I suppose it’s possible that the universe hasn’t actually been created yet. We cannot point to any one moment and say “This is Now.”
Spooky.
And, ultimately, as per the definition of God’s plan, ineffable.
Which is the whole point, I think. Spititus, Cooper, you’re trying to counter a young earth belief by saying God’s actions “don’t make sense,” is that what I’m hearing?
Well, duh. You’re human. God is so far above you that you can barely comprehend His existence, let alone His Plan.
Ineffable.
(disclaimer: the above does not necessarily represent my beliefs, nor those of CMK. But by golly, it’s a common enough belief. Who wants to believe in a fully human and predictable God?)
This isn’t an exaggeration of your analogy. I’m trying to point out that in your conception the universe is a much vaster sham than a vase that isn’t really from ancient china.
Why can you apply rationalization and speculation to the interpretation of the universe with the veracity of the bible of as an axiom, but you cannot question the veracity of the bible itself?
Not to point out the obvious, but it would be exactly those scientific rules which allowed such a universe to exist. If you predicate that our universe is such a universe, then it would be exactly the physical laws which we presently see in effect. Of course, if there were no deception then there would be no “appearance of history” and the scientific method would lead us to conclude that all of existence had come into being less than 10,000 years ago.
You are quite welcome, obviously, to embrace your religion and reject scientific evidence as invalid in all areas where they conflict. However, that approach implies either a rejection of science and its methods or a deceptive creator. The statement, “God created the universe with apparent age to give us confidence in science” leads directly to “God used the appearance of age to mislead us into falsely believing the universe was what it appeared to be.” As to your analogy, it is a poor one as offered. Since you object to others restating it I will simply point out that you drastically understates both the level of counterfeiting involved and the number of false contextual references required to explain the forgery.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
Because I consider the pedigree of the testimony regarding the revelation at Sinai to be genuine. The (supposed) witnesses to the event number in the millions, and those witnesses all told their children that the event is accurately transcribed in the Bible. The works of Judaic literature offer a traceable path of teacher-to-student regarding the scholars who have been primarily responsible for dissminating (sp?) the information.
Spiritus Mundi:
Maybe I phrased this wrong. What I mean is, there are various laws of physics that we have been able to derive from the fact that our universe has seen so much passage of time. We’re learning stuff about births of stars and supernovas and galactic expansion that will enable us to eventually apply the principles that control these to our everyday lives. Heck, I’ll even go out on a limb to say that’s true of evolution. Had the universe not been created with that apparent age, these are things we would not be seeing and would not be learning from. It would require a different set of rules from the ones we’re familiar with.
I’m not sure I understand you. Are you saying that you never use protein homology in your work? You have never performed a BLAST search or a sequence alignment? Because you don’t need to work on homology in order to work with it, any more than a surveyor needs to be a mathematician before he can understand trigonometry and use it in his work.
Both CMKeller and batgirl are Jewish. This is not an issue of import itself, and lest someone think otherwise, I am technically Jewish by birth myself. But follow me here.
The Bible - in the New Testament - says that Jesus is the messiah, son of God, and He died for your sins and all. But as Jews, you choose to NOT believe this thing that’s in the Bible.
So how come you can say the Bible is the “inerrant word of God,” yet when push comes to shove, you are essentially ignoring what all Catholics and Christians feel is the most IMPORTANT thing in the Bible?
Seems strange to me that you’re kinda picking and choosing here. Yes, the world is only 5,000+ years old. No, Jesus is not the messiah.
Tell me, do you ever eat rare steaks? Wear cotton-polyester blends? Get your hair cut?
The New Testament is not part of the Bible to Jews. They’re not ignoring what they consider to be the Bible at all–and I’m pretty sure CMKeller tries to follow the Torah as interpreted by the Talmud exactly. If that means “don’t eat rare steaks,” I bet he doesn’t. If you want to get specific, it’s the Torah that (some) Jews consider to be the “inerrant word of God”, not this new-and-funky New Testament stuff the Christians came up with (of course, the perspective is considerably different if you are a Christian).
Satan, you may as well ask every Christian why they don’t believe in the mormon bible, or the muslim scripture, or believe that David Koresh was the latest incarnation of Jesus Christ. Just because a religion is an offshoot of a previous belief doesn’t mean everyone with the previous belief is obligated to believe the latest and greatest testament of the lord.
CmKeller: you are not making any sense at all. You think god created a sham universe in order to teach us rules that are arbitrary to begin with? PLEASE, stop and think about this. Stop trying to win this tortured argument and think for yourself.
Cooper, I think it might be a little rude, not to mention counterproductive, to tell Chaim he’s an idiot for his faith. Maybe he’s content with it? Maybe there are no contradictions for him? Just because you think he’s wrong doesn’t mean he’s stupid. “Think for yourself?” I would find that extremely insulting.
Slythe, don’t make the mistake of thinking that there’s one Biblial passage that gives the age of the earth. The calculations are part of Talmudic law, and are based on numerous Biblical references. But I’m sure Chaim can actually cite the correct ones.
Before I address your post, a curious aside: You’re Jewish by birth? Is only your mother Jewish, or is O’Neill a professional name, or are there just more Irish Jews out there than I’d realized?
Now:
As Gaudere stated, Jews do not believe the “New” Testament is divine. The rules defining valid prophecy are quite clearly enumerated in Deuteronomy. Anyone who tried (or tries) to claim Jewish divinity would have been subjected to those tests by his contemporaries and accepted and rejected on that basis.
All the time. Nothing in the Torah that forbids eating mat rare, or even raw. As long as it doesn’t still have blood in it.
Again, all the time. But I never wear wool-and-linen blends. That’s the type of fabric mixture forbidden by the Torah.
Again, yes…but never with a razor, and never cutting my sideburns too high.
Inaccurate translations really can make things sound so different. There are many good Hebrew-English Torahs out there today that no one need rely, for the “Old” testament, on the extremely inaccurate Christian versions, which are (at the very least) English translations of Latin translations of Greek translations of the Hebrew original.
slythe:
It’s all in the calculations. Genesis 5 totals up the number of years from Adam’s creation until Noah’s birth, generation by generation. The flood occurred in Noah’s six hundredth year of life. Two years after that, his son Shem gave birth to Abraham’s ancestor, and I believe it’s in Genesis 12 that an accounting of years until Abraham’s birth is written. Isaac was born when Abraham was 100. The Israelites were freed from Egypt 400 years after Isaac’s birth (this bit of calculation is not explicit in the Torah, but I’m going to oversimplify here for the moment rather than go through the whole Midrashic figuring). The total, when one runs the numbers, is that the Exodus from Egypt occurred in the year 2448 after Adam’s creation. In Kings, Solomon completed construction of the first Temple 480 years after the Exodus from Egypt, giving us the year 2928. The chronology of the Kings of Judah and Israel as recorded in the books of Kings and Chronicles yields a total of 410 years from that point until the Temple’s destruction, 3338. According to tradition (I’m not sure exactly which book this is recorded in), the second temple was built seventy years later, 3408. The Talmud (the authors of which lived only a few generations after the second Temple’s destruction in the year 69 or 70 CE) says that the second Temple had stood a total of 420 years, which squares with those calculations.
Most secular historians actually have a somewhat different time line regarding the destruction of the first Temple and building of the second one, placing them some 160 years earlier than Jewish tradition does. However, the jury’s still out.
Cooper:
No, I don’t think the rules are arbitrary. Who knows what other possible physical structures G-d might have considered and rejected before settling on the current ones as optimal for his divine plan? To assume they’re arbitrary is unjustified.
I’m not trying to “win” any argument. The original poster asked how do young-Earth creationists explain the scientific evidence for age, such as rotating galaxies and protein homology. As a young-Earth creationist, I gave my explanation. Naturally, this explanation relies, to a great degree, on the belief I maintain in the revelation that my ancestors witnessed. I don’t see what you find so disturbing about that.
When you say “work on protein homology” I guess it depends on how you define “work on …” Right now I’m investigating the role of different signal transduction proteins in asthma. One of the proteins I’m looking at is Nuclear Factor kappa B (NFkB) which is a member of a family of homologous proteins. Actually, I shouldn’t say “one of the proteins is NFkB,” because NFkB is a family of homologous proteins within a larger family of less homologous proteins. So yes, I work with proteins that are homologous to other proteins, but I don’t sequence proteins or look for areas of homology, etc.
Having said that, study of the NFkB protein family does shed some light a possible reason for the existence of homologous proteins (at least within a species; homology between species is another discussion). NFkB is composed of two subunits, alpha and beta. There are different subtypes of alpha and beta: alpha-alpha, alpha-beta, alpha-gamma, etc. The last I read there were 7 types of alpha and 5 types of beta, but more may have been discovered since then. By combining different known alpha and beta subunits, one can potentially generate 16,807 (7 x 7 x 7 x 7 x 7) different NFkB proteins. I’m not sure how many of these have been found, that’s just the theoretical number and there may be more alpha and beta subtypes, meaning even more possibilities. So why, you may ask, have 16,807 different NFkB proteins? Well, by using basically the same mechanism, each NFkB protein can then regulate a specific protein, i.e. NFkB alpha-gamma / beta-epsilon regualtes protein A, NFkB alpha-delta / beta-delta regualtes protein B, etc. Different subtypes have been shown to regualte different proteins.
So why not just create 16,807 different signal transduction proteins? Well you could, but one reason to do it this way is that NFkB (or to be more correct, members of the NFkB family) is regulated by an inhibitory protein, IkB. When IkB binds NFkB, NFkB is sequestered in the cytoplasm and is inactive. Upon activation, IkB dissociates and NFkB translocates to the nucleus. So we now have up to 16,807 proteins being regulated by one protein, instead of 16,807 regulatory proteins.
As you might expect, there are also subtypes of IkB, leading to even finer control with just a few proteins. IkB-alpha binds NFkB and sequesters it in the cytoplasm, IkB-beta binds NFkB when it is bound to DNA, preventing IkB-alpha from binding and keeping NFkB in the active state.
Bottom line (for everyone I’ve lost) in this particular case, by using homologous proteins the cell needs fewer proteins than if homologous proteins weren’t used.
I realize that this is only one example and that this explanation may not apply to other homologous proteins. And I haven’t addressed the NFkB DNA binding sites at all, but I thought I’d gone on long enough for now.
When I say Bible I really mean what Christians would call the Old Testament. I actually probably only mean the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, which are the five books that are believed to have been given to Moses. I should be more precise with my use of language, but if not everyone is familiar with the terminology sometimes it’s easier to be less precise.
In answer to your questions: I wear cotton / poly blends - the prohibition is against mixing linen and wool, which I don’t wear. If I buy a garment with a label saying that it contains linen or wool I take it to someone to have it checked and make sure that none of the other textile is present though it’s not listed on the label. I don’t eat rare meat, but just because I think it’s disgusting. My understanding of the prohibition against eating blood (which I got from a shochet - someone knowledgable in the laws of slaughtering) is that under Jewish law there are different types of blood, only some of which are prohibited. For the same reason, liver can be permissible, even though it is chock full of red blood cells. Yes, I cut my hair (IIRC Paul said something about hair cutting in the New Testament). Because of the prohibition about cutting the corners near the ear, I asked my competent local rabbinic authority about cutting my hair there and he said that it was ok but not to use a razor. My husband does not shave that area, but he does trim it with scissors. He also asked our local rabbi about the correct way to do it.
Chaim, a small cavil having nothing to do with the original post, but in answer to one of your remarks.
Though my capabilities in transliterated Hebrew are extremely minimal (a few phrases) and I cannot read in the Hebrew alphabet, I can speak for intention with regard to the more scholarly modern Christian-Bible translations, which are intended to be accurate, usage-aware renderings translated directly from the original text, insofar as it has been preserved in the extant manuscripts. In particular I’d refer you to the New Jerusalem Bible, the New English Bible, and the New International Bible (largely Catholic, Anglican, and conservative Protestant origins respectively). Tom~ may be able to add a couple of others. In each case the original Hebrew (or Aramaic for those few passages in Daniel and Ezra) was used for the Jewish Bible, and the original Greek for the New Testament and deuterocanonical (“Apocrypha”) books (in the first two cases; the NIV doesn’t render the Apocrypha). Careful reconstruction from the manuscripts was performed to determine, e.g., what exactly Isaiah might have meant by that passage that looks somewhat garbled, or whether St. Paul really put that reference to the Trinity into II Timothy.
It’s rare to find a mistake in your posts – an assertion of faith that can be disagreed with, yes, but not a factual error. Only the older translations depend on the translation chain you mention (with the small exception that the original Jerusalem Bible was a translation from the French Sainte Bible de Jerusaleme, which was itself produced by the above methodology). So I felt a correction was in order.
I’m sure Chaim will make this point and much better than I can, but I’m here so I’ll put my two cents in now. There is no way a translation, no matter how good it is, can convey all of the meaning than one can get from reading Torah in the original Hebrew. Volumes of material have been written over the centuries about what we can learn from the use of a particular word or even a particular spelling. I think it’s something that’s hard to appreciate until you’ve read some of the commentaries.
Batgirl: I agree that for the best understanding comes from reading the original whether its Voltaire in French, Dostoevsky in Russian, or the Bible in Hebrew, Aramiac, and Greek. But we do get a very good sense of secular works even with translation.
I don’t think God is thwarted (see above quote) by careful and honest translation.
Tinker Grey,
Yes, one can get a very good sense of a meaning from a translation, but a lot can also get left out. And it can cause problems. For example, people trying to make the claim about not taking the Bible “literally” (whatever than means) will often cite the old “Eye for an eye passage.” Well, if you look at the commentaries, nobody thinks that that really means “if somebody hurts your eye, go hurt his.” The “eye for the eye” passage is the subject of very lengthy discussions in the Talmud. But without reading the commentaires, all of that gets lost.
Allright, let me try once more. Whether we assume God had choices about the rules of the universe and arbitrarily picked one set is irrelevant, so I will let this go. However, can you even attempt to explain:
If our rules require a universe billions of year old in order to present enough data to gather an understanding of those same rules - why would god create a sham universe that is only 6000 years old? Why not let the universe run the way it appears to run for billions of years? Is he short on time?
The problem is that you are starting with Genesis and trying to find a way for it to make sense, rather than accepting it as metaphorical as most people do. I think a more valid approach would be to start with the observable universe and see which explanations model it.
Batgirl:
I assume you understand enough about biology to know that you cannot possibly have a viable species of mammal descend from only two specimens. There are certain animals that are alive now, that will almost certainly become extinct because their genetic base is not large enough - the additive effects of inbreeding will eventually result in generations that are infertile or that won’t survive to adulthood.
What is the explanation for where all the other necessary genetic stock came from? I am thinking primarily here of course about Adam and Eve but this is also a primary question concerning the biblical tale of the flood. I suppose you will say all the animals that went into the arc were genetically perfect - which begs the question of how so many recessive genetic diseases and anamolies have been created in the last few thousand years.
Actually, more than two of each animal went on the ark: IIRC it was two pair of the non-kosher animals and seven pair of the kosher animals. I would look it up myself, but I don’t have a Bible handy.
Still, that doesn’t answer your question. I’m not sure about your statement that you can’t produce viable species if there’s inbreeding. When I was growing up we had a dog that was fathered by her grandfather. (Missouri Hank fathered Lucy Baines and then fathered a litter with Lucy Baines, of which we got one of the pups. Those were the names on the AKC papers.) Our dog went on to have a couple of litters before we had her “fixed.” True, I didn’t follow the litter to say how they did, but it seems that inbreeding is not unheard of in the animal breeding business.
As for genetic diseases, I stated in an earlier post that I don’t think anyone disputes that mutations occurr.