I would argue that “secular science” and similar terms are actually tautologies, because secular (in this sort of context) means “not specifically religious”, and given that science is not religion, all science is secular by definition.
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Are you saying that monotheism wasn’t a Jewish thing? God revealed himself to Abraham.
Nobody is saying that. But Israel was influenced by other cultures.
There he is with his personal opinion, and its theology, truly a self-contradiction. There is nothing ‘truly’ about illogical thinking. All the while neglecting the otherness of his ‘theology’, to which he has never responded.
One more time, @adamjedgar:
Exactly. Just like secular and Christian plumbing 
, as others and I have argued elsewhere.
One would hope that the Christian who plumbs always does an honest and more than respectable job, which is not a given, unfortunately.
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George Washington admitting he cut down the cherry tree is a myth. Nonetheless, I’d think it fair to say that it has stopped many a young person from telling a lie. Mission accomplished!
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The ANE person would say, “Science? What’s that?”
YECs tend to use the word “secular” in this sort of context to mean specifically anti-religious.
That’s why I consider it so important to stress that the reasons why people reject young earthism have nothing whatsoever to do with secularism.
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There was a “Christian plumber” business in one town I lived in. They always laid hands on the pipes before beginning, asking God to make sure they found all the problems, and there was an old hymn they sang about “Make sure the works of my hands” (or something along those lines) as they worked, and then they prayed for the pipes again when they were done, asking God to bless the work so they wouldn’t have to come back any time soon.
That final prayer actually made word-of-mouth advertising for them because it showed an uncommon attitude; too many businesses like that (and I’ve dealt with some) only fix the minimum necessary and leave bits they recognize are going to fail just so they can come back and charge more – one outfit I started warning landlords about: they came back six times for a leak issue in the same apartment because after they fixed one part another bit just a couple of feet away failed, like dominoes. I flat out told the owner there that they were ripping him off, that they should have – as I would have if he’d called me as a handyman – replaced the entire twelve-foot piece of pipe at once. His attitude was that he didn’t want to spend that much for one job, which I told him wasn’t too bright because every time there was a leak it was costing him a couple of hundred to fix the ceiling the progressive leak kept damaging, so it cost him over $1500 more than necessary because that outfit was doing it on purpose.
In contrast the Christian business always inspected everything they could reach from whatever spot they were actually working on and showed the property owner any nascent problems.
But the plumbing itself was just plumbing.
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I think more precisely, they wouldn’t have been able to conceive of anything happening apart from the gods, so the idea of “cause and effect” would have been alien to them: everyone knew that the gods could change what happened, so leaving out the gods as a cause would not have just struck them as foolish but as dangerous.
Interestingly it took an ever more severe attitude about God having his hand in things to get to modern science; to the Old Testament ‘theologian’ God wasn’t just a possible cause, He was always a or even the cause of everything! But that was a step towards science because with it came the insistence that God was faithful and steadfast, not capricious, and so just as He gave laws for how society was to work then plainly He must have rules for how He ran His universe – and that meant that people could figure out those rules.
I’d never quite thought of it that way, but your first statement is right. I think I’d conceived of it as indicating “doesn’t care about God”, not “deliberately excludes God” – though come to think of it, I doubt a YECer would recognize the difference.
And indeed from all the Christian science professors I learned from they would chuckle and say something to the effect that deliberately bringing in God to make science “speak God” was silly because science “speaks God” already since it is nothing more or less than searching out His ways.
True enough. To use one of my professors as an example, it would be hard to accuse him of “secularism” given that every class began with a prayer that always concluded with “Lord be in my life and in my learning”.
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and Morris is 100% right on this. The reason why is because of the way in which the entire bible is bound together. All of the “theological stories of the bible” tend to come from examples of literal history for very good reason, we are able to look back on the experiences of others in order to ensure that we understand what God is asking of us. He also explains the consequences of disobedience using that same history. These are not allegories, these are real people and the consequences are just as real. Christ did not allegorically die on the cross any more than Cain and Abel, Abraham, The Highpriest Aaron did not really kill and offer lambs as sacrifices to God. The reality is that all of the above were real events in history with very real consequences.
The tabernacle built in the wilderness…it original is found in Exodus and Leviticus and is part of the sacrificial system… are you honestly making the claim that building did not really exist…its just a fable? If you make that claim, how then do you explain the Temple built of bricks and mortar, which was rebuilt by King Herod and destroyed by Romans in A.D 70), traced directly back to King David? His son Solomon built the thing based on his fathers wish that God would have a permanent home and not a tent! Are you really going to claim all of this is an allegory? That is an impossible position to support!
The problem is that his science is 100% wrong.
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can we make an important distinction here…YOU believe his INTERPRETATION of the science is wrong.
Fundamentally, these types of determinations that are provided ignore aspects of life that cannot be ignored. You can pretend science all you like, but you cannot ignore philosophical concerns that drive individuals to consider science investigation in the first place. Science interpretation does not drive the search for knowledge…that is not a scientific claim.
All that “science” (the way you have just used it) does, is produce results from “designed” experiments.
Those experiments exist because an intelligent mind created them.
Sorry, one does not get to interpret away science just because it suits a literalist interpretation of Genesis. YEC does not differ just by interpretation, but in its misrepresentations, quote mining, selectivity and willful blindness to the total data, wild and nonsensical narratives, and at times outright fraudulent claims. Astronomy, dendrochronology, radiometric dating, varves, the fossil record, and geological stratification all present data that are contrary to a young earth. And it is not just that the earth is old, but we know a great deal of detail concerning the conditions and what transpired during that time. That has little to do with philosophy, presuppositions, or hermeneutics for that matter.
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No, Morris is a fool on two counts: bad science and bad exegesis. It’s sheer arrogance to demand that God have forced a writer over three millennia ago to satisfy the prejudices of our modern worldview; it’s also bad theology because revelation is incarnational, God adapting to our weakness.
I can think of five “theological stories of the Bible” that are not literal history and were never meant to be, right there in the opening of Genesis.
I didn’t address your second paragraph because you have descended into making up things about other people plus continue to impose a false dichotomy on scripture. You’re the only one here talking about allegory, yet you falsely impute it to others! Seems to me there’s a rather explicit instruction concerning that sort of thing.
So is his Biblical interpretation. Morris acts as though he regards the opening chapters of Genesis as being some friend’s great-grandfather’s diary of events he lived through, ignoring that it is ancient literature. My impression on meeting him was that of a slick, manipulative used car salesman only worse because he sucks at science and he sucks at scripture,
That gets the award for the most irrelevant statement of the week – and the assertion before it gets a nomination for least informed.
Absolutely.
But YECism doesn’t just differ on the Bible by interpretation, it differs in that it throws out the basics of scholarship that apply to all ancient literature – and while the scriptures may be more than mere literature, they are never less than that.
To steal a bit from an eminently-well-done movie, one does not simply walk into Genesis in a translation and start interpreting, one must prepare and prepare well. Yet the only forays into the original text that I have seen from YECers amount to little more than acting as though Hebrew was really just a code for English that uses funny-looking letters with the result that they do not use the Hebrew to help understand the English, they dump out the actual meaning of the Hebrew and fill it up again with their low-quality English-based opinions.
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honestly, ii am really struggling see any biblical evidence to support what is your personal view here. You are making claims that must be made simply to support a pre existing world view…that the evolutionary science interpretation is the foremost authority. Your claim about Mosee is absurd and did not even answer my question in any way shape or form.
To simplify my previous point i ask again… define and explain the sanctuary service (both earthly and heavenly)?
He’s not believing it, he’s stating it as a fact. Sorry, but you don’t get to dismiss scientific conclusions by chanting the word “interpretation” as if it were some kind of hocus pocus magic shibboleth just because you don’t like them. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: interpretation of scientific evidence has rules. If an interpretation of scientific evidence does not obey the basic rules of measurement, mathematics, logic, and factual accuracy, then it is wrong. Period. End of story.
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how interesting…ok here is a doozy that completely demolishes your claim here…
Remember the Lindy Chamberlain case “The dingo took my baby”
If you recall, Joy Kuhl (a scientist) tested the samples taken from Michael Chamberlains car and claimed that the testing proved that the samples in the car contained fetal blood. (Yellow Torana if you recall…i know the car as I went to school with Aiden and Regan Chamberlain and taught Lindies youngest daughter that she birthed after she went to jail)
Anyway, the world believed that scientific fact presented as such by Joy Cool… ie fetal blood was found in the Chamberlains car.
Imagine the surprise years later when the company that designed and built the lab machine that tested the samples taken from the car published a report that told the world that the machine was not in fact capable of detecting fetal blood. What is worse, the control mechanism by which the determination was made had a serious error…
In a statement made last month
and tendered to the Sydney inquiry
yesterday, Mrs Kuhl said when she
had given evidence at the trial she
believed she had used adult controls
However, from looking at the result
book she now saw she did not use an
adult control on 28 items, including
scrapings from under the glovebox,
the seam area of the camera bag and
a chamois.> on each of her tests. 14 Oct 1986 - Joy Kuhl: some of my trial evidence wrong - Trove
So, was the fetal blood found in the Chamberlains car Scientific fact or Scientific interpretation?
The essential trouble was that both the investigating police, and the principal scientific witnesses were victims of what some called theory-dependence. They believed - in some cases just ‘‘knew’’ in their gut - that the Chamberlains were guilty and the dingo story cock and bull. They looked for evidence that tended to confirm their theories, and tended to ignore or explain away evidence which did not.*No safety from legal lynching
This is the problem with TEists in the evolutionary debates, they ignore crime scene investigation work when making off the cuff statements such as "there is no such thing as scientific interpretation, only facts!
Perhaps in future i will use the term TEist Scientific Filtering. Of course you are obviously going to also use the reciprocal term YEC Scientific Filtering…and here we are, same place where we started. Or are we?
Perhaps if nothing else, we have redefined the issue…its not interpretation, its filtering 
Just a piece of advice here, Adam. Before you start bombastically claiming that something is a “doozy” that “completely demolishes your argument,” please make sure that it is actually relevant to the argument in the first place.
Besides the fact that I’ve never heard of the “dingo took my baby” case of which you speak, the idea that the way that police officers do science might have any bearing on the way that petroleum geologists do science is patently ridiculous.
Police officers may be incentivised to twist the science to fit their conclusions if they are under pressure to secure a conviction. Petroleum geologists have no such incentives. They have to get their science right (and that includes their assessments of the ages of rock strata and what did or did not evolve from what) otherwise they won’t get the stuff out of the ground.
And before you try responding to the arguments of scientifically literate people, please make sure that you are responding to the actual arguments themselves and not an inaccurate straw man cartoon caricature of them.
Neither I nor anyone else is saying that there is no such thing as scientific interpretation. What we are saying is that, as I’ve said repeatedly, interpretation of scientific evidence has rules. What you refer to as “TEist Scientific Filtering” is nothing more nor less than diligently and carefully applying those rules. Young earthist Scientific Filtering, on the other hand, throws out the rules altogether when they stand in the way of getting a predetermined result.
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I am not surprised by this statement…but a fair person would have at the very least checked out the included references or even googled it before they responded right?
Joy Kuhl was not a Pollice officer, she was a scientist contracted to test the samples taken from the Chamberlains car!
And it is 100% relevant to the topic and to your claim. It illustrates exactly that your claim, “there is no such thing as scientific interpretation”, is 100% false! That is the point.
'I find it absurd that when presented with a philosophical fundamental error, you suddenly revert to “sandboxing”. Sorry but the issue is the underlying principal, the illustrations are a manifestation of the problems caused by that fundamental issue. It seems you reject that idea although i don’t know how you could possibly do such a thing as i believe most TEists have no option but to remain aligned with Stephen Hawkings scientific rationale or are you going to separate yourself from it?:
In an interview with the Spanish publication El Mundo, Hawking was even more direct. "Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe, he said. "
But now science offers a more convincing explanation,
What I meant by ‘We would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn’t. I’m an atheist."
Stephen Hawkin is an example of an individual who cannot accept a God designed and created anything. He rejects God.
So, without God, how can Stephen Hawking explain his own existence? Well, he has only one other solution…since we have little evidence proving evolution in our lifetime, we must extrapolate that change happened over an enormous period of time. Immediately all scientific results must stay aligned with the “there is no God” timeline. It should come as no surprise that the majority of world scientists support evolution…the majority of world scientists are not Christians!
Exactly, she was hired to test samples. That isn’t science. From Wikipedia
Just because someone uses the term “scientific” doesn’t mean they are actually talking about science. I didn’t see anything in your summary that pointed to what is considered to be the actual practice of science.
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