How much is a billion – or 4 billion, and does that represent the age of the Earth? See the scientific data that may convince you otherwise.
That’s a Fact – Measuring Billions from Institute for Creation Research on Vimeo.
Month: October 2011
Is it irrational to disbelieve evolution? It depends on the kind of evolution you’re talking about. Obviously we see creatures changing and adapting all the time. Yet, can we extend that deep into the past to infer molecules-to-man evolution? Science tells us we cannot.
Categories
The Nature of Science
When we hear the charge that creationists are “anti-science,” it’s important to make a distinction between science that’s based on repeatable, observable phenomena in the present verses making inferences into the past with limited clues. When looking at history, we must look to documents and eyewitness accounts to help us piece it together. One collection of observations exists in what we know of as the Bible.
Glen Scrivener, an evangelist in Eastbourne, UK and blogger at KingsEnglish.info, masterfully works through 100 phrases we commonly use in the English language which came from the King James version of the Holy Bible. Read his blog for a new phrase each day to celebrate its 400th anniversary.
Our nation still suffers from racial tensions on a daily basis. A better understanding of the Bible tells us that we are all really just one race – the human race! This video, part of the excellent “Check This Out” series also explains why we see so many different skin colors.
Early this year I discovered a fascinating visualization that mapped all the connections made between “friends” on Facebook. It quickly spread around the internet with many people pointing out how country boundaries appeared from the links themselves with no borders drawn in the background.
So, as is my tendency, I thought about what it might look like to do something similar based on the connections between people and places in the Bible. Once I set out to define these relationships, I quickly found it hard to get the data I would need. Unlike with Facebook, Moses and Aaron had no way to input their personal information in a database that makes it easy to do this kind of thing. The Semantic Bible project has come a long way in terms of explicitly defining relationships among New Testament figures, but nothing yet for the Old Testament which contains far more people and places. Chris Harrison managed a complex visualization of social networks, but it is based strictly on word proximity to generate connections.
Since MetaV contains genealogical information for everyone in the Bible and geolocation data, I was able to create a composite database of links using both definite relationships and textual proximity. Then, I mapped the data following a very handy tutorial by Nathan Yau at FlowingData. People are linked to places if that person’s name appears in the same sentence as a place name. “Sentence” connections are those which have two people mentioned by name in the same sentence. “Self” links are where one person is linked to multiple places due to travels, marriage, etc. “Spouse” and “Parent” relationships are defined according to available genealogy data.
Color variations are a function of how many times the connection appears and the distance between the places. Lines are drawn along great circle routes in keeping with the Facebook map inspiration.
What is immediately clear (though not at all surprising) is the centrality of Israel. The links within Israel and the ones going around the world are so dense that one can’t help but notice is is at the heart of all the interconnection in scripture, no matter how you slice the data. I would love to hear your thoughts on these patterns, so please leave a comment if you find something interesting!