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11,000-Year-Old Temple Found In Turkey
Ralph Spoilsport writes "In Southeast Turkey, the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt has discovered an 11,000-year-old temple. Established civilization theory suggests that agriculture created cities, and cities created monuments. This discovery suggests just the opposite — people got together to build a huge monument to their religion, and in order to sustain it, communities were formed and agriculture (already in development) quickly followed on to sustain the population. Truly a startling find with significant implications."
There's nothing in the bible that says how long one of God's days are (in human years), so there's no definitive date for the age of the earth in the bible -- just the age of 'men'.
That having been said, I would argue that, you could still accept the 6000 year old 'birth' date of adam and reconcile that with a 11,000 year old temple, if you declare that pre-adam homo-sapiens simply weren't officially 'men' from the bible's perspective (Pre-release betas, so to speak)
OK: so it's science and blind faith in myths that are incompatible.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Of course we'd have to go back to the original language, and also understand that language well enough to understand what a "day" was meant to be in all occurances. It could be pretty flexible, just like we have cultures that don't have much of a number system, and just use their version of "many" pretty early in discussing quantity.
If you go back to the original Hebrew, you find that it's not even that big of an issue because the word "day" doesn't even appear.
I believe the Hebrew word used in Genesis is "yem" (or something like that), which simply means "passage of time"--much like our modern-day "eon" except without the automatic connotation of a long time period (though not excluding long periods of time). In other words, essentially zero context as to how long was the period that was translated into the English word "day".
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
You mistake the interplay between truth (is there any?), theory, hypothesis, and observation.
Both science and faith can exist in this gray area.
Science generates incremental, provable (observable, repeatable) hypotheses. If these are generally believed (faith!), they are called a theory. There is no generally accepted absolute truth available to a scientist.
I refer you to Albert Einstein's quote, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," and so religion at least can co-exist with science. You certainly don't have to accept either one!
Faith in the scientific method and in the majority of your scientific peers is essential, unless you intend to resolve everything you believe in through exhaustive observations -- and then you would only have it down to a small probability that you are deceived. Scientists must consider their peers and teachers trustworthy, or our collected knowledge could not be accepted and those who found it out would die faster than those who could prove it to themselves.
Faith in absolute truths accepted by a large population at some point gets called a "religion." Pascal's wager -- since the majority of the humans alive today are religious, you are safer to accept the hypothesis that religion is not a hoax, than you are to accept the hypothesis that religion is a hoax -- implies that science provides support of faith.
So in other words, science (about faith) proves that faith is a reasonable assumption -- as much as science can prove anything. Faith (in science) is a necessary assumption to prevent the loss of scientific knowledge, and faith as a general quality allows scientists to work together.
Science often suffers from "groupthink." Faith often also gets lost in "myth." All in pursuit of truth, something that men can't ever really capture.
Good luck!