(April 2, 2014 at 10:15 pm)Huggy74 Wrote: 2 Peter 3I wonder, when was the first time someone mocked a Christian over how late the second coming was? Because that would mark that date as the beginning of the "last days." Presumably the last days before the end. Peter tries to cover himself by stating that god might seem to be a bit slow but that he's simply patient, but it's possible that we've been in the "last days" for hundreds of years now.
3 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
Time is meaningless for an eternal being. The "last days" could encompass a time period of millions, billions, or trillions of years. Or longer. It's not as if god is getting old, and it's not as if he owes it to us to finish the job at all, much less within a specific time period. Maybe when Jesus spoke of Armageddon, he was actually referring to the heat-death of the universe.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
