According to reviewers, Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking claims in an about-to-be-published book "The Grand Design" that The Big Bang was the result of the inevitable laws of physics and did not need God to spark the creation of the Universe.
Hawking is an influential guy, and he should be careful about what he says.
Hawking has erred before, in the same arena. The problem wasn't quite as simple as this, but it came down to this: Hawking Radiation, which has never been detected per se, was said by Hawking to be emitted by all black holes, causing them all, ultimately, to evaporate.
In other words, no black hole is truly black.
The problem with saying that is that relative to us, NO BLACK HOLE HAS EVER COMPLETED FORMING. This is called "relativistic time dilation." In a sense, there CAN'T BE such a thing as a "black hole," because black holes, relative to distant observers, never reach "black-hole-ness."
The reason why this happens is that as things get heavier, gravity from them gets stronger. As the gravity gets stronger, the forward progression of time within that gravitational field slows down relative to the time of observers not so close to the gravitational source. As the gravitational field of the heavy object approaches the theoretical weight of an object with gravity so strong that one must travel the speed of light to escape, time begins to become infinitely slow.
Result: The stuff making-up the star forming a black hole never quite succeeds in forming a black hole relative to people far away -- us.
Black holes thus can not, in a philosophical sense, "begin to evaporate," because the black holes themselves relative to us never finish forming. Ever.
What black holes do, instead, is approach "black-hole-ness" the same way a child, during recess, approaches the wall of the school by always stepping half of the remaining distance toward the wall of the school, never ever quite reaching it. She will be there for the next 20,000 centuries and beyond, trying uselessly to solve the problem of reaching the school wall while she follows the rule. In mathematics, we would say that the wall as become an "asymptope" -- something always approached but never reached.
Another way-y to-o-o-o understand-d-d-d-d-d-d-d what-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t is-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s happening-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g is-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s ... and so on, ad infinitum. The sentence is infinitely long.
If, relative to us, a black hole never finishes becoming a black hole, the black-hole-in-formation -- what I call an "incipient black hole," or "IBH," can never evaporate.
Yet, Hawking's Hawking Radiation is talked about, and analyzed, as though black holes finish forming relative to us.
They don't.
One might respond, "But there are TWO realities, Mr. Dawson -- one AT the black hole, one away from it."
Are there? The problem with the dual reality claim is that the speaker of the sentence -- like Mr. Hawking himself -- is out here.
And he can PRETEND to himself that his mind can bridge the time dilation gap.
But can it, really? Can it, really? Philosophically, IS there a useful place to go?
Interestingly, as I discussed at the beginning of the blog, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are apparently LOOKING FOR evaporating mini-black-holes -- as though one could finish form relative to observers and then -- phhhhhhtttttt! -- wink out of existence.
The best they are liable to come up with, I am afraid, is a non-evaporating persistently-existing mini-IBH -- a nearly invisible little monster which eats its way through the walls of the collider with extraordinary explosive violence, and then eats its way to the center of the Earth, where gravity will force-feed the Earth's rock to it, until we are gone.
If Mother Earth is collapsing all around him and he is about to be sucked-into an Earth-eating IBH created by the Collider, I wonder if Hawking will pray to God, or to Gravity?
Showing posts with label black hole. Show all posts
Showing posts with label black hole. Show all posts
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Accelerating Expansion of the Known Universe
For about the last 15 years, astronomers, who have long known about the expanding of the Universe, have been aware that that rate of expansion seems to be accelerating.
The phenomenon is sometimes attributed to "Phantom Energy," which is a concept like "dark matter" -- like "luminiferous ether," it was a concept that was thought of not because the thing named was detected, but rather because scientists observing the behavior of matter concluded, "Look, it simply HAS to be there!" In the case of "luminiferous ether" -- stuff which, when waves are in it, they are perceived by us as light -- it appears that scientists have been wrong.
I have a very simple explanation for the appearance that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate -- accelerating expansion is what being sucked inside a black hole looks like as one rushes faster and faster toward the center after entering the event horizon and experiencing time reversal.
The phenomenon is sometimes attributed to "Phantom Energy," which is a concept like "dark matter" -- like "luminiferous ether," it was a concept that was thought of not because the thing named was detected, but rather because scientists observing the behavior of matter concluded, "Look, it simply HAS to be there!" In the case of "luminiferous ether" -- stuff which, when waves are in it, they are perceived by us as light -- it appears that scientists have been wrong.
I have a very simple explanation for the appearance that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate -- accelerating expansion is what being sucked inside a black hole looks like as one rushes faster and faster toward the center after entering the event horizon and experiencing time reversal.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
As the Scientists Crank-Up Their $20 Billion Science Experiment...
I forgot to mention one of the points I made to the two scientists I talked-to about the Large Hadron Collider.
It was a one-word argument: Tunguska.
They argued that cosmic rays from space -- 90% of which are extremely-high-energy protons, similar to what the Collider will generate -- don't cause a problem on Earth, so why worry?
In response I said, "Tunguska."
In 1908, the largest explosion in the history of the world -- some estimates are in the 100 megaton range -- flattened a vast, vast area of Siberia -- about 1,200 square miles.
The impact point was very obvious -- trees radiated away from the impact point very revealingly.
But, there was no crater. Just a little lake.
In any event, Tunguska is probably the best candidate for being the event when an incipient mini black hole passed through the Earth.
It was a one-word argument: Tunguska.
They argued that cosmic rays from space -- 90% of which are extremely-high-energy protons, similar to what the Collider will generate -- don't cause a problem on Earth, so why worry?
In response I said, "Tunguska."
In 1908, the largest explosion in the history of the world -- some estimates are in the 100 megaton range -- flattened a vast, vast area of Siberia -- about 1,200 square miles.
The impact point was very obvious -- trees radiated away from the impact point very revealingly.
But, there was no crater. Just a little lake.
In any event, Tunguska is probably the best candidate for being the event when an incipient mini black hole passed through the Earth.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Time Travel
Things like the time machine in the movie Time Machine are impossible, right?
Well, in a sense, no time machine is needed for time travel because, in a sense, time travel occurs constantly without the assistance of a machine.
This assumes that time, like the number line, is infinitely divisible into smaller and smaller parts.
There is a concept called Planck Time -- which says that the time light takes to travel the shortest measurable distance, 5.391 × 10−44 seconds, is the smallest unit of time measurable -- but that is a Heisenberg-type limit, an innate measuring tool limitation, and does not necessarily reflect anything fundamental about time.
If we make that assumption -- namely, that time is infinitely divisible -- then because under Einstein’s theories velocity relative to surroundings slows down time relative to surroundings, it is safe to say that every time someone moves relative to the world around him or her, then that moving person's time slows down ever so slightly, an extremely teeny tiny amount, relative to the rest of the world -- a variety of journey into the past relative to the world around him or her. So, by getting off your tail and taking a walk, you become a kind of "time machine."
Years ago physicists proved that the effect just described, called relativistic time dilation, occurs by taking two identical, precisely-calibrated atomic clocks. They kept one on the ground, and loaded the other onto a Boeing 727, which was flown around the world several times. When the 727 finally ended its journey, the two atomic clocks were compared, and the airborne one was slower by the amount predicted by Einstein.
Between 1977 and 1981, a machine called a pi-meson gun in Los Alamos, New Mexico, made use of time dilation to aim subatomic particles called pi-mesons at otherwise inoperable cancer patients.
By speeding-up or slowing down the particles in the particle beam emitted by the gun, the operators could precisely control when and where the particles "died" and "exploded" into their component particle parts. The operators would carefully immobilize the body part containing the inoperable cancer -- for example, the head -- and fire the pi meson gun at it. By carefully regulating speed, the gun operators changed the time of the particles in the beam, making them last exactly long enough to reach the tumor inside the afflicted person's brain. After passing harmlessly through healthy tissue and entering the tumor, the pi mesons being controlled by time dilation would break down into their component subatomic particles in a kind of tiny fission explosion, destroying a tiny bit of the tumor. By doing this slowly (to keep the brain from getting hot) scientists were able to destroy the tumor tissue.
Time travel amounting to more than dilation slowing time down -- in other words, time stopping and even time reversal -- may be occurring in our Universe.
Every time astronomers say, "We have found another nebula characterized by a high-energy jet...
...being fired out of the accretion disk around a black hole," they don't literally mean that there "is" a black hole, there, at the location being talked about.
What they mean is that a black hole is in the process of forming, there, relative to us -- but it never finishes forming, relative to us, looking at it.
Black holes experience a kind of dual reality each of which is "really real" and neither of which is an illusion.
Relative to us, there is no such thing as a "black hole." Why? Because time itself slows down in the presence extreme gravitational pull, just as it slows down in the presence of movement as discussed above, and as the object in space becoming a black hole gets closer and closer to having the gravitational pull needed to even pull light into itself, relative to distant observers like us the time slows down so much it almost stops. So, relative to distant observers like us no black hole ever finishes forming. Ergo, relative to us, there is no such thing as a black hole.
However, relative to themselves black holes finish forming very quickly. Slap your hands together. That’s how quickly they form, if you are there, at the forming black hole, because at the black hole, time seems normal.
Neither situation is an illusion. Infernally slow time for observers distant from the forming black hole, and unbelievably fast time at the black hole, are two completely different realities, each of which is "really real" -- not an illusion.
If we had a much more powerful telescope than we have today, and were to focus upon the black hole forming at the base of jets in space, what we would see, from our place and time on Earth, are objects frozen in time, moving unbelievably slowly toward the forming black hole, like a school child during recess always walking half of the remaining distance to the school wall, never actually reaching it.
Functionally, we would see time almost stopped.
For objects at the black hole, something entirely different occurs. Objects in space get pulled into a swirling tornado of matter call an "accretion disk"...
What they mean is that a black hole is in the process of forming, there, relative to us -- but it never finishes forming, relative to us, looking at it.
Black holes experience a kind of dual reality each of which is "really real" and neither of which is an illusion.
Relative to us, there is no such thing as a "black hole." Why? Because time itself slows down in the presence extreme gravitational pull, just as it slows down in the presence of movement as discussed above, and as the object in space becoming a black hole gets closer and closer to having the gravitational pull needed to even pull light into itself, relative to distant observers like us the time slows down so much it almost stops. So, relative to distant observers like us no black hole ever finishes forming. Ergo, relative to us, there is no such thing as a black hole.
However, relative to themselves black holes finish forming very quickly. Slap your hands together. That’s how quickly they form, if you are there, at the forming black hole, because at the black hole, time seems normal.
Neither situation is an illusion. Infernally slow time for observers distant from the forming black hole, and unbelievably fast time at the black hole, are two completely different realities, each of which is "really real" -- not an illusion.
If we had a much more powerful telescope than we have today, and were to focus upon the black hole forming at the base of jets in space, what we would see, from our place and time on Earth, are objects frozen in time, moving unbelievably slowly toward the forming black hole, like a school child during recess always walking half of the remaining distance to the school wall, never actually reaching it.
Functionally, we would see time almost stopped.
For objects at the black hole, something entirely different occurs. Objects in space get pulled into a swirling tornado of matter call an "accretion disk"...
...where they are ripped apart and -- pfffffffftttttt!!!!! -- sucked-in by immense gravity.
Once they pass through the boundary called the "event horizon," they enter a world where the escape velocity necessary to get away from the immense gravity is more than the speed of light.
Since time stops at the speed of light, some have asked if, just possibly, time reversal occurs inside a black hole relative to us distant observers outside of it. This concept was broadened by some Russians into the black hole / wormhole / white hole theory, where matter captured by black holes might be thrown back in time through a naturally-occurring tunnel through time into the past, called a wormhole, and then get squirted-out of space in the distant past through an opening in the fabric of reality in the past called a "white hole." Objects in our telescopes called "quasars" -- non-star pinpoints in space emitting ridiculous amounts of energy -- have been offered as possible white holes squirting out the contents of worm holes receiving matter from black holes.
What this theory does is connect our future to our past, so that reality does not have a true beginning and end in time, but is circular.
Thus, according to the theory, what looks to us like background radiation from a Big Bang could actually be energy squirted-out of a quasar at some point in our past.
And, in such a scenario, it is conceivable that we are made of particulate matter seemingly trapped on our side of of some local black hole, by time-slowing time dilation, but somehow captured and squirted-out into our past, "back there" where our astronomers see in their telescopes light being emitted from a quasar.
"Our stuff" -- the matter we are made of -- might be in our Universe twice!
I am bothered by a lot of the material in this analysis. But, there it is, for you to chew on.
Once they pass through the boundary called the "event horizon," they enter a world where the escape velocity necessary to get away from the immense gravity is more than the speed of light.
Since time stops at the speed of light, some have asked if, just possibly, time reversal occurs inside a black hole relative to us distant observers outside of it. This concept was broadened by some Russians into the black hole / wormhole / white hole theory, where matter captured by black holes might be thrown back in time through a naturally-occurring tunnel through time into the past, called a wormhole, and then get squirted-out of space in the distant past through an opening in the fabric of reality in the past called a "white hole." Objects in our telescopes called "quasars" -- non-star pinpoints in space emitting ridiculous amounts of energy -- have been offered as possible white holes squirting out the contents of worm holes receiving matter from black holes.
What this theory does is connect our future to our past, so that reality does not have a true beginning and end in time, but is circular.
Thus, according to the theory, what looks to us like background radiation from a Big Bang could actually be energy squirted-out of a quasar at some point in our past.
And, in such a scenario, it is conceivable that we are made of particulate matter seemingly trapped on our side of of some local black hole, by time-slowing time dilation, but somehow captured and squirted-out into our past, "back there" where our astronomers see in their telescopes light being emitted from a quasar.
"Our stuff" -- the matter we are made of -- might be in our Universe twice!
I am bothered by a lot of the material in this analysis. But, there it is, for you to chew on.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Proving God
All nine of us kids were raised in a Catholic home where our father insisted stubbornly that God's existence is easily proven. Essentially, he argued Aquinas. Order = orderer. Movement = mover. Etc.
I never accepted Aquinas' arguments, because God, as God, always Himself would have to violate the rules relied-upon to establish His existence. If God has order with Himself, then God Himself has an orderer. If there is movement within God, then God Himself has a mover.
Aquinas and his proponents never explain why the syllogism "turns off" after we get to God.
Conversely, if God does need an orderer or a mover, why does reality?
Our father loved to use the Big Bang as his argument for God. In one looks out at the Universe with a spectroscope, one finds that there is "red shift." The wavelengths of the light are all wrong, shifting in the direction of the red end of the spectrum, indicating movement away from each other. Additionally, there is leftover background radiation "out there." Leftover from what?
Scientists -- and our father -- concluded that the expansion and the radiation are a product of a Big Bang at the beginning of time.
Since nothing comes out of nothing, a God must be responsible for the Big Bang, our father would argue.
Well, all of that is not necessarily the case, either. I have thought of another possible explanation for the Big Bang symptoms.
Suppose we are inside a black hole, ourselves.
As matter gets pulled toward a black hole, it is stretched and ripped apart by the enormous differences in gravity at different altitudes above the object.
Suppose, after the matter proceeds beyond the black hole's event horizon (where the escape velocity = the speed of light) on its journey to the singularity, or center, what we, outside a black hole, imagine would look like a journey in, suddenly looks like a journey out, due to time and space inversion between the event horizon and singularity.
Accelerating toward what we on the outside call the singularity after a fiery entry through the event horizon might, on the inside, look exactly like what we see in our telescopes -- acceleration away from a point, for no apparent reason, with background radiation.
In which case there may have been no definitive Big Bang.
No Big Bang = no Big Bang proof of God.
But, I still believe in God. And He isn't just there, but He is my personal friend. I talk to Him. He talks to me.
Several years ago, I stumbled upon an exciting proof of God's existence. It's inductive, not deductive, so it is not in the nature of what follows an equal sign after the addition of 1 + 1.
It is in Bible typology. One does not have to begin with a belief that the Bible is inspired.
All one has to do is pay attention.
The concept is this: The Old Testament is jammed with semi-hidden predictions about the life of Christ on earth. That simply isn't possible unless somebody with the ability to see the future put those predictions there.
It's a pretty good bet that that someone is God.
I've already sent up a few trial balloons, to see how the argument fairs.
The skeptics argue these things:
(1) The Old Testament has been rewritten by the Catholic Church. The predictions about Christ are fake.
I respond, "I used the Jewish Old Testament, which no Jew on Earth would agree is based on Catholic sources!"
(2) The Old Testament is so big that someone can find any "hidden predictions" there.
I respond, "Not like these. Pay attention. Try to replicate my results in Tolstoy's War and Peace."
(3) The details of Jesus' death were faked, to conform to the predictions.
I respond, "Okay, but that leaves you with having to explain why Jewish books predict the same death with the same details again and again and again and again."
Here I'll use the Catholic Old Testament, simply because its convenient. Anyone checking the Jewish Torah will find that the translation is essentially unchanged in all important details.
After the Original Sin is exposed, God sentences the Satan Serpent...
14 Then the LORD God said to the serpent: "Because you have done this, you shall be banned from all the animals and from all the wild creatures; On your belly shall you crawl, and dirt shall you eat all the days of your life.
15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; He [the offspring of the woman] will strike at your head [when his cross pierces the dust at Skull Place, get it?], while you strike at his heel [with nails through His feet]." Genesis 3:14-15.
One of the folks over in one of the atheist websites I have posted in took Scripture to task, requiring it to be true down to the jot-and-tittle level before it would be believed. She said, "Jesus was nailed through the top of His feet, not the heel!"
I answered that modern Christian crucifixes were just guesswork, and the Church does not teach that Jesus was nailed in the top of the feet. Additionally, in 1968 archaeologists recovered from a cemetery north of Jerusalem a man crucified by the Romans during the time of Christ.
The nail holes went through His heel.
Of course, the skeptic was unpersuaded.
Next, here is the story of the testing of Abraham...
1 Some time after these events, God put Abraham to the test. He called to him, "Abraham!" "Ready!" he replied.
2 Then God said: "Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah [the land of Moriah would include Mount Motiah, on which Jerusalem was built; so, here we see Abraham taking Isaac to Jerusalem]. There you shall offer him up as a holocaust on a height that I will point out to you."
3 Early the next morning Abraham saddled his donkey [Jesus road to Jerusalem on the colt of an ass just before His crucifixion], took with him his son Isaac, and two of his servants as well, and with the wood that he had cut for the holocaust, set out for the place of which God had told him.
4 On the third day Abraham got sight of the place from afar.
5 Then he said to his servants: "Both of you stay here with the donkey, while the boy and I go on over yonder. We will worship and then come back to you."
6 Thereupon Abraham took the wood for the holocaust and laid it on his son Isaac's shoulders [just as Jesus carried His cross], while he himself carried the fire and the knife.
7 As the two walked on together, Isaac spoke to his father Abraham. "Father!" he said. "Yes, son," he replied. Isaac continued, "Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for the holocaust?"
8 "Son," Abraham answered, "God himself will provide the sheep for the holocaust." [God provided Jesus, didn't He?] Then the two continued going forward.
9 When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. Next he tied up his son Isaac, and put him on top of the wood on the altar. [Jesus was laid on the wood of the cross He had carried, to be sacrificed.]
10 Then he reached out and took the knife to slaughter his son.
11 But the LORD'S messenger called to him from heaven, "Abraham, Abraham!" "Yes, Lord," he answered.
12 "Do not lay your hand on the boy," said the messenger. "Do not do the least thing to him. I know now how devoted you are to God, since you did not withhold from me your own beloved son."
13 As Abraham looked about, he spied a ram caught by its horns in the thicket [the crown of thorns -- Jesus' head was "in a thicket"]. So he went and took the ram and offered it up as a holocaust in place of his son. Genesis 22:1-13.
And here's another...
Here Joseph the Patriarch brings his two children to Jacob their grandfather for his blessing.
13 Then Joseph took the two, Ephraim with his right hand, to Israel's left, and Manasseh with his left hand, to Israel's right, and led them to him.
14 But Israel, crossing his hands, put out his right hand and laid it on the head of Ephraim, although he was the younger, and his left hand on the head of Manasseh, although he was the first-born [Note well: A cross -- crossed arms -- on a "Skull Place" -- the kids' heads -- from which blessing proceeds!].
15 Then he blessed them... Genesis 48:13:15.
I never accepted Aquinas' arguments, because God, as God, always Himself would have to violate the rules relied-upon to establish His existence. If God has order with Himself, then God Himself has an orderer. If there is movement within God, then God Himself has a mover.
Aquinas and his proponents never explain why the syllogism "turns off" after we get to God.
Conversely, if God does need an orderer or a mover, why does reality?
Our father loved to use the Big Bang as his argument for God. In one looks out at the Universe with a spectroscope, one finds that there is "red shift." The wavelengths of the light are all wrong, shifting in the direction of the red end of the spectrum, indicating movement away from each other. Additionally, there is leftover background radiation "out there." Leftover from what?
Scientists -- and our father -- concluded that the expansion and the radiation are a product of a Big Bang at the beginning of time.
Since nothing comes out of nothing, a God must be responsible for the Big Bang, our father would argue.
Well, all of that is not necessarily the case, either. I have thought of another possible explanation for the Big Bang symptoms.
Suppose we are inside a black hole, ourselves.
As matter gets pulled toward a black hole, it is stretched and ripped apart by the enormous differences in gravity at different altitudes above the object.
Suppose, after the matter proceeds beyond the black hole's event horizon (where the escape velocity = the speed of light) on its journey to the singularity, or center, what we, outside a black hole, imagine would look like a journey in, suddenly looks like a journey out, due to time and space inversion between the event horizon and singularity.
Accelerating toward what we on the outside call the singularity after a fiery entry through the event horizon might, on the inside, look exactly like what we see in our telescopes -- acceleration away from a point, for no apparent reason, with background radiation.
In which case there may have been no definitive Big Bang.
No Big Bang = no Big Bang proof of God.
But, I still believe in God. And He isn't just there, but He is my personal friend. I talk to Him. He talks to me.
Several years ago, I stumbled upon an exciting proof of God's existence. It's inductive, not deductive, so it is not in the nature of what follows an equal sign after the addition of 1 + 1.
It is in Bible typology. One does not have to begin with a belief that the Bible is inspired.
All one has to do is pay attention.
The concept is this: The Old Testament is jammed with semi-hidden predictions about the life of Christ on earth. That simply isn't possible unless somebody with the ability to see the future put those predictions there.
It's a pretty good bet that that someone is God.
I've already sent up a few trial balloons, to see how the argument fairs.
The skeptics argue these things:
(1) The Old Testament has been rewritten by the Catholic Church. The predictions about Christ are fake.
I respond, "I used the Jewish Old Testament, which no Jew on Earth would agree is based on Catholic sources!"
(2) The Old Testament is so big that someone can find any "hidden predictions" there.
I respond, "Not like these. Pay attention. Try to replicate my results in Tolstoy's War and Peace."
(3) The details of Jesus' death were faked, to conform to the predictions.
I respond, "Okay, but that leaves you with having to explain why Jewish books predict the same death with the same details again and again and again and again."
Here I'll use the Catholic Old Testament, simply because its convenient. Anyone checking the Jewish Torah will find that the translation is essentially unchanged in all important details.
After the Original Sin is exposed, God sentences the Satan Serpent...
14 Then the LORD God said to the serpent: "Because you have done this, you shall be banned from all the animals and from all the wild creatures; On your belly shall you crawl, and dirt shall you eat all the days of your life.
15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; He [the offspring of the woman] will strike at your head [when his cross pierces the dust at Skull Place, get it?], while you strike at his heel [with nails through His feet]." Genesis 3:14-15.
One of the folks over in one of the atheist websites I have posted in took Scripture to task, requiring it to be true down to the jot-and-tittle level before it would be believed. She said, "Jesus was nailed through the top of His feet, not the heel!"
I answered that modern Christian crucifixes were just guesswork, and the Church does not teach that Jesus was nailed in the top of the feet. Additionally, in 1968 archaeologists recovered from a cemetery north of Jerusalem a man crucified by the Romans during the time of Christ.
The nail holes went through His heel.
Of course, the skeptic was unpersuaded.
Next, here is the story of the testing of Abraham...
1 Some time after these events, God put Abraham to the test. He called to him, "Abraham!" "Ready!" he replied.
2 Then God said: "Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah [the land of Moriah would include Mount Motiah, on which Jerusalem was built; so, here we see Abraham taking Isaac to Jerusalem]. There you shall offer him up as a holocaust on a height that I will point out to you."
3 Early the next morning Abraham saddled his donkey [Jesus road to Jerusalem on the colt of an ass just before His crucifixion], took with him his son Isaac, and two of his servants as well, and with the wood that he had cut for the holocaust, set out for the place of which God had told him.
4 On the third day Abraham got sight of the place from afar.
5 Then he said to his servants: "Both of you stay here with the donkey, while the boy and I go on over yonder. We will worship and then come back to you."
6 Thereupon Abraham took the wood for the holocaust and laid it on his son Isaac's shoulders [just as Jesus carried His cross], while he himself carried the fire and the knife.
7 As the two walked on together, Isaac spoke to his father Abraham. "Father!" he said. "Yes, son," he replied. Isaac continued, "Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for the holocaust?"
8 "Son," Abraham answered, "God himself will provide the sheep for the holocaust." [God provided Jesus, didn't He?] Then the two continued going forward.
9 When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. Next he tied up his son Isaac, and put him on top of the wood on the altar. [Jesus was laid on the wood of the cross He had carried, to be sacrificed.]
10 Then he reached out and took the knife to slaughter his son.
11 But the LORD'S messenger called to him from heaven, "Abraham, Abraham!" "Yes, Lord," he answered.
12 "Do not lay your hand on the boy," said the messenger. "Do not do the least thing to him. I know now how devoted you are to God, since you did not withhold from me your own beloved son."
13 As Abraham looked about, he spied a ram caught by its horns in the thicket [the crown of thorns -- Jesus' head was "in a thicket"]. So he went and took the ram and offered it up as a holocaust in place of his son. Genesis 22:1-13.
And here's another...
Here Joseph the Patriarch brings his two children to Jacob their grandfather for his blessing.
13 Then Joseph took the two, Ephraim with his right hand, to Israel's left, and Manasseh with his left hand, to Israel's right, and led them to him.
14 But Israel, crossing his hands, put out his right hand and laid it on the head of Ephraim, although he was the younger, and his left hand on the head of Manasseh, although he was the first-born [Note well: A cross -- crossed arms -- on a "Skull Place" -- the kids' heads -- from which blessing proceeds!].
15 Then he blessed them... Genesis 48:13:15.
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