Once a creature reaches a basic level of complexity the difference between species becomes greater, let alone cats & dogs for instance. There is no mechanism within Evolution to make the amount of changes needed even to instantly change species so the idea of changing a reptile into a mammal becomes ludicrous.
Evolution is a gradual process whereby the changes slowly split the two groups apart rather than an instant incompatability
Plant physiology and reproduction is much more basic.
What’s ludicrous is the total lack of understanding of evolutionary theory that the above expresses. It is the equivalent of saying that because the minute hand on a clock can’t advance ten minutes from the two to the four all at once it will never reach nine o’clock.
I’d give up on analogies if I were you. It just demonstrates your lack of understanding,
It is the scope of change that governs the capacity. Evolution works slowly. But it doesn’t matter how long you have you will never build a physical bridge to the moon. It is physically impossible for so many reasons. And it is this concept of the impossible that you continually fail to grasp.
There is a physical limit to the size of structure that you can build with match sticks. Even if you had enough available there are tensile limits to any structure. There are limits to what the process of evolutionary change can achieve without some sort of outside influence, be it the explosion of a bomb, or some other energy (or God).
The point, in the context of this thread is this. Scripture claims a participation in creation that science (Evolution) does not. So you have to decide at some stage whether Scripture has any relevance and say, or whether it is to be dismissed as ignorance. It is not a case of YEC or Evolution. It is a case of admitting that Evolution, as it stands is incapable of doing the whole job. And some of its claims are as unrealistic as YEC,
There is no mechanism within Evolution to make the amount of changes needed even to instantly change species so the idea of changing a reptile into a mammal becomes ludicrous.
That’s exactly the same as my analogy since both depend on claiming that because a big change can’t happen in one step little changes can’t get to the same place.
That just repeats your error. There is nothing that happened with the explosion of those bombs that can’t happen naturally – it’s a difference only in degree, not in kind.
That’s your prejudice, it isn’t science or even related to science. It’s really the old argument from incredulity – you can’t imagine it, so you don’t believe it.
All this DNA matching is circumstantial at best and you refuse to accept that it actually proves nothing. A brick house will have the same basic components to any other regardless of who built it. The structure governs the compionents as much as the design And worldwide brick houses have been built without any relationship to each other or even knowledge that the other existed.
What actually matter is whether the process(s) involved can complete the task, and, you perpetually shy away from trying to define the processes involved, or to consider the scope of changes necessary.
Time cannot achieve everything.
There are limits to what a process can do, and you fail to understand those limits,.or even consider the possibilities.of such limitations
There are 26 letters in our alphabet. Cmbining them makes words, but ,
it depends on which language you are using
many combinations are invalid in ay language
The meaning maybe the same but the sequence is different for each language
To fully understand the combinations yo would need to know every language.
We are barely scratching the surface in understanding DNA sequencing. We do not know if there is a universal language or whether it varies according to lifeform. Therefore, any conclusion about comparisons are purely on vision, not meaning… You could be comparing English and French, or English and American English. (similar but very different)
IOW you are assuming that there is one Universal language of DNA so that you can trace it back. You cannot compare without knowing the meaning of what you are comparing.
The tree that I pasted in is of half of a gene which encodes a mitochondrial electron-transport chain. If I wished to, I could probably find a program that would translate the DNA sequences into amino acid sequences a bit faster than I could go through and translate all 630-ish bases into 210-ish amino acids.
It sure looks like it works the same way for all organisms that have been checked.
So I wonder why species are incompatible? Is it the number of strands?
Just curious., I mean, if the code is universal, why can’t they talk to each other?
What separates species?
Richard
Edit. Having looked up Reproductive barriers I can see that there is not a succinct answer to this question.
The Point being that these barriers exist for no apparent reason other than the prevention of contaminating a gene set. It would IMHO have an impact on any evolutionary heredity and question whether all creatures can therefore be linked.
I think the second part is problematic as you do not explain WHY the Old Testament should be read any differently to the New?
Its almost as if you insert 10’s of thousands of years between them to seemingly support that using the idea " man was primative in the earlier old testament times".
Given Isaiah clearly lived less than a millenia before Christ, its not possible to argue early writers were intellectually primitive (or at least far less capable mentally) because that is contrary to the long age TEistic evolutionary timeline for human cognitive development! (Im of the opinion there isnt enough time to use the cognitive development argument)
So, please answer the WHY we should read OT differently to the New.
Well for one, the New Testament writers had been surrounded by and immersed in Greco-Roman influence for 350-400 years, thus, some of their cultural presuppositions would have been different.
So, we actually read them according to the same principles, but those principles when applied give a different reading depending on the attributes of the text, such as genre, author’s perspective, purpose, culture, etc. We read Psalms differently than Ezekiel, and even John differently than Matthew to some extent.
I am an English speaking white male, when i open Psalms, Exekiel, Daniel, Jeremiah, Matthew, Romans, Revelation, the words i see before me have the same meaning in my head…otherwise, how else can i even understand what the writers are saying.
Now you may answer “oh but the translators have already done that for you”
my answer, “how could the translators know either”
It is bluntly obvious to any individual with any intelligence and reading skills that the entire Bible is written in the language of men and not God, the bible even tells us this
The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 14 says Now, brothers, if I come to you and speak in tongues, what good will I be to you, unless I bring you some revelation or knowledge or prophecy or word of instruction?.. So it is with you. Unless you speak intelligible words with your tongue, how will anyone know what you are saying? You will just be speaking into the air. Undoubtedly there are all sorts of languages in the world, yet none of them is without meaning. If then I do not grasp the meaning of what someone is saying, I am a foreigner to the speaker, and he is a foreigner to me.
In the Law it is written: “Through men of strange tongues and through the lips of foreigners I will speak to this people, but even then they will not listen to me,” [6] says the Lord.
Can you give examples of how they [O/T and N/T] are read differently on issues of theology and doctrine? Lets narrow it down to the basics for starters…can you cite examples on how Christs death and ressurection are not directly a result of what God foretold to Eve after the fall of man in the Garden and that what is very obviously a normal reading of language is not the correct way to comprehend this given the cross references we also have that shed light on the text in Genesis?
15And I will put enmity between you and the woman,
the point is, if one is not able to understand the Old Testament writings, then how is it that we have the New Testament affirming and explaining the Old in this way? Now I am no scholar, however, if we are intent on encouraging others to not seek for affirmation in theology and doctrine through both Testaments of the Bible, then i argue that is exactly the warning we are given about adding to and subtracting from scripture (its not just about adding or subtracting written words…its also about adding and subtracting from cross referenced revelation of Gods Word)
I believe that we can learn the essential information about God and His plans simply by reading translations of biblical scriptures, also in the case of ancient biblical texts. Details are another matter because they have been told in a culture-dependent way - we easily miss something in the message or even missunderstand a crucial point if we treat the text as it would have been written a decade ago to me. Luckily, we have many good translations and we can get much understanding simply by comparing different translations.
The problem with understanding ancient texts is the same as with all communication: words are just pegs to hang ideas on. Every word is loaded with our cultural way to interpret the meaning of the word. A person living in another culture is likely to interpret the meaning of many words in a different way. When there is a great cultural and temporal distance between the writer and us, it is practically certain that many words and expressions are understood differently. Even the word ‘create’ may be understood differently because our worldview is materialistic (focused on what is formed of matter or otherwise follows the rules of science) while the ancient cultures did not have this kind of worldview, at least if the experts are correct.
Even by reading modern translations, the Spirit can give us sufficient wisdom that we can be saved through Jesus Christ and understand the will of God in our life. However, the ancient biblical scriptures are like treasure boxes with lots of layers. To get more understanding, we need to be willing to dig deeper, study and learn. We also need to have genuine love of truth, even when it means exposing and abandoning our earlier interpretations that do not stand the tests. I assume that all of us have believed or believe in such interpretations that are not true, at least in some details of the biblical scriptures.
The Old Testament and the New Testament “are not read differently on issues of theology and doctrine” exactly because the Christian Church has always read the Old Testament through the lens of the New Testament.
The New Testament explains the Old Testament in a particular, Trinitarian and Christ-related way. At the same time, there is the other tradition of reading the Old Testament. The Jewish tradition doesn’t see anything about the Trinity in Genesis 1; they don’t read the Isaiah’s discourses about the suffering Servant as the prophecy about Jesus, and so on. Jewish exegetes had their textual arguments, Christian exegetes had theirs - but there is no way to decisively prove the correctness of either interpretation from the Old Testament text itself.
Why do we read the Old Testament the way we read it? In the end, the reason is that Jesus is “properly basic” for us. The story of Jesus from Nazareth - the God Incarnate and the human being, who loves us, takes our side, who died for us and was resurrected in a real but glorified body to give us hope - is the message that we take as the divine revelation. Therefore, the Old Testament may fit into the picture only as the prequel to the story of Jesus. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense.
That’s not the issue – the issue is that every part should be read as the literary type it was written as.
I have no idea where you got that from – or are you still trying to push science into theology?
Stop trying to shove science into theology! This has nothing to do with what I wrote.
That’s the wrong question. The question is what literary type each piece of scripture is. The writings of the old covenant have literary types those of the new do not, but the reverse is also true.
And that shows in literary genres. Two examples: Greek βίος (BE-oss), a type of biographical writing, and ἐπιστολή (eh-poss-toh-LAY), “epistle”, a type of letter, did not exist in Old Testament times; they both came from Greek culture.
Yes – and the first principle is always to read a piece of writing as the type of literature it was composed as. The second is to read it in terms of its own worldview, but the worldview through the entire Old Testament period hardly changes at all, and in the New there’s still not that much difference. Yet while the worldview doesn’t change much, literary types do even within a single book; Genesis has five types I can think of.
John v. Matthew . . . there have been enough graduate dissertations just on that to fill a small library!
Even in English it’s possible to tell that different writers used words differently. Go into the original languages and it’s even more obvious – a great example is Hebrew יוֹם (yome), which has a different meaning in theological-historical narrative than in poetry, and for that matter tends to be somewhat different in prophecy than in poetry.
Hebrew scholars argue over whether יוֹם has four or five distinct meanings in the Old Testament; going back to early Genesis it may actually mean “warm”, in which case the opening Creation account is identifying the difference between light and dark as that between the warmer and cooler parts of the day – if that’s true, there are five meanings; if not, there are (probably) only four.
Study always begins with the common meaning of a word, but as different writers are read carefully their different use can emerge. This is risky in English for two major reasons: first is that a given word in Hebrew or Greek will not always be translated using the same word in English; second is that it is rare for any word in one language to match identically a word in another language, so the adage “it loses something in translation” has to be augmented with “it gains something in translation”, i.e. the English word chosen for a particular instance of a Hebrew or Greek word almost always brings in some shade of meaning the original lacked.
Insofar as that is possible, they have tried their best. Yet due to the reasons stated above, that best may not actually get the job done. This is a huge reason why serious theology always has to be done on the basis of the original languages!
There are also uses of words in Greek that can’t be rendered into English at all For example, in Greek a word could be used with two different meanings at the same time, which is something we just don’t do in English! My favorite example is the little word εἰ (ei) which can mean “if” in some constructions, can mean “since” in other constructions, but can be suspended between those in others (Paul makes use of this when he writes “εἰ you are in Christ”, which is usually rendered “if you are in Christ” but for his argument may mean “since you are in Christ” – which as one of my third-year Greek profs pointed out should cause the reader/hearer to pause and ask, “Am I really in Christ?” while allowing the self-righteous to think, “Well of course I’m in Christ!”). Additionally, depending on how old your translation is there can be words – especially Hebrew ones – that scholars really don’t know what they mean; a great example of that is the word סֶלָה (seh-lah) “selah”, which one of my Hebrew profs called “a liturgical hiccup”, for which scholars have ventured that it may have something to do with music, or indicate a pause, or . . . well, even at the time of Christ the rabbis didn’t know what it meant!
Because they study every know instance of each word, and in Hebrew also every known instance of words with the same root, along with every known instance of matching words in languages spoken at the time, plus how each word has been translated into other languages especially by people who spoke both.
A superb example of this is the term translated “city of gold”: That seems pretty straightforward, but it was found on a list of items kept in a “box” (in quotes because the word there could mean anything from something the size of a kitchen matchbox to one as large as a freight container) – and cities just don’t fit into boxes. As a first hypothesis, scholars guessed maybe it meant a model, made of gold, of a city, but then a later discovery of the term was on a list of things a lady could have in her apartment, which made the idea of a model of a city unlikely. Skipping all the intervening detail, eventually it was found that a “city of gold” was a type of crown the shape of which resembled the skyline of a city.
That was in Akkadian, IIRC, but it had an impact on the meaning of some Hebrew term that I forget.
Huh? That’s like asking if one is unable to read old Castillian how can there be a translation into modern English?
Where did this idea come from???
If you’re referring to the statement at the end of John’s Apocalypse, that refers only to that piece of writing. We know this because it is a common phrase used at the end of other apocalyptic writing, and because it was not always the last book in the New Testament canon.
Which illustrates that theology can’t be done without studying a lot more than the Bible.
A plain example of this may be found in Leviticus 11:13-19
13 “‘These are the birds you are to regard as unclean and not eat because they are unclean: the eagle,[a] the vulture, the black vulture, 14 the red kite, any kind of black kite, 15 any kind of raven, 16 the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, 17 the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, 18 the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, 19 the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.
By both common usage and formal taxonomy, in English referring to bats as birds is just wrong, and reflects poorly on the writer. In Hebrew, the word collectively references animals that fly, which English does not have a single word for, as birds and bats are consistently distinguished. As most creatures that fly are birds, that is the closest translation. This is not some error in the Bible; it just reflects that consideration must be paid to differences in language, culture, and outlook, in understanding the intent of the original writing.
I listened to a fantastic illustration of this just this morning: when we read the account of the Transfiguration it seems like an interesting event without much to it, but if we read it and are aware that the account is stuffed with references to the Psalms, Deuteronomy, Exodus, and Second-Temple Jewish literature it becomes an incredibly powerful theological essay!
Which illustrates how non-scholars can get meaning not just found in the bare English words: there are videos from real scholars that bring out such meaning. Several have been mentioned quite positively on Biologos, including Tim Mackie, John Walton, Michael Heiser, and N. T. Wright. The first and third are especially good at explaining the background that the original audiences would have taken for granted and in view of which the full meaning of the scriptures can be found.
Or something as seemingly simple as “morning” or “tomorrow”!
A couple of grad school professors loved assigning readings that took us through decades of work where new discoveries changed how things were understood. It was disturbing at first since each reading seemed to make a very solid case and the next reading could totally shred that!
Yeah – like the idea that the concept of the Trinity was invented entirely by the early church!
They used to read it as referring to the Messiah. That stopped around 120 A.D.
