4 Things Americans Can Learn About Faith and Evolution From Great Britain and Canada

Sounding a little like Ken "Were you there?"Ham. :wink:

I was using @Bill_Smith criteria:

" All of our observations of complex things that WE KNOW HOW THEY CAME TOGETHER have a designer."

I would also accept evidence found in the present for claims of what happened in the past, just for the record.

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You said biological reproduction was a natural process in response to me saying, “It is utter nonsense to believe that things just put themselves together. If you drop a bunch of pickup sticks they do not form a log cabin on their own.”
You said, “Have you not heard of biological reproduction? I didn’t form by things just putting themselves together, and I also wasn’t created supernaturally. My parents made me through very natural processes, at least the way they tell it.”
The point you are missing is that things do not put themselves together as evolution requires. Biological reproduction is not an example of something putting itself together. It is already put together. The dna, the womb, etc. are already put together. The ‘complex machine’ has already been assembled that performs biological reproduction. It is a natural process, but it is a process being executed by something that is already assembled. An example of something putting itself together would be a hydrogen atom just randomly joining with other atoms to form a person or going out to the desert and waiting for the sand to form a new car for you.

The evidence is that we have never seen anything complex THAT WE KNOW HOW IT CAME TO BE formed without a designer. You can go against all of our experience(our science) and have blind faith that living things came about by a process that we have never seen operate, but I choose to believe that our uniform experience is correct and living things did not randomly assemble, there must have been a designer, just like everything else that is complex had to have.

An even greater evidence is that God has said he is the designer who made it all in 6 days. As I said above, the case for the Bible and Christianity being true is unbeatable.

I don’t think you have an accurate definition of faith. I hear this a lot. Everyone uses faith all the time. You are taking it on faith that the sun will come up tomorrow. You cannot prove conclusively that there will not be some catastrophe tomorrow that will wipe out the sun which was undetected by any of our instruments. You just take it on faith that it will come up. Now, you have pretty good reasons for putting your faith in the sun coming up and can probably predict within a nanosecond when it will appear where you live if you take the time to do so and find the right website. It is still faith. Reasonable faith, but still faith. I believe that Christianity has all the reasons behind it and so it is a reasonable faith and that evolution has no reasons behind it and so it requires blind faith to believe it.

Maybe the problem is that he doesn’t have your definition of faith.

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You may have read this or known it already, but they pointed to a good article on the Hittites (pointed to by this website).
Here is the address in case you have not seen it.
http://www.biblearchaeology.org/file.axd?file=2011%2F12%2F11_08_11+Hittites+and+Hethites-+A+Proposed+Solution+to+an+Etymological+Conundrum.pdf

@Bill_Smith,

You are going to be arguing this forever if you don’t specifically state which Biblical references are for the Anatolian Hittites and which ones are for another group that is commonly (and erroneously) labeled as Hittites.

From the article linked by you yourself we read this very articulate discussion:

"There was a time when historians scoffed at the name Hittite(s) in the OT since it was not
known outside the Bible.[FN 4: For convenience, I shall use Hittite(s) to represent both
Hethite(s) and Hittite(s) in our English translations, until the end of the article when I shall
separate the two.]

Archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Turkey and
Syria from the early nineteenth century on, however, have revealed an Indo-European
group scholars have dubbed “Hittites” (as opposed to “Hethites”), who established an
empire in Anatolia that became a major power in the ancient Near East. But a serious
problem remains."

" The Biblical references to Hittites living in Canaan appear to be
unhistorical since there is no evidence—linguistic, historical, or archaeological—for a Hittite
presence in Canaan. Kempinsky attempted to establish an early twelfth-century migration of
Hittites to Canaan, requiring Abraham to be placed in the thirteenth-twelfth century BC,[5]
but this scenario finds little support in the archaeological record.

Singer recently reviewed the finds and concluded:

the archaeological evidence seems hardly sufficient to prove a presence of northern
Hittites in Palestine. After a century of intensive excavations, all that has surfaced is a
handful of Hittite seals and about a dozen pottery vessels that exhibit some northern
artistic influences. The seals may have belonged to Hittite citizens who passed through
Canaan, and the vessels may have filtered gradually into Palestine through various Syrian
intermediaries. The paucity of tangible evidence becomes even more conspicuous in the
face of the absence of two salient features of Hittite culture—the hieroglyphic script and
the cremation burial—both of which seem to have extended only as far south as the
region of Hama in central Syria.[6]

As for the Biblical use of the term Hittite(s) for residents of Canaan, Singer subscribes to an
anachronistic explanation. He believes the name came from the Assyrian period when the
term ážȘattiwas used for Anatolia, Syria, and Israel.[7]

The difficulty, which Gelb said was “a historical enigma,”[8] has been described succinctly by
Ishida: “although the Hebrew Bible often mentions the Hittites among the original
inhabitants of the Promised Land, we have had so far no definite evidence of a Hittite
presence in Palestine in the second millennium B.C. Therefore recent studies are reluctant to
regard biblical references to the Hittites in Palestine as historical.”[9]

The purposes of this paper are to clear up the confusion by sorting out the non-Hittites from
the genuine Hittites, and offer a means to distinguish between the two."


©2011 Associates for Biblical Research. All rights reserved. Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

@Bill_Smith, what is a shame is the author wrote this perfect sentence for you:
“There was a time when historians scoffed at the name Hittite(s) in the OT since it was not
known outside the Bible.”

And then he didn’t give us any examples of who these historians were. I suppose it doesn’t
matter - - if they were wrong.

@Bill_Smith:

At this point in the discussion on Hittites, I’m not sure if either one of you would be willing to agree with the author’s very persuasive conclusion:

Hittites and Hethites: A Proposed Solution to an Etymological Conundrum
Nov 08, 2011 - by Bryant G. Wood, PhD

www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2011/11/08/Hittitesand-Hethites-A-Proposed-Solution-to-an-Etymological-Conundrum.aspx

"The problem is one of semantics and terminology. As the term Hittites for the Indo-
Europeans of Anatolia and north Syria is firmly embedded in the scholarly and popular
literature, that name cannot be changed.[56] Because the Bible writers
distinguished between the two groups, this should be reflected in our English
translations. I suggest an ecumenical solution to the problem. Since the
demonyms ~yTixi (áž„ittĂźm) and tYOTixi (áž„ittĂźyƍt) refer to the Indo-Europeans
of Anatolia and northern Syria, I propose retaining the
Protestant term “Hittites” for those entities."

"For the ethnonyms yTixi (áž„ittĂź) and tyTixi (áž„ittĂźt), on the other hand, the
Roman Catholic term Hethite(s) is the correct choice, since yTixi (áž„ittĂź) is
synonymous with txe-ynEB. (be nĂȘ áž„Ä“t) and tyTixih; (haáž„ittĂźt) is synonymous
with txetAnB. (be nĂŽt áž„Ä“t). "

"If these changes were incorporated into future translations of our English
Bibles, it would clearly distinguish the indigenous descendants of txe (áž„Ä“t)
from the people of ážȘatti and alleviate present misunderstandings."

Yes, I saw that when I read the article. I have also read others who say the same thing. I suppose that I could go back and dig up quotes by Graf and Wellhausen and others to prove my point but I didn’t think it was worth the time. The position given by Singer also bolsters my argument(Singer subscribes to ananachronistic explanation). It is well known, as evidenced by the quote I gave from Albright, that historians have said the Bible is wrong and then they were later proved wrong and the Bible right as more information came to light. I have also witnessed the ridicule of the Bible by those who do not believe it, including by scholars. As far as the different theories on the Hittites, the article may be correct which is why I repeated the link that someone, maybe you(I forget), had posted
 As I mentioned in a previous post I had read or thought of some of the possibilities long ago when I was looking into the question. I actually found a short discussion by Yamauchi from 1972 in a book I bought back then that mentions the possibilities that are also discussed in the article by Bryant Wood. It is also discussed in some of my other books.

Bryant’s position may be right. It sounds reasonable to me. There could also be a relationship that traces the both the Hittites and Hethites back to Heth, one of Canaan’s descendants. It could be just a coincidIence that the names are similar, but maybe not. It can get a little tricky when delving into tracing the genealogies and following the historical record for the correlation. Some parts are obvious and others less certain. I would have to look into it again to see what I think.

As I just now posted, it may very well be right. It makes a lot of sense although there could be more to it also as I said in my previous post.

@Bill_Smith

Awwww
 now you ruined it. You are going to try to make both types of Hittites tie ultimately to the same references in the Table of Nations?

The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 is hardly historical. It is based on geographical knowledge circa 600’s BCE. And I would hazard a guess that I don’t think there is anything in the Bible that is truly about the Anatolian Hittites 
 so really, the original critics of the term in the Bible were right for the wrong reasons - - the Hittites that Bible refers to are not the Anatolian type at all.

You assume too much.

You really believe that evolution has NO reasons behind it? None at all?

Do you believe it just emerged out of someone’s imagination? Or that it was conceived of by the Devil and planted in someone’s mind?

NO evidence whatsoever?

Ha, says the other Assumer (@Bill_Smith) that all his interpretations of the Bible must be right


I notice you didn’t even attempt to defend your position with a single detail.

Hi G.
I asked a question. The respondents have made it clear that they are having a problem with the bible.
It’s always been my understanding that what makes a christian is not someone who was raised in a family which possessed a given ideology, but someone who actually believes God.
As creation is part of the biblical narrative, and clearly so, when someone tells me that I should be more like another group of people, and less like Jesus— I think that’s a credible reason to question their beliefs.

I think they are asking you to see that if your view of the Bible is correct, then you are describing a God that intentionally made thousands of life forms look like they were created through Evolution.

@Steve_Buckley,

Surely we are not so strange as you try to make it sound?

There have been generations of Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopelians, Methodists and even some Baptists who have no problem seeing Evoluton fitting into God’s creation. They have thought about it, they think the Creationists are over-stating their position and they can’t take them seriously.

And they have lived god-filled lives, bringing other people to Jesus, and dying with the confidence that they will meet the creator of the Universe.

You deciding that you need to upset all that doesn’t really seem to fit the context


The DNA that makes up my genome didn’t exist until I was conceived, and my genome is exclusive to me. Nowhere in time has there been another organism with the DNA sequence found in my genome, nor will there ever be another organism with my genome. I started out as a single cell, and from that single cell I developed through natural means into the person I am today.

I also sense that you reject common ancestry between species, yet it is this same process of mutations and mixing DNA that drives evolution. So why do you reject common ancestry when you accept all of the mechanisms that drive it?[quote=“Bill_Smith, post:241, topic:36748”]
The evidence is that we have never seen anything complex THAT WE KNOW HOW IT CAME TO BE formed without a designer.
[/quote]

Then if we don’t know how these complex things came together you can’t claim that it was created by a designer.[quote=“Bill_Smith, post:241, topic:36748”]
You can go against all of our experience(our science) and have blind faith that living things came about by a process that we have never seen operate, but I choose to believe that our uniform experience is correct and living things did not randomly assemble, there must have been a designer, just like everything else that is complex had to have.
[/quote]

Our experience says that organisms come from other organisms through natural processes.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Fossils: Evidence of evolution or evidence of a global flood?

I didn’t think I needed to answer this because you probably know my position, but since someone objected later, my answer is that the table of nations is perfectly accurate. It was based on God’s knowledge which goes before 600BC, in fact his knowledge goes long before 1400BC when Moses wrote it, probably using records passed down from the time of Adam.

Your DNA did not exist, but your parents dna did exist and along with your mother’s womb, had everything already in existence to form your dna. Your dna did not come about by random chance, but by the complex machine executing its instructions to form you with the existing materials provided. The natural means of development were a finely tuned complex machine that already existed with all the capabilities to assemble you. They did not have the capability to form a jelly bean, just a human.

Many different species are all the same kind of the Bible. Chihauhuas and Great Danes are both the same kind, although they look a lot different. They both descended from the same dog kind on the ark, probably including wolfs and coyotes as well. Believing that mutations can create a new better kind, is like going into an auto factory that makes fords and blowing up a few machines and expecting the broken factory to start putting out chevys. Mutations just break the complex machine, they do not design a new one. Again, you can believe the nonsense that random chance will design something, like throwing a bomb into a ford factory will make it produce chevys, but that is not how the world works.

You are still missing the point. You can’t absolutely prove anything. Everything could have luckily put itself together, but we have never seen that happen. Everything complex THAT WE KNOW HOW IT CAME TO BE was formed by a designer. You have zero examples of complex things arising by random chance. You can choose to believe that the things that we are arguing about, living organisms(something complex), came about without a designer, but you have no examples of that ever happening. I choose to believe that living organisms came about just like everything else complex came about, by a designer.

Our experience says that organisms come from other organisms(which are complex machines with everything already built in to make a new one) through natural processes(processes executed by a complex machine that has already been built).