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Replying to post 401 by rikuoamero]
I almost forget you rikuoamero.
Tell me you're kidding.
Who designed it first?
In recent years, scientists and engineers have, in a very real sense, allowed plants and animals to instruct them. (Job 12:7, 8)
Job 12:7, 8
7However, ask, please, the animals, and they will instruct you; Also the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you. 8Or give consideration to the earth, and it will instruct you; And the fish of the sea will declare it to you.
They are studying and mimicking the design features of various creatures"a field known as biomimetics " in an effort to create new products and improve the performance of existing ones.
Long before science knew anything about biomimetics, the Bible said that man can learn from animals.
In The New York Times of February 7, 2005, Microbiologist Michael J. Behe wrote:
The strong appearance of design [in nature] allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude its a duck.
His opinion? Design should not be overlooked simply because its so obvious.
Ahead of science
Do you know the laws governing the heavens, Or can you impose their authority on the earth? - Job 38:33
4th century B.C.E. about 100 years after the Hebrew scriptures were written.
Greek philosopher Aristotle was teaching the leading scholars of his day about the physical heavens. Today, he is still ranked among the most influential scientists who ever lived.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Aristotle was the first genuine scientist in history. His writings include " physics, biology, zoology,metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music,rhetoric, linguistics, politics and government " and constitute the first comprehensive system of Western philosophy.. . . . Every scientist is in his debt.
Aristotle carefully worked out a model for the cosmos. He proposed a system in which the earth was at the center of a universe made of over 50 crystalline spheres (
Celestial spheres), one nestled inside the other. The stars were affixed to the outermost sphere, the planets to spheres nearer the earth. Everything beyond earth was eternal, changeless. Those ideas may sound fanciful to us today, but they influenced men of science for some 2,000 years.
From the 3rd century to the 16th century, the dominant view held that the Earth was the rotational center of the universe.
The flat Earth model is an archaic conception of the Earth's shape as a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat Earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East.
The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC), although most pre-Socratics retained the flat Earth model. Aristotle provided evidence for the spherical shape of the Earth on empirical grounds by around 330 BC. Knowledge of the spherical Earth gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world from then on.
Ahead of science
There is One who dwells above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers. He is stretching out the heavens like a fine gauze, And he spreads them out like a tent to dwell in. - Isaiah 40:22
Centuries earlier, the Bible offered a description of the universe that was discovered by modern science.
20th century
Astronomers were amazed to learn that the universe is anything but rigid. In fact, the galaxies appear to be moving rapidly away from one another. Few scientists, if any, had ever imagined such expansion of the universe. Today, cosmologists generally believe that the universe started out in a very compact state and has been expanding ever since. In effect, science has rendered Aristotles model obsolete.
4th century B.C.E.
To Aristotle, the universe was packed full. He saw the earth and its atmosphere as composed of four elements " earth, water [
five, in later years], air, and fire. The universe beyond was filled with crystalline spheres, all composed of an eternal substance he called ether. The heavenly bodies were attached to the invisible spheres. Aristotles idea long appealed to most men of science, for it seemed to fit a basic assumption: An object must rest on or be attached to something, or else it will fall.
Ahead of science
He stretches out the northern sky over empty space, Suspending the earth upon nothing... - Job 26:7
Can you tie the ropes of the Kimah constellation Or untie the cords of the Kesil constellation? - Job 38:31
17th century C.E., some 3,000 years after Jobs day:
Pevailing scientific theory held that the universe was filled, not with crystalline spheres, but with a kind of fluid.
Late in that century, though, physicist Sir Isaac Newton proposed a completely different idea. Gravity, he said, caused an attraction between the heavenly bodies.
Newton had come one step closer to understanding that the earth and other heavenly bodies did indeed hang in empty space, what would appear to humans as nothing.
Interestingly...
Newtons theory about gravity met with a great deal of opposition.
It was still hard for many scientifically minded men to envision that stars and other heavenly bodies were not held in place by something substantial. How could our massive earth or the heavenly orbs simply hang there in space? The idea struck some as supernatural.
Since Aristotles day, most men of science had believed that space must be filled with something.
All these facts does reveal an important point.
As the saying goes - "Give credit where it is due."
And who else should get the credit?
Is it not the first cause - who caused the innumerable stars to stretch out across the vastness of space, who holds them in place with the bonds of gravity, and who sustains them through their endless cycles, by means of his dynamic energy?
Lift up your eyes to heaven and see. Who has created these things? It is the One who brings out their army by number; He calls them all by name. Because of his vast dynamic energy and his awe-inspiring power, Not one of them is missing. - Isaiah 40:26
That statement contains another recent scientific discovery.
In the 19th century, scientist William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin, discovered the second law of thermodynamics, which explains why, over time, natural systems tend to decay and break down. One factor that inspired him to reach this conclusion was a careful study of Psalm 102:25-27.
Here's an interesting read on Thomson
Thomson remained a devout believer in Christianity throughout his life; attendance at chapel was part of his daily routine. He saw his Christian faith as supporting and informing his scientific work, as is evident from his address to the annual meeting of the Christian Evidence Society, 23 May 1889.
One of the clearest instances of this interaction is in his estimate of the age of the Earth. Given his youthful work on the figure of the Earth and his interest in heat conduction, it is no surprise that he chose to investigate the Earth's cooling and to make historical inferences of the Earth's age from his calculations. Thomson was a creationist in a broad sense, but he was not a 'flood geologist'. He contended that the laws of thermodynamics operated from the birth of the universe and envisaged a dynamic process that saw the organisation and evolution of the solar system and other structures, followed by a gradual "heat death". He developed the view that the Earth had once been too hot to support life and contrasted this view with that of uniformitarianism, that conditions had remained constant since the indefinite past. He contended that "This earth, certainly a moderate number of millions of years ago, was a red-hot globe ... ."
After the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, Thomson saw evidence of the relatively short habitable age of the Earth as tending to contradict Darwin's gradualist explanation of slow natural selection bringing about biological diversity. Thomson's own views favoured a version of theistic evolution sped up by divine guidance. His calculations showed that the Sun could not have possibly existed long enough to allow the slow incremental development by evolution " unless some energy source beyond what he or any other Victorian era person knew of was found. He was soon drawn into public disagreement with geologists, and with Darwin's supporters John Tyndall and T.H. Huxley. In his response to Huxley's address to the Geological Society of London (1868) he presented his address "Of Geological Dynamics", (1869) which, among his other writings, challenged the geologists' acceptance that the earth must be of indefinite age.
Thomson's initial 1864 estimate of the Earth's age was from 20 to 400 million years old. These wide limits were due to his uncertainty about the melting temperature of rock, to which he equated the earth's interior temperature. Over the years he refined his arguments and reduced the upper bound by a factor of ten, and in 1897 Thomson, now Lord Kelvin, ultimately settled on an estimate that the Earth was 20"40 million years old. His exploration of this estimate can be found in his 1897 address to the Victoria Institute, given at the request of the Institute's president George Stokes, as recorded in that Institute's journal Transactions. Although his former assistant John Perry published a paper in 1895 challenging Kelvin's assumption of low thermal conductivity inside the Earth, and thus showing a much greater age, this had little immediate impact. The discovery in 1903 that radioactive decay releases heat led to Kelvin's estimate being challenged, and Ernest Rutherford famously made the argument in a lecture attended by Kelvin that this provided the unknown energy source Kelvin had suggested, but the estimate was not overturned until the development in 1907 of radiometric dating of rocks.
It was widely believed that the discovery of radioactivity had invalidated Thomson's estimate of the age of the Earth. Thomson himself never publicly acknowledged this because he thought he had a much stronger argument restricting the age of the Sun to no more than 20 million years. Without sunlight, there could be no explanation for the sediment record on the Earth's surface. At the time, the only known source for the solar power output was gravitational collapse. It was only when thermonuclear fusion was recognised in the 1930s that Thomson's age paradox was truly resolved
Genetics
Genesis 31:10-12
This is just one of many places.
