They're really different. I think I have already mentioned that while in the UK people generally find a private teacher for their instrument, or do it through a school scheme, here there are municipal music school, conservatoires and so on. The situation is a little more complex than I had first understood, because the schools vary in the rigidity of their organisation: the most, the conservatoires, next the municipals, then the associations. Our music school is an association, but it tends to apply the standards of the municipal schools with its programme of cycles, etc. Britain - grade 1 to 8, grade 8 being roughly equivalent to A-level, pre university/conservatoire. France - 3 cycles, each taking about 4 years, with 3ème cycle being roughly equivalent to grade 8. Theory of music - UK to take grade 8 you need theory grade 5. In France you study theory alongside your instrumental studies, very slowly. Catrin's flute music is MUCH more difficult than the stuff she does in theor...
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Why am I not convinced that the six days in Gen 1 are six 24 hour periods?
1) Because (24 hour) days are reckoned according to the sun, and the sun wasn't apparently created until day 4. Arguing that it was concealed behind cloud (or something) and only became visible later on is not what the text says, and seems to be an argument to justify a prior conclusion.
2) Because the creation account in Genesis 1 is written from the perspective of God in heaven, not from a human perspective. It isn't clear that God's timescales are the same as ours: in fact, later on, we are explicitly told that they aren't ("a day is like a thousand years").
3)... this ties into the fact that the seventh day is different. God enters his rest on the seventh day - and remains in his rest - which Adam and Eve are created to share to begin with, but which they lose. From the perspective of this passage, there is no "eighth day".
I am familiar with these arguments about the six days.
Re. no. 2, I just don't think that verse is very relevant, though I know some people have used it to argue for a 6000 year week of creation. I know you wouldn't do that! When God is talking to people about what will happen when or what did happen when he does use terrestrial chronology (thankfully). e.g. this morning we read 2 Kings 6 & 7, and nobody would ever suggest that "this time tomorrow" could mean anything other than tomorrow, and round about this time (I wouldn't hold out for milliseconds).
Re. no. 1: Sometimes I don't see the sun for days on end, and there have been times when I haven't even seen daylight for a day or two (never work in computing!) but I've always known the day was passing, and had some idea of when it was evening and morning. Indeed, when the sun is created it has a ready rhythm to govern - rather than shining for a thousand years and then somehow going off for a thousand years.
Now no. 3: if any argument would convince me that the days are not days it is this one; that still today it is day 7.
But it hasn't. Not yet.
while in Bible college, we had to prepare a series of sermon for the preaching module. Mine was on the first few chapters of Genesis. We had to present one of them to the class, mine was on Genesis 1. And I insisted that the days were 24 hours.
The tutor, who is a well known Pastor reminded us that stating that the days were 24 hours was a bit presumptuous. One could say that a day is a complete revolution of the earth around its axis. But one can't tell if the speed of this revolution has always been the same. It may have slowed down, or accelerated...
Does this help, or is it confusing ?
Yes one could say that, but to an astronomer it would still seem at best approximate, certainly ambiguous, and at worst foolish (exactly which may depend on how much your hearer wants to hear what you are saying).
The above is pretty close to the formal definition of what we astronomers call an apparrent sidereal day (currently 23h56m04.091s).
The mean solar day (which is currently almost exactly 24 hours) is slightly more than a single revolution due to the Earth's prograde motion around the Sun.
However, due the Earth slowing down, a leap second is added to International Atomic Time to the year from time to time.
All this may seem like so much pedantry, but it does underline some interesting issues, including:
1) if the common "day" consists not only of the Earth's rotation in the light of the Sun, but also it's orbit around the Sun, the very least we can say is that the notion of "day" becomes rather fuzzy in the absence of the Sun.
2) as the earth is (currently) slowing down we simply don't have enough data to say precisely how long a day would have been in Genesis 1:5 (whenever that was).
3) the Bible never uses the rotation of the Earth to define a day (e.g. Genesis 1:5 simply says "there was evening and there was morning, one day").
In summary, we can be pretty certain that the Genesis 1:5 day was not precisely 86400 of our modern seconds long (but I've yet to be convinced that it was anything other than that order of magnitude)!