The evidence is an extremely finely tuned word full of extremely complicated living things that Richard Dawkins admits, “have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose”.
So one interpretation is that things which clearly appear to have been created for a purpose were created for a purpose. The other interpretation was brilliantly summed up Fred Hoyle:
“A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.”
With the major difference that I have rationality and Occam’s Razor on my side… Things which clearly appeared to have been designed for a purpose more likely than not were designed for a purpose.
Maybe they were analogous days or figurative days, like the workday in The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16). You are elevating science above the intent of scripture by insisting that the Bible has to be scientifically correct. (And I’m a ‘sabbatarian’.)
Thanks for your brilliant post, Robert. I tried to bring up the collapse of the Big Bang Idea (not a scientific theory by any stretch of the imagination) in my last thread, but as with every thread I’ve started here, some censorious moderator shut it down just when things were getting good (aka: when the evidence being presented was unable to be refuted or even explained away by the professors who run this joint). It seems that cognitive dissonance and unabashed zeal for a preferred paradigm might indeed cause them to be the last to know.
The assumptions don’t control the outcomes as the assumptions in Biblical interpretation do. That is why you can take the Bible and end up with hundreds of different conclusions. Each conclusion started with slightly different assumptions.
Yes there are disagreements between scientists and sometimes those disagreements end up with new science. I have never seen a Calvinist convince an Arminian they were wrong, or vice-versa.
Depends on what you mean by “historical sciences.” Geology is certainly one historical science and yes it does make predictions that are tested all the time. Otherwise geologists wouldn’t never be able to find oil and gas.
You might want to take a look at this and see why the Big Bang Theory counts as a scientific theory.
That the Earth is a sphere has been known for over 2500 years. It is a fools errand to attempt to reason with someone that far out of date, and is that impervious to evidence, to discuss modern cosmology. Feel free to parody yourself. If it makes you feel better to state I am the one who is blind, fine.
Nope – they said those days were “divine days” because there weren’t any humans yet to measure them by human measurements.
God ‘rested’ after six divine days, humans rest after six human days. They would say that claiming God rested after six human days was belittling God.
False dichotomy. The other option is to read the Bible as the ancient literature it is, starting by identifying what kind of literature each portion was meant to be by the writer, then to understand the culture and worldview of the writer, then coming to understand what the original audience would have understood that portion to mean.
Nothing in the Bible says we have to take it as 100% historically and scientifically accurate; that idea actually comes from the humanistic philosophy of scientific materialism which asserts that to be true a thing must be 100% scientifically and historically accurate. That means that reading it literally when that contradicts what God has told us in His other “book”, the “Book of Creation”, is foolish because it requires adhering to a view of truth that does not derive from the Bible.
This link exemplifies why I find the closing of threads after seven days to be extremely irritating: it essentially locks newcomers out of commenting!
It’s even more irritating than the silly “Consider replying to several posts at once” message that appears and blocks the preview of what I’m writing. That’s annoying because it assumes that throwing several unrelated items together is somehow an improvement over keeping each post to a single topic/aspect.
I liked the note for one thread; I forget which one: it said “This topic will close ten years after the last reply” – that conforms to how the best boards I’ve been on work; a thread (not a topic; the two are not the same!) stays open so newcomers can comment, which serves to keep a discussion all available in one thread and not scattered piecemeal in different threads.
For example in the linked thread I wanted to point out that while the stated relationship between “theory” and “hypothesis” may be instructive it is not actually correct since “thesis” does not equal “theory”. If you want to throw the three together, the relationship is actually rather linear: a hypothesis is an idea proposed in a way that makes it testable, a thesis is a statement of an idea along with a cohesive and coherent argument why it should be true, and a theory is the explanation that arises from testing a number of related theses and falsifying what could be falsified and thus establishing a pattern to which all the facts fit.
That’s a bit over simplified, but sufficient. OTOH in science the relationship between hypothesis and theory is in practice as stated since when writing up a hypothesis the thesis is part of that work because that’s where claims that can be measured are proposed.
Well I’m sorry Mikey, but what consists of accurate and honest weights and measures is not determined by what you believe, or by what anyone else believes for that matter. It is determined by specific rules—rules that, I hasten to add, have nothing whatsoever to do with “secularism” or “consensus paradigms,” but that have proven themselves by being applied repeatedly in situations where adhering to them means the difference between things working as intended and things going catastrophically wrong. Rules that are exactly the same whether you are a Christian or an atheist or anything else in between.
If scientific determinations of the age of the earth are not based on accurate and honest weights and measures as you assert, then you will be able to point to specific rules of accurate and honest weights and measures that they are breaking. If you are not able to point to specific rules that they are breaking, then your assertion is just that—an assertion, and an unjustified one at that.
If the “particular narrative” is adherence to the rules of accurate and honest weights and measurements, then no it doesn’t.
First justify the young earth approach to measurement and demonstrate that it does obey the rules, then we can talk about whether they have any legitimate claims for discrimination or not.
Do you actually know what the rules of accurate and honest measurement are?
The evidence is billions of dead things buried in sediments that were laid down very rapidly by water all over the world. A worldwide flood is exactly what the evidence supports.
Polystrate fossils are also very good evidence. It used to be that geologists avoided the word “flood” like the plague. Now floods are the common explanation for most huge fossil deposits - but it is always a local massive flooding event - here, there, and everywhere. Why not one single worldwide flood instead?
Just in this past decade, there have been local massive flooding events in Japan, Pakistan, Germany, the United States and Canada, Brazil, Peru, Australia, China, just to name a few; you could say here, there, and everywhere. Were those Noah’s flood as well?
There is only one way to understand these words with honest weights and measures…
You are to work six days and rest on the seventh BECAUSE I created heaven, earth, sea, and everything in them in six days and rested on the seventh.
It is one thing for you to believe your faith-based doctrine that the world is 4.5 billion years old and evolution is a fact, and dismiss the Bible as flat out wrong. But it requires irrational mental gymnastics, not honest weights and measures, to attempt to reconcile the two blatantly contradictory accounts.
The long argument from incredulity with which you ended your post exposes you as living in a world that is far from reality. I wasn’t aware there were any intelligent people left on earth who still believe we actually travelled to and landed on the moon with this homeless tweaker shelter made from construction paper, aluminum foil, curtain rods, and Scotch tape. This baby withstood a 1 x 10 -11 torr vacuum and temperatures fluctuating between +392 and -328 degrees Fahrenheit!
As for chemtrails, I can tell the indoctrination is complete when you’ve been convinced to reject the evidence of your own eyes… especially when the people indoctrinating you are also telling you that they’ve been doing it since the Vietnam war!
Surely we all remember painting these kinds of clouds as children, right?
As for 9-11, airplane wings that can be destroyed by a bird do not cut through solid steel beams like a knife through warm butter, and fires don’t cause such buildings to collapse perfectly into their own footprints at freefall speed.
James, were you aware that the term “conspiracy theorist” was actually invented by the CIA after the Kennedy assassination, who then directed their agents in the mainstream media (research Operation Mockingbird) to use it often as a term of derision towards anyone speaking out against the official narrative?
We’ve been living through psyop after psyop for decades - made possible by gullible people who are all too happy to just believe and parrot whatever nonsensical crap they’re spoon fed by the ones running the psyops.
Perhaps the reason God told the Israelites to work six literal days and rest on the seventh because He created in six literal days and rested on the seventh is that He actually did do what He clearly told them He did.
I don’t get it. Was the day in the parable not a literal day? Also, are there any scriptural reasons for us to not understand the days of creation as literal days? Or just secular ones?
Not sure what the first part means, but I know that there isn’t any real science that prohibits the Biblical account of the age and shape of the world from being accurate.
Meaning the previous scientific consensus was wrong the entire time, right?
It is one thing to observe an apple tree and “predict” that it will produce apples in a few months. It is another to observe an apple tree and conclude that it evolved over billions of years. Surely you see the difference, right?
One time unique events cannot be observed, repeated, or tested. If it is not subject to repeated testing and observation, it is not a part of empirical science.
I’m not impervious to evidence, but rather to your interpretation of the evidence. Big difference. By the way, how exactly was it known (i.e. a proven fact) 2500 years ago?
