M-------

I'm not smart

I'm assuming that no one will ever read this, but here it goes.

(Commence rambling about stuff that I don't understand and should really not bother stinking my nose into because I'm not smart enough.)

In an attempt to reconcile the certain views of Christianity and Science.

One can obviously declare that they cannot both be true, and choose one to deny, but it seems much more challenging (fun) to try to find out where they overlap, and intertwine.

The first option is that the passages that mention the universe being created in six days is not a literal six days, but a figurative six days, such as to say a day is like a thousand years (II Peter 3:8). Again, this seems to me like the easy way out.

More challenging: Let's looks at time in a different way.

What about the theory of relativity? Or maybe I should say what about Galilean invariance?

Bear with me on this.

Q: How do we measure days?
A: The Sun

Q: When was the sun created according to scripture?
A: On the 4th day.

Q: That means 3 days went by before there was a sun, which is the thing we use to measure days, right?
A: You just blew my freaking mind.

Okay, seriously I have a point to make, and I'm almost sure what it is.

My point = Those first 3 days were pretty wacky.

Let me try again... Okay, this is an example that helps me to reconcile my understanding of the scriptural account of creation and the scientific view.

Imagine this:

If you were able to step back and watch what was happening on the first few days of the existence of the universe. I think it would be a lot like this:

Imagine spending six full days watching a movie that goes on non stop for 24 hours every day. That is, measured in our time, 24 literal hours. Not a metaphor.

But the first day, the movie is in fast forward to the extreme. Our eyes would not distinguish one image to the next. It would all just look like light.

Then the second day, it would still be in fast forward, but slowed down just a little. You would be able to see flashes of things going by, making out vague shapes perhaps, but mostly indistinguishable.

The third day, it's a little slower. You can finally start to see images, but the images are shooting by so fast it all seems random and disjointed.

As the days go by, the movie would get a little slower, and a little slower. You would begin to see things you recognize, but it would all appear to be happening much faster than normal. It would be like watching time-lapse photography, but every day, the time that elapses is less and less.

This means one day you would be able to watch the continents break apart and drift away and mountains forming etc., but a few days later it might be slowed down so that you would be able to distinguish animals birth, life and death in what seems to be a matter of seconds, until finally it slowed down to a ratio of 1 to 1. Time would be back to what we would call normal.

Now, imagine that you wanted to look back at how much film you have watched. It would be very very hard to answer that question.

Q: How much film have you watched?
A: It's hard to say.

You could say, "I've watched six days worth" and that would be true, in a certain way of understanding.

But if you looked backward to the amount of film which had wound up on the projector reel, it would look like much more that six days worth.

I'm saying, and i think this is putting it concisely and clearly enough,

Maybe the scriptural account was from the guy watching the movie, and the scientific account was from the guy looking at the amount of film wound up on the projector reel. Neither one is a metaphor. Both are literally true.

Maybe they look different, but they're not.

- posted by Alan @ 6:34 PM

Using gaming hardware for video editing!!

I was just working on some digital video editing in Adobe Premiere, when my hand accidentally bumped the joystick on my Saitek gaming keypad, which was sitting closeby. When I did, the video advanced forward by a frame. And it just dawned on me that I can use my gaming keypad for video editing! After using the dang thing for gaming for who knows how long, it was like a light turned on! I quickly programmed the joystick to work as a jog/shuttle. Left & right plays the video in forward or reverse, playing faster each time you press that direction. Up & down advances the frame forward or backward. And I have other keys which pause or unpause, cut or select clips, advance to the next or previous edit points and all sorts of other stuff. Soon enough, I had it up and running! It feels almost like using the editing hardware in the edit bays when I was working at the news studio. I don't know why I hadn't thought of doing this before.

- posted by Alan @ 12:19 AM