Although it is generally known that skeletal remains and fossils give us a much older date for the existance of humans, do JWs still take the bible's cronology as literal fact?
Mile 0
? for dubs re age of human race
by Mile 0 9 Replies latest jw friends
-
-
badboy
YES,THEY DO.
-
Mile 0
You would think that in this age of information and discovery that some of the regular dubs must secretly be thinking for themselves stuff that they wouldn't take literally anymore. But then, that would bring up the issue of whether the org is "spirit directed", or whatever term is currently fashionable.
Mile 0
-
Euphemism
Yeah, that really troubled me as a Witness. I generally argued that any hominid fossils must either be misidentified--i.e. they were actually non-human apes--or else misdated--i.e. they were actually less than 6,000 years old. The only way I maintained those positions was by avoiding digging into the specifics of those fossils.
What I found even harder to deal with was the evidence of civilization shortly after the flood. The Egyptian regnal chronology goes back to ~3000 BC; I remember reading in Awake (of all places) about an Indian civilization with similar dating.
However, I didn't seriously question the creation or flood doctrines until after I questioned the Watchtower. I know people for whom the process worked in reverse, however.
-
moshe
Otzi the ice man who was found frozen in ice in the Italian Alps over 10 years ago and was carbon-14 dated to have died 5300 years ago. He would have been a contemporary of Noah and Methuselah. Does he look like someone who had the technology to build a huge Ark? The real paradox is how Otzi died and was frozen in ice before the Global flood of Noah, yet the 40 days of rain never melted the ice or washed the body away. If modern men lived 20,000 or more years ago as evidence suggets, then that could be a problem for some people's religious faith.
-
stillajwexelder
Actually they are softening their viewpoint. they once taught Earth was made in 7 x 7000 year days and that the earth was about 49000 years old. they no longer teach that. They now allow for the fact that earth may well be much older. The move away from 1935 also suggest they are slowly softening on dates.
-
bigmouth
For years carbon dated was maligned in the WT for being grossly inaccurate.
As good Witnesses we never bothered to check if this was so. And as Watching The World in the Awake! reported the latest dating of a fossil being cut from 40 billion years to 38 billion years we would all cheer and say that soon they'll admit that they were only a few thousand years old! -
Hortensia
moshe, I never thought of that - of course JWs would say the ice man was from a more recent period or something like that, they always have an answer now matter how ridiculous. I remember my mother getting quite irate about the gorilla who could use sign language. My mother said, in spite of the evidence right in front of her on television, that it could never happen because god gave man dominion over the animals. My mother was a nice woman, and intelligent, so I always wondered about this kind of logic...just crazy.
-
garybuss
Reasoning From The Scriptures 1989 p. 88 Creation
Was all physical creation accomplished in just six days sometime within the past 6,000 to 10,000 years?
The facts disagree with such a conclusion: (1) Light from the Andromeda nebula can be seen on a clear night in the northern hemisphere. It takes about 2,000,000 years for that light to reach the earth, indicating that the universe must be at least millions of years old. (2) End products of radioactive decay in rocks in the earth testify that some rock formations have been undisturbed for billions of years.
*********************
"Consider the relationship between Jehovah and Jesus. They were together in heaven for perhaps billions of years."
The Watchtower, August 15, 2005
Page 27, Paragraph 15 -
gaiagirl
Poor Otzi, closer examination of his body have revealed that he has an arrow wound, which may have been a mortal wound, as it looks as if it could have penetrated a lung. This raises the question "Why was someone else angry enough at him to kill him"? Was he an escaped prisoner, or someone from one tribe trespassing on the lands of another? Did he try to run away with someones daughter, only to be caught and killed on the spot? I remember seeing an exhibit in a museum in Texas which showed native Americans who had lived in that region for something like 12,000 years, the age confirmed not only with radiometric means, but by dendrochronology (tree rings). There is a JW and another evangelistic Christian where I work, and they both believe in a human race only 6,000 years or so old. The last time they brought it up, I said, "OK, perhaps your Adam DID live 6000 years ago. However, my people are not descended from him, but were already living in Nod. You may have read about Adams son, Cain, who travelled to our land and married one of our people?"
