Science a Major Reason ‘Nones’ are Skeptical of Christianity

Faith & Science Conversation
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This is a common theme to hear, and yet those who believe it betray their own (and more real) principle by moments later going on to explain something about scriptures with words that are not themselves direct quotes from scripture. In other words, …apparently scriptures don’t just automatically explain themselves. If they really did, then the die-hard scripturalist (which you and others fancy that you are) would and could always do nothing but just quote scriptures as a reply to every religious question or challenge that comes their way. And some do come closer than others to trying to self-consciously do just that! Most others around them have a word for that: ‘annoying’. Because it also comes bundled with a self-assurrance that because I’m giving out more words straight from scriptures than those around me, therefore I’m infallibly right more than they could be. But even with persons aspiring to do exactly that, keep listening to them in any extended discourse for more than just a minute or two, and sure enough! They will be explaining something about some verse or passage that is just ‘clear as day’ to them because ‘there it is - right there in scriptures!’ and yet there they are - interpreting for their listeners what they insist did not need any interpretation whatsoever! It just ends up revealing to their listeners that they have a bigger blind spot than most about themselves: that they too are interpreters and applyers (and highly fallible ones at that) just like everybody else is and always has been.

[The very existence of every study and devotional book ever - I’m going through one right now by Paul David Tripp that I really like - is a betrayal that exposes how nobody really believes this (that scriptures need no further interpretation) even while they like to say that they do believe it’s all just simply there in black and white. If that were really true, then the entire Christian publishing industry (from people who think like this) would be non-existent, except to print Bibles. And yet there they are - in all their glory - publishing forth multitudes of words not directly from scriptures, to convince everyone how their very own words are unneeded. But … apparently they are needed!]

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The cultural history of Rome stated that Romulus and Remus were demigods whose father was Mars himself. The twin brothers were cast out and saved by a wolf who suckled them.

Do you think this all happened as described?

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It would be more correct to say “YEC Scientists are simply trying to find different interpretations of the data that agree with and support their (human and fallible) interpretation of the bible and the events they believe to have occurred (for which there is no evidence in the physical world or recorded in the Bible).”

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Fabrication and misrepresentation does not count as interpretation. People see through that, so no wonder they then become skeptical.

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After reading that diatribe, i make note…a complaint apparently against individuals who apparently dont quote scripture???
Go back and read the vast majority of my forum responses…you will find them absolutely loaded with scriptural references that directly support my claims here.

You know what, lets reflect on my claims on these forums with an easy one:

You say Noahs flood wasnt global, indeed im pretty sure you dont even believe it ever happened…its just a story to convey a principle to us right?

Read the epistles of 1st and 2nd Peter and please explain to us how it is that my claim about the flood is wrong.

  1. Peter says his revelation came from the writings of the prophets, the ministry of Christ, and directly from God (which we know would have been in vision/dreams and audibly because of old testament prophets accounts)

  2. Peter says God saved Noah from a flood which wiped out all other life on earth

  3. Peter says Lot was saved from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorah

  4. Peter says Satan (an angel) and his followers (angels) were cast out of heaven, they rebelled against God.

Are you honestly going to tell me, that Peter has the above description of what are clearly recorded in his and Moses writings as historical events, wrong? Are you really going to claim I am interpreting the above with a modern non biblocal spin? The meaning of the Epistles of Peter are rather self evident via a normal reading of language. You may attempt to reject this, but to do so is about as silly as calling a cow with an udder a bull!

Btw…instead of just spewing out verbal bull, go and actually read the Epistles of Peter…take notes and then address each of the above with your notes citing biblical references showing my reading and understanding of normal language on this is wrong! You claim you follow evidence…so follow biblical evidence.

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I wasn’t even addressing my ‘diatribe’ for you or at you, Adam. Nor was I addressing any of the specific issues you seem to think I had in mind.

But of all the scriptures you could have brought up, I’m surprised you omitted the one that actually does, if taken in isolation, give me pause: …“no scriptures are a matter of personal interpretation”… I’m pretty sure that words to that effect are in one of Peter’s epistles without even having to look it up. So … no; I don’t have to indulge you by doing lots of homework on your behalf. I’ve read the entire New Testament many times over. Playing the chapter and verse game doesn’t interest me any more. The message it imparts - or rather - who it points me to is what I try to grow and live into.

[… Though I guess since it was your text that provoked my thoughts and my reply was to you, I guess it was “at you” - though you’ll just have to take my word for it that I wasn’t even thinking overmuch of who the specific speaker was as I was writing - I literally have family members and friends who very much think this way, and at times it is words like these that I wish they would be ready to hear - but you’re the one who got to hear them, ostensibly addressed to you, whether you were ready or not. So maybe I owe you an apology for using you as such a proxy. ]

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It sounds like you have a bad day feeling overly criticized. I would not think you postulate that we can live out our sins and do what we want as its already been paid for by the blood of Christ and repentance is for losers as God forgives and there is nothing we can / have to do about it.

Now the thing I understand from the bible is that we can not be saved by our works, e.g. negotiate our way into heaven for our good deeds, but that does not mean we don’t have to do anything. To repent means to rethink, e.g. we have to do everything different. If Jesus has been resurrected inside you that comes without saying. It makes you submit to God in a way that sets you free, as you are free to do his will instead or the selfish one.

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that is the answer i expected…no study of the bible, no referencing of the epistles of Peter that clearly prove YEC claims that a literal historical reading of the flood account and destruction of Sodom & Gomorah …what we get instead is the “I’ve read the bible…”

I do not need to quote the text “no scripture needs interpretation”…that is implied by the mere fact that Peter tells us quite plainly, he has already received the interpretation through revelation via writings of the prophets, Christs ministry, and via direct revelation from Jehovah (The Father).The only individual here whom i need to regularly quote that text to is St Roymond…because he continually tries to claim we are interpreting the bible…which is utter nonsense.

If you have read the bible, then you would have an appropriately thought out answer to the huge dilemma TEism faces with the writings in Peters Epistles.

Its actually surprising that individuals here don’t have researched biblically supported answers for the writings of Peter…its one of the most common references AGAINST the modern reading of Genesis (that claims Moses writings are not literal historical Creation or Flood accounts). The apostle Peter clearly believed and taught that Genesis was to be read literally and that the O/T prophets writings, Christ’s ministry, and Jehovah through visions, taught him to do so! Clearly you do not appreciate the significance of the YEC claim on this…its a slam dunk and catastrophic to TEist theology.

What you are left with is simply the claim…“science says the earth is billions of years old, the bible must be wrong…oh hang on, the bible isn’t allowed to be wrong (because its inspired by God), so we must be interpreting it” (and interpreting incorrectly at that).

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I fail to understand your reasoning. How can you be a loser if, bot actually and mentally you are forgiven?

What difference does it make to you how God treats someone else?

Or do you feel threatened by a universal blanket forgiveness?

Why?

Religious snobbery perhaps?

If you want to sin you are not a Christian. It is not about punishment.

Richard

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what comes to mind is Koukl’s phrase about “never read a bible verse”. Even cross referencing to other bible verses might not work as one might think as we can take a lot of bible verses out of context at the same time.

I find the bible to be a brilliant mirror for its readers as it shows you to be the image of the God you resemble, as it correctly states that we are our God’s image. If you read it with a loving God of superior logic in mind you will find in it the wisdom of a loving God, if you read it as if you were a God with your own superior logic you will find a book full of contradictions, written by primitive goatherders, full of ignorance, genocide, oppression and violence. So no wonder some people claim there is no God as it says thou shall not have any other Gods besides the one God, and they already are

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if there is universal blanket forgiveness then there is no sin and the concept if justice is irrelevant.

It’s all about logic, I can be forgiven for what I did in the past before Jesus came alive in me, but it does not give me a free pass carry on to be sinful in the future because I will be forgiven whatever I do.
Forgiveness comes from repentance and repentance comes at a cost as it makes you aware of your guilt if you are self-conscious.

What difference does it make to you if others are not judged for their sins but left to roam free? Blanket forgiveness is not a just concept.

Do you feel threatened by justice?
Why?

However we should go bac to the question at hand. Is science the reason for the “nones” scepticism or is it that they are Gods to themselves already

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You think in terms of human justice.

Why should you care how God treats anyone else?

The only reason for you to be jealous is because you want to sin like they do and feel constrained by Scripture. IOW you want to sin. If so you are not a Christian.

The only other reason is that you ant sinners to be punished. which is also not the sign of a Christian.

If you need Scripture to tell you what you can and cannot do then you are not a Christian. Scripture is not a replacement for “the law” It is the start of faith, not the be all and end all.

Christianity is about aligning ourselves with God. We behave inn a manner that we believe in. It has nothing to do with anyone else. That is for God to judge or forgive, not you.

Heaven is not a members only club for Christians.

Richard

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When your interpretation of the Bible conflicts with reality I would think the obvious error would be in the interpretation of the Bible.

“But to want to affirm that the Sun, in very truth, is at the centre of the universe and only rotates on its axis without traveling from east to west, and that the Earth is situated in the third sphere and revolves very swiftly around the Sun, is a very dangerous attitude and one calculated not only to arouse all Scholastic philosophers and theologians but also to injure our holy faith by contradicting the Scriptures….”–Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615

Look at the title of the thread. If you ask people to ignore reality in order to be a Christian what do you think their reaction is going to be?

“If the tenets of young earth creationism were true, basically all of the sciences of geology, cosmology, and biology would utterly collapse. It would be the same as saying 2 plus 2 is actually 5. The tragedy of young-earth creationism is that it takes a relatively recent and extreme view of Genesis, applies to it an unjustified scientific gloss, and then asks sincere and well-meaning seekers to swallow this whole, despite the massive discordance with decades of scientific evidence from multiple disciplines. Is it any wonder that many sadly turn away from faith concluding that they cannot believe in a God who asks for an abandonment of logic and reason?”–Francis Collins, “Faith and the Human Genome”

And a warning from St. Augustine:

“In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different Interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”

“It is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel [unbeliever] to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn … If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well, and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books [Scriptures], how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?”

–St. Augustine

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Ok.

There is NO PLACE in the Bible, Peter’s writings included, where the word “earth” means a planet. And the fact is that descriptions of the earth in the Bible sound NOTHING like a planet and indeed sound a great deal more like a small portion of the planet.

2 Peter does not say WHEN God cast Satan and his angels out of heaven, and the story in Revelation is that this happened AFTER Christ was born.

Your claim here is simply wrong and any academic knows its wrong.

Half the trouble is you people get so used to believing your own errant line of reasoning, you don’t even see the overwhelming Biblical evidence against such reasoning. Either you agree with the Bible OR you follow the philosophy of some anti-science christian cult.

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The idea that Satan was an angel comes from 1st Enoch, which was excluded from the canon. And I have often wondered how Satan could cause problems here on earth when he has supposedly been cast down to hell and bound with chains. So did Peter get this wrong?

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  • But does Satan actually get cast down to Hell?
    • For if God didn’t spare the angels who sinned but threw them down into Tartarus and delivered them to be kept in chains of darkness until judgment (2 Pet 2:4, HCSB).
    • And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day (Jude 1:6).
  • Tartarus — 2 Peter 2:4
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But pretending the Bible teaches science doesn’t agree with the Bible – nowhere in it will you find any claim to be teaching science. So YEC is following a non-Christian philosophy.

YEC depends on taking scripture out of context! It throws out the historical context, which includes the culture, worldview, and literary aspects. YEC ignores the culture, the worldview, and the literature.

But the opening of Genesis wasn’t written as history; they didn’t even have a concept of what we call history so it couldn’t have been. It was written using literary forms the people would recognize, not forms to make 21st-century people happy.

Where is that in the text? You love making these non-biblical assertions about the scriptures, assertions that come from a modern worldview, not a scriptural one.

If you assume that the Old Testament writers were telling the whole story, then it didn’t happen “as the bible writes” – it was more complex than that.

What does the Conquest have to do with “old age scientific view”? Whether it is history as we understand it has nothing to do with science – and it has everything to do with understanding the culture of the time.

No they’re not, they’re stubbornly refusing to let the Bible be what it is and read it that way, preferring to pretend it wasn’t written to people in an ancient culture using forms they would recognize and understand.

But it is “twisting scripture” – twisting it to fit a modern scientific worldview instead of letting it be what it is.

I have yet to hear or read anything from any YECists that shows that they even care how the Bible was written – so they can’t read it as written.

This is a great trap from the Adversary – get people to stop actually paying attention to the scriptures by reading them as though they need no training to do so.

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That’s an excellent question because it shows that YECists and similar folks don’t think that the Hebrew scriptures are actually human literature – if they thought they were human literature, they would actually apply the historical-grammatical method by asking what kind of literature the original audience would have seen it as, but they don’t do that, they ask what kind of literature it looks like to them.

This illustrates the issue: this statement assumes that the writer’s worldview is totally correct and thus the writer is somehow able to grasp what the scriptures say without having to actually study.

Because the Hebrew text doesn’t say that – and neither does Peter. In both cases, you’re reading into the text the result of over two millennia of linguistic and cultural shift.

Did Peter say he got things that way? No – which means you’re inventing things the Bible doesn’t say.

Peter doesn’t even mention what you must wrote! If he had, then we wouldn’t have to worry about the Adversary and his minions, because Peter wrote that they were locked up.
You have no clue what Peter was talking about, despite hints I’ve given (the big one being the word “Tartarus”).

No, I’m going to say that what you think is “clear” is wrong. The Hebrew text tells of a flood that wiped out the known world (the land), and Peter does not contradict that. I’m also going to say that your first error is thinking that Moses was writing history as we understand it.

Are you employing the historical-grammatical method and thus reading it in the Hebrew while knowing its ancient literary genre and culture and worldview? If you aren’t, then your reading and understanding isn’t “of normal language” at all, because you have no clue what you’re looking at, you’re just imposing your personal worldview and acting as though the scriptures were written in modern English.

I keep waiting for you to start doing that.

It occurs to me that the entire SDA enterprise rests on totally ignoring that verse.

Ditto that, and in four languages, partially in two more.

Bingo.

This is the problem: you live in a made-up worldview that rests on circular reasoning that you think is biblical because you can quote individual verses. The epistles of Peter don’t prove any such thing unless you already assume that they are saying what is needed to prove that.

That doesn’t mean that what he wrote means what you claim.

But that’s exactly what you are doing, which is demonstrated by just how often you resort to things the Bible doesn’t say anywhere at all, beginning with your claim that the Bible teaches science.

They aren’t, which we know because they’re not historical narrative, which we know because that literary form didn’t even exist in the time of Moses (or of David, for that matter).
You have this bizarre notion that all knowledge comes from the Bible – something the Bible never claims. You have the bizarre notion that the Bible teaches science – something the Bible never claims. You have the bizarre notion that you can know what kind of literature something is without having to actually study what kinds of literature existed when that something was written – something the Bible doesn’t justify at all.

That’s not in the text, it’s your addition to the text.

What I’m left with is the text, which YEC refuses to deal with.

The Bible isn’t allowed to be wrong when you’re reading it as what it is instead of trying to force it to be something that it isn’t.

Why does that mean that the Bible has to teach science? Nowhere in the Bible are we told to expect it to teach us any science, or that being scientifically correct is even a part of its definition of being right!

You constantly challenge people to defend their views from scripture, yet you refuse to defend the foundation of your views from scripture – and you can’t, because there’s no basis for your foundational claim.

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Bishop Augustine had humility. YEC cannot by its nature have any because they have bought into scientific materialism for their definition of truth – which they dare not admit because it would immediately show that Collins is correct:

Besides which Peter didn’t write about that, Adam’s assertions to the contrary.

Peter wasn’t even writing about Satan, he was writing about the heavenly parents of the Nephilim, often called “The Watchers”.

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This sounds like some other religion and not the Bible. Ah yes the Book of Enoch, right? That is not my religion to be sure. OK, I can see how you might infer that this is a literary reference to the book of Enoch, but that doesn’t prove that Peter believed any of that stuff. That is like taking a reference in what I have written to Harry Potter or Star Wars and concluding that I believe in Hogwarts or the force. It doesn’t follow.