Sinful-Actually it sounds as though you have become frusterated with a conversation with a creationist. Something that I can completely understand.
I think you will find that on the SD the attitudes are a little different than that of the typical Creation v. Evolution MB.
sqweels:
But there are things to be learned from the state the earth is in. Scientific principles to be derived and conclusions to be reached which would not have been derivable from a fresh Earth. All these scientific principles are there for humans to take advantage of in managing their future.
As for automakers…come on, there are about a thousand different holes that could be poked in that analogy.
And easily derivable through observation and scientific experimentation. (Although you’ll find that there are many indications that Jewish sages, based on Biblical traditions of calculating the new moon, knew the world is round.) The Bible is a religious document, containing information deemed important for man’s relationship with G-d. Things that are entirely within the physical realm do not merit mention in the Bible.
Sinful:
Who said anything of the sort? Yes, there’s a genuine similarity between humans and apes, and between other families of species. Using principles which we can derive from our studies of said similarities, we can somehow make the world a better place in which to live.
He hasn’t gone anywhere. However, the degree of human endeavor - both sinful and virtuous - that used to elicit miraculous divine response no longer occurs. A thorough study of the “Old” Testament would reveal that the reduction of overt interaction between humanity and G-d has been both steady and gradual.
MEBuckner:
True…but find me some source which says so and appears to mean it (i.e., not the post you just posted saying so), and then we can discuss the veracity of that source. What’s the point of discussing a claim no one makes?
Chaim Mattis Keller
Well…why not the post I just made? And how would one go about discussing the veracity of a source? External evidence? But we’ve already established that when the external evidence disagrees with one particular source, the external evidence gets tossed. Internal consistency? But I would say that the Bible is not at all internally consistent; and yet defenders of Biblical inerrantism will claim that it is, using methods of rectifying things which are facially contradictory which seem to me to make it impossible to say anything is contradictory, except maybe for the most carefully written and rigidly defined logical or mathematical proofs.
If you’re willing to toss aside all evidence to the contrary (or rationalize it away with the most convoluted of explanations), and do the same for any internal inconsistencies, then there’s not going to be any dicussion of the veracity of any source, beyond “We believe in this Infallible Book, whereas your Infallible Book contradicts ours, and therefore must be wrong”.
You’ve heard the saying that God works in mysterious ways. Well, whos to say he did not use evolution in the creation of life. Thus, t could explain the quote a day to God is that of a thousand years. plus remember, God is eternal/immortal, time really does not exist to him, so a day to him, may well have been a thousand years to us. And something you probably have not heard (if I remember correctly, I’ll have to double check sometime), is this little fact finding that tells of Paleantologists discovering writings in some caves, and pictures showing humans actually riding dinosaurs (and no, not t-rex either, we all know what would’ve happened there.) have a nice day 
Not a bad line of thinking, RSC, though I’d differ with the “time really does not exist to him” line – He’s quite well aware of time, but it doesn’t limit Him as it does us.
However, this part: “this little fact finding that tells of Paleantologists discovering writings in some caves, and pictures showing humans actually riding dinosaurs (and no, not t-rex either, we all know what would’ve happened there.)” really has me hopping. Ain’t no such thing – if there were, it would have been the biggest news in decades, both in real science and in “scientific creationism” news. I’m afraid it’s another one of those off-the-wall allegations that unscrupulous folks arguing for “creation science” pass off as “fact.” (GOM and I, who differ remarkably on how God chose to create things, are united in despising people who lie in the name of their pet theory – correct me if I misstate your position, GOM!)
It is certainly of more use than discussing claims about supposed “facts” that are non-falsifiable. You posit scenarios which are no more than ad-hoc mental gymnastics simply to justify belief in a predetermined conclusion. If I embraced theism, I would be offended by your suggestions that my diety practiced deception. Instead, I am astonished that you lack the imagination to allow your chosen supreme being the ability to create as is evidenced by his own handiwork.
And if you don’t like the claim that the universe was created 5 minutes ago, how about a source indicating it came into existence approximately 15 billion years ago? I can find a multitude of well-supported claims holding to this theory, but for some reason I don’t think you are interested.
Actually, EVERY single one of those alleged cave paintings has been a forgery. It really isn’t that much of a fact, it was basically a scheme by natives to sell off rocks that they painted to people eager to have a piece of “history”. Have a nice day!
Some thoughts:
Um, yes, it would appear so, about some things. Doesn’t say which things he will confound them/us with, such as a mature earth, but then again if it did specify, it wouldn’t be very confounding…
But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; I Corinthians 1:27
**
Well, isn’t that (one of) the debates? One of the arguments is that God created a mature earth, which would – or could – include fossils. If the creator of the universe decided to create them in their mature fossil state, then no, they wouldn’t have to die first.
** I have never been able to understand why this is so difficult to believe (or to understand that others believe). If we’re operating under the possible premise that God/a creator created the earth, and the universe, etc., among other rather amazing feats (like the beginning of time…hmm, how to explain that one if not by a being who can step out of time?) why is it difficult to include in that possible premise that he created the fossils in situ and the starlight in transit? Wouldn’t that be absolute child’s play to a being who could speak the world into existence? If, indeed, a creator created the Earth and the universe, etc., and some of his many little inventions were some humans (who just the other day figured out the structure of DNA – oh, no, not how to replicate it and actually make a human, but just the structure itself) – wouldn’t it be strange if those same extremely primitive, powerless, uninformed (in comparison) humans could possibly understand it all? If they could, wouldn’t they be pretty much on the same intellectual and spiritual level as the creator himself? We can’t even figure out how to make batteries last a long time. I don’t understand how the inability to scientifically account for everything with human science and human minds necessarily means the creator doesn’t exist and didn’t create the universe, etc. If there is a creator, I don’t see how it could be any other way than that humans would be unable to understand and account for everything, or rather, most things.
Please do double check it, and post back with your conclusion; I’d love to see it, but I think that if such a piece of conclusive evidence existed, the furore it would cause in the scientific community would make it impossible that we wouldn’t have heard about it.
MEBuckner:
Because you didn’t mean it seriously.
Not true. I do not consider the Bible authoritative simply because it itself claims to be. I consider it authoritative because my ancestors experienced the divine revealation of it themselves, which experience they testified about from generation to generation.
hardcore:
First of all, most of paleontology is non-falsifiable as well. Secondly, yes, I have a pre-determined conclusion here, based on the testimony of my ancestors that they experienced divine revealation en masse. That experience, to me and millions of other Jews justifies any level of mental gymnastics to understand the details of that revealation.
Where’s the deception? Yes, G-d created a simulation, but (to those of us who believe the Bible) he told us straight=out that it was a simulation.
“Lack the imagination”? “allow him the ability”? I’m taking him at what I consider to be his revealed word. Where do either imagination (which I would think is quite in evidence, given my “mental gymnastic” ability) or any perception of limits on divine power play into that?
Chaim Mattis Keller
cm:
You mean like…evolution? Plate tectonics? The Ice Age? The speed of light as a constant? The leftover background radiation from the Big Bang? Many of these scientific principles and conclusions you speak of are evidence of past events that creationists believe did not occur.
NCB:
But this could imply they believed that the Earth was platter-shaped. After all, a circle is not a sphere and you cannot be “above” a sphere suspended in space. The Bible implies a flat Earth and geocentrism in a number of places:
http://www.skepticfriends.org/forum/showquestion.asp?faq=4&fldAuto=61
The Bible purports to be God’s Ultimate Guide to Existence for Mankind. It begins with a brief cosmology, to establish context as one might expect, mentioning the Sun, Moon, stars, the shaping of the Earth,and going into some detail as to flora and fauna. Genesis 1 need not be any less brief, but I expect it to be more accurate. Shouldn’t it point out that the Sun is one of may stars? That’s a pretty important contextual fact. One might even expect some reference to the neighborhood in which our world is located and the peoples in nearby solar systems.
This is a bit further afield, but to me one of the greatest indictments of the Bible is in its failure to warn against behaviors that harm the Earth’s ecosystem. Damn straight it’s a sin to hurt the environment. If God is in the planet manufacturing business He knows all too well how easy it is to damage one thru misuse. Why doesn’t God’s Book of Instructions include some rules for keeping the Earth healthy along with the endless nitpicking about sex? Because the people who wrote the Bible had no clue, that’s why.
Hmm… paleontology is non-falsifiable?? I’m sure this will come as a great surprise to the many scientists who practice it. And to think, all along they were simply kidding themselves by considering their chosen field scientific. Who knew?
It seems to me that paleontology is quite obviously falsifiable, as I can imagine any number of predictions concerning it that could be either true or false, depending on what the evidence would yield. Which is a far cry from your position of hypothesizing it was all poofed into place in order to fool us less enlightened types. Besides, if your claim is that God placed these fossils in order for us to learn scientific principles, this appears to be at odds with your current suggestion that the study of fossils isn’t scientific anyway. But please, do tell me what tortured logic you used to reach this assertion.
Ok, so the end justifies the means. However, I guess we do agree on your use of mental gymnastics to reach a pre-determined conclusion. Not a process likely to be successful at reducing ignorance, but whatever. Let me leave you with this idea-- if you must remove all sense of logic in order to understand the details of his revelation, you might consider the possibility that you are incorrectly interpreting these details. Occam’s Razor and all that.
Well, I guess I must have missed the part in the Old Testament where it states “Verily I say unto thee… despair not over the bones in the ground, for I have placed them in just the right manner to simulate nonexistant eons. Likewise, woe be unto anyone who searches the firmament for signs of The Flood, for I have also magically removed them, so that you might further understand my creation. Heed not the similarities evident with the other beasts, for I have only made it to appear as if you have common ancestors, not out of a desire to deceive man, but in order to reward my chosen few who might see through this obvious misdirection.”
cmkeller, there are untold millions of people who have read the Bible and do not agree with your conclusion about a simulation. To state it so emphatically misrepresents the situation, in my opinion. At the very least, either you or the other Bible-believing theists who do not reject the current scientific consensus are being deceived about the nature of reality.
Perhaps my choice of words did not convey my intention. I am trying to impress upon you that I consider your approach to be limiting with respect to your chosen deity. If I believed in God, I would think the evidence found in the universe he created to be closer to the revealed Truth then words (and oral histories) given by Men, if for no other reason than the obvious fallibility of Man. Removing a source of error would seem to be a better method of “hearing” the voice of any possible creator.
On second glance, I notice that you side-stepped my proposition about the veracity comparison between the 15 billion year old universe claim and the 6000 year claim of your dead ancestors. As long as you are going to propose that a supreme being just whipped it all into existence, why not do so without resorting to ad hoc explanations? Care to address this issue?
Sqweels, as I said in the rest of my post,
cmkeller, you said,
I have to ask, “Huh?” :dubious: Where does it say that?
While I’m all for someone defending their faith, such statements tend to undermine any reasonable discussion, and we are left with “Did so!” “Did not!”
Granted, someone else’s definitions may not sway you at all, but please! Give some of us other God Believers™ a break.
Now that all of that is out of the way, I must ask the non religious in this thread, Why is it ignorant to believe in a Supreme Being? Or are you simply trying to aid the Literalists to become more logical?
While we can discuss Science vs the Bible and probably come up with some mutually agreeable conclusions, when it comes down to the Ultimate “Is There A God?” question, can either opinion ever change the dissenting view? From what I’ve seen in in GD, it becomes a free for all of opinion and assertions. (Though, there have been some noticable exceptions, I must say.) Oh well, I guess that’s why it’s a cosmic question, for those who care to be interested.
Im not anti-religious, or atheist, I just really wonder how people can belive this!
Granted you can belive in whatever you want, doesnt bother me one iota. Just religion has been the cause of all major conflicts since before recorded history. (no oil jokes please!). 
NCB:
But Genesis 1 is scientific in a limited sense; it describes the shaping of the cosmos and the world around us. What, the basic shape of the very Earth at our feet is too much of a technical detail to be “revealed”? And is it “science” to know that you have neighbors, people who live in other parts of the world if not on other worlds? People who also worship God so we know we’re not alone?
The tribal oral traditions that became the book of Genesis is quite obviously a reflection of the lack of knowledge of the people living at that time. They weren’t being “deliberately vague”, they didn’t know any more than they should be expected to and it shows.
sqweels:
Yes and no. We can act AS IF they had been actual events, because the universe was created in a state that reflects what a universe that had experienced such events would look like.
Let me give an analogy: It’s 1984, and you’re watching the first episode of The Cosby Show. From watching this episode, you can conclude that Cliff and Claire Huxtable had been married for 18 (approx?) years, that Claire has given birth to five children, that Cliff had gone to medical school and Claire to law school and both graduated, etc. With this knowledge, you can understand the context of upcoming episodes of the series, and were you to get a job as a scriptwriter for NBC, it is based on this knowledge that you would write plots around these characters. BUT…if you were to search for 18-year-old videotape of an episode which featured the Huxtables’ wedding, or the birth of the children, or any of the other inferred events which you gained knowledge of by watching that first episode…it doesn’t exist. These are events in a created backstory, but that first episode is the beginning of those characters.
According to the Bible, the world was created in six days, 5763 years ago. There is a backstory there, and one can act as if the backstory had actually occurred, but when G-d revealed the Bible, he is telling straight-out that the genuine beginning of the world’s story was Genesis.
Yes, there are creationists who will try to deny what science says about the universe around us. The position I am advancing is not theirs.
hardcore:
Most of it, yes.
I’m sure if they thought about it for long enough, it would. Nonetheless, it is true. Most of what paleontology says about the prehistoric past cannot possibly be proven false. Most such theories are not testable through experimentation.
Please do share some.
I never claimed it was falsifiable. Just because I am willing to believe that millions of Jews were not delusional in claiming a shared experience of divine communication does not mean that I can prove it. Go ahead and disbelieve, I’ll never be able to stop you.
Point # 1 - I didn’t say all of paleontology was unfalsifiable, I said most of it, as currently practiced, is.
Point # 2 - Just because much paleontological theory cannot be tested right now does not mean that at it will not be possible at some point in the future to set up a test environment that validates or falsifies those theories.
Point # 3 - There is more to the “older than 5763 years” universe than fossils.
Well, that logic goes like this:
Fact (to us Bible- believers): G-d revealed that he created the universe 5763 years ago.
Fact (to us Bible-believers): G-d has stated that everything he created is for humanity’s use.
Fact: There are objects in the world that, as age can be scientifically measured, show greater age than that.
Conclusion: G-d created objects already showing signs of a certain degree of age.
Guess: The usefulness of these apparently-aged items is in principles we can derive from their study.
Tortured enough for you?
What a terrible misuse of Occam’s Razor. By doing so, you presuppose the non-truth of the divine revealation, which is the conclusion you were trying to use Occam’s Razor to support.
Oh, get real. It’s enough for G-d to say “the world was created X years ago” and the specific ramifications of that are easy enough to figure out.
You are correct about that. The opinion I have posed regarding reconciling my belief with apparently contradictory scientific evidence is one avenue which in my opinion addresses the issue, but is not by any means a consensus of theistic opinion. This being a message board that solicits individual opinions, I choose to forward my own preferred solution to the problem posed in the OP, and I say this without any intention to denigrate those who reconcile their faith and the evidence in an alternate manner.
Well, what do you consider to be an “ad hoc” explanation?
NoClueBoy:
By declaring the actual age of the universe to be less than what some items appear to be, it makes the implicit statement that anything that appears to be older than that really isn’t. Granted, it says nothing outright about dinosaur bones, etc.
This is not intended as a defense of my faith; this is merely a reconciliation between my faith - which has its basis in other matters - and scientific evidence. The OP seems to ask, how can the two be reconciled, and I answered, that’s one way that it can be reconciled.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Quick question: Did God say that 5000+ years ago the universe was created or did he say 5000+ years ago that he created the universe?
My genesis is a little rusty. Currently I’m thinking that we are assuming the bible means in genesis that he created the world right then and there, but that might not have been the intent. (I’m thinking in a “literal” sense today).
Granted the geneologies of Adam are still an issue, I’m just wondering about Genesis…
I’m totally off base, aren’t I?
Meatros:
When the Bible was written (whether you say by G-d or whether you say by man), the chronologies contained therein work out to a date of creation that, today, equals 5763 years ago.
Those of us who believe in the revealation at Sinai say that G-d revealed, 3315 years ago, that he had created the universe 2448 years earlier.
Those who say the Bible was compiled, say, in the days of King Josiah, will say that the compiler says that G-d created the universe some 3300 years earlier.
Chaim Mattis Keller
It’s not God’s story. It’s Adam’s story. Much of Genesis jibes with scientific reality, much does not. Presumably a given man without the scientific background we have might interpret things differently.
A thing does not exist to you until you have named it, hence Adam named all the beasts of the Earth. It took seven days. Right, anyone with any scientific knowledge whatsoever knows that Earth days couldn’t exist without the Earth, although one could presume that God’s day matches the Earth’s. Why not? He made it.
Genesis is widely considered to be a primordial notion. An image in the back of the human mind that formed into a story, perhaps handed accross continents before they seperated. The wearing of clothing and the expulsion from paradise closely fall into line with evolutionary thought, as well as the dawning of human intelligence, and the understanding of faith.
There is a great deal of evidence that Adam and Eve existed in some form or another.
Finally, Adam was created on the seventh day, so his whole story is heresay anyhow.
Well, according to the Bible, thesixth day. (See Genesis 1: 26-31)
My nitpick ends.