What's Your Opinion? Views on Creation Models and Eschatology

[RichardG (Richard Gillett)]

@T_aquaticus

I think your posts says a lot more about you than I ever could. Thank you.

Sorry, I do not trust you cognitive analysis of me. You have proved that more times than I can remember.

Glad to be of service though. If it mkes you feel better.

Richard

Edit,
this had better stop before the Moderators get wind of it and pull the plug again.

[St.Roymond]

@RichardG

Within the scientific community. it is not easy for smeone like me to get access to them,

Surely your local library subscribes to Discover, New Scientist, and/or Scientific American? Some libraries, if you’re a member, provide access to those online. Popular Science and Science News aren’t bad, either.
They’re not journals, but then 99% of people aren’t up to trudging through journals since they’re in technical-speak. And heck, apart from botany I think I’ve learned more about biology from those than I got at university!

@Roy

That’s just an excuse. You have the same access that I do.

Most likely. If not, there’s an easy way to get access: many small local (community) colleges allow senior citizens to audit courses for free, and that generally gives a student ID which allows access to an incredible amount of resources online, plus the campus library which almost certainly carries every lay-science magazine published.

@Kendel

Get thee to the library!

You left out a couple of words . . . “Get thee hence unto yon local library!”

@Apistos

You ‘know’ that you are communicating perfectly clearly to everyone, but no one make make any sense of what you’re saying.

Good insight. Makes me think of a guy I encountered in Mexico; a ‘gringo’, he was sure he was speaking perfectly good Spanish, but it was like he took English sentences and replaced the words with Spanish ones (and then pronounced them woodenly and poorly). When others couldn’t understand him he just doubled down.

[There’s an interesting idiom! It says something about western culture.]

[RichardG (Richard Gillett)]

@St.Roymond

Surely your local library subscribes to

I answerd this as well… but you probaby didn’t read it because i was not answering you.

never mind

Richard

[St.Roymond]

@knor

The obstacle in accepting that Yeshua (Jesus) is the Messiah is that the prophecies and promises in the scriptures were interpreted in a different way than how the followers of Yeshua interpret them. There are passages about a suffering Messiah and passages about Messiah as a victorious king.

Which led some second-Temple rabbis to conjecture that there were two different Messiahs, a suffering priestly one and a conquering royal one. But when Christianity was perceived as a threat, the aspects of the suffering Messiah were transferred to Israel as a nation/people (due also to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple).
They couldn’t pack the two concepts together, and neither can most people – we see the result of that in the popular image of Jesus as one who conquers politically and promises riches. That image has lost sight of then fact that the Cross is the victory.

@knor

Another problem was the claim of the Messiah being the Son of Man who sits on the right side of the Most High. That would have been more than the Jews expected and could understand.

If you think in terms of spiritual warfare, that near-silence on the matter makes perfect sense: don’t give away the plan to the Adversary! For centuries God’s people were mostly kept in the dark just so the plan could go forward without the “dark side” catching on. The pieces were there, but it took the Resurrection and Ascension to make sense out of them.
A fascinating aspect is that most second-Temple rabbis would have no problem with God showing up in human form; that happens in the Tanakh. The issue was the claim that Yahweh was born as a man!

@Kendel

why lament over the junk on the Internet?

Especially when there are trustworthy sources in print that can also be accessed on the internet.

@RichardG

I hae never come across a platform where things are taken so seriously

It’s called trying to uphold professional values. If you think this forum is “tight” about that, you should see a few of the gun forums where I lurk – the disputes between “open carry” and “concealed carry” advocates there make the YEC vs. science arguments here look like a British upper-crust afternoon tea attended only by retired old ladies.

[St.Roymond]

@T_aquaticus

Perhaps you think the link between the macroscopic and microscopic world is tenuous at best because you are 40 years behind in genetics?

This triggered a memory of an article where a mathematician took on the matter of probabilities regarding DNA, and concluded that either Someone was tinkering and making it look as though He/She/It was not, or evolution happened as it’s understood, as far as the DNA goes. He conceded that many things appear highly improbable, but countered that all other possibilities were halfway to impossible from what is currently understood.
It intrigued me because it looked at the “evolution is utterly improbable!” assertions and examined the flip side: what is the possibility that it happened any other way?
I don’t remember much other than that; much of it was beyond me in terms of genetics and math both, and most of what I could understand fell into the category of understanding while reading but not being able to articulate it later.

[St.Roymond]

@RichardG

@St.Roymond

Surely your local library subscribes to

I answerd this as well

Your response was a few posts down the line from what I commented on it’s a matter of responding without reading all the new posts first. I do that sometimes, but I was like three dozen posts behind here so I took them one by one.
I will repeat one recommendation: Discover magazine. I recommend that one most because it publishes once a month and reading two articles a week keeps one pretty well up to date with the latest stuff, plus it has (or at least used to have; I’ve only skimmed a few articles a year for about a decade) good writers. A friend who subscribes keeps his copy by the toilet and says he has enough time that way to read the whole of every issue.

[T_aquaticus (The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)]

@St.Roymond

It intrigued me because it looked at the “evolution is utterly improbable!” assertions and examined the flip side: what is the possibility that it happened any other way?

One of the examples my mind often goes to is the probability of yourself. What are the chances that you would come about from that one specific egg and sperm cell? What are the odds that the haploid genome in each of those cells had meiotic crossover events at those precise locations, and that we got those chromosomes out of each pair? What are the odds that you got the 70 or so mutations in the exact locations that they are found? Now multiply this back through hundreds of generations.

The same could probably be said for any number of physical systems, with butterflies flapping wings as such. It is the arrow of time that results in inevitable improbabilities.

[St.Roymond]

@T_aquaticus

inevitable improbabilities.

Nice turn of phrase – it points out that until it happens, almost everything is improbable. Like, what are the odds of all the people in the U.S. who buy a morning newspaper bought the one they did and then chose whatever article to read first? That specific combination of events is so unlikely as to be impossible, and yet it or something very like it was inevitable.

[T_aquaticus (The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)]

@St.Roymond

it points out that until it happens, almost everything is improbable.

Exactly. ID advocates will often claim that the odds of this or that is like being dealt a royal flush 10 times in a row. However, you are guaranteed to get a hand 4 times more improbable than a royal flush just by being dealt 5 cards, and that is true every time you are dealt a 5 card hand from a freshly shuffled deck. Human bias can trick us into drawing bullseyes around arrows.