate cosmology.
The Bible is silent about extraterrestrials, for the precise reason that it lacks a concept of anything non-terrestrial or in the "vault" of sky directly connected to it.
The point we are addressing is that the Bible is spectacularly inaccurate in its cosmology and reflects only what the ancients knew of the "heavens". If it is divinely inspired, why does it not stand out over the centuries as totally prescient of the knowledge humanity would eventually figure out? Why was it not ridiculed for countless generations for its "crazy talk" of light years and red dwarf stars and cloud nebulae and galactic expansion, only to have science shamefacedly apologize upon discovering these things in fact exist? Why is exactly the inverse true?*
* Except that theists are not shamefacedly apologizing to science, of course!
Why does the Bible not mention the universe or any other planets?
a few references of the universe:
Genesis 1:1
[ The Beginning ] In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 2:1
Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.
Nehemiah 9:6
You alone are the Lord. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, ....
Isaiah 34:4
All the stars in the sky will be dissolved and the heavens rolled up like a scroll;
all the starry host will fall like withered leaves from the vine, like shriveled figs from the fig tree.
Isaiah 45:12
It is I who made the earth and created mankind on it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshaled their starry hosts.
Isaiah 48:13
My own hand laid the foundations of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I summon them, they all stand up together.
Jeremiah 4:23
I looked at the earth, and it was formless and empty; and at the heavens, and their light was gone.
Jeremiah 10:12
But God made the earth by his power; he founded the world by his wisdom and stretched out the heavens by his understanding.
Nehemiah 9:6
You alone are the LORD. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you.
Mark 13:25
the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken
So in those Genesis verses "heavens" means planets rather than the place of eternal life?
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