Genesis Creation

[The Anointed]

Post #60 continued.

According to the Genesis narrative, it is on the second day that the Lord calls for a "firmament" to be in the "midst of the waters" to divide the waters:

"And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under (or within) the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day." (Genesis 1:6-8 KJV)

The term "firmament" according to the Creation account, is taken from the Hebrew: רָקִיעַ raqiya` raw-kee'-ah, which is defined by many scholars as an expanse, or the visible arch of the sky:—firmament, but a primitive root; “רָקַע raqa` raw-kah” means, to pound, hammer, to overlay (with thin sheets of metal):—beat, make broad, spread abroad (forth, over, out, into plates), stamp, stretch.

The creation of the firmament is associated with the placement of some sort of structure, and in some modern Bibles many modern scholars translate the Hebrew word raqia as a "dome" or "vault". The Hebrew language appears to imply that the firmament is a firm, fixed structure (FIRMament, which can now be seen as the spherical cloud of comets (Icy vault) in which our solar system was created from the solar nebula cloud that was divided from the greater galactic nebula cloud.

Unlike the orbits of the planets and the Kuiper Belt, which are pretty flat like a disk, the Oort Cloud is a spherical shell surrounding everything in our solar system. It's like a bubble with a thick shell. The Oort Cloud is made up of icy pieces of space debris.

"And God said, “Let there be lights within the firmament or vault to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also."

(Genesis 1:14-16 KJV) This verse says that the Sun, Moon, and Stars=planets of our solar system, are "within" the firmament. Therefore, the waters that are "above the firmament=dome/vault" must be above the Sun, Moon and Stars=planets of our solar system, revealing that the waters which are referred to in Psalms 148:4; "Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that [be] above the heavens," belong to the greater galactic nebula cloud which has become our Milky Way Galaxy.

The Oort cloud, or the Opik-Oort cloud, which is named after Jan Oort, is a spherical cloud that surrounds our solar system, a cloud of predominantly icy objects such as comets that are comprised of mainly hydrogen, oxygen=water, ammonia and methane, and extends up to about a light year from the sun and defines the cosmographical boundary of our Solar System and the region of the suns gravitational dominance. Here is the Firmament, the great spherical vault within which is found the sun, moons and planets of our solar system, the dome of ice above us.

Knowing that the planets of our solar system were already created before the actual sun came into existence when the hydrogen nuclei within the condensing solar cloud started fusing together to produce helium nuclei and a lot of energy thereby creating our sun, we must now ask the question, “Did life on earth begin to evolve before the creation of the sun?” As is recorded in the Bible. And can life exist without actual sunlight? Proof of this is to be found in the darkest depths of our oceans, where life has evolved around the extremely hot and noxious gas vents over six miles beneath the surface where sunlight does not and cannot penetrate.

 

[Polymath257]

How about a little mental exercise? What model would you come up with if the only tool you had was your eyes? Seriously, try to sit down and draw the universe without resorting to anything you've learned from our modern science. Not very easy, is it? Come on, give at least some credit to the ancients for having come up with a model that fit their observations.

Probably one close to that of Eudoxus, which was a precursor to that of Ptolemy. And, of course, Ptolemy's system was based solely on observations with eyes only.

It isn't too difficult with eyes only to figure out that the Earth isn't flat. That can be seen when there is a lunar eclipse and those happen often enough to give at least that much information. What we now know as the rotation of the Earth shows up as the motion of the sun and stars across the sky to reappear the next day or night.

Again, it is easy enough to see that the moon's phase has to do with the angle from the sun and that both the sun and the moon move with respect to the stars, which stay in the same relative positions in the sky. The cyclical nature of both the movement of the moon and that of the sun have been very apparent since ancient times and probably before there was writing.

That *does* suggest a background dome on which the stars are placed with the sun, moon, and planets moving in front of that dome. How to deal with the specific motion of the planets against that background would be the main sticking point (which, by the way, it was for Ptolemy).

To get to a heliocentric model as opposed to a geocentric model is very tricky without a telescope to give some extra information. One big clue is the brightness of Venus, but the phases of Venus aren't visible without a telescope, so that doesn't go a long way. Another is the retrograde motion of the planets in the sky, but with the accuracy possible with only naked eye observation, there are other systems that work reasonably well.

As far as the Bible goes, the flat Earth surrounded by ocean and under a sky dome is certainly less sophisticated than a reasonably intelligent observer with eyes only could make.

 

[robocop (actually)]

The creation story of Genesis is often used as "proof" that the Bible is false. Of course it is true that the universe is constructed in a way that is not even close to what is said in Genesis. But is it reasonable to think that God should have told the people about atoms, leptons, quarks, space-time continuum, conservation of energy, etc.? Personally, I think it highly unreasonable to think that way.

The structure of the universe as described in Genesis is much the same as all other ancient Near East concepts of the universe.

View attachment 49075

Looking at this image, it is obvious that it is not an accurate representation of the actual universe. That can not be denied. But, few consider the effect this has on the overall message of the scriptures. That would be none, zero, zip, nada!

Very few people, and I mean VERY few, even know what the scriptures are about. Just Google, "what is the Bible about" for many different answers. But if one want to really know what it is about, they need read nothing more than the Gospel Luke or John.

Luke 24:27,

And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.​

John 5:39,

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.
​

The scriptures are about Jesus Christ. They are not meant to be a science book. God's only goal in life after Adam and Eve screwed up was to send a redeemer. He had to convince humans to believe the things He said about the coming Messiah. That was all He cared to communicate. He didn't care if Israel knew and understood the intricacies of cosmology as we know them today. Such knowledge was totally irrelevant to the message He wanted to proclaim.

Since Israel was surrounded by the other ancient Near East people, there was no reason to complicate the message by introducing our modern concepts of cosmology. It didn't detract from the message one bit to just let Israel think the same way as the rest of the ancient Near East people. There is simply no way they could have understood what we know today. Why gum up the message with irrelevant information that they never could have understood anyway?

Since God could not really explain the truth of cosmology, and since it didn't matter one whit anyway, He just wisely let them believe what they believed concerning the structure of the universe. It was a moot point.

To those who insist that Genesis must conform to our modern science, I would issue a challenge to come up with the curriculum that would have "enlightened" the ancient Near East on how the world came to be and the structure of the universe.

On a related note, lately I've been seeing a lot of scientific news about radically new ideas on how the universe came to be. Old universally accepted ideas of cosmology and cosmogony are being questioned in light of these new observations. Could it be that 3,000 years from now our image of the universe will appear as quaint and gullible to the then modern scientist as that of the ancient Near East appears to the scientists of today?

Who gave you the authority to know that that picture doesn't somehow represent reality?

 

[Tiberius]

But is it reasonable to think that God should have told the people about atoms, leptons, quarks, space-time continuum, conservation of energy, etc.? Personally, I think it highly unreasonable to think that way.

I don't see why not. There are plenty of ways God could have given those primitive people scientific knowledge that they could not possibly have known about, and in a way that clearly and unambiguously describes it. For example:

And the Earth moved in a great circle around the sun, held in place by the sun's mass. And the circle was not perfect, but was longer in one direction than the perpendicular, and the passage of the Earth swept out equal areas in equal times. And the sun shone with the light of its tiniest parts coming together.​

It describes very nicely the following facts:

1. the Earth has an elliptical orbit
2. the sun's mass giving it gravity
3. Kepler's second law of planetary motion
4. the sun glows because of nuclear fusion.

There is no way for people living a thousand years ago to know any of this stuff. And it is written in simple language that people back then could have understood.

But we don't ever see anything like this. Every passage in the Bible is something that could have been written by people at the time, and any claims that a passage conveys some scientific information that was not known back then rely on the passage being so vague that it can be interpreted to mean whatever the reader wants.

 

[darkskies]

God's only goal in life after Adam and Eve screwed up was to send a redeemer.

Just as the universe has been shown to be different from the one in Genesis, humans have been shown to have evolved and not been created. I suggest you look into that as well.

 

[Heyo]

While true they didn't have atom smashers and telescopes, they did have eyes. With those eyes they observed nature and came up with a model that fit their observations. I suppose they could have come up with some other model, but it would never have been like our modern day model.

How about a little mental exercise? What model would you come up with if the only tool you had was your eyes? Seriously, try to sit down and draw the universe without resorting to anything you've learned from our modern science. Not very easy, is it? Come on, give at least some credit to the ancients for having come up with a model that fit their observations.

I did give credit to the ancients by mentioning Eratosthenes. He calculated the circumference of the earth within 1% of what we today know it to be. And he had the same tools as the authors of Genesis, his eyes and his brain. (He might have had a slightly bigger brain than the authors of Genesis.)
Also in the 3rd century BC was Aristarchos of Samos, the first person we know of to propose a heliocentric model. Already in the 4th century BC Heraclides explained that a rotating Earth would lead to the same observations as the seeming motion of space around Earth.
You see that, given a little effort, people could come up with scientific views and some did. Others made **** up, proclaimed it was revealed to them by the gods and fooled the (dumb) public for centuries.
Thought exercise: imagine where we would be if we had followed the scientific method of the Greeks instead of the "just believe" method of the Semites.

 

[joelr]

The creation story of Genesis is often used as "proof" that the Bible is false. Of course it is true that the universe is constructed in a way that is not even close to what is said in Genesis. But is it reasonable to think that God should have told the people about atoms, leptons, quarks, space-time continuum, conservation of energy, etc.? Personally, I think it highly unreasonable to think that way.

The structure of the universe as described in Genesis is much the same as all other ancient Near East concepts of the universe.

View attachment 49075

Looking at this image, it is obvious that it is not an accurate representation of the actual universe. That can not be denied. But, few consider the effect this has on the overall message of the scriptures. That would be none, zero, zip, nada!

Very few people, and I mean VERY few, even know what the scriptures are about. Just Google, "what is the Bible about" for many different answers. But if one want to really know what it is about, they need read nothing more than the Gospel Luke or John.

Luke 24:27,

And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.​

John 5:39,

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.
​

The scriptures are about Jesus Christ. They are not meant to be a science book. God's only goal in life after Adam and Eve screwed up was to send a redeemer. He had to convince humans to believe the things He said about the coming Messiah. That was all He cared to communicate. He didn't care if Israel knew and understood the intricacies of cosmology as we know them today. Such knowledge was totally irrelevant to the message He wanted to proclaim.

Since Israel was surrounded by the other ancient Near East people, there was no reason to complicate the message by introducing our modern concepts of cosmology. It didn't detract from the message one bit to just let Israel think the same way as the rest of the ancient Near East people. There is simply no way they could have understood what we know today. Why gum up the message with irrelevant information that they never could have understood anyway?

Since God could not really explain the truth of cosmology, and since it didn't matter one whit anyway, He just wisely let them believe what they believed concerning the structure of the universe. It was a moot point.

To those who insist that Genesis must conform to our modern science, I would issue a challenge to come up with the curriculum that would have "enlightened" the ancient Near East on how the world came to be and the structure of the universe.

On a related note, lately I've been seeing a lot of scientific news about radically new ideas on how the universe came to be. Old universally accepted ideas of cosmology and cosmogony are being questioned in light of these new observations. Could it be that 3,000 years from now our image of the universe will appear as quaint and gullible to the then modern scientist as that of the ancient Near East appears to the scientists of today?

You are jumping around here. It's not that Genesis has to be accurate it's that it follows the 2 Mesopotamian creation myths and the flood story is an extremely close copy of the Epic of Gilamesh. Later ideas about afterlife and such are believed to have come from Hellenistic and Persian sources. Even the beginning books in the OT are shown to be adaptations of Canaanite mythology:
Israelite Religion

"Israelite religion, like Israel’s languageand culture, is a child of the Canaanite or West Semitic world"

"The tripartite hierarchy of the divine world—Yahweh,the Sons of God or Heavenly Host, and the angels—derivesfrom the earlier structure of Canaanite religion. "

Even Adam and Eve can be found in the religion of the Persians along with world messiahs who were virgin born and will save humanity, resurrection of the dead and all sorts of other concepts that were added while the Persians occupied Israel. So you can say the cosmology doesn't need to be exact (an apologetics excuse) the facts show this is all shared myths. Archeology shows very little in the OT actually happened as it claimed to as well.

Jumping ahead to the NT is an entirely different set of religious syncretism from Persian and many earlier mystery religions. The OT is not about Jesus, no Jewish scholar would ever say that and the gospels are obvious fiction using every mythic device possible, are not eyewitness accounts and not written independant of each other.

 

[Samael_Khan]

I guess it takes a fair bit of power to raise the dead.

Power is relative though isnt it? For instance humans have the power to do all sorts of things that other creatures cannot.

 

[YoursTrue]

Power is relative though isnt it? For instance humans have the power to do all sorts of things that other creatures cannot.

uh oh--you're getting into difficult territory there. I can only imagine that someone will say, "Ants can do things that humans cannot." (Well, with that in mind, so can bonobos.)

 

[YoursTrue]

While true they didn't have atom smashers and telescopes, they did have eyes. With those eyes they observed nature and came up with a model that fit their observations. I suppose they could have come up with some other model, but it would never have been like our modern day model.

How about a little mental exercise? What model would you come up with if the only tool you had was your eyes? Seriously, try to sit down and draw the universe without resorting to anything you've learned from our modern science. Not very easy, is it? Come on, give at least some credit to the ancients for having come up with a model that fit their observations.

I was thinking about the universe lately, due to these types of conversations. And the Bible says, (1 Corinthians 15:41)
Contemporary English Version
"The sun isn't like the moon, the moon isn't like the stars, and each star is different."
(A more literal translation says)
Douay-Rheims Bible
"One is the glory of the sun, another the glory of the moon, and another the glory of the stars. For star differeth from star in glory."

So especially when it says that star differs from star in glory, how did the Bible writer know that? While heavenly bodies may look somewhat similar to our eye as we look into the sky, substance and topography is different. As it is written, the sun is one type of substance, the moon another, the stars differ one from the other.

 

[YoursTrue]

According to the best theory we have today as to the origin of this generation of the universe, it was some 14 billion years ago, that an immense explosion, known as the Big Bang, spewed out massive amounts of liquid like electromagnetic energy in the trillions and trillions of degrees, creating a rapidly expanding universe.
...

Of course that is a theory. Similar to evolution. The universe is there. How it really got there is a matter of wonder and conjecture. I personally believe God made the universe. Similar it is to humans and other forms of life. People figure evolution (like the 'big bang') just happened to come about somehow (without a God).

 

[YoursTrue]

The creation story of Genesis is often used as "proof" that the Bible is false. Of course it is true that the universe is constructed in a way that is not even close to what is said in Genesis. But is it reasonable to think that God should have told the people about atoms, leptons, quarks, space-time continuum, conservation of energy, etc.? Personally, I think it highly unreasonable to think that way.

The structure of the universe as described in Genesis is much the same as all other ancient Near East concepts of the universe.

View attachment 49075

Looking at this image, it is obvious that it is not an accurate representation of the actual universe. That can not be denied. But, few consider the effect this has on the overall message of the scriptures. That would be none, zero, zip, nada!

Very few people, and I mean VERY few, even know what the scriptures are about. Just Google, "what is the Bible about" for many different answers. But if one want to really know what it is about, they need read nothing more than the Gospel Luke or John.

Luke 24:27,

And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.​

John 5:39,

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.
​

The scriptures are about Jesus Christ. They are not meant to be a science book. God's only goal in life after Adam and Eve screwed up was to send a redeemer. He had to convince humans to believe the things He said about the coming Messiah. That was all He cared to communicate. He didn't care if Israel knew and understood the intricacies of cosmology as we know them today. Such knowledge was totally irrelevant to the message He wanted to proclaim.

Since Israel was surrounded by the other ancient Near East people, there was no reason to complicate the message by introducing our modern concepts of cosmology. It didn't detract from the message one bit to just let Israel think the same way as the rest of the ancient Near East people. There is simply no way they could have understood what we know today. Why gum up the message with irrelevant information that they never could have understood anyway?

Since God could not really explain the truth of cosmology, and since it didn't matter one whit anyway, He just wisely let them believe what they believed concerning the structure of the universe. It was a moot point.

To those who insist that Genesis must conform to our modern science, I would issue a challenge to come up with the curriculum that would have "enlightened" the ancient Near East on how the world came to be and the structure of the universe.

On a related note, lately I've been seeing a lot of scientific news about radically new ideas on how the universe came to be. Old universally accepted ideas of cosmology and cosmogony are being questioned in light of these new observations. Could it be that 3,000 years from now our image of the universe will appear as quaint and gullible to the then modern scientist as that of the ancient Near East appears to the scientists of today?

Yes, the Bible is not meant to be a science book. Which makes me think that one day humans will be able to have wonder and a good time exploring the makings of things. In peace, harmony, and happiness. True beneficial and astounding science. What child doesn't like to explore things? How much fun did we have going through a maze and finding the way out. Or doing puzzles. Imagine how scientists were happy when they came up with a successful vaccine. So imagine doing wonderfully 'scientific' and creative explorations.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 - English Standard Version
He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

 

[Heyo]

To get to a heliocentric model as opposed to a geocentric model is very tricky without a telescope to give some extra information. One big clue is the brightness of Venus, but the phases of Venus aren't visible without a telescope, so that doesn't go a long way.

What can be easily viewed without a telescope is that Mercury and Venus are never seen a certain degree from the sun. Which makes it logical to believe that at least those revolve around the sun (as Heraclides did).

 

[Thief]

Genesis is literal
just badly written

 

[Samael_Khan]

uh oh--you're getting into difficult territory there. I can only imagine that someone will say, "Ants can do things that humans cannot." (Well, with that in mind, so can bonobos.)

And that is a good point as well. For instance, what can humans do that God cannot? And that puts the whole idea of omnipotence in perspective.

 

[ChristineM]

Power is relative though isnt it? For instance humans have the power to do all sorts of things that other creatures cannot.

That is not particularly power but ability. I see power as energy expended over time

 

[thomas t]

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
― Douglas Adams

that's a funny theory.
Thank you for posting it.
In case it means that anyone could come up with any theory claiming that the universe just disappeared, let me just refer to this one:
The OP just said that

it is obvious that [Genesis 1] is not an accurate representation of the actual universe.

...
I was just criticising that this is what one would expect anyway if reading the Bible.
For Genesis 1 did not present a representation of the current edition of planet earth, according to the Bible. For Genesis 1 needs to be put in lights of 2 Peter in order to get the whole picture of how the Bible sees creation.
So if Bible teaches that the earthes changed, it is exactly what the quote from your theory was about.
This is what Bible actually says.

In any case, how does the truth of the first heaven and earth perishing have any bearing on my original post? Everything I said is based on this, the current, earth as described in Genesis.

The first heaven and earth perished already, as 2 Peter 3:5-6 says.
The perishing happened already during the flood. Hence, the current earth is not the one that Genesis was describing according to Peter.

 

[Left Coast]

RE: Adam and Eve

In the OP I proposed that the subject of the scriptures is Jesus Christ. I gave a couple of verses there.

More specifically, the entire book, from Genesis 3:15 onward, was given so that the man who was to be born as the redeemer, i.e. Jesus Christ, would know both who he was, i.e. God's only begotten son, as well as what he needed to do to redeem mankind from sin (dysfunctional behavior) and it's resultant death. They were Jesus' instruction books.

This is fascinating. So Jesus did not originally know he was God's only begotten son, he learned it from reading the Tanakh? Where in the Tanakh did he read that?

However, there is one huge difference in the Genesis account of creation than all the other ancient texts. It is only in Genesis that we are told that God existed apart from the creation. All others say things like, "god rose up from the deep." That means the deep existed before their god. The scriptures declare that Yahweh existed before the deep, that He Himself created the deep from which sprang all else.

The fascinating thing is, the text in Genesis 1 actually does not say that.

 

[Tiberius]

Genesis is literal
just badly written

How is that supposed to work?

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

How about a little mental exercise? What model would you come up with if the only tool you had was your eyes? Seriously, try to sit down and draw the universe without resorting to anything you've learned from our modern science. Not very easy, is it? Come on, give at least some credit to the ancients for having come up with a model that fit their observations.

Your expectations for your god are very low. Sure, the world appears flat, fixed and immovable, with the sun and stars orbiting it fixed in a dome that leaks rain which is why such a cosmology bears the fingerprints of man, not a deity. At the same time that believers are saying or implying that the biblical text is the word of a divinity and fit to base one's life on, they explain to us why that scripture looks just like human beings wrote it. You can't have it both ways. Either this book is a unique collection of thoughts and instructions from a transcendent mind and worthy of my study, or its just the impressions of people that didn't know where the rain came from or what a star is. If it's the latter, just put it in the pile with all of the other creation myths. Here's another one that's also wrong, but fit the naive expectations of primitive people (Sumerians):

• "The mighty Marduk took his club and split Tiamat’s body in half. He placed half of her body in the sky and made the heavens [space]. He created the moon to guard the heavens, and set it moving back and forth, on endless [time] patrol [energy]. With the other half of Tiamat's body he made the land [matter].”

Why do you suppose that cosmological model you presented was any better than that? How about another from the Vikings? Why is the snow globe model from the Christian Bible better than this one? Would you base your life on the words of a book that contained this? :

• "Odin, Vili, and Vé killed the giant Ymir. The sons of Bor then ... made the world from him. From his blood they made the sea and the lakes; from his flesh the earth; from his hair the trees; and from his bones the mountains. They made rocks and pebbles from his teeth and jaws and those bones that were broken. Maggots appeared in Ymir's flesh and came to life. By the decree of the gods they acquired human understanding and the appearance of men, although they lived in the earth and in rocks. From Ymir's skull the sons of Bor made the sky ... The sons of Bor flung Ymir's brains into the air, and they became the clouds. Then they took the sparks and burning embers that were flying about after they had been blown out of Muspell, and placed them in the midst of Ginnungagap to give light to heaven above and earth beneath. To the stars they gave appointed places and paths."

Genesis was perfectly accurate to the people to whom it was actually given.

I don't think you know what accurate means. Genesis is wrong, not accurate. To consider it accurate is to be wrong yourself. If that's what you mean, once again, I have a higher standard, although I understand that you consider it arrogant for me to hole a god to any standard.

A god would do better? That's a huge assumption. Not much different that believing God created Adam and Eve.

I have standards for entities I'm willing to call a god. This vexes the believer, who is forced to defend the low standards for a god his scriptures offer, and call the skeptic too picky.

Well I could use any number of ancient texts, secular or religious, to point out your arrogance in describing some of the most successful societies of all time as having a child like bronze age mind, but I won't....ooops....I guess I kinda did... No offense intended

Of course offense was intended. This is how the believer who believes he is instructed to be kind and charitable to others but just doesn't want to be attacks his critic. Then says, "Aw shucks, I was just kidding (smiley face). Where's your sense of humor?"

No problem. I don't require of you what you believe your god does. You're good with me.

God is not limiting you. You are limiting Him.

No, you are limiting your god with your low expectations for it. I am limiting what I will accept as as a depiction of a god.

Unlike the average Sumerian, I was able to attend Georgia Tech. But then if it weren't for the "ignorant" ancient Middle Easterner coming up with, oh, say something like metalurgy, then poor 'ol GA Tech would never have seen the results of an atom smashing and then I'd still think like the old way.

So you think your education at Georgia Tech was necessary to understand the science I proposed for scripture, such as the one about scientific cosmogenesis for cave men, or the one about antibiotics for goatherds? : " If thou groweth a particular mold and collect its discharges, they can be used to correct fever with pus, which is caused by tiny beings too small for you to see, but capable of causing death, and susceptible to the mold discharge."

Do you think that you needed a college education to understand that? I don't. You might need a formal education to come up with it, but not to understand it, and it would serve as notice of a superhuman intelligence better than any other biblical prophecy, better than any show of walking on water or turning into wine.

You're willing to dismiss the evidence that allows the impartial critical thinker to realize that scripture are the words of ordinary men with excuses for this god, such as, 'Look at what it had to try to speak to, people that hadn't been to Georgia Tech yet and thus not able to understand more than the snow globe cosmology memorializing the illusion of living on a flat, fixed, immovable earth with moving celestial objects overhead.' This is apologetics, the creative act of trying to make up down and black white, of excusing the flaws in scripture to try to defend the claim that the god is perfect, and any apparent defects in its description aren't really defects after all. Oh, and if someone thinks otherwise, they are arrogant.