Creation, wanting answers from Catholics and NonCatholics

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isaacalsop

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Alright. Ill cut to the cheese. How old is the Earth? Im Catholic, and Ive seen people of all denominations say the earth is 6017 years old, or 13 billion. What stance does the Church hold, if any? If the Church has no stance, what do you think, and why?
 
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. The universe is an estimate 14 billion years
 
"The Time Question

“Much less has been defined as to when the universe, life, and man appeared. The Church has infallibly determined that the universe is of finite age—that it has not existed from all eternity—but it has not infallibly defined whether the world was created only a few thousand years ago or whether it was created several billion years ago.”

Peace,
Ed
 
Yes. God created the universe.Time is relative. Is this the hill you want to die on? I think not.
 
isaacalsop said:
Alright. Ill cut to the cheese. How old is the Earth? Im Catholic, and Ive seen people of all denominations say the earth is 6017 years old, or 13 billion. What stance does the Church hold, if any? If the Church has no stance, what do you think, and why?
Click to expand...
The church does not say anyway, but the church is a big proponent of science and following where science takes us.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old. The Universe is 14 billion years old.

Only Fundamentalist require a 6000 year old earth because they use the Bible as their only book…making it a science textbook when it is not anything of the sort.
 
The Catholic Church has no argument with the Big Bang theory (indeed, it was a Catholic priest who first formulated the idea). Both science and Juedo-Christian religion accept the idea that the entire universe originated from nothing (in scientific terms, a zero-dimensional mass-less singularity - which is about as close to “nothing” that science can possibly describe).

The big question is causality: What CAUSED the Big Bang? Science has absolutely no answer whatsoever. The Church says it was God.

Then there is the question about how life arose. Science says it was a purely random event. The Church says it was designed by God.

Science tells us that EVERY FORM OF LIFE ON EARTH arose from a SINGLE one-celled organism, called (by scientists) the Last Common Universal Ancestor (or LUCA). Every insect, and every fungus, and every bacteria, and every fern, and every tree, and every mushroom, and every snake, and every dinosaur, and every bird, and every dog, and every monkey, and every human was descended from ONE single-celled organism. This can be proven by genome sequencing. This is undisputed fact in the scientific community.

The Church has no grounds to dispute this finding. In fact, it is quite agreeable to the scientific teaching that all of humanity arose from one particular female (Mitochondrial Eve) and one particular male (Y-Chromosome Adam). Even scientists have labeled these particular human ancestors as “Adam and Eve” (though they do not teach that these two ever met - they “met” through genetic union, but the disparity of such “meeting” has shrunk from 300,000 years to a more modern idea of 30,000 years or less).
 
There is far to much evidence to prove the earth is more that 6000 years old…
There is no evidence at all to prove it’s less that 7000 years old …
The universe is over 13 billion years old… End of story
 
I think this is the best way of reconciling the differences and showing what time is like. (My ancestors were way ahead of us when it came to advanced physics, mathematics and logic, but it all got lost when the Romans came with the Church and eradicated it in ignorance.)

If you look back through time you can either think linear or curved. Both are accurate. The shorter linear route appears much more recent than the longer curved route.

Oh, and as you can see in the purple box at the beginning of the universe, it started off as a square spiral which clearly demonstrates G-D created the universe as such spirals now don’t exist naturally, or not yet.

Hope that helps.
 
isaacalsop said:
Alright. Ill cut to the cheese. How old is the Earth? Im Catholic, and Ive seen people of all denominations say the earth is 6017 years old, or 13 billion. What stance does the Church hold, if any? If the Church has no stance, what do you think, and why?
Click to expand...
As already expressed - the Church takes no “official” stance on the matter.
For myself I am perfectly comfortable with people holding either view (new earth or old earth).
It makes absolutely no difference at all in my faith walk.

I think that it is one of satan’s little deceits to get people to make it a point of contention. I He does this to drive wedges…

Theologically there are much more important things to discuss.

Peace
James
 
edwest2 said:
"The Time Question

“Much less has been defined as to when the universe, life, and man appeared. The Church has infallibly determined that the universe is of finite age—that it has not existed from all eternity—but it has not infallibly defined whether the world was created only a few thousand years ago or whether it was created several billion years ago.”

Peace,
Ed
Click to expand...
Yet almost every civilisation pre-Christianity had a better and accurate idea about the nature of creation through science and mathematics. Take the Maya. When the Church came promising eternal life or damnation, they believed that Catholics had solved the mathematical and intellectually challenging conundrum of immortality, one of their holy grails. They also believed the Church had identified and proven other planes.

At the same time all their books packed with useful equations were destroyed or taken back to Rome. So the conquered natives lost hundreds of years of painstaking research and knowledge.

As for the stolen texts, if someone did solve a formula for, say, calculating the weather months ahead of time, it would never have been made public. That kind of knowledge is power and profit.

So it is no wonder the Church doesn’t have a view on the age of the universe. It could give the game away.
 
JRKH said:
As already expressed - the Church takes no “official” stance on the matter.
For myself I am perfectly comfortable with people holding either view (new earth or old earth).
It makes absolutely no difference at all in my faith walk.

I think that it is one of satan’s little deceits to get people to make it a point of contention. I He does this to drive wedges…

Theologically there are much more important things to discuss.

Peace
James
Click to expand...
There’s nothing theological about it. I’ve shown you visually the mathematical definition of the universe. If you don’t believe me, to get a rough estimate take the equatorial coordinates of any two planets relative to the moon, apply Pythagoras to each pair and plot one value on the x-axis, the other on the y. Extrapolate backwards using Kepler’s laws for billions of years until it stops/disappears. No metaphysics required. 🙂
 
JRKH said:
As already expressed - the Church takes no “official” stance on the matter.
For myself I am perfectly comfortable with people holding either view (new earth or old earth).
It makes absolutely no difference at all in my faith walk.

I think that it is one of satan’s little deceits to get people to make it a point of contention. I He does this to drive wedges…

Theologically there are much more important things to discuss.

Peace
James
Click to expand...
I agree! Also, there is the encyclical “Humani Generis”, that can explain how to look at certain things in the light of the creation of man. Science will never get in the way of the Lord’s truth.
 
inthespirit said:
Yet almost every civilisation pre-Christianity had a better and accurate idea about the nature of creation through science and mathematics.
Click to expand...
Just because I tend to be technical…

I find such statements as this to be a bit presumptuous…I don’t mean that in a nasty way…we all do it from time to time but really…
How many "Pre-Christian civilizations do we actually know about and what do we actually know about them?
How many “pre-Christian” civilizations might there be that have not been discovered yet?

How does one define that this group is a “civilization” and that group is not?

And so how can anyone then say that “almost every civilization pre-Christianity had a better…”

Certainly I would not dispute the assertion that other civilizations had great knowledge that was, unfortunately, lost through the foolishness of other civilizations - - but I just wonder about expressing the idea in such a way as to make our more recent historical civilizations seem somehow backwards or evil or whatever…🤷

Not trying to pick a fight…Just thinking with my fingers…

Peace
James
 
inthespirit said:
There’s nothing theological about it. I’ve shown you visually the mathematical definition of the universe. If you don’t believe me, to get a rough estimate take the equatorial coordinates of any two planets relative to the moon, apply Pythagoras to each pair and plot one value on the x-axis, the other on the y. Extrapolate backwards using Kepler’s laws for billions of years until it stops/disappears. No metaphysics required. 🙂
Click to expand...
Oh - it has nothing to do with believing you or not…My post was simply in answer to the OP’s question. The age of the earth / universe is basically of complete indifference to me.

Peace
James
 
isaacalsop said:
Alright. Ill cut to the cheese. How old is the Earth? Im Catholic, and Ive seen people of all denominations say the earth is 6017 years old, or 13 billion. What stance does the Church hold, if any? If the Church has no stance, what do you think, and why?
Click to expand...
Just under 6000 years old.
adawgj said:
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. The universe is an estimate 14 billion years
Click to expand...
It is not, I believe the Bible over science. God can create the world in one second if He wants to.
Jon_S said:
The earth is 4.5 billion years old. The Universe is 14 billion years old.

Only Fundamentalist require a 6000 year old earth because they use the Bible as their only book…making it a science textbook when it is not anything of the sort.
Click to expand...
It is not, I believe the Bible over science. God can create the world in one second if He wants to.

I cannot believe you are putting a time constraint on God!
phil_at_dayboro said:
There is far to much evidence to prove the earth is more that 6000 years old…
There is no evidence at all to prove it’s less that 7000 years old …
The universe is over 13 billion years old… End of story
Click to expand...
Where is this evidence? Nowhere!

Read the Bible!
 
Nelka said:
Just under 6000 years old.

It is not, I believe the Bible over science. God can create the world in one second if He wants to.

It is not, I believe the Bible over science. God can create the world in one second if He wants to.

I cannot believe you are putting a time constraint on God!

Read the Bible!
Click to expand...
Show us in the Bible where it states that the world is 6000 years old? 🤷
 
JRKH said:
Just because I tend to be technical…

I find such statements as this to be a bit presumptuous…I don’t mean that in a nasty way…we all do it from time to time but really…
How many "Pre-Christian civilizations do we actually know about and what do we actually know about them?
How many “pre-Christian” civilizations might there be that have not been discovered yet?

How does one define that this group is a “civilization” and that group is not?

And so how can anyone then say that “almost every civilization pre-Christianity had a better…”

Certainly I would not dispute the assertion that other civilizations had great knowledge that was, unfortunately, lost through the foolishness of other civilizations - - but I just wonder about expressing the idea in such a way as to make our more recent historical civilizations seem somehow backwards or evil or whatever…🤷

Not trying to pick a fight…Just thinking with my fingers…

Peace
James
Click to expand...
Here is a sample. Find any of these symbols in a culture and they had ‘the wisdom’ of pure logic and mathematics, perfected over the centuries, which they applied to the world around them. The snake is actually a sine wave in cartesian space. The spiral derives from the function Atan when graphed using polar coordinates. (Linear and curved space examples) If you look carefully at hundreds of glyphs and symbols you will see that the graphed curves are used to represent their functions. Oh, and half a circle or moon shape represents pi to at least five decimal places.

As for our civilisation, yep we are actually pretty backwards when it comes to understanding our environment. We have decided that the weather is chaotic. That is nonsense. We are trying to define matter, time and space in 11 dimensions with string theory. Rubbish. Relativity: doesn’t permit linear and curved time coexisting. Expansion: nope, the universe is like a train running in a tunnel. Gravity: doesn’t permit gravitational waves on Earth. and insists that the effect of gravity diminishes the further away you are. Nah. Speed of light? It’s only constant in linear space and time, not curved.

And all this fantastic physics fails to reconcile with and tries to contradict the existence of G-D. Most of the theology tries to agree with our science and so now G-D is said to be outside time and space like Dr Who, and a multi-planar metaphysical being impossible to prove. The pre-Christian era saw none of that. It all fitted together perfectly, as you have seen.

Still, we are not able to blow the planet up which is a blessing, I suppose. We can’t even have an impact on the weather.
 
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