Spirituality
12 May 12
02 Jun 12
Originally posted by Proper KnobThe person that wrote that is just FLAT out wrong.
[b]What you DID propose I objected, and still object that it really doesn't rise to the level of a FLAT and TOTAL contradiction.
From the wiki on Adam & Eve -
[quote]In terms of human genetics, the concept that all humans descended from two historical persons is impossible. Genetic evidence indicates humans descended from a group of at least 1 ...[text shortened]... ipedia.org/wiki/Adam_and_Eve#Science
If that's not a flat out total contradiction, what is?[/b]
02 Jun 12
Originally posted by RJHindsHow would you rationally know when you are not a geneticist nor have you looked an analogised the relevant data?
The person that wrote that is just FLAT out wrong.
The geneticists know vastly more about it than you do ( and would generally be a lot more intelligent just to have got qualified ) so their scientific analysis of it would be vastly more credible than your religious judgement on it.
Why should we believe your non-expert irrational religious judgement on it rather than their expert scientific analysis of it?
02 Jun 12
Originally posted by SwissGambit
Maybe simpler answers will sink in better. The five questions, answered in order:
-
N/A
No.
N/A
Wrong.
Maybe simpler answers will sink in better. The five questions, answered in order:
-
N/A
No.
N/A
Wrong.
Aesop's fables do not claim for themselves that they are a record of God speaking.
Genesis on the other hand has " and God said " or record what God spoke a large number of times.
The point here is not whether you believe it or not. I know you don't believe God spoke. But my immediate point is that this puts Aesop's Fables and Genesis into two entirely different kinds of writing.
There is a lot of wisdom in the Aesop's Fables. There is a lot admirable wisdom in those Fables.
By the way, there are places in the Bible where it acknowledges that some great worldly wisdom was known and spoken by someone having apparently nothing to do with the Jews or thier sacred book. It gives credit where it is due.
After all, "All truth is God's truth".
One more point here. Of course ANY book could say "Oh here is God speaking." I don't beleive it JUST because it says "God said".
What HELPS to convince me is the track record of this Speakers interaction with man over the thousands of years. The record of His keeping promise and overcoming every imaginable obstacle to His promises. His way of wisdom in "branching over the wall" of all kinds of barriers to the Divine Will.
This makes me pay attention. "Maybe this really is the speaking of God."
At any rate this little debate has run its course for me. Aesop's Fables are great. For me I put them on one side of the desk and Genesis on the other side. One has good wisdom for human life. The other has that and also a record of the meaning for God's creation of humanity and more profound things concerning His plan of salvation.
They are not equal in that regard.
02 Jun 12
Originally posted by humyDon't believe in me. Believe in God and His Christ.
How would you rationally know when you are not a geneticist nor have you looked an analogised the relevant data?
The geneticists know vastly more about it than you do ( and would generally be a lot more intelligent just to have got qualified ) so their scientific analysis of it would be vastly more credible than your religious judgement on it.
Why should we ...[text shortened]... -expert irrational religious judgement on it rather than their expert scientific analysis of it?
HalleluYah !!! Praise the Lord!
02 Jun 12
1 edit
Originally posted by jaywill
Aesop's fables do not claim for themselves that they are a record of God speaking.
Genesis on the other hand has " and God said " or record what God spoke a large number of times.
The point here is not whether you believe it or not. I know you don't believe God spoke. But my immediate point is that this puts Aesop's Fables and Genesis into two entirely ...[text shortened]... ings concerning His plan of salvation.
They are not equal in that regard.
The point here is not whether you believe it or not. I know you don't believe God spoke. But my immediate point is that this puts Aesop's Fables and Genesis into two entirely different kinds of writing.Not really - Aesop had his gods, too:
A Waggoner was driving his team along a muddy lane with a full load behind them, when the wheels of his waggon sank so deep in the mire that no efforts of his horses could move them. As he stood there, looking helplessly on, and calling loudly at intervals upon Hercules for assistance, the god himself appeared, and said to him, "Put your shoulder to the wheel, man, and goad on your horses, and then you may call on Hercules to assist you. If you won't lift a finger to help yourself, you can't expect Hercules or any one else to come to your aid."I quite agree that it makes no difference whether anyone believes in YHWH, Hercules, Zeus, etc. That's really not the point.
By the way, there are places in the Bible where it acknowledges that some great worldly wisdom was known and spoken by someone having apparently nothing to do with the Jews or thier sacred book. It gives credit where it is due.That's not giving credit where credit is due. That's taking it away from those who deserve it and giving it all to a mythical figure.
After all, "All truth is God's truth".
Originally posted by jaywillThe way you want to frame this discussion is deceptive.
..............2.) If there is a true flat and total contradiction between an accepted Science fact and what the Bible says, my response as a Christian who also respects science is this:.................
If we agree on the total and absolute truth of the 31 verses of Genesis to which you refer, then what is it that we have agreed? I am not going beyond verse 1 here. When God began to create heaven and earth the earth was without form - darkness was over the earth and God's breath hovering over the waters. Well, as you say, this is not creation from nothing and Earth already exists. Since we know that the Earth is by its nature a planet in orbit around the Sun, then we know that it cannot be entirely without form, since the laws of gravity will force it into a roughly spherical shape and we know it cannot be in darkness since the Sun is a star. However, we can maybe preserve the text by suggesting that the term "without form" concerns, let us say, the arrangement of the continents and the seas, which have changed entirely over time. The question of water is less difficult since we agree that Creation is happening after the Earth comes into existence as a planet so we can allow quite a lot of time for it to have cooled.
Even so, this is Creation in a sense very hard to reconcile with the description supplied by Creationists. It is especially hard to combine with an account such as a video you referred me to some months ago (maybe a year) which declares that the Big Bang itself is referred to in the Bible. You can argue that Creation is a continuing process, with many episodes, of which verse 1 in Genesis refers only to one. But you cannot (and you don't) argue that Genesis contains any information about most other episodes and the argument leads to serious difficulties (another debate but the problem is the failure to identify any break with the established laws of science, so there is no need for let alone evidence of miraculous intervention).
By a process of slow torture, we can manipulate our interpretation of the text to the required interpretation. A naive reader would struggle to achieve this synthesis. But let's just say, for now, that the synthesis is achieved. Then what have we achieved? We have refuted the claim that science falsifies the Bible. But only to the satisfaction of those few who interpret the Bible in this manner.
The problem is that you introduce the insistence on a FACT that contradicts Genesis
2.) If there is a true flat and total contradiction between an accepted Science fact and what the Bible says, my response as a Christian who also respects science is this:...
A scientist or a philosopher of science would present the issue differently. In Science, what we often encounter is rival descriptions of reality which appear internally consistent and which have reasonable empirical support. The task is to select between these alternatives. To keep this simple, our choice is between Genesis and Science.
Now, our culture for many centuries relied on an account of our origins which is based on Genesis. Genesis itself says terribly little on the subject, so it must of necessity be elaborated and so it often is. This can lead to claims that are not contained in the text of the Bible but derived from them by some process of reasoning. The first interesting question becomes this - when we extrapolate from the Bible, by methods that are considered appropriate, then does this lead us to useful and helpful knowledge about the world?
The answer, looking at the facts of history, is a resounding negative. It took quite a long time from people like Galileo until Western Europe caught up on the level of knowledge previously attained by the Greek philophers (taking their work through to its peak at Alexandria, before it was destroyed and the last philosopher murdered by a mob). Christians actually relied on a few acceptable Greek philosophers and refused to continue their work or criticise it. They lost the ability to criticise even the obviously false, for example regarding anatomy, which in Alexandria was far more advanced and included a knowledge of the circulation of the blood. They failed to understand that Aristotle, for example, was not important for what he said about the world, but for advocating a method to find out about the world.
What does science say, then, for example about the origin of the Earth we inhabit? The scientific account does not concern itself with Genesis and works entirely independently of scripture to arrive at a very detailed, exhaustive and well justified account, which is supported by many different branches of science. The scientific account has turned out to be not only accurate. For example, even the Pope who approved the house arrest of Galileo had his horoscope cast using the calculations of Copernicus because they were known already to be the most accurate available and he wanted the best possible horospcope! But even more importantly, they have been highly fertile, leading to ever more discoveries, a process that is not yet complete by a long way. Currently, for example, we have started to locate and study planets around other stars, something even scientists thought we might never achieve as recently as the 1980s.
So when we say that the creation account is wrong and the scientific account is correct, this does not always rest on careful reading of Genesis. It often rests on careful reading of wild claims that have been derived from Genesis and the whole project of trying to base our knowledge of the world on Genesis or on scripture generally. You can cheerfully jettison those wild claims and rely on ever closer scrutiny of Genesis, but that misses the whole point. The point is that there is next to no useful information in Genesis in the first place. Even if you can satsify yourself with the tortured interpretations by which you reconcile Genesis with the scientific account, you have to do that in retrospect. In other word, you need science to tell you what to look for or you will never find it. It would be impossible to start out from Genesis and arrive at a factually accurate account of anything very much at all. And the related point is that people have promoted false theories on the basis of their reading of the Bible. Either they are bad at Bible reading (and that suggests that an awful lot of people throughout history have been very bad at this, possibly until Bible reading achieved its present state of perfection in the USA) or the Bible is a bad guide.
You frequently insist that God did not set out to give an exhaustive account and that is a coherent argument. Indeed, it would be uncontroversial to suggest that Genesis does not offer a factual account at all in the scientific sense. Possibly the early Jews regarded their Creation myth as factually accurate and it satisfied their limited curiosity, but that ceased to be the case at the latest after Alexander the Great brought Hellenic ways of thinking to the region. Indeed, the Jewish faith evolved considerably over time.
Now turn your challenge around in the other direction. Can we demonstrate that the Bible falsifies a well established scientific theory? We have encountered endless efforts to do this in respect of Evolution by Natural Selection and I have yet to see an argument that cannot be given a perfectly adequate reply and has been, over and over. That may never convince you, but the Bible will never tell you how to deal with a drug resistent strain of bacteria, whereas the theory of evolution by natural selection tells you a huge amount and puts you on the right track for a solution.
03 Jun 12
Originally posted by finneganI think you will find the following video informative and worth your while in viewing.
The way you want to frame this discussion is deceptive.
If we agree on the total and absolute truth of the 31 verses of Genesis to which you refer, then what is it that we have agreed? I am not going beyond verse 1 here. When God began to create heaven and earth the earth was without form - darkness was over the earth and God's breath hovering over the w ...[text shortened]... y natural selection tells you a huge amount and puts you on the right track for a solution.
&feature=related
03 Jun 12
Originally posted by finneganQuite an exceptional post.
The way you want to frame this discussion is deceptive.
If we agree on the total and absolute truth of the 31 verses of Genesis to which you refer, then what is it that we have agreed? I am not going beyond verse 1 here. When God began to create heaven and earth the earth was without form - darkness was over the earth and God's breath hovering over the w ...[text shortened]... y natural selection tells you a huge amount and puts you on the right track for a solution.
l thank you.
03 Jun 12
1 edit
Originally posted by SwissGambitincorrect response on some points.The point here is not whether you believe it or not. I know you don't believe God spoke. But my immediate point is that this puts Aesop's Fables and Genesis into two entirely different kinds of writing.Not really - Aesop had his gods, too:[quote]A Waggoner was driving his team along a muddy lane with a full load behind them, when the wheel t's taking it away from those who deserve it and giving it all to a mythical figure.