Did Genesis Copy Sunmerian, Babylonian, and Egyption Creation Accounts?

Faith & Science Conversation
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142

aw come on Bill are you really going to make that absurd claim…honestly???

A key forensic witness

to the Chamberlain inquiry said yes

terday that she had given wrong

evidence in the Darwin trial of Lindy

and Michael Chamberlain.

A forensic biologist, Mrs Joy Kuhl,

who examined the Chamberlains’ car

in 1981, told the trial of positive

reactions for foetal blood which sup

(14 Oct 1986 - Joy Kuhl: some of my trial evidence wrong - Trove)ported the Crown case that Mrs

Chamberlain had slit her nine-week

old daughter Azaria’s throat in the

car.

Testimony of Joy Kuhl, cross-examined by John Phillips

Q. ‘Now, Mrs. Kuhl, that is a demonstration electrophoresis plate?’

A: ‘Yes…’

Q: ‘That is a demonstration photograph of a gradient gel?’

A. ‘Yes.’

Q. ‘And that is a demonstration photograph of an Ouchterlony plate?’

A. ‘Yes.’

Q: ‘What about the real thing? What about the actual electrophoresis plates that you ended up with at the end of your tests? Do you produce those?’

A: ‘No.’

Q: ‘What about the actual Ouchterlony plates that you ended up with at the end of your tests? Do you produce those?’

A: ‘No.’

Q: ‘What about the actual gradient gel that you used in your tests? Do you produce that?’

A: ‘No.’

Q: ‘What about the plate that you used for attempt at a haptoglobin grouping? Do you produce that?’

A: ‘No.’

Q: ‘They are in Sydney, are they?’

A: ‘No…’

Q: ‘Where are they?’

A: ‘They have been destroyed.’

Q: ‘The plates are destroyed?’

A: ‘Yes.’

Q: ‘All of them?’

A: ‘All of them.’

Q: ‘Whose decision was that? Who is to take responsibility for this?’

A: ‘I don’t see it as anyone’s responsibility. It is standard procedure in our laboratory.’

Q: 'Did you take any photographs of them? Or did you direct that any photographs be taken of this evidence, before you destroyed it?’

A: ‘No. We have not the facilities for that…’

Q: ‘Now, at the inquest, did you swear this? "Human fetal hemoglobin is different from adult hemoglobin. While a baby, or a fetus, is in uterus it does not have any adult hemoglobin.”’
> A: ‘Yes, I did.’
**> **
> Q: ‘That was demonstrably false.’
**> **
> A: ‘I used that statement for the - for purposes of making things clear and simple. It was not a false statement.’
**> **
> Q: ‘I say false in the sense of incorrect?’
**> **
> A: ‘It was incorrect, scientifically. It was used as an indication of the relative amounts.’
**> **
> Q: ‘You are perfectly entitled to give any explanation which you have, but the fact is, scientifically that statement is utterly incorrect.’
**> **
> A: ‘Scientifically, it is not correct. Yes…’

Q: ‘Are you suggesting that we should, as it were, shut the door [on the possibility that the blood stains she examined could have been present in the Chamberlain car in] September 1979?’
**> **
> A: ‘That would have been consistent with my opinion, yes.’
**> **
> Q: ‘These stains could not date from August 1979? Do you swear that?’
**> **
> A: ‘It is an opinion. Based purely on experience. I can’t swear that.’

Q: ‘Do you swear they cannot date from July 1979?’

A: ‘Once again, no, I can’t swear that.’

Q: ‘Do you swear they cannot date from June 1979?’

A: ‘No…’

Q. ‘Here are two bands [of reaction], Mrs. Kuhl?’

A: ‘A band and a smudge.’

Q: ‘There is a band, and a faint impression of a second band?’
A: ‘No, I can see only one band.’

Q: ‘That is a band, is it not?’
A: ‘It is not a band. It is an artifact in the staining procedure.’

143

I’m sorry Adam, but not only are you quoting me as saying something that I did not say, you are quoting me as saying something that I explicitly denied saying.

Kindly stop wasting my time and everyone else’s.

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144

Jamycakes…my response was to @ Bill in relation to the comment made about Joy Kuhl…it may be that you have gotten included into that part of the discussion?

The comment from Bill that i was responding too was the following…

“Exactly, she was hired to test samples. That isn’t science”

Unfortuntaely Jamycakes, rather than correct Bills error, you added to it with the following:

Again, Joy Kuhl is not a police officer…she is a forensic scientist. i posted references that explain that.

You missed the point of the Joy Kuhl illustration completely…the point was, it is the fundamental decision to make an interpretation that is the problem here…not the science. Extrapolating from this, seems to me that you are still claiming YEC research isn’t science. I challenge that as being absurd and you know its absurd. This has nothing to do with Science, and everything to do with the way in which the Science is interpreted. The fact that an experiment is repeatable is not enough to reconcile the differences in interpretation. That is because interpretation is reliant on the philosophical when filtering data (just as Joy Kuhl did in the Chamberlain example i gave in an earlier post) and on assumptions based on experience. Joy screwed up on both accounts in the Chamberlain case and got her interpretation of the results completely wrong.

Anyway, to clear up the error Bill made a few posts back (ie “Joy Kuhls work was not science”), here is a definition of Applied Science ( Bill i hope that for the purposes of this discussion this resolves the error in your statement and we can move on to more important things)

“Applied science is the use of the scientific method and knowledge obtained via conclusions from the method to attain practical goals . It includes a broad range of disciplines such as engineering and medicine.”

In the case of Joy Kuhl’s work, her aim was to use forensic science to determine whether or not the samples that were taken from the car, contained fetal blood.

145

But what about the price of tea in China?

146

And you have been missing the point that I have been making over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, Adam.

Science has rules.

Interpretation of scientific evidence has rules.

If you don’t want to be told you’re not doing science, then you need to obey the rules of science. It’s as simple as that.

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147

I am fully aware that science has rules. The trouble is, you deny those rules are driven philosophically in such a manner that filtering of data occurs (as the Joy Kuhl evidence proves). Again you ignore the very real reference i gave concerning the Chamberlain case. You continue to make up stuff that is simply ignorant of filtering and i am never surprised to hear TEism attempt to make up theology from the Bible that simply is not there…things such as God is not Omnipotent, Allknowing, and Allpowerful. That is an absurd position to take in order to reconcile scientific interpretations, given the bible very specifically states He (God) is all those things!

To add to the above, and to remain on-topic, because of absolutely lousy theology caused by twisting of scipture, and flat out denial of its historicity in order to match atheist scientific interpretations, we then find ourselves defending the claim that the Christian Bible is a plagiarism of Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultural beliefs that the same bible very specifically states is a corruption.

How can you possibly reconcile that dilemma?

148

Yes, Adam, I am denying that those rules are driven philosophically in such a manner that filtering of data occurs. I am denying it because the rules in question are driven by being thrashed out in real-world situations where getting them wrong causes things to stop working. I am also denying it because the filtering of which you speak is not a consequence of the rules; it is a breach of the rules.

The Joy Kuhl/Chamberlain case is a case where the rules were not followed. It is also a case where breaking the rules did not have any immediately obvious consequences. But there are other situations where breaking the rules very much does have consequences, and it is these other situations that you must account for. It is also the question of consequences that renders your analogy with the Joy Kuhl/Chamberlain case invalid and irrelevant.

That’s why I mentioned oil exploration in particular. Oil exploration is a situation where breaking the rules causes things to stop working. Not only that, it is a situation where breaking the rules when considering the age of the earth or evolution causes things to stop working.

I’m sorry Adam, but the only person making stuff up here is you.

I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but one of the rules of this forum states that you must not ascribe views or religious beliefs to other people that they do not acknowledge themselves. If you think that I believe that “God is not Omnipotent, Allknowing, and Allpowerful,” then you are doing precisely that.

Now before you start throwing around false accusations against scientifically literate Christians of “making up stuff,” please let me give you a bit of advice. First, go and get a university degree in science. Then, go and spend twenty years putting what you learned in said degree into practice in real-world situations where getting it wrong has consequences.

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149

Yes. A “scientific” witness in a trail is not practicing the “scientific method”. They are just qualified (that might be a PhD) technicians that are performing tests. What would the hypotheses be in a trial? How could the tests be repeated by another researcher? What journal was used to publish the test results?

150

Making stuff up about other people again.

My “pre-existing world view” comes from studying ANE literature, and specifically the Hebrew text of early Genesis. I didn’t even bother thinking about evolution until I’d had six or seven years of Hebrew under my wings (along with forays into hieroglyphics and cuneiform for reading similar texts in the original languages). When I took geology I entertained the Gap Theory briefly but the evidence, both scientific and grammatical, dump that bit of imagination into the trash: there are formations that are indisputably many hundreds of thousands of years old that contain fossils, so the Gap Theory fails there, and the grammar of the Hebrew indicates that the Earth continued in existence from the moment of its creation, leaving no time for the catastrophe that supposed destroyed a previous creation. The Gap Theory was a futile and foolish attempt to smuggle an old Earth into Genesis despite the science and the grammar.

And my foundation remains the text itself: the first Creation account is the wrong type of literature to be making any historical claims from, and indeed Hebrew scholars back earlier than Copernicus decided the sun was in the center of the solar system rather than the Earth concluded from the Hebrew that the universe is ancient beyond human imagination, which establishes that evolution is essentially irrelevant to interpreting Genesis – though geology is since the rocks tell a story of at least tens of millions of years, a very obvious story to those who approach it honestly, And God’s “Book of Creation”, in the section on geology, is not going to lie to us.

I didn’t answer it because the foundation of your question is fallacious: you are setting up a false dichotomy that can only stand when there is ignorance of not just ancient literature but literature itself – just a review of seventeenth through eighteenth century English literature is enough to toss your dichotomy into the trash bin.

151

I think the real point here is that you are making false statements about other people after you’ve been corrected!

This is called “bearing false witness”, and as I recall there’s a statement about that in Exodus.

Since when is Hawking a biologist? Hawkings does cosmology, and biologists don’t actually care about cosmology, they study life on our little planet.

With reference to what I bolded, this shows an ignorance of science that I was teaching to high school freshmen over thirty years ago: that the Earth was many millions of years old was a conclusion from studying the rocks, and nothing else. Orogeny tells us that the Earth is at least many hundreds of thousands of years old; seafloor spreading says it’s hundreds of millions. Evolution has nothing to do with dating the Earth.

As far as what I italicized: maybe you don’t know that there’s a Nobel laureate who became a Christian due to studying evolution, and a lot of other scientists who followed the same path; and maybe you don’t know that the vast majority of Christian scientists have no problem with evolution.

Dragging in Hawking and misusing statistics are not useful arguments.

It’s an application of science, but here’s the thing: doing things scientifically does not guarantee that the answers arrived at will be correct! A better application of science to that situation would have been to provide samples to five or six different labs and not telling them what the source was.

I’m assuming that “TEism” means “theistic evolution”.
I have known hundreds of theistic evolution advocates and I have never once heard a single one of them “make up theology from the Bible that simply is not there”, especially not “things such as God is not Omnipotent, Allknowing, and Allpowerful”. I think that this is nothing but a basket of red herrings.

Last item for this post…

Excremetum tauri.

First of all, you’re lying about the claims, and you darned well know it by now: no one is claiming plagiarism.
Second, “atheistic scientific interpretations” have nothing to do with the study of ancient literature of which the Bible is a part – and of course you also know that by now because it’s been made plain in this discussion… so again you’re lying.
Third, alleging that nothing in the Bible has anything to do with ANE culture and religion and worldview is just bizarre: the Bible, specifically Genesis, was written by men using the terms of their worldview and their understanding of the world, and nowhere does scripture tell us that God over-rode their minds to force them to speak in terms that make modern people happy.

And in fact that last is important: the one and only reason that anyone came up with the idea that the Bible has to fit modern science is that the worldview of scientific materialism filtered into the church carrying with it the false belief that in order for something to be true it has to be 100% scientifically accurate. The idea doesn’t come from the Bible, it gets forced on the Bible. Thus YECism is actually founded on an atheistic worldview.

The biggest travesty of YECism is that it has to ignore the fact that the Bible, especially Genesis, is actually ancient literature. It has to pretend that God engages in possession of people just like demons do, overriding their minds and personality for the sole purpose of satisfying people thousands of years later.

At any rate, stop lying to yourself and the rest of us. Get rid of the filters that cause you to read everything in terms of your pre-conceived views of science and other people’s motives and for once slow down and read what people have actually said! – if for no other reason than that your continual invention of things about others and about what they have said is more than a little disrespectful.

152

And additionally, stop listening to amateur theologians and start learning from people who actually analyze ancient literature. YECism tosses half or more of the meaning of the first Genesis Creation account into the trash because it treats it like someone’s great-grandfather’s diary of events he witnessed, when in reality it is a masterpiece weaving two different kinds of ancient literature into one.

153

This.

This is something that I’ve noticed coming from young earth zealots time and time again. They will make a claim, then you will point out to them that their claim is untrue, along with a careful explanation as to why it is untrue, then you will see them continuing to repeat the same claim over and over again without saying a thing to address your explanations of why their claim is untrue.

I and others have carefully explained to Adam and the other young earth zealots who appear on this forum from time to time that the reasons why scientifically literate people (including scientifically literate Christians) reject a young earth have nothing whatsoever to do with “atheism.” We have carefully explained that it all boils down to the basic rules and principles of mathematics and measurement, which are about as independent and neutral when it comes to philosophy or worldviews as you can possibly get. We have even pointed out that these are matters on which the Bible itself demands that we approach them honestly and accurately.

So when I see shenanigans such as this:

I’m sorry, but I can no longer assume good faith on the part of people who continue to repeat such false accusations of “absolutely lousy theology” or “matching atheistic scientific interpretations” or “corruption” after having repeatedly had it explained to them not only that such accusations are false but why such accusations are false. Either they aren’t listening, or else they know full well that they aren’t telling the truth.

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154

I’m with you there. It’s not just on this forum but on several others that YECers read things that aren’t there and fail to read things that are and so come up with false accusations repeatedly even after being corrected – as Adam is doing here.

They get especially dishonest when I inform them that I have known former atheists and agnostics who concluded there must be a Designer and ended up as Christians because of their studies of evolution. So far they’ve all been at a loss to make any other reply than to claim I’m lying when I tell them I don’t care about evolution, I hold to an ancient universe and planet because of the Hebrew text. On another board I’ve been trying to get through to a guy who insists that Genesis says, “And the Earth became formless and desolate”; I’ve done everything but start giving Hebrew lessons but he won’t admit that the verb is in the wrong tense to mean “became”.

I get seriously frustrated because I’ve had to spend time with young people who are seeing the glory of God in evolution and then encounter YECers insisting that evolution is atheist. The whole YEC community needs to stick that warning from Augustine on the top of their computer keyboard and read it again every time they open a new web page; they don’t realize the damage they’re doing to people who are questioning.

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