So you are using science as part of your understanding of Scripture. The question is why do you stop here? In fact there is much more in Scripture that has been reinterpreted based on science than the story of the origin of man and you don’t seem to understand or acknowledge this.
You also might want to investigate the rather recent return to YEC belief which was triggered by the visions of Ellen G White who opposed evolution for a rather specific reason.
So you are using science as part of your understanding of Scripture. The question is why do you stop here? In fact there is much more in Scripture that has been reinterpreted based on science than the story of the origin of man and you don’t seem to understand or acknowledge this.<
This is your assumption. I never said that my belief that the Earth is a sphere is based purely upon ‘science’. Scientific observations may be one of the reasons but not the only set of reasons. There are other factors to be taken into consideration such as the received testimony of airline pilots and the that of naval navigation. Also from personal experience of flying to another country at a height of 35 thousand feet. As far as I understand, we have not one piece of credible testimonial evidence from someone who has sailed to the edge of a flat earth and witnessed the alleged ice wall that flat earthers insist upon. The icewall that prevents all of the sea draining of the edges. To maintain that the earth is flat rests upon the belief that there is a huge conspiracy to convince everyone that the earth is in fact a sphere. I am not at present willing to buy into that kind of mindset. I grew up being taught that the earth was a sphere which circled around the sun and although I have looked into flat earth claims, I have seen no valid reason to change my mind on the subject. If you have evidence to the contrary then go ahead and I will listen to you. However, flat earth or not it isn’t something that significantly changes claims regarding the origins of the human race on either side of the creation/evolution debate.
you don’t seem to understand or acknowledge this.<
You don’t know me.
That is ok Mr. moderator.
I don’t really have an issue with people reading these posts or even commenting. I do understand that this is an open forum. What I do have a tendency to resist is the way folk barge in on someone elses discussion and expect answers to all of their objections. They then jump in and wish to take what I have said in an entirely different direction. You know those hot under the collar evolutionist types who are so eager to make their point regardless of what you may or may not have actually been discussing with someone else. I am not always up for that.
My point is that there is not a real evolutionary lens to look at the Bible through, but there are several different ways to interpret it, many of which allows for cell phones and evolution.<
Comparing cell phones with evolution is like proverbial ‘apples and oranges’. I can hold a cell phone in my hand and even dial people up on one and speak to them. No one has actually witnessed evolution taking place in the way that many evolutionists claim regarding human origins. Much of the theory rests upon extrapolation and uniformitarian philosophy in order to interpret raw data rather than that of pure observation.
You say that the Bible allows for evolution, but there is a difference between allowing for evolution and insisting upon it when everything is interpreted according to scientistic ‘evolutionism’ and the claim for universal common descent resting upon nothing else but natural processes and the environment.
Furthermore the term ‘evolution’ itself is a very wide category of belief and not all evolutionists see eye to eye. Even so the Bible itself does not teach that it ‘allows’ for evolution. Evolution is primarily a philosophical or religious worldview before it is ever a science. This is a philosophy which arises outside of the Bible, a philosophy which more often than not rests upon an a priori commitment to methodological naturalism over long periods of time rather than that of abrupt acts of supernatural intervention.
My former conversation (with someone else) was about the way that this philosophy is taken as a ‘given’ and then everything else must conform to it in every area of human understanding, even ancient texts which do not acknowledge evolution, never refer to evolution or require an evolutionary framework in order to understand them. This was entirely my point.
That said, I am not intending to take on the entire Biologos forum and everyone else wishing to jump on the bandwagon. I have made my point.
Thank you Mr Moderator.
If science can disprove Newtonian mechanics then why can’t it disprove ID/creationism?
What percentage of working biologists support ID or creationism over evolution?
I do not admit any such thing. Design is the difference between living organisms and machines. The origin of nothing living can be explained by design. Though… these are not black and white distinctions. Life is a highly quantitative thing and design can be one part of the many causal factors in the origin of something. But I would say that the degree to which something is designed also contributes to the degree which is it not a living organism. We are already using the machinery of life to design tools for medical applications. The fact that they are using the same biochemistry does not make them living organisms.
I have very grave doubts about whether these people should be called scientists. But I have little doubt that the same observation I have made about black and white distinctions is also applicable here. Thus we can say the degree that they do not accept the findings according to the objective evidence is also the degree to which they are not scientists but are something else like theologians (to the degree which they are putting Biblical interpretations first) instead.
Fair enough. I will conform to your philosophy of posting. But it still remains a fallacy that evolution is imposed upon the text. And both evolutionists and non-evolutionists commit that fallacy, as have I in the past. it is often repeated by those whose worldview is threatened by evolution in order to support their argument by ultimately appealing to the ultimate authority and saying, “God said it” and by which they are saying that their interpretation and view of scripture is directly from the mouth of God.
Just thinking out loud, don’t feel you must respond.
I have very grave doubts about whether these people should be called scientists.<
They may say the very same thing about you.
Yes people who live by rhetoric rather than evidence tend to change the definition of words to suit the worldviews they intend on forcing on other people in their pursuit of power. But what they say will not and cannot change the simple facts about where they are getting their conclusions from.
… Only to say that I have not said the things you directly quote. Also that my original comments were directed to someone who appeared to be an imposing evolutionary meaning upon the text that is not actually there. So no- not a fallacy in this particular instance.
Facts…Facts… yes we all love facts. More of those please.
its actually better translated as the tree of realisation of good and evil which has a beautiful subtlety to it, as in understanding and making it reality.
the theology invented to undermine the message is the one that declares God to say that "if you eat from that tree I am going to kill you.
if you do not understand pubrty other than in hair growing around your genitalia you miss a lot 
That should be required reading for all YECists!
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Which is why some atheist and agnostic students when I was at university concluded from their study of evolution that there must be a Designer – evolution is such an elegant system!
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You’re introducing something that wasn’t said: what you’re paraphrasing does not say “over and against God’s intent”.
Why? I’ll point out that there are two different ways to define “God wanted it this way”, that I’ll label with the nicknames from my university informal intelligent design club: “toy farm animals”, which means that every single form on the planet at the moment is exactly as God planned, and “beautiful system” where God didn’t specifically plan any of those forms but designed a system that would produce more and more wonderful forms.
It’s the latter that led those atheist and agnostic students to conclude from their study of evolution there must be a Designer.
This also has content you’re reading into it – besides the fact that it uses an incorrect assumption about evolution when you say “unguided”.
That would only count as evidence to those present as observers when those happened.
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I think the phrasing “unguided and unpurposed natural forces” is an inherently atheistic assumption. The natural forces in the universe actually work as guides for what is and isn’t possible, even to the point that from the first second after the Big Bang the existence of a planet like Earth was inevitable. So “natural forces” are God’s guidance.
Design is implicit in the presence/existence of laws that govern the universe. All that design really boils down to is setting things up so they actually work and do so in an orderly fashion. Sure, God didn’t likely sit down with a white board and sketch things out, but what He did resulted in a universe that works and does so in orderly fashion, so the term “design” applies.
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This brings to mind the university friend who claimed to have ‘calculated’ that starting with one single cell God would only have had to intervene seven times to get creatures we would recognize as human.
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That just might depend on the wall!
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Argument from incredulity.
Not at all accurate.
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A signal that had the first ten thousand digits of pi would serve.
Besides which, natural sources have patterns that indicate they are natural.
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Not really.
I know of at least one exception, from a course called Human Ecology: a ranger in (IIRC) Colorado took samples of water from a stream that had an old gold mine as its source, from which arsenic leaked. One day after checking for living organisms he decided to take a sample of those organisms and put them into water from farther up the stream where the arsenic concentration was higher. Most of the organisms (single-cell) died, but some didn’t, so he provided some nutrients so the survivors could reproduce, and then he repeated the process.
How many steps he went through I don’t recall, but eventually he got a population of organisms that were thriving better than the previous ones. He checked the water and found a lower concentration of arsenic. Thinking he’d somehow gotten an odd sample of water, he got another from the same distance up the stream and this time checked the arsenic content before putting some of the latest group of organisms into it. A few days later when he checked the new sample he found the same as before: the organisms were thriving more than the previous batch, and there was less arsenic in the water than when the organisms were put into it.
The conclusion was obvious, but he tested anyway and discovered that the latest population of organisms was taking in arsenic and sequestering it internally.
He continued the process using this new population, and eventually he once again got a population that was thriving better than the previous and there was reduced arsenic. His guess was that the organisms were just sequestering more arsenic, but when he took a sample to a lab for analysis the result was something unexpected: the organisms weren’t just sequestering arsenic, they were metabolizing it.
The conclusion is unavoidable: twice in his populations of those organisms a beneficial mutation had occurred, first one that let the organisms sequester arsenic in their cells and thus survive better, and second one that let them actually make use of arsenic. Neither of these was a trait present in the original population.
The really interesting thing about this is that neither mutation would have been likely to occur in the stream itself, but by transferring populations into ever-higher arsenic concentrations he unintentionally set up conditions where such mutations would be beneficial.
Oh – and he went back to the sample population from before each of those mutations and went through the process again. A mutation that made the organisms able to sequester arsenic occurred again, but only after many more generations and it wasn’t the same mutation, but the second mutation never occurred again despite many attempts. This process proved beyond doubt that new genetic information had appeared that made those organisms more able to deal with arsenic in their environment – in other words, adaptation was evolution.
The clincher in terms of the class, i.e. how this tied to humans, was that the arsenic-metabolizing organisms were grown by the trillions and introduced into the stream right where it came out of the gold mine, with the result that downstream where arsenic levels had been too high for the water to be safe became nearly arsenic-free.
A famous one from that same Human Ecology class was the transfer of firefly genes into tobacco, resulting in tobacco that would glow in the dark when disturbed by a breeze or animal. Later someone transferred the gene responsible for making digitalis into tobacco as part of a project to try to make tobacco a cash crop that didn’t lead to cancer.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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