Ad hominem Patrick? Could that be your way to concede a point when you don’t like it? You don’t know me and you’re so way off that it’s actually funny.
If by “None” you meant “unaffiliated” as in believing in God but not following any particular organizzed religion then that would not have helped your point - that is also a “kind of religion” where people make up their own definition of God and still worship it. So the only “Nones” that could match your response are those who declare themselves as agnostic even though, in practice, they live their lives as if there is no God (i.e., no difference from atheism).
You have repeatedly asked Christians to critically evaluate their faith - are you sure you do the same with yours?
Ad hominem - no. Concede a point? Don’t see any point to concede on.
First you say that nones don’t exist. Now you supposedly know everything about them. Nones will soon be the majority in this country. You meet them everyday in your daily life. Be nice to them as they just want to life a purposeful and meaningful life free of doctrine and dogma.
Stacey,
Do you not think that the Islamic religion is dangerous to non-believers like you and me? (btw both atheist and Christians are considered non-believers in the Koran)
Atheism has no doctrine nor dogma, but that does mean that people who have no belief in God are not good and decent people who make great contributions to society, and live purposeful and meaningful lives.
I wouldn’t place any value on the protection afforded by anything written 2000 years. Your non-believer status would be a target should you travel to that part of the world. In this country, just being unlucky enough to be at the wrong place and time anywhere in this country should terrorism strike. Stay vigilant and be aware of your surroundings.
True, according to the Koran, atheist are killed immediately, Christians and Jews are allow to pay a special tax until they either convert or be killed.
Using very round figures, it’s easy to see how the figures that are quoted by AiG are reasonable, even if you choose to disbelieve the biblical account.
At the rate quoted, 1.2%, the population would double in around 60 years. Which means that it would grow by a factor of 10 every 200 years. In (just under) 1800 years the population could grow to around 1,000,000,000. These figures are only approx, and could well be an underestimate, given that God commanded His creation to “fill the earth”. As AiG states, no one can be certain what the population was, but a population of billions, both then (and from then to now in four and a half thousand years) is both feasible and reasonable. If you choose not to believe the Genesis account of the flood, don’t let it be simply through a misunderstanding of population growth.
Matt,
Welcome. I looked at your calculations going back from present day population of 7 billion to a population of 750 million to 4 billion some 4350 years ago. This growth rate is not too far off from population studies done. But the bigger problem comes from going from 2 people (A&E) to 750 million to 4 billion in just 1650 years from A&E’s creation to the flood genocide of all but eight people.
There was a study done recently involving potential population growth rates from Adam an Eve. I’m unable to find it at the moment, but (if I remember it correctly) the figures showed a recognisable exponentially rate after a few hundred years that would equate to many hundreds of millions by the time the flood came. The first few hundred years would, no doubt, see a small population, but as the centuries passed the value would rise increasingly fast.
I don’t think that the problem would be whether the population growth were possible, but what that population would, in fact, be. AiG is estimating billions. Although this is possible, it’s not necessarily what would have happened. We know that the people of Babel were disobeying God when it came to filling the earth (which is one of the reasons why thy were scattered) so they might have not obeyed Him before and therefore the population might have been much smaller.
Matt,
How come each of our genomes contains no evidence of such population bottlenecks? If my lineage and yours can be traced to eight people 4350 years ago, why doesn’t it? My genome has Neanderthal genes in it? Does yours?
Well,the diversity of each of our genomes with respect to one another shows the migration of people through Europe, Asia, and the Americas and Australia over the past 50,000 years. Your genome and mine doesn’t point to only eight people in the Middle East 4350 years ago as our only ancestors. Mine and your genome (and everyone else’s genome) points back to tens of thousands of ancestors in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Every person not from Sub-Saharan Africa has between 1 to 3 percent Neanderthal genes. Certain traits like skin color, eye color, are attributed to these genes. So is diseases like diabetes and even allergies attributed as being past to us from the Neanderthals. Note that Neanderthals have been extinct for about 40,000 years.
Put more simply, we know this from population genetics. A literalist Flood interpretation makes very clear, specific, mathematical predictions about what we’ll find, and we don’t find any of those predictions to be true.
