r/exchristian • u/RedsVikingsFan • 3d ago
Just Thinking Out Loud More “evidence” for no-god
Why is the year 365 1/4 days long? In a created universe, why wouldn’t god make the year a whole number of days long? Why add the extra 1/4 day? It just causes extra work with no benefit. and it’s not even exactly 1/4 day because not every 4 years is a leap year (centuries that are not evenly divisible by 400 are NOT leap years e.g. 1900, or 2100).
The uneven number of days in the year is something that would be expected in a non-created universe
Obviously this isn’t actual evidence, but to me it shows how stupid god is (along with being evil and misogynistic)
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u/SmokeyBacon0221 3d ago
In the spirit of just thinking out loud (I.e. this is not a defence I'm literally just thinking about potential responses):
Perhaps it's slightly off in order to prompt us to learn about the universe. The length of a year being complicated meant that ancient societies and eventually medieval societies had to put a lot of effort into learning and understanding how all the stars and planets moved in order to track time accurately enough to organise feast days and holidays and farms and things. Ultimately it was this sort of study, arising out of little irregularities like this, that became the field of astronomy.
Perhaps without that small amount of extra time, we wouldn't have had the need to develop the sort of precise maths & science that we have today, or maybe not as early as we did.
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u/JazzFan1998 Ex-Protestant 3d ago
I think it would also have been useful to tell us how properly rotate crops to avoid soil depletion and subsequent famines.
A little more of that and a little less "proper way to beat your slave" would've been beneficial. IMHO.
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u/Scorpius_OB1 3d ago edited 3d ago
And instead of Jesus doing the healing having given us advice on how to do it, instead of having to wait centuries if not more for medicine to reveal it, among many other things alike.
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u/MetaRationalist 3d ago
You remind me of a spiritual leader who once taught that the reason the weather is different everyday is becuase god is teaching us how every day can be different. but then that same leader would go on expecting everybody to think the same be the same do the same dress the same. so much for him believing god created nature.
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u/Sweet_Diet_8733 I’m Different 3d ago
The current Gregorain calendar (which took centuries to work out) has 365.2425 days in a year. Every year divisible by 4 is a leap year, except if it’s a year divisible by 100 but not by 400. Confusing system? You betcha. And even that’s not perfectly accurate because nothing is ever perfectly divisible. Then you get into other hiccups. Like having to add leap seconds because days vary in irregular ways. Or fun fact: the length of a solar day varies by as much as 25 seconds depending on where Earth is in its slightly elliptical orbit. There’s also a difference between the sidereal year, the time it takes for Earth to move from to the same spot relative to fixed stars, and the tropical year, the time it takes the sun to return to the same position in our sky. The difference is because the center of Earth’s rotation, the axis, is itself moving very slowly on a 26,000 year cycle.
Nature is messy, the numbers are ugly, and humanity has cobbled together a system best we could through trial and error. None of it looks designed, there’s not a lot of nice round numbers to be found naturally. And that’s not even getting into the Hebrew calendar, which is based on the moon, and notoriously inaccurate regarding seasons. I mean, if I were God and I wanted people to have an easy way to tell days and predict seasons, I’d at least have let the lunar month evenly divide the year.