What you do not seem to understand is that circumcision in the Bible is the sign of the Old Covenant, just as baptism is the sign of the New Covenant. You can only follow one covenant, so circumcision as the Judaizers practiced it meant one is saved by the Old Testament Covenant.
If one is saved by following the OT covenant, then one is a Jew. If one is saved by following the NT covenant by Jesus Christ alone, then one is a Christian. Jesus like Paul taught that one is saved by faith in Jesus as the Messiah or Savior.
George, you need to read the Bible and understand what it says instead of relying on your own opinions.
[quote=“Eddie, post:178, topic:3204”]
Evidence does not speak except through interpretation. And the interpretation is always the word of man.[/quote]
You and Jon don’t interpret the evidence for yourselves. You interpret interpretations instead. I’m asking why Jon claims to be interpreting the evidence when he doesn’t. The same question applies to you.
I also notice that you’re pretending that science isn’t about interpreting without the evidence in hand to make empirical predictions.
It’s what we still know. Again, you aren’t engaging with any evidence. All the evidence indicates that almost all of the human genome is still junk. Very little of it has been found to be functional. “Transcribed” isn’t synonymous with “functional,” as the ENCODE folks have conceded.
The evidence is the word of God.
[quote]Not “science” but “nature” is the word of God.
[/quote]What’s your point? I wrote that God speaks to us through the evidence, that the evidence is the word of God. Why not engage with the evidence directly instead of pretending that everything starts and ends with the word of man?
I’ll challenge you (and Jon) again to make a substantive comment that doesn’t cite any hearsay and includes zero interpretation of others’ interpretations. I don’t think that either of you are capable of it.
Your ridiculous comment about junk is a fine example of a pathological avoidance of evidence; you’re simply redefining junk. The proportion of the genome with no known function is always decreasing, but not at all dramatically.
I have to admit, this is hometown bias. I live in Holmdel NJ where the CBM was first measured 50 years ago. So there are many old-timers in town who makes sure that both science and history classes starting in grade school knows of the Big Bang cosmic background radiation story and its significance. For years Bell Labs scientists would speak at the schools in town. Fifth and six graders asked the best questions and were far past the teachers you described above. I have seen pictures in classrooms of COBE, WMAP and Planck and the kids at even grade school level have some level of understanding of the pictures. I am really amazed at the speed of science education. Newtonian mechanics is now taught as an approximation of GR. And students do simulations on computer instead of rolling metal balls down ramps.
No it didn’t. It came from new results with new rapid methods of sequencing to uncover previous unknown functions as well as the interconnection with other organizisms both living and extinct.
Roger, I think circumcision is completely irrelevant to your standing with Jesus. The Council of
Jerusalem did not discourage a related Old Testament concern !:
Act 15:19-21
“Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God:
But that we write unto them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood. For Moses of old time hath in every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every sabbath day.”
Once students acquire more scientific knowledge, ID will never get even a look. The children of the 35% of the US population - the millennial nones will be far advanced in scientific knowledge and will never understand the purpose of the debate surrounding ID.
Yes, they can do the math as the math is geared to the science. For example, basic Euclidian geometry is used to explain an expanding flat universe. You really don’t need calculus to do Newtonian mechanics via a computer. Even relativity can be made so that the math is grade appropriate. E=hf and E=mc^2 is doable in fifth or sixth grade.
There is a lot of video in school now. Everyone has laptops connected to the internet and students can really explore science websites with wonderful videos on them. This starts in kindergarden now. Did you see that Grandmother fish .pdf for preschoolers?
One thing I want to say is that in NJ/NY, this is no controversy between science and faith even in parochial schools. YEC would be laughed at by most 3rd graders around here.
[quote=“Eddie, post:189, topic:3204”]
BioLogos doesn’t explore Intelligent Design.[/quote]
Yes, it does. It does a very good job of showing that ID isn’t supported by evidence.
A blog? Are you serious? Doesn’t any superficial reading of UD blow up your claim that ID is not theologically motivated? After a blog, what items are left to file under “etc.” anyway?
If you offer UD is an accurate representation of ID, then you can’t credibly deny the religious aspect.
And there’s ID guru Dembski: “Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.” IIRC he started UD.
The Wedge Document, produced by Discovery as an institution, explicitly frames ID as a religious idea: “Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”
Casey Luskin is a spokesman for Discovery: http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1475
The title of the piece is, “Intelligent Design is Constitutional and has Educational and Legal Merit,” and in it Luskin states, “I believe that teaching ID is easily justified under a fair and neutral application of these standards for good science education. There are thus a number of clear secular purposes that justify teaching students about scientific alternatives to neo-Darwinian evolution like intelligent design.”
Clearly Luskin disagrees with you. What position do you hold in the ID movement or organisations that allows you to pontificate on what “they think”? From your framing, you create the impression that you’re directing the movement.
[quote]They think that ID can be left until later, when the students have acquired more scientific knowledge and therefore have the sophistication to understand the challenge which ID raises.
[/quote]“They think” again? That’s clearly not what Luskin says. Why should we accept that a pseudonymous commenter has more authority to speak for Discovery than a Discovery spokesman has?
What you think now about circumcision is completely irrelevant to what the Bible says. The important thing is what circumcision meant to Paul and the people back then.
[quote=“Eddie, post:193, topic:3204”]
You’re quite wrong. The more we understand the intricacies of nature generally, and living nature in particular, the stronger the case for ID becomes.[/quote]
Eddie, I don’t see any evidence that you understand the intricacies generally or particularly. Your endless name-dropping style illustrates that, as does your running away from any discussion of real biological evidence.
Biochemists aren’t that familiar with “the world of the interior of the cell,” Eddie, because most biochemistry is done in vitro. Where did you get that falsehood from? Do you not realize that those scientists are called cell biologists?
[quote]you would be more aware of just how intricate and interconnected everything in an organism is, and more skeptical about the possibility of such intricacy arising via undirected natural processes.
[/quote]Perhaps if you studied real biology instead of name-dropping ID pseudoscience, you’d be more aware of the incredible redundancy of living systems, which screams to virtually everyone who actually examines the evidence that they arose from a mind-bogglingly iterative process.
For example, here’s some real biology for you.
How is the large number of first messengers, coupled with the tiny number of second-messenger pathways, consistent with intelligent design instead of duplications and divergence? Is there anything intelligently designed that is analogous to this phenomenon? What’s your ID hypothesis and what entirely empirical predictions does it make?
Why is the ribosome that assembles the proteins in your body a ribozyme, and why can’t your hero Meyer bring himself to inform his readers about this Nobel-winning discovery? What’s the ID hypothesis explaining the choice of an inferior type of catalyst for such an important function?
Why do stop codons not encode amino acid residues, while start codons do? What proportion of active proteins retain their N-terminal residue? Why was your hypothetical Intelligent Designer so much more intelligent in designing translation stops than starts?
Hmmm…perhaps you should read before pontificating, particularly the first line: “Editor’s note: This article was posted on behalf of Discovery Institute…”
