CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

Giants from Attack on Titan not that far fetched.

I wrote this article related to my project called The Grigori. It deals with giants in the Bible. Click on My DA journal to read the article. Its a good read!

http://dvpfilms.deviantart.com/journal/Giants-from-Attack-on-Titan-not-that-far-fetched-489588896

...Is this for real or some pretend non-fiction stuff?

Mr. SmartyPants wrote:...Is this for real or some pretend non-fiction stuff?

Its real and not pretend.

Gashadokuro are cool.

Welp I've seen it all now...

It's not nice to say bad things about Yao Ming, he is a very nice man.

Mr. SmartyPants wrote:Welp I've seen it all now...

Not sure what you mean. Giants are in the Bible so I was making a comparison between The Bible, Ancient documents and the show Attack on Titan.

It's okay, if the giants from Attack on Titan were real, they'd collapse under their own weight.

Basically giants cannot exist because it is physically impossible for them to, their legs would not be able to support their upper body weight. Even Robert Wadlow, the tallest human on record at 8 ft. 11 inches (or 2.72 meters for you non-US folks), had to have leg braces to walk, because it was already at that height difficult for his legs to support his body. So the possibility of humanlike creatures that are any taller is, of course, not possible. For them to be much taller, they wouldn't look human at all, they'd basically look like grotesque monstrosities to have the necessary physiology to not break their leg and thigh bones when they tried to take a single step.

Isn't comparing the Bible and AoT basically blasphemy?

I wouldn't say it's blasphemous but I know what your'e getting at, it seems kinda disrespectful to use the bible as evidence for a dumb anime cartoon's plausibility (and it is still not only implausible in this instance but impossible).

It was a joke on how bad AoT is, but that too.

Nate wrote:It's okay, if the giants from Attack on Titan were real, they'd collapse under their own weight.

Basically giants cannot exist because it is physically impossible for them to, their legs would not be able to support their upper body weight. Even Robert Wadlow, the tallest human on record at 8 ft. 11 inches (or 2.72 meters for you non-US folks), had to have leg braces to walk, because it was already at that height difficult for his legs to support his body. So the possibility of humanlike creatures that are any taller is, of course, not possible. For them to be much taller, they wouldn't look human at all, they'd basically look like grotesque monstrosities to have the necessary physiology to not break their leg and thigh bones when they tried to take a single step.

Uh... didn't you know? Gravity back then was different...

Or giants had stronger legs back then. Or something. I dunno.

Or simply that giants never existed.

I'm totally willing to accept there were giants, just not that they looked human. We already know there were very tall animals in the past. Paraceratherium, for example, was a hornless rhino and the largest land mammal that ever existed, at about 20 feet tall. That's pretty giant!

The only real way to have human-shaped giants is if their bones were nothing like human bones in composition. If they were made of some other substance then they would be able to stand and walk just fine...but then, if their bones were not the same as human bones, then they still wouldn't have been human anyway!

Consider the following: ancient giant robots.

So...uh....I...um...what? Why don't we believe in giants again? First off, Robert Wadlow's enormous height was due to an abnormal growth hormone issue, so it seems rather understandable that that would cause issues, because he wasn't built for that height. I almost want to think you're being sarcastic, because I have literally never heard the argument that giants never existed. (Though I guess it depends on what your definition of "giant" is; I'm not talking about titans, more in the 9'-12' range)

I don't particularly want to start an argument about it, mostly because I realize I know very little on the subject. But if I recall correctly, there's some rather strong evidence for the existence of giants in "ancient" history. That and, there's sort of record of a guy who was 9 feet tall in the Bible (Goliath, anyone?). I get that not all of us take the Bible at face value here, so if you want to throw that out the window, I guess that works. But like...it's in there.

ClaecElric4God wrote:So...uh....I...um...what? Why don't we believe in giants again?

They are mathematically impossible.

Galileo begins “Two New Sciences” with the striking observation that if two ships, one large and one small, have identical proportions and are constructed of the same materials, so that one is purely a scaled up version of the other in every respect, nevertheless the larger one will require proportionately more scaffolding and support on launching to prevent its breaking apart under its own weight.

This is because of how mathematics works, and scaling.

"Who does not know that a horse falling from a height of three or four cubits will break his bones, while a dog falling from the same height or a cat from a height of eight or ten cubits will suffer no injury? ... and just as smaller animals are proportionately stronger and more robust than the larger, so also smaller plants are able to stand up better than the larger. I am certain you both know that an oak two hundred cubits high would not be able to sustain its own branches if they were distributed as in a tree of ordinary size; and that nature cannot produce a horse as large as twenty ordinary horses or a giant ten times taller than an ordinary man unless by miracle or by greatly altering the proportions of his limbs and especially his bones, which would have to be considerably enlarged over the ordinary."

Basically the cross-sectional area of a material determines how much weight it can support. Let's say I have a stone pillar that is just enough to support the weight of a particular statue. Now let's say I want a statue twice as big. I can't just double the size of the pillar, because it will be too weak to hold the bigger statute; because of how physics works, a statue twice as big will weigh eight times as much (because you are doubling the width, the height, and the length, and 2 x 2 x 2 = 8).

However if you double the size of the stone pillar, you are only increasing the weight it can hold by 4, because a cross sectional area is only two dimensions...2 x 2 = 4. This kind of stuff is important in, say, architecture, because you can't just take a blueprint of a building and just scale it up by multiplying everything by a number.

Galileo understood that you cannot have a creature looking a lot like an ordinary gorilla except that it’s sixty feet high. Likewise, you can't have a human that looks like an ordinary human that's sixty feet high. The cross-sectional area of the leg bones wouldn't be able to support its weight.

There is a famous essay on this point by the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, in which he talks of the more venerable giants in Pilgrim’s Progress, who were ten times bigger than humans in every dimension, so their weight would have been a thousand times larger, say eighty tons or so. As Haldane says, their thighbones would only have a hundred times the cross section of a human thighbone, which is known to break if stressed by ten times the weight it normally carries. So these giants would break their thighbones on their first step.

There's two ways around this problem, both involving changing the skeleton. The first is for the bones to change in size by a factor greater than the enlargement. So if you have someone ten times the size of a human, the bones would need to be more than 10 times larger than a human's bones. I don't know what the exact number would have to be, but for the sake of simplicity, let's say that they'd need to be 50 times larger than a human bone.

So now, you have someone 10 times the size of a normal human...with bones 50 times larger. As you can imagine, they wouldn't look very human at all. They would look like grotesque monsters. So, we still can't have human-looking giants in this solution.

The second involves the skeleton being made out of a much stronger and entirely different material than our human skeletons. If their skeletons were made out of say, steel, or some other material as strong as steel, then it would be able to support much more weight, and they could keep the same proportions as a human.

However, since humans obviously do not have skeletons made of material like that, this would mean that the giants would also not be human, even if they looked human. So unless you want to go with the theory that God miracled up adamantium coated skeletons for these human giants, then we still can't have human-looking giants in this situation either.

Given historical data about average heights in ancient times, largely due to nutrition variances a 'giant' could've been just as tall as a modern basketball player. 7' and a few inches is pretty frightening if the average height is, as some historians suggest, 5'5" or less. Imagine a young teen, 5' or possibly shorter, less than a hundred pounds vs a man of Yao Ming's stature 7'6", 310 pounds , and one can easily see where the term 'giant' comes into the dialogue.

I agree completely and I almost said that in an earlier post but ended up removing it. I can definitely see Goliath being called a giant if he was about Yao Ming's height or maybe even a little more. Heck I'm willing to even say maybe Goliath could've been 8 feet or so, and if most people back then were around 5'5", or even if they were six feet, that's still a pretty huge dude. I bet if I met Yao Ming in person I'd go "Man this dude is super tall" and I'm 6'3".

Anyway to respond to a bit more of Claec's post.

ClaecElric4God wrote:I have literally never heard the argument that giants never existed. (Though I guess it depends on what your definition of "giant" is; I'm not talking about titans, more in the 9'-12' range)

I'm not saying giants never existed. I'm just saying that the only giants that existed were either non-human (such as the ancestor of the rhino that was 20 feet tall, again, that's totally giant, but it's not a human giant), or that they were tall, but no taller than the tallest people that we have on record. Goliath may have been 8, 8 and a half feet tall, but probably not much more than that. Again, that is pretty freaking tall and even more so since people were a bit shorter on average back then I think, so he definitely would qualify as a giant...but he still would be within the height maximums that we have verified ourselves.

For the record, the current tallest human alive today is Sultan Kösen, a Turkish dude who's 8'3". He ties for fifth tallest person on record (or third tallest if you cut out two people whose height is disputed).

That and, there's sort of record of a guy who was 9 feet tall in the Bible (Goliath, anyone?). I get that not all of us take the Bible at face value here, so if you want to throw that out the window, I guess that works. But like...it's in there.

ACTUALLY, the Dead Sea Scrolls version of Samuel (the oldest one), as well as some of the other older manuscripts from the fourth century, have Goliath at "four cubits and a span" which is roughly 6'9". Apparently it is only the later manuscripts that give it as six cubits and a span (which is 9'9").

This can probably be chalked up to how that fish your grandpa caught keeps getting a little bit bigger every time he tells the story of how he caught it. It may also have been a reaction to the fact that human height was getting taller on average and some scribes going "Huh if normal everyday guys are close to four cubits then four and a span doesn't seem very giant."

Besides the Bible isn't even sure who actually killed Goliath anyway, as 2 Samuel 21:18-19 says that Elhanan son of Jair-Oregim the Bethlehemite slew Goliath. Now, Chronicles says that Elhanan slew "Lehmi the brother of Goliath," and the translators of the King James Version realized this and so if you look in the KJV, it will say in 2 Samuel 21:18-19 that Elhanan slew the brother of Goliath as well...but the actual Hebrew text of 2 Samuel does not mention a brother at all, it straight up says that Elhanan slew Goliath.

There is a theory that Elhanan was another name for David, which is about the best you can do to try and fix the discrepancy if you want to go for an inerrant Bible. I think the most common theory though is that Elhanan was kind of obscure, maybe a local folk hero who wasn't well-known, and so after David became a big name and famous he got credited with the slaying of Goliath to make him seem even more great. Another possibility is sort of the opposite, that 2 Samuel was edited by later scribes to attribute the slaying to Elhanan and taking the credit away from David, for whatever reason.

Nate wrote:It's okay, if the giants from Attack on Titan were real, they'd collapse under their own weight.

Basically giants cannot exist because it is physically impossible for them to, their legs would not be able to support their upper body weight. Even Robert Wadlow, the tallest human on record at 8 ft. 11 inches (or 2.72 meters for you non-US folks), had to have leg braces to walk, because it was already at that height difficult for his legs to support his body. So the possibility of humanlike creatures that are any taller is, of course, not possible. For them to be much taller, they wouldn't look human at all, they'd basically look like grotesque monstrosities to have the necessary physiology to not break their leg and thigh bones when they tried to take a single step.

If you dont believe in Giants I would have to question then how much of the Bible you actually believe then. 2nd we are not talking about humans being that tall these are a combination of Angels and human women. And then if you watch the video of the femur they say would be of a person that is 12 feet tall...well...it has proven you wrong.

Nate wrote:

ClaecElric4God wrote:So...uh....I...um...what? Why don't we believe in giants again?

They are mathematically impossible.

Galileo begins “Two New Sciences” with the striking observation that if two ships, one large and one small, have identical proportions and are constructed of the same materials, so that one is purely a scaled up version of the other in every respect, nevertheless the larger one will require proportionately more scaffolding and support on launching to prevent its breaking apart under its own weight.

This is because of how mathematics works, and scaling.

"Who does not know that a horse falling from a height of three or four cubits will break his bones, while a dog falling from the same height or a cat from a height of eight or ten cubits will suffer no injury? ... and just as smaller animals are proportionately stronger and more robust than the larger, so also smaller plants are able to stand up better than the larger. I am certain you both know that an oak two hundred cubits high would not be able to sustain its own branches if they were distributed as in a tree of ordinary size; and that nature cannot produce a horse as large as twenty ordinary horses or a giant ten times taller than an ordinary man unless by miracle or by greatly altering the proportions of his limbs and especially his bones, which would have to be considerably enlarged over the ordinary."

Basically the cross-sectional area of a material determines how much weight it can support. Let's say I have a stone pillar that is just enough to support the weight of a particular statue. Now let's say I want a statue twice as big. I can't just double the size of the pillar, because it will be too weak to hold the bigger statute; because of how physics works, a statue twice as big will weigh eight times as much (because you are doubling the width, the height, and the length, and 2 x 2 x 2 = 8).

However if you double the size of the stone pillar, you are only increasing the weight it can hold by 4, because a cross sectional area is only two dimensions...2 x 2 = 4. This kind of stuff is important in, say, architecture, because you can't just take a blueprint of a building and just scale it up by multiplying everything by a number.

Galileo understood that you cannot have a creature looking a lot like an ordinary gorilla except that it’s sixty feet high. Likewise, you can't have a human that looks like an ordinary human that's sixty feet high. The cross-sectional area of the leg bones wouldn't be able to support its weight.

There is a famous essay on this point by the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, in which he talks of the more venerable giants in Pilgrim’s Progress, who were ten times bigger than humans in every dimension, so their weight would have been a thousand times larger, say eighty tons or so. As Haldane says, their thighbones would only have a hundred times the cross section of a human thighbone, which is known to break if stressed by ten times the weight it normally carries. So these giants would break their thighbones on their first step.

There's two ways around this problem, both involving changing the skeleton. The first is for the bones to change in size by a factor greater than the enlargement. So if you have someone ten times the size of a human, the bones would need to be more than 10 times larger than a human's bones. I don't know what the exact number would have to be, but for the sake of simplicity, let's say that they'd need to be 50 times larger than a human bone.

So now, you have someone 10 times the size of a normal human...with bones 50 times larger. As you can imagine, they wouldn't look very human at all. They would look like grotesque monsters. So, we still can't have human-looking giants in this solution.

The second involves the skeleton being made out of a much stronger and entirely different material than our human skeletons. If their skeletons were made out of say, steel, or some other material as strong as steel, then it would be able to support much more weight, and they could keep the same proportions as a human.

However, since humans obviously do not have skeletons made of material like that, this would mean that the giants would also not be human, even if they looked human. So unless you want to go with the theory that God miracled up adamantium coated skeletons for these human giants, then we still can't have human-looking giants in this situation either.

Well if we look at science based on what your saying we can destroy the Bible instantly. If God said there were giants, then they were. If the Bible says there were giants as tall as cedars (amos 2:9), then they were. If you actually watch the video a femur 2x the size of a human which DNA tests have not been done yet. 2nd what it seems what most people do not get is that they are angels and human woman mating. So then they are not full human. They recently just found the largest dinosaur in world which would seem to defy what scientist thought couldnt be. Scientist are always wrong, have been proven wrong and constantly changing their theories. And yet because we dont have any human that has grown over 9 feet in modern history we have yet to prove this mathematical theory wrong, but thats a human. Basketball players should not be as athletic according to people who dismiss giants in the bible. Goliath himself was not a direct descendant of the angel/ human. He was giant and giant which then he would be as tall as the cedar giant from Amos 2:9. So to deny giants didnt exist is denying the Bible itself.

mechana2015 wrote:Given historical data about average heights in ancient times, largely due to nutrition variances a 'giant' could've been just as tall as a modern basketball player. 7' and a few inches is pretty frightening if the average height is, as some historians suggest, 5'5" or less. Imagine a young teen, 5' or possibly shorter, less than a hundred pounds vs a man of Yao Ming's stature 7'6", 310 pounds , and one can easily see where the term 'giant' comes into the dialogue.

We are not talking about humans we are talking about the angels and humans Genesis 6:1-4


Read Amos 2:9 Giants as tall as cedars. The word kills all arguments.

Count down to this thread getting locked starting...now.

TheGrigori wrote:
Read Amos 2:9 Giants as tall as cedars. The word kills all arguments.

About half the translations I'm reading for that verse pluralize "Amorite," which indicates to me that the verse isn't talking about one specific Amorite being as tall as a cedar tree, or even all of them, but as the Amorites as a singular nation, taking on the power and majesty we normally ascribe to cedar trees.This seems to match up with the symbolism ascribed to cedars in other parts of the Bible. As they are now, cedar trees are big, they're strong, they're signs of riches, but here, God chopped them down from the root anyway. And while the other appearances of the word refer primarily to one single tribe of Canaanites, one commentary says that the Amorites, in this verse, are standing in for all of the people of Canaan. The term gets used in the same way in Ezekiel 16:3 - "Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite." (NLT, taking after the Septuagint) - in a passage (symbolically) discussing Israel, so if the Amorites were giants, were the Israelites also half-giants somehow?

As for the giant bed from Deuteronomy, well, kings love impractically huge things. Does everyone who owns a California king-sized bed necessarily fill the whole thing? The word translated "of the giants," harephaim, can apparently also be translated to be a place name, "of Rapha," or even "invigorating," rather than referring to something that is giant. The Septuagint* takes the tack of it being a place name or a proper noun, leaving it as "Raphain" - capitalized, but with a declension on its end to denote its role in the sentence. This is something that isn't always done with Hebrew loanwords and place names, but since it's indicating a group of people, I think you can do that. (The difference in spelling in the Septuagint is due to the transliteration from Hebrew to Greek.)

An additional note, just something I've found interesting in my reading, and I believe this was from National Geographic some time ago. The ancient Greeks dug up skeletons and bones, much more massive than any human, but still similar to what you would see in a human skeleton. As was obvious to them, they assembled these into human skeletons, which ended up being 10-15 feet tall, and voila, giants! But as it turns out, upon modern inspection, they weren't human bones at all, but from mastodons. Could it be possible that some of the evidence displayed for giants might actually be from mastodons, and not humans? However, the femoral cap in the museum's bone seems relatively distinct, unlike in mastodon bones, where most other mastodons and elephants have a pretty lumpy, less distinct femur, as seen here. It's still something to take into account, though, because it's happened before.

*(Okay, I know the Septuagint's a bit of an iffy translation from the Hebrew, but a) writers in the New Testament had no problem using quotes from it as Messianic prophecies despite their roots in the Hebrew not supporting those prophecies - hello, Book of Hebrews - and b) it was all those writers had, so it was good enough for them, and c) since I'm learning Greek and not Hebrew at the moment, it's as close as I can get to the original OT writings.)

The Grigori, plese do not spam multiple posts, respond in one single post. I'll collapse them this time.
Secondly we're approaching debate territory with the attitude being displayed here so were going to lock this. Calm discussion is fine, but it's gone into personal attacks so its over. Continue in PM if necessary.