Are creationists dishonest?

I’ll say. The simple fact of the matter is that vaccums do not exert any force at all. I mean, think about it- theres nothing there to exert any force! The reasons that people get sucked out of airlocks is because air pushes them out, and the vacuum isn’t pushing them back in. The same goes for Scylla’s description of the Bernoulli effect- the plane is pushing against air beneath the wing, and is not being “sucked” upwards by low pressure above it, because “suction” is an illusion- it’s a word we use to say that something is being pulled by air when really it’s being pushed.

Bantmof, I like your reference to Newton’s laws. No matter how you cut it, the plane isn’t an antigravity machine. If it’s going to put distance between itself and the ground, it has to push against the ground somehow, and it does so through the intervening medium of the air. ( Incidentally, Daedalus/David Jones once suggested that you could build a helicopter detector consisting of a large array of pressure sensors spread over a field. They would detect the downwash of the rotors.)

-Ben

If I might add a thing or two here, I’ve noticed in talking to fundamentalists that sometimes they have a tendency to take everything, not just the Bible, literally. And let me be plain that I’m not saying that most fundamentalists do this- just that if I had to pick out a trait that was distinctively fundamentalist, then it would be over-literalism.

What I mean by this is that when I speak to fundamentalists, sometimes they have a hard time understanding concepts like hypothetical questions. If they say that gay marriage should be outlawed because the Bible says so, I ask them how they’d feel if pork was outlawed because the Koran said so. I very frequently get replies like, “Don’t be silly- Muslims don’t have nearly that kind of political power in America.”

The reason I bring this up is because it relates to an odd sort of cognitive dissonance I see in fundamentalist Christians sometimes. To choose the most characteristic example, I once was speaking to a woman about the Bible and her interpretation of it, and she basically felt that she could not change her mind on any issue, because doing so would mean that she lacked faith in the infallibility of the Bible. I tried asking her questions like, “What if the Devil had convinced you that your interpretation was correct even though it was wrong? Wouldn’t the Devil want you to be unwilling to change your mind?” But she couldn’t handle that sort of what-if game, because she was so literal about everything that she couldn’t handle anything other than the immediate here-and-now.

The interesting part is that when I pointed to specific verses that contradicted her beliefs, she was plainly made quite uncomfortable, and said that she could not change her mind, because doing so would mean that she lacked faith in the infallibility of the Bible. And let me stress again that she said this even though she would have been changing her beliefs only in order to make them more in line with the plain word of the Bible. Her principle of “believe the Bible despite all the evidence” applied even when the evidence was the Bible itself.
-Ben

I’ve been thinking…I know it’s dangerous, but I can’t help it sometimes. I have arrived at the following conclusion.

Parts of the Bible are literally true. Parts of it are intended to reveal truth, without necessarily being literally true in and of themselves.
With the Fundies, belief in the truth and inerrancey of scripture is an all or nothing proposition. It’s either all literally true, or none of it is. Therefore, to believe that Genesis is not literally true would be to deny the truth of the whole Bible, including the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Christ.

I’m willing to believe that Genesis is not literally true because there were no eyewitnesses to the Creation of the Earth, which means that the guys who wrote it had to do the best they could by observation and a belief in God. The creation account in Genesis reveals that the Earth, all that lives on it including Man, was created by God, who intended that Man have a special communal relationship with Him, which the first humans screwed up by their disobedience to Him. The exact details of how He went about creating the world- ok the Universe, heck, the Multiverse if you want, are really not so important as the fact that it happened.

I’m willing to believe in the literal truth of the Virgin Birth, the miracles of Jesus, and the Resurrection (which my church is celebrating tonight) because of an abundance of eyewitness testimony.
Joseph married Mary, who was pregnant with a kid who was not his, because he believed that what an angel told him, that the Child Mary was carrying was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Heck, if that kind of testimony was good enough for someone who was in a legal position to have her put to death for what would have legally been considered adultry- they were engaged- it’s good enough for me.

There were eyewitnesses to all of the miracles.

There were eyewitnesses to Christ’s death on the cross, to the subsequent discovery that the tomb was empty, in spite of the fact that it was sealed and heavily guarded, to the fact that He dropped by to have dinner with his disciples at least twice- without using the door, no less. We all know the story of Thomas refusing to believe until he had actually put his fingers through the nail holes in Jesus’ wrists… at one time, He appeared to a gathering of five hundred of his disciples. And of course, there were eyewitnesses to His ascension.

Sorry if I’m getting a little off topic, but the point I’m trying to make is that I don’t feel that the whole Bible is meant to be taken literally. And that a story can reveal truth without being true in and of itself. But the Fundies seem to feel that the Bible was not just inspired (God-breathed) but was actually dictated by God, and that if every single word in it is not literally true, then none of it can be true.

Ok, gang, you know what’s coming next. Everybody say it along with me

The Bible is not a science book.

Now in my second month of exile in the 21 pit