From your comment 49:
But then also this in your earlier comment 7:
Do you see the contradiction between these two?
In #7 you seem to favour the idea that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. But that idea is, in your words of #49, a “tradition of men”: the sort of thing you strongly disfavour.
To defend “Moses wrote the Pentateuch” is to defend “the tradition of men”.
One of the biggest reasons I detest young earth creationism , and I absolutely do. “ Love the young earth creationist , hate the young earth creationism “ type of thing. Ultimately young earth creationism is bad theology that misses basic things like genre type and often they ignore common sense practices such as editing of a story, but they also ignore and misrepresent science. Ultimately it just encourages a very backwards unintelligent way of seeing the world. It does not mean the YEacist is stupid, but it does mean they often wear these dummy glasses. It often also seems like it’s teamed up with other things exponentially. I feel like you find far less bigotry within EC than you do within YECism.
Westboro Baptist church has been been holding “ evolution is satanic lies”.
Though the KKK is mostly gone it still exists somewhat and one of those places is in the south, though they are also in Washington state and ect… but in the south at food festivals like the strawberry festivals or German sausage festivals you still end up seeing these people set up a tent, wearing their uniform with the hood down selling little trinkets like pocket knives with the rebel flag and so on. I often poke at them when I’m there and none of them have ever agreed with evolution and when they do it’s a weird mixture of Adam was white and certain animals evolved into subhuman like species. But in general they just reject evolution in any form. Either way they ignore the actual scientific data.
Now i don’t think anywhere near all YECist are to those extremes. But I do often see YECism breeding in the same vein movements. Such as the political movement to enforce theocracy where all kinds of things are banned or criminalized. It seems to breed bigotry in many forms. It seems to breed this desire to suffocate personal freedoms. There are always exceptions and outliers but most of the time when there is some
Christian Parents that refuse medical treatment for their kids it’s some kind of YECist. The bulk of anti maskers and anti vaxxers I met were also some kind of yecist. When I’m doing volunteer work at nature preserves and meet other Christian’s they tend to almost always either already accepts evolutions or are in the process of being critical of YECism and want to accept EC but are not sure how to harmonize it and after talking are relieved to know that many do and here are some sources.
So in a nutshell I oppose YECism because I think it breeds toxicity, anti love and anti stewardship through misrepresenting and ignoring science and promoting the worse kinds of biblical hermeneutics.
Yes, we can.
When you ignore evidence because it conflicts with the conclusion you want, you are no longer doing science.
Science is an activity. Science is a method. Science requires you to test falsifiable hypotheses. When you decide that no evidence can ever falsify your hypothesis you are no longer doing science.
I am sorry to hear that the Communists killed your grandfather. I am sure he was a good man. On the other hand, you should know that communism is based on Marxist economic theory, not evolution. It is about politics and social movement, not about science.
During WW2 Hitler claimed tone Christian, but Nazi racism was the main enemy. Stalin was an atheist and a brutal dictator, but Hitler was worse.
Nowhere does the bible claim inerrancy for itself, or ultimate authority so no interpretation, grammatical or otherwise can either.
Richard
YEC’s do claim inerrancy. They are telling us that their interpretation of the Bible is infallible which allows them to ignore any and all evidence that contradicts their interpretation. That is not science.
The gospels in the New Testament have Jesus talking about a widow with a mite, a father with a prodigal son, a virtuous Samaritan, and a sower of seeds. I don’t think any of us understand these events to be literal.
“The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.”–Galileo Galilei
Why did God take a whole 144 hours to create the universe? Why not do it instantaneously?
Dale, you know that God could have created it all in an instant, but if you have read Genesis 1 you shall find that God spread out His work over the course of six days. God worked six days, so shall we, read Exodus 20 on the fourth commandment. [content removed by moderator]
No, then you do not know how Stalin pointed to evolutionary theory to support Communism. I have personally read dozens of Hungarian language articles from the Communist era of Hungary all supporting without a shadow of a doubt that Communism is based on evolutionary theory. Communists believed that biological evolution continues in societal evolution with the working class overthrowing the capitalists resulting in Utopia. Communist authors all placed historical development into an evolutionary perspective. [content removed by moderator]
Deuteronomy 25:13-16 applies to every context in which measurement is used. No exceptions, no excuses. You cannot fob it off as applying only to business dealings for the simple reason that claiming that it does not apply to other contexts is demanding the right to tell lies about those contexts.
What you say makes absolutely no sense at all. All you are saying is that you must be honest in your business dealings and make accurate measurements. It doesn’t matter whether you are an evolutionist or a creationist or conservative or liberal or Democrat or Republican or whatnot. It has no direct bearing on the creation/evolution debate. What about the fact that evolutionists ignore the 50+ articles in peer-reviewed journals that describe soft tissue in dinosaur bones? Red blood cells, osteocytes, stretchy collagen. Why don’t they teach about these things in public schools? Because it would greatly weaken their theory. So, they falsify the measurements. Lies. They have no right to do this. Shame on them.
Could you share some of these articles, please? This evolutionary creationist would genuinely love to read some. After all, if there is 50+ it shouldn’t be too hard to share a link or two with me, right?
In return you may wish to read this article with Dr. Mary Schweitzer, the palaeontologist who discovered the fossilised soft tissue.
And this explainer about the evidence:
https://biologos.org/articles/soft-tissue-in-dinosaur-bones-what-does-the-evidence-really-say
If you do you’ll discover that it is not evolutionists who are ignoring the peer reviewed journals.
Self contradictory statement. The act of publishing in peer-review journals means by definition that evolutionists have not ignored results involving soft tissue in dinosaur fossils. Who did you think the peers were?
Check out the Stated Clearly YouTube Soft Tissue Found Inside a Dinosaur Bone!
and here is what soft tissue in the form of a wolf head preserved for 40 thousand years REALLY looks like -
So where are the dinosaur heads if they are only 4500 years old? On that topic, where are the living, breathing dinosaurs?
No, Matthew. I am saying that you must make accurate measurements, period. Whether they involve “business dealings” or not. For the simple reason that not having accurate measurements is lying, whether they involve “business dealings” or not. I shouldn’t even have to quote the Bible to make this point, let alone quibble about whether it involves “business dealings” or not. And if this makes absolutely no sense at all to you, then quite frankly I don’t know what doesn’t. It’s a concept that schoolchildren can understand.
In any case, if you are selling books or teaching materials whose conclusions are invalid as a result of being based on inaccurate or dishonest measurements, then we are talking about business dealings.
And I’m sorry, but measurement has everything to do with the creation/evolution debate because the age of the earth is determined by measuring things (such as radioisotope levels in minerals such as zircons). Relationships between species and transitional fossils are determined by measuring things (such as brain case sizes in fossil skulls). If you think that figuring out how old the earth is, or who or what did or didn’t evolve from what, has nothing to do with measurement, then you simply aren’t getting your facts straight.
Well if you’re going to bring up soft tissue in dinosaur bones, you need to make sure you’re getting your facts straight about what the soft tissue consists of before trying to make any claims about what it does or doesn’t support.
Mary Schweitzer did not find actual red blood cells in the samples. All she reported finding were round red microstructures consisting of long-lived stable molecules that were the end product of the decomposition of red blood cells. Similarly with osteocytes, she didn’t report finding actual osteocytes themselves, but only structures that were similar in size and shape to osteocytes. To claim that she found actual red blood cells, or actual osteocytes, when all she found were the decay products of red blood cells and the decay products of osteocytes, that is falsifying measurements and that is lying.
As for collagen, the time that it takes to decompose is poorly specified and very sensitive to environmental conditions. By contrast, the radioactive decay rates used to determine the ages of the fossils are very, very stable and very, very strongly resistant to changing environmental conditions, depending almost entirely on the fundamental forces of physics. This is a common trope that I see in young earth claims – they take poorly specified quantities with huge uncertainties and huge error bars and parade them as if they were evidence that hundreds of thousands of far more well established quantities with far tighter error bars must be consistently out by factors of up to a million. I’m sorry but measurement does not work that way and neither does anything else for that matter.
Besides, if the earth really were six thousand years old, then we should have found not just actual red blood cells and actual osteocytes in the dinosaur fossils, but sequenceable DNA. Gobs and gobs and gobs and gobs and gobs of it. We should have sequenced the entire T-Rex genome by now, as we have with Neanderthals, Denisovans, woolly mammoths, and so on. Why haven’t we?
And it is extremely durable, as organics go. As a further example, people have known about Paleozoic bivalve ligaments surviving since before radiometric dating existed. Nobody (that I know of) thinks that that is a problem for the age of the specimens.
Another one: how does aragonite disappear in a really short period of time? Most pre-Pliocene deposits east of the Appalachians have lost their aragonite, and so any shells made solely of aragonite are only left as molds. The time for aragonite to disappear is extremely variable: some Pliocene deposits have lost it, and some Paleozoic ones still have it.
The leaching and turning to limestone process requires either very high pressures (which is ruled out by the low amount of stuff on top) or percolating freshwater. That means that all of the layers who have a limestone sublayer, and either side of the limestone is still unconsolidated had to have been above sea level for a while in between. There are stacks with 20 repetitions of that pattern.
So Communists lied by misusing the concept of evolution to support their ideas. That makes evolution wrong?!
Propaganda, my friend, is rarely true, and if you believe that it is true, they have you where they want you. You have to think and investigate for yourself.
Stalin banned Darwinian evolution. Russia adopted a Lamarckian type of evolution called Lysenkoism which replaced Darwinian evolution. This decision actually set Russia back a few decades because they used wrong-headed ideas of how plants and animals adapt as part of their agricultural development.
How? The theory of evolution says nothing about how capital, resources, and labor should be distributed in an economy. The theory merely describes how life has changed through time. The theory says NOTHING about how humans should act, how we should run our economies, or how we should run our governments.
They are making it up because the theory says nothing about the working class doing anything.
@Matthew_Cserhati @T_aquaticus
The very most you can conclude from all this is that atheism (for the communists were indeed atheist) does not make one immune to irrational dogmatism believing in book philosophical/ideological pronouncements over the evidence, let alone all kinds of deception and atrocities on a massive scale. Yes atheists can do such things also, just as people calling themselves Christian have done. But in neither case does atheism or Christianity necessitate such things, and we see plenty of atheists and Christians who do much better than this. Many atheists might object that these were more anti-theist, just as we Christians can object that these so called Christians were only so in their heads superficially rather than their heart. But both can get you accused of a “no true Scotsman” fallacy. And it is probably just better to just admit that neither is any kind of panacea for world problems and people can use either in the pursuit of evil as well as good.
Thanks for those linked articles… very interesting read. It also shows that how anybody no matter what their worldview can get a touchy with a case of “my side bias” when their stand in the culture war is challenged (or jump to wrong conclusions when the other side is challenged). Just got to chill the rhetoric and open your eyes to look closely at the actual evidence!
Absolutely true. We are all fallible and can find ourselves following a misguided ideology.
The problem comes when we assert that ideology and try to make it mandatory or at least critical. So that a person becomes condemned for their beliefs.
Richard
“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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