Quoth DCnDC :
But surely you can see that only works one way?
Your position assumes the existence of a god. It is a reasonable compromise for believers, but from the perspective of one who does not make that assumption, it remains untenable.
Well, yes, atheism is fundamentally at odds with theism. That doesn’t imply any conflict between science and theism, though.
Judges are train to rule on legal validity, not scientific validity.
Legal definition of “minitrial”. Please note that in the rules of this bar bet, all court costs will be paid by the prevailing party. Can someone in the know estimate approximately how much this little shindig would cost the “winner”?
You really don’t even have to bring evolution into this. Just ask the judge which part of Genesis actually happened:
Genesis 1:25-27 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image… So God created man in his own image.
Genesis 2:18-19 And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
So which came first, the chicken or the [strike]egg[/strike] human?
stpauler:
You really don’t even have to bring evolution into this. Just ask the judge which part of Genesis actually happened:
Genesis 1:25-27 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image… So God created man in his own image.
Genesis 2:18-19 And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
So which came first, the chicken or the [strike]egg[/strike] human?
The judge will rule on the evidence brought before her/him…but please note what evidence is acceptable in rule #5 .
An important difference between a court trial and a minitrial is that the rules of evidence do not apply at the minitrial except for the rules governing privileged communications and attorney work product. Another difference is that minitrials are not recorded, so no transcript can be produced. Finally, the proceedings are totally confidential and any offers or statements made in the process are inadmissible at a court trial.
I’ll be over here at the minibar.
It looks like a mug’s game to me. I suspect that no one will play and he will declare a default victory.
Yes, but to get to #5 , you have to pass by #4 first:proves that science indicates the literal reading of Genesis , then the literal Genesis advocate is awarded the $20,000.
This is just fundamentally misguided, and highlights very well the misunderstanding creationists have with respect to science: scientific facts are not decided by court order; they stand or fall on their own merits. There is no higher authority capable of declaring something scientifically valid (or not). Agreeing to this bet, and thus, accepting this precondition, is already akin to a loss.
stpauler:
Yes, but to get to #5 , you have to pass by #4 first:proves that science indicates the literal reading of Genesis , then the literal Genesis advocate is awarded the $20,000.
What exactly does that mean?
The rules don’t address my question.
The preponderance of evidence prevails.
At the end of the trial, the judge hands the prevailing party both checks.
That implies the judge will decide who won the debate. But it doesn’t explicitly state that. After all, a judge doesn’t decide the verdict in many regular trials so there’s ample precedent.
It’s obviously a rigged contest if Mastropaolo gets to decide if he won or lost it.
pinqy
March 27, 2013, 2:41pm
32
Actually, a practical demonstration can be done.
37 And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chesnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods.
38 And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink.
39 And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted.
So all that would be required is to duplicate that experiment.
I’m assuming that it means the onus is on the creationist’s to prove that the literal Bible isn’t contradicted by science. Since the literal Bible offers two polar opposite positions on which came first, it becomes this unprovable Schrödinger’s Cat’s box that has to be opened by the literalist who must choose one outcome thus disproving the other (and themselves at the same time).
I thought it meant that science indicates that the Bible is supposed to be read literally, not that it is the literal truth.
Biblical literalism can mean both. “Sociologists also use the term in reference to conservative Christian beliefs which include not just literalism but also inerrancy.” Where Mastropaolo stands has not been determined as far as I could tell. But based on the link to the rules which states at the top of the page: “Honoring those who honored God’s word as literally written in Genesis”. I’m tending to think that they’re on the side inerrancy.
Here is where Mastropaolo goes into more detail about his…umm, beliefs:
The retrospective view from the medical evidence destroyed evolution. Going backward in time we saw fewer and fewer genetic disorders until by inference they disappear and we find a genetically perfect couple. That was a disaster of the greatest magnitude for evolution because of the strenuous efforts for centuries, even millennia, to completely discredit the credibility of religion, particularly the Bible. In other words, instead of the evolutionist’s hallucination of a pregnant swamp, we find instead from science the genetically perfect Adam and Eve in an environment of genetically perfect plants and animals with pristine air, water and earth where life expectancy is 900 years and intermarriage cannot produce any genetic disorders. Medical science specified Adam and Eve in a paradisiacal Garden of Eden and early Earth. Thus, the epidemiological and teratology evidence confirmed the famous secondary historical evidence of Gn 1: 26, 27: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”[19] “In His own image” means genetically perfect, with no genetic disorders. Given that genetic perfection, the intermarriage of the children of Adam and Eve would not have concentrated genetic disorders because there were none. The patriarchs would have lived 900 years because there was nothing in the environment to accelerate the mutation of their genetically perfect DNA. Given the scientific confirmation of Genesis and the Primordial Law of Biology, minor vita ex vita, life arises only from life and always with less vitality, then God is the mega-intelligent mega-engineer, the only origin and uninterrupted source of life from its beginning to the present. The probability of that being true was more than 104,478,296 (a 1 followed by more than 4,478,296 zeros) to less than 1.[20] To write more than 4,000,000 zeros would require a stack of books more than one foot high. For belief, a scientist needs evidence that would be true 95 times to 5 or less. For a scientist, the believability of Genesis at 104,478,296 to 1 cannot be more certain.
Here he is showing how he gets to the Biblical age of the Earth:
The Age of the Earth. Genesis reported the ages of the progenitors as the generations of humans unfolded from Adam and Eve to recent times. The calculated age of the Earth from these historical records were in the thousands of years as solar years are counted and recorded on calendars. However, if the Earth were only thousands of years old, then evolution would not have had time to achieve its sequence of vitalism miracles in defiance of the laws of thermodynamics and engineering. Although a very old world would mean the extinction of the entire biosphere, evolutionists nonetheless began their search for indirect indicators of an ancient Earth. They thereby were forced to add immortality of the biosphere to their list of vitalism miracles in order for their vitalism-evolution-neo-darwinism to seem plausible. These evolutionist indirect methods needed to be verified for objectivity, validity, reliability, and calibration because they did not count solar years and must be referenced to that standard. Let us see whether the historical direct method of Genesis or the indirect methods of evolutionists were objective, valid, reliable, and calibrated science to determine the age of the Earth. To do that, let us first take a simple example to illustrate the concept of reliability by means of a simple statistic called, confidence interval. Let us do it for hypothetically determining the height of a child.
SNIP
For the historical direct method for finding the age of the Earth, one of the earliest records was from the Rabbinical Chronicles of about 1550 B.C. that gave a creation date of about 5,760 years ago from the present time, approximately 2000 A.D.[69] About 150 A.D., Theophilus gave the creation date as about 7,529 years ago.[70] In about 225 A.D., Julius Africanus gave a date of 7,500 years ago.[71] In 382 A.D., the Roman Catholic Vulgate gave a date of 7,199 years ago.[72] In 1654, Ussher gave the date as 6,004 years ago.[73] For these historical data, the mean and standard deviation (M ± SD) were 6,798 ± 851 years. If we allowed a confidence interval of plus two SD to minus two SD from the mean, as we did for the height example above, then the age of the Earth at the 95% level of confidence was between 5,096 and 8,500 years ago. There did not seem to be anything that would cast doubt on this range of dates. Therefore, objective science obligated acceptance of the direct estimate of 6,798 ± 851, or approximately 6,800 ± 850, solar years for the age of the Earth by the historical method.
And then there’s this:
Summary and Conclusions. Genesis may be read literally, or it may be read allegorically in deference to the perceived contradictions of Adam and Eve from ape-men and the perceived contradictions of a young Earth by 19th and 20th century indirect methods that alleged the Earth was millions or billions of years old. The alleged contradictions of Adam and Eve collapsed scientifically because all alleged ape-men were frauds or forgeries, and ape and monkey bones were anatomically dissimilar compared to human bones thus belying alleged mosaic similarities and a common ancestor.
On the basis of natural science, theologians need no longer compromise the meaning of Scripture. Natural science supported the literal reading of Genesis . In fact, science supported religion in general. The only conflicts were between religion and the anti-science, evolution, and between science and the anti-science, evolution. Like evolution and the alleged old Earth, a natural scientific reason for the allegorical reading of Genesis, or for any conflict with religion in general, was nonexistent.
No, I was thinking of Minitrue .
Whoa. The Jackson Pollack of deductive reasoning. I bow before the master. :eek:
The rules say that both parties must use the same standard of evidence. So the literal Genesis interpreter will have to prove ’ that science indicates the literal reading of Genesis’ using ‘objective, valid, reliable and calibrated’ evidence.
Um, ok.
Genesis 1:1In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Go.
If he’s arguing from a literal interpretation point of view, he’ll have to stop after the first sentence in Genesis and show conclusive proof of the existence of a god of any kind. If he can’t, he has no argument.
Clothahump:
If he’s arguing from a literal interpretation point of view, he’ll have to stop after the first sentence in Genesis and show conclusive proof of the existence of a god of any kind. If he can’t, he has no argument.
No judge is going to rule on the existence of God.