I haven’t been “certain for so long.” We are coming from opposite places. I was raised with the distrust of science that you are recommending. I looked into it for myself when I had to teach my kids, and realized, like @Boscopup I had been repeatedly lied to by the people I trusted to give me good information. Scientists are not the ones who have been dishonest with me and broken my trust. Everything they have told me has checked out. And I have many Christian friends who are scientists, and I trust both their character and expertise.
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Hi Christy, I am sorry to hear that you were repeatedly lied to. There is no excuse for that. Dont misunderstand me, I am not saying we shouldnt trust science - we have benfited greatly from it. I believe it is essential that we teach children critical thinking skills, especially today with the enormous ammount of information of all kinds that they are exposed to. And I also believe that all subjects should be on the table for discussion, even if it makes us feel ncomfortable. Thank you and all the others for the discussion - I’m going to give my brain a rest now 
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So what now again are the things you would prefer be on the table to be discussed? Does it make sense to go ahead and teach all possible theories of the origin of species? Like that high school friend of mine that is in a New Age cult that believes all lifeforms come from this special crystal energy.
Hi pevaquark, you could discuss it if you wanted to. Alternatively, you could leave your friend to continue believing that life came from crystal energy.
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The wording of this question opens up a can of worms for me, it is hard to know where to start.
I guess the first thing is why is anyone trying to put any limits on what our children read, discuss, or analyze? It is the uncluttered minds of the young that will lead us out the world of dogma, doctrine and rhetoric that we live in.
For any spiritually oriented person, it should be clear that the young souls coming into this world have knowledge and wisdom that we can learn from, if we listen. They have come from a place of wisdom into our corrupt world, and we have the arrogance to think that we can teach them anything….
The humble teachers go to work exited to learn something new each day from their students. And the smart ones help these children to follow their train of thought regardless of where it leads. All they need is the teacher’s guidance to follow their train of thought logically to its conclusion, without any preconception.
The problem with teaching any theory to children is that by the time they grow up, it is mostly likely no longer valid. What schools should be teaching young people today is critical thinking, not knowledge. There is more that enough knowledge freely available and not enough critical thinkers to cut through the rhetoric to find wisdom.
But he wants his view point taught to children as a viable alternative to evolution. He hopes to use it as a critical thinking exercise.
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So what you are saying is, if I’ve understood you correctly, your friend is being dishonest.
I would think before evolution, school kids might well be given the task of determining the age of the earth, given the various measurements at our disposal. That is much more concrete and easier to follow, and does not require application of more abstract ideas.
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He is a pretty honest person. He really tries to figure out the past history of earth and humanity using some ancient writings found in some Hindu caves. He tries to read physics papers and figure out some of the properties of crystals. The first life probably started inside of a crystal he says and he feels really alive when he connects with one. It would be dishonest, he says, to withhold the truth from students. And let them decide between all the evidence that he and others in his religion have put together verse those materialistic evolutionists.
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It appears that belief in life from crystals is not confined to New Agers. Atheist professor of philosophy Michael Ruse also mentioned this as a possible explanation for the origin of life.
Thank God we’re not all cut from the same cloth.
Oh he definitely let me know when some atheists said something that sounds a little like what he believes. He says it’s only a matter of time before secular scientists prove him to be right. He is disappointed though a little because his ancient books specifically say it is a green crystal and there’s no evidence of that yet. But it’s practically as good as true he says and he believes soon atheists will see the truth of his books.
Hi J, You say end of story but I disagree. Lying involves deliberate dishonesty. There is a big difference between being deliberately dishonest and being mistaken. If I accepted your definition of lying, then Ptolemy was a liar when he said the sun and the planets orbited the earth. There are plenty of beliefs throughout history that are no longer accepted as true. We could argue that some of those beliefs were unreasonable but that still doesn’t mean the people who held those beliefs were liars.
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I would agree that this is a good nuance. I do lie to my kids about the sun rising sometimes (though they know what I mean); and goodness knows that it’s hard to get our minds around science, with our own prejudices and anxieties, (I want to have the Bible correct, so I argued honestly but mistakenly at one time in favor of YEC, for example). And it is helpful to assume the other person means well from the beginning. At the same time, we should, probably, look all the more diligently to weighing things carefully, and calling out error where it lies; I should do that in my own life. Thanks.
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Ptolemy could not have been expected to know any better. In fact even more than a thousand years after him, the knowledge of the day still pointed pretty unambiguously toward a geo-stationary and geocentric earth. They had very little reason to think otherwise. That simply isn’t the case for YEC proponents today.
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This has been a fascinating discussion thus far and I have enjoyed reading all the responses.
If I may, I’d like to drop in a few thoughts about lying. Since people have strong views on what constitutes a lie and the word is somewhat imprecise, I think it is helpful to provide one’s personal definition. Personally, I would suggest that lies are speech or writing that are deployed with the express intention to deceive others to the benefit of one’s own selfish agenda or that of one’s tribe.
Clearly, if my wife asks me about a surprise party for her and I deny all knowledge I am not being truthful, but I am not lying either because the deception is not for my selfish benefit but intended to maximize her joy come 25th November. Similarly, Rehab (Joshua 2) did not lie when she denied knowledge of the spies because she deceived the soldiers so as to save the lives of the spies. If one thinks this separation is too semantic, then perhaps one might prefer to talk about permissible and impermissible lies or sinful vs. non-sinful lies.
Either way, when a person speaks out of ignorance, haste, arrogance, pride, or misunderstanding, etc. and is later shown to be wrong then that person is not a liar - they are just wrong. However, a person who manipulates, twists, misrepresents, misquotes, knowingly misassigns motives, consciously straw-mans arguments, or selectively samples evidence (etc.) with the intention of deceiving others to further their own (or their group’s) agenda then such a person is a liar.
Such lying no doubt happens within the scientific and academic community. However, being married to a PhD student who has two published papers to her name, the Peer-Review system does in 99% of cases leave one with nowhere to hide. If you write something which is not factually accurate (even unintentionally) they will find it and you will know about it. Resultantly, within academia, liars are quickly rooted out and appropriately disciplined… sometimes with career-ending results. I’ve no doubt the same is true within the scientific world which operates a more rigorous system of peer review, testability, and repeatability.
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The discussion of critical thinking has devolved to a discussion of what a lie is. So how do you use critical thinking to root our the lies that the scribes and priests implanted in their transcriptions of scripture? Since no complete original exists of any book of the Bible, how do you separate the lies from the truth since no amount of peer review will help?
Ptolemy could reasonably have been expected to know better? That part was in bold in James’ definition. The problem with some of these scientists, who I believe are lying about evidence, is that the problems (i.e. false claims) with what they are saying have been repeatedly pointed out to them and they have the training to understand the corrections. If they still go around pretending like what they are claiming is true, then that is being willfully deceptive.
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Great question Shawn. I’ll happily concede that no original copy of Esther or Romans (etc.) exists (as far as we know). However, the purpose of textual criticism is to compare the various manuscript copies that we have to create an authoritative (or critical text). And in this way, it is very much like the peer review process.
Since there are so many manuscript copies and fragments of, for sake of argument, Mark’s gospel spanning several centuries it is actually fairly easy to compare the texts and identify any potential additions, subtractions, interpolations, and variant readings. The more time’s the same wording appears in a manuscript of Mark’s gospel the more we can be confident that it is the original wording of Mark’s gospel we are dealing with.
Again, I’ll concede that this process must begin with the earliest, most complete copy of Mark rather than the one that came from Mark’s pen. However, that is good enough for me since any addition would have needed to creep in extremely early in the copying process to beat the modern text-critical process. This is particularly hard when some recent evidence seems to indicate that rather than lasting for 10-20 years (as previously thought), a well-kept papyrus manuscript may have lasted for up to 200 years in some cases. This means that when the Codex Sinaiticus New Testament was compiled around 330 AD, the scribes may have been reproducing second (perhaps even first) generation copies of Mark’s gospel. Again that makes it much harder for errors to creep into the text.
Mark is a particularly good example of how the text-critical process is like peer-reviewing since there is the ‘compassion’ vs. ‘indigent’ manuscript variation for Mark 1:41 and the disputed long ending (Mark 16:9-20).
I hope that helps answer your question.
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By 330 AD many manmade doctrines had been established already and these concepts would have been required in any text, “clarifying the meaning of the Word”. So, please consider that even one copy away from the original could stray greatly from the original.