Why didnt Jesus give us any NEW information before we discovered it ourselves? Using the History of Science this article demonstrates a reasonable doubt about the idea that Jesus adapted his teaching to suit humans. While I don't think there is actually a theory called "Adaption Theory", there should be to encapsulate this idea that the ancients were not sophisticated enough to handle the truth. All of the characters in the bible had contemporaries in science. This article lists the more famous ones, briefly describes what they did and provides a link to more information about them. I rushed to get this out in support of Johns article The Accomodation Theory of the Bible.
Did you ever wonder why there is no mention of any of the Ice Ages in the Bible? They took so much time to detail the parameters of the ark but didn't spend a word on "there was time when the world was frozen, and the melting ice caused the flood!". It would not have made it any more true, but it would have made it more plausible and hard to deny.
Did you ever wonder why a God on Earth wouldn't allot some time to write anything down?
Pythagoras, not a prophet, just a sinner, is reportedly to have said "numbers are the essence of things" at least 500 years before Jesus and a thousand years before Mohammad. This appears to be true since many discoveries about nature occurred through mathematics. If Jesus had given us a clue about the concept of Zero (discovered by Ptolemy about 130 ad, then rediscovered between 598 - 876) we may have been able to develop more quickly in terms of technology and intellect. Many medical, charitable, evangelical (etc..) organizations greatly benefit from technology enabled by mathematics that use zero. Jesus could have busted many incorrectly held beliefs that could have been empirically verified through the ages.
Jesus could have given us Ptolemies Tables before Ptolemy (140ce) or got the jump on Dioscorides (50ce) and wrote a little something about pharmacology. Jesus could have told us that the world is not flat and that the stars are not rooted in a dome over the earth. Eratosthenes (240 bc) proved the world was not flat and Tyco Brahe (1577) proved there were no domes around the earth. If these had come from divine revelation from a prophet, just think how much this fact would support a belief in Jesus.
Instead Zero came from the Hindus and Algebra came from the Muslims (generally speaking) and Jesus apparently erroneously predicted his return before all his apostles died (Mt. 16:28).
Jesus could have told us about the earths water cycle, precipitation, how to build better materials, how to improve sanitation, how to handle infections better, how to do agriculture better, that God doesn't live in the clouds, etc. Jesus should have come as the engineer/leader/politician type anticipated by the Jews. He could have changed the face of politics forever.
Jesus could have told us about the Fibonacci series in Nature, Quantum Mechanics (1900), the Chaos theory (1903) that there is energy stored in matter (1905), Jesus could have told us that randomness in a closed system, much like what can be demonstrated by running a 'chaos theory' program on a computer, is common in nature. Jesus could have told us about Evolution (1859).
Jesus could have prevented or corrected the errors in the old testament regarding the flat earth and the domed sky, or the fact that anything with wings (Lev.11:23), that is not mythical, does not have four legs or the Pi is not three, or all the other ones listed here at this site. Even Jesus philosophy of reciprocity or "the golden rule" first appeared in "The tale of the Eloquent Peasant" between 1670 - 1640s BC, a good four hundred years before it was attributed to Moses.
I know that scripture are not history or science treatise, but heck, even Dan Brown gets facts about the world he lives in correct and scientists make predictions that get verified all the time and they are just a human.
Here's a list of People that added new information to the world that were, more or less, contemporaries of Moses, Jesus and Mohammad
- BCE 3000 Astronomy Egyptians, Babylonians and Chinese
- BCE 530 Pythagorus - Pythagorean theorem
- BCE 350 Aristotle - Started biological classifications for animals, founded western philosophy.
- BCE 320 Theophrastus - Started botanical science
- BCE 300 Euclid - "Father of Geometry"
- BCE 260 Archimedes - Inventor and discoverer of Priciples of Density and Buonancy.
- BCE 240 Eratosthenes - Proved the world was round, first to calculate the size of it.
- BCE 134 Hipparchus - Developed accurate models of motion for sun and moon
- CE 50 Dioscorides - Wrote the first five books that started Pharmacology
- CE 140 Ptolemy - Discovered methods to model the solar system and map the Earth.
- CE 180 Galen - Set the standard for Modern medicine
- CE 876 Brahmagupta - Discovered Zero, the most important discovery in mathematics.
Why doesn't God give his religious leaders or scientists verifiable revelations?
There's no time like the present! Here's a list of past and present from Wikipedia but I'm sure you know some more that I missed.
- List of Christian Thinkers in Science
- List of Muslim Scientists
As far as I know, not one of them has said "God gave me a revelation when I was praying one day. It had nothing to do with dedicating a large portion of my life to research. Here's the proof, you can verify it for yourselves."
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