Of course they did - they wrote to influence people, and it was common in those days to claim that what you wrote was actually from someone else of higher authority. A non-religious example: Plato claimed that what he wrote was actually said by Socrates.
And even atheists think that some of the historical information in the Bible is somewhat accurate. Legends in text do not invalidate the entire text. Parson Weems made up the story that Washington through the dollar across the Potomac. That doesn’t mean that Washington never lived.
You should put down your Bible once in a while and read both real science books and history of science books. In the late 18th - early 19th centuries, many amateur but very skilled scientists were ministers. Far from being involved in science to disprove the Bible, they got involved because they were convinced that the evidence they find in the rocks would agree with the Bible. They found different, but were able to interpret the Bible so that they did not have to reject it. This went on until Darwin showed that we did not have to be specially created, which knocked the legs out of the movement, which let the fundamentalists, who had always been suspicious of anything except blind belief, take hold.
You might consider who wrote the rocks versus who wrote the Bible. If you believe God created the world, in whichever way, you must believe that fossils were put there by God. We just have the claim of people that they were inspired - but we don’t have to trust any person to read what is in the rocks. You seem to be rejecting the directly written word of God for the word of humans. Don’t you think God will be upset with you for rejecting his word?
Science is subjective in the sense that the theories we create are subjective, and sometimes we interpret data subjectively. That is why everything we do is reviewed by those with different biases. But, more importantly, science is predictive. A theory must tell us what to expect from discoveries and experiments not yet done. If these experiments contradict our theory, out it goes. Darwin did not understand genetics, and his attempt to explain how traits are passed on, with modification, was totally wrong. But when we did understand it we found that genetics supported evolution far better than Darwin’s ideas. Evolution also predicted what we would find when we learned ti decide DNA - and we found it. Religion may make you feel good, but tell us what verifiable truths it tells us about the world.
Or maybe we can leave the guy alone, as we’re not going to convince him, and stop attacking his religious beliefs.
Or maybe you like it when Fundies do the same thing to you. Funny how they’re always villified, but proselytizing atheists are perfectly fine.
I fully agree that we should stop forcing him to read and post on this message board. Damnit, people, stop cuffing him to his keyboard! Stop propping his eyes open with toothpicks! Stop using your mind control helmets to force him to compose replies!
This is great debates, BigT. You come here, you put yourself in peril of being debated at - theists and atheists. And if theists are ‘villified’ and atheists are ‘perfectly fine’, there are two possible explanations: 1) that there are never enough theists on the board to mount proper vilifying criticism of the atheists, or 2) the theistic arguments are just that much poorer. I suspect the true answer is a combination of the two, leaning towards the latter.
Ah. Thanks
So, correcting someone’s ignorance about science is attacking religious beliefs now?
Personally, I don’t mind it at all when fundies try to do the same thing to me. Bring 'em on. I’ve got The Logic on my side, and The Logic is a powerful ally.
Ha, thanks BigT, but bergburt is right; I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to talk about it.
Dan, if I was putting my faith in a omnipotent God that didn’t even have the power to get his book published the way he wanted, then I think at that point I might have to concede to you and join the ranks of Atheists United.
Voyager-“You should put down your Bible once in a while and read both real science books and history of science books.” Thats like me telling you to go read the bible and maybe you’ll learn something about Jesus and why your so bad.
See–your not gonna do it either.
Sorry guys, but the only (scientific) perspective present that manages to explain existence at all, is mine. You guys have the Big Bang…which is fine and all, but sooner or later evolutionists will have to face up to reality of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I don’t care how many trillons and billions of years you want to go back beyond the Big Bang, you would eventually have to admit that matter came from nothing somewhere along the line.
You’re presuming that an omnipotent God would want a book published that perfectly describes his intents. The idea of biblical literalism always struck me as a bit odd, because what would be the point? Why bother with all this free will nonsense, if he’s going to write down exactly what he wants us to think and do? That basically boils human life down to a reading comprehension quiz. If God is interested in humans’ moral decisions, it seems much more likely to me that he’d play his cards a lot closer to his chest. I mean, which is the more significant moral achievement? A man who acts morally, and in accordance with God’s wishes, because he has independently arrived at the conclusion that his actions are correct? Or a man who acts morally and in accordance with God’s wishes because he read the instruction manual?
Okay, I’ll take your word on this.
Now, explain how that’s evidence for the existence of God.
That is the fallacy of the “excluded middle”. You do not have to give up faith in God to accept that the world is billions of years old and that animals evolved over millions of years. Many, if not most, Christians accept evolution as the way that God created man. The details of evolution are so much more magnificent than thinking that God sat down and individually created each and every species, created stars with light rays in mid flight, and left geologic and fossil clues to trick man.
Sorry, but you have it too. Science is an extension of our human senses, and the best observations point to things like the Big Bang, geologic time going back about 4.5 billion years on our planet, and evolution of species. That’s just our examination of nature, and the word for that is reality (and no, I won’t be drawn into a discussion of metaphysics).
The thing is, nobody decided to view reality in that way to piss off religious people. They called it as they saw it, and then it was verified by others time and time again, with better and better instrumentation. So it isn’t a matter of us nasty atheists lining up against your religion with science as our weapon of choice. We’re just saying that, as best we can detect it, the sky appears blue. The fact that this observation conflicts with your flavor of religion… well, I’m genuinely sorry to offend you (seriously!). But the sky still appears to be blue.
People like Kepler himself had this problem. When he found that the movements of planets could not be explained with perfect circles, but rather ellipses, he tried to re-jigger the math to make it otherwise. Sadly, math doesn’t lie. It had to be ellipses, and he had to come to terms with his findings.
In short, it’s nothing personal.
You want to talk, but I have yet to see you listen.
You believe the book is by God because the book says it is by God. Different Christian sects use different versions of the bible. Which is the right one?
Why does the bible contradict known factual things?
The bible is a bronze age book written by ignorant men. The things they say aren’t true and the claims they make about the origin of life are in the wrong order.
Science works. Science builds bridges. Science creates the technology that lets you post on message boards. Why should someone ignore science and decide to believe a book that was written by ignorant bronze-age men?
“A super powerful spirit made it.” isn’t an explanation. Who made the super powerful spirit?
Lol. Without googling it, what are the other laws of thermodynamics?
The big bang isn’t the same thing as evolution. If you even had a high-school understanding of science you’d know that. Evolution says nothing about the creation of the universe.
Why do flu shots work if evolution is false? Why do fruit fly experiments come out the way we expect them to? Why does DNA show that we are related to animals?
You are offering up as rebuttal a book written by ignorant men. What does that say about you?
The big bang was around 15 billion years ago. We don’t know what happened before that, likely never will.
But hey, where did God come from? You seem to think that this is a big problem for cosmology, so where did your thinking, angry sociopath with powers of creation come from? What was there before him?
Jeeze, you don’t even understand your own arguments. :rolleyes:
Also, this post was written by God, the creator of the universe. Lobohan was directed by Him and he just wants to tell you that the bible is completely full of shit, and by blindly believing in such drivel you’re ignoring the gift of reason you’ve been given.
Also, gay sex is not only okay, God thinks it’s cooler than regular sex.
Woah, I guess because I just said I was directed by God, I must have been…
There are three general school of opinions on this:
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The Liberal viewpoint is that very little of the Bible is true and even that Jesus wasn’t the Son of God but more of a moral philosopher. This opinion more or less disregards the Bible.
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The hyper-literalist Fundamentalist viewpoint is that every word of the Bible is factually true although even they have to make exceptions for parables and passages such as “God is a rock,” and other metaphors.
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The third literalist viewpoint popular among Evangelicals is that while every word of the Bible is true, it can be true in the metaphorical sense rather than the factual sense. After all some parts of the Bible are clearly metaphor (ie Song of Solomon).
BTW, what is your denomination?
Of course, salvation is about receiving Jesus as Saviour and Lord. That’s Theology 101.
Well let me start by saying that I do very well believe that you can be a firm Christian and believe in evolution. The main point of our religion is Christ-- if you’ve got that down correctly then you pretty much in the club. You see, however, you still have to bend the bible pretty badly to get it to fit in with the explanation evolution would provide. And I can’t imagine why God would decide to have everything take place over millions of years when he could just do it in a day.
Some creationist evolutionists theorize that, because God said, “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day,” (2 Peter 3:8–9) that the six days of creation could somehow be millions of years. Yet that explanation doesn’t make sense for more than one reason. Even if that were true, that would make the creation period 6,000 years old…barely millions or billions. Further more, Jesus was raised from the dead in three days…are we to think it actually meant 3,000 years? or when it says that Satan will be locked away for 1,000 years. Are we to believe it will only be for a day? Like I said, I’m not saying you can’t be saved if you believe in evolution, but I think any real christian would have to take another good look at that idea.
The name of the game isn’t who reads the instruction manual, but who follows it. He points us in the right direction, its just ultimately up to you to start walking that way.
Well, it wasn’t really an explanation for an existence of God. It was an explanation as to why your explanation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But, clearly we’re here; as in, human kind. Even if we put aside creation for a moment, we must gotten here somehow. And when we throw in all the feelings and functions we have that are so clearly different from that of a random animal, we’ll realize we are quite in fact different…perhpas we are here for some specific reason? When I see a God giving me a reason, and the ‘teeming millions’, a reason, in his word, that then helps me too see a bit clearer evidence for an existence of God. Thats a Christian explanation in a nutshell the size of a peanut however, but, an explanation nonetheless.
Then why didn’t God create the world in a day rather than six and why did He need to rest?
No, he could do it in six days. He had to rest afterwards. Haven’t you even read the bible?
Again, evolution is supported by evidence. The bible is a book that doesn’t match evidence. Why do you believe a book that was written by bronze age ignorant men is correct when factual evidence shows that they guessed wrong?
We are animals. We share DNA with animals. We can see the descent from ape-like creatures and creatures before. This is factual. You are saying what you would like to be true, not what is backed up by facts.
You have no evidence that the reason isn’t to fight for Odin. You have no evidence that the reason isn’t to sacrifice children to Cthuhlu.
You haven’t seen God. You’ve decided to listen to ignorant bronze age men. And they are wrong about many, many factual things.
It isn’t an explanation. It’s you floundering around and unable to defend your entirely silly beliefs.
I have seen more accurate statements of Christian theological viewpoints from Der Trihs and lekatt. Next tim you go to categorize the views of others, read something besides your own denomination’s propaganda first, huh?
In what ways am I wrong?
There are liberals that are Christians, for one.
Start with this. It’s “His book” in that it records the Israelite/Jewish and early Christian experience of Him and was putatively “inspired” by Him – but what people mean by the term “inspiration” varies, which is why the (non-sneer) quotes. It is clearly, by its own internal evidence, a book by multiple human authors, presumably acting in His behalf.
The doctrine that it is the way it is, contains what it does, because He intended that to happen is a human doctrine, fallible and capable of error. So is the literalist conception that every word of it that is not “obviously” metaphorical, poetic, or parabolic is factual reportage. The Jews were very alive to the teaching value of story – and Scripture, Genesis in particular, is jam packed with story. (The technical terms are myth and *legend[/I, meant in the anthropological sense, but this is usually off-putting to non-scholars, who take them in the popular sense and think they mean “fiction, untrue,” which is incorrect.
The advice as I gather it was to know what it is you’re opposing before you go to argue against it, because you sound like you have no clue what it is that science actually teaches. Even if you come away from the experience still convinced of YEC, you’ll at least have a clue why other people doubt it.
So an omnipotent God could not come up with a plan that starts with calling photons (particles of light) into existence for the Big Bang, creating “every kind of creature” by evolutionry process, and inspiring Moses to write up what He did in easy-to-remember story form? You prefer a God who is such a supernatural trickster he makes Loki and Coyote look like innocent angels? As J.B. Phillips said, “your God is too small.”
And when did I deny that? There are plenty of people in Christian churches that adhere to viewpoint one such as for one extreme example Bishop Spong of the Anglican Church. As to whether they are saved I’m uncertain though.