RE: Observations On Atheism Part II - God And The Bible
December 9, 2008 at 3:54 pm
(This post was last modified: December 9, 2008 at 3:56 pm by Daystar.)
(December 6, 2008 at 5:06 pm)lukec Wrote: Daystar- do you really think that in the time the Bible was written people thought the earth was round? How would they take "the four corners of the earth?" Isaiah 40:22 says nothing about dimension, and in fact reinforces my point- the earth is a circle, with "the Heavens" spread out like a canopy above it- this is plainly thinking of the earth as a flat place where heaven is directly above. Not a sphere. The sun is the same idea, and almost all ancient cultures thought this way, that the sun was moving around the earth. It has nothing to do with expressions. Egyptians thought the sun was a god riding across the sky. A quick google search yields 68 sun gods. And why not? The sun brings life, warmth, everything. But nobody knew until Copernicus that the earth was moving around the sun (although some scholars, but not christian ones, postulated that perhaps this could be so). But before him the prevailing idea was Ptolemaic.
And obviously if you were to use the expression now, I would understand that you meant all over the earth. But the expression itself is FROM the bible, where it literally meant the four corners of a flat earth. These expressions are only expressions now, but they came from what was thought to be correct.
Lukec, I think that at the time of the writing of Isaiah 40:22, people thought that the earth was flat - generally speaking. What Isaiah wrote there, by devine inspiration, was that the earth was a circle or spherical. He used the hebrew word chugh (or hhug).
It reads: "There is One who is dwelling above the circle of the earth."
This was two hundred years before Pythagoras formulated his theory.
At Job 26:10 it says: "He has described a circle upon the face of the waters, To where light ends in darkness ."
When God looks down upon the earth from heaven he sees the earth as a circle, just as we see the moon as a circle.
The Hebrew word chugh can be translated as circle, globe, sphere, or round (A Concordance of the Hebrew and Chaldee Scriptures, by B. Davidson), but it is interesting that only a sphere would be seen as a circle when looked at from most angles. A flat disc would have more often appeared as an illipse rather than a circle, so from heaven would have appeared more than likely as such.
So other than your circular reasoning based upon the assumptions that they must have thought the earth was flat because that is what people are thought to have thought back then, indicates that the BIble said the Earth was a sphereical shape object hanging upon nothing long before anyone else did.
