You can find vast amounts pitfalls and contradictions in the bible and in christianity, just a matter of how much time you want to put in(same goes with any other religion on the planet). It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that these are not things you should devote your life too or even take seriously one could easily argue. If you can come to realize that, just be glad you are one of the FEW lucky, intelligent folks on the planet.
“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
Chaim, what’s your take on “flood geology”? You know, the arguments that most sedimentary deposits, fossils, erosion were due to the catastrophic results of Noah’s flood. Just curious.
I’m not quite certain of the full contents of a “flood geology” theory. I do not take too seriously the notion that extremely aged fossils are the remains of creatures that lived immediately prior to the flood and somehow it was their death in the flood that gives them the appearance of age. On the other hand, the Bible does state that much of the water of the flood was not merely from natural rain…the Noah story in Genesis mentions G-d opening some mysterious “springs of the deep” as well as the “storehouses of the heavens” which could at least be realistically interpreted as rain (although maybe that too refers to a supernatural source). It is certainly possible, in my opinion, that much of what modern science would expect to see from a fully natural flood (in the way of erosion or sedimentary deposits) of great magnitude is not in evidence due to the supernatural nature of Noah’s flood. Without reading more in detail of what these “flood geology” believers say, I can’t be more specific.
Can’t speak from the strict-Orthodox POV of Chaim, but some forms of “Oomphalistic Creationism” (i.e. creation w. a simulation of the “backstory”, so humans can figure out the laws operating NOW from the “apparent” prior data) would not necessitate Diluvian Geology, as the world would have been created WITH the Grand Canyon, the Scablands, the Black Sea, the Xichulub impact basin, Manicouagan Crater, etc. already in-place, as-if their formation had happened in the deep past.
Basically, sincere believers posed with the quandary that “the evidence my eyes can see and hands can touch tells me a different story than what my forefathers handed down” can either find the best explanation that does not violate literal scriptural infallibility (e.g. Chaim), or conclude that the literal words-on-page have a deeper meaning apart from the evidenced physical reality (e.g. some Christians). OTOH, a lot of run-of-the-mill “creationists” try foolishly to somehow show that the physical evidence itself directly proves the Genesis narrationevenwhenit doesn’t or is irrelevant.
BTW one important element in creationism as posed by Chaim: in that created universe, Evolution and Natural Selection CAN happen. Just that they started 5763 years ago!
Chaim, some (Christian, almost to a man) “creationists” use those passages of Genesis to pose that the originally-created Earth even after Eden had radically different geology and environmental conditions, and included physical reservoirs of underground water and orbiting water – or even an actual “firmament sphere”, a clear shell of water concentrically above the atmosphere – that upon the Flood were unleashed to just seek their level, leading to the current accidented state of Earth’s crust and multiple ecosystems by physical means. Like I said, rather than the elegant literalist explanation that hey, He made a miracle happen, He can do that, they will insist that what we see squares with the Flood story as straight physical evidence.
Problem with that attitude is that then how can we figure universal laws from observation, if the Creator himself arbitrarily changes the very structure of the universe when the game is already under way.
And on the seventh day he rested(I was fried, ok?). Presumably, although the Bible does not state this, God also spent this day(7) defining everything from the beginning of the universe until it’s end including a full disclosure of fossil records, pre-existing beings, the shape and function of the Earth, the makeup of the Earth’s core and an admittance of extra terrestrial beings. This Adam remembered in order to pass it on to his children in the oral tradition. Unfortunately, Cain killed Abel and dwelt in the land of Nod(Possessed of this knowledge), and Adam grew too old to remember fully and started telling tales to fill in the blanks.
I’ll admit it’s a stretch, but not greater than this:
Let’s pick on the Bible, eh? But what if we suppose that the Bible is a written record of man to record his knowledge of God Almighty? This is not a reply to the OP, but a moment’s pause to consider. As Selection is one of the few intelligent folks on the planet, perhaps this warrants a mild rebuke. How does a pitfall which you have discovered then snap the frail hair by which the existance of God and the deity of Christ hang?
I am willing to believe that you are the most intelligent being on the planet, but I fail to see how you, taken by the evidence you have collected can challenge the notion of the existance of God? Not the factual existance mind you, but the idea that perhaps a God exists. To the best of my knowledge this has not been disproven conclusively. In addition, you attack the deity of Christ, which also cannot be disproven conclusively at this time, unless I have been misinformed.
What I believe you were trying to express is that fact that if the bible is taken as absolute truth, created by God and given to man, an error in the infallible nature of said book would present a great difficulty to those who believe this. Otherwise, I would submit that an individual who searches a record of existance for the truth of God is not ignorant or foolish. Certainly an individual who decides based on their own merit that their own belief of the universe and it’s nature are true could not make such an assessment.
End hijack, you may now return to your criticism of creationists. Sorry I could not be of more help Chaim.
But why would anyone assume there had been a wedding or that the children had been given birth to as opposed to hatching from pods? Because their experience–everyone’s experience–in the Real World tells them that that’s what people usually do when they get married and that’s where babies come from. The Huxtable clan is a simulation of a real world that is known to us. There is a process of confirmation that turns one-off suppositions into probable facts, probable truths, as a result of seeing them repeated consistently over time. It’s also a fact confirmed by everyone that family sitcoms are created in a studio, the walls don’t go beyond what the cameras need to see and the people aren’t really related. One doesn’t believe this just because one read it in the National Enquirer, after all, who believes everything they read?
One of the things the process of confirmation confirms is the process of confirmation. Few of us have seen the inside of a TV studio, but we accept the truth about sitcoms once the need for firsthand confirmation gives way to trusting secondhand sources–so long as they are multiple, consistent, and make available info that can confirm it for you firsthand. (Children OTOH have very naive and quaint asumptions abount where TV shown come from.) Even if you don’t avail yourself of the information, the confirmation that it’s available–or the confirmation that it’s available is available–is available.
If the Huxtables had been a real family, it would have taken 18 years of “evolution” to get to that point. Every detail that came into place did so the hard way. When complex environments purport to have sprung up overnight, we know that’s not reality.
I’ve got my own sitcom analogy. During the opening of “The Odd Couple” the narrator state, “Several years earlier, Madison’s wife had thrown him out, requesting thast he, too, never return”. But there was an episode where Oscar and Felix flashed back the their marraiges and a disaterous vacation they took together, that in the end stated that they all got divorced at roughly the same time. Futhermore, there were several episodes which contradicted one another as to how and when the two first met. These scripts were written by a number of different writers who didn’t place a lot of importance on keeping their facts straight, just like in you-know-what. But I suppose those pathetic people who persist in believing TV showns are real will make up some nonsense to explain it away like, I dunno, that whole season was all a character’s dream.
Me? The post title drew me in, as I suppose you could say I’m religious, but I’m not a creationist. I find that the compilation of the Bible actually provides more meat than my God-Given brethren may take. If the Bible is a running tally of the Divine in the life of man, then it is certainly the longest in history, added to and recompiled several times, in much the same way as a science textbook might be, if one had been passed for six thousand years from person to person. This provides a strong insight into the Divine, and as each thing is proven, and substantiated by archeological records, the faith become stronger. As such, I’m not going to comment on Dinosaurs and the Flood. So, I really did hijack for a moment to point out a minor thing, but the overall discussion doesn’t really apply to me.
A hoax by scientists, a hoax by God or a hoax by the Devil?
I 'm wondering to what exent fundies with competing hypotheses debate each other. Chaim claims the evidence is being interpreted correctly as may be, but it’s all a simulation. Other argue that the dinosaurs lived but were killed in the Flood, others say that they were aboard Noah’s Ark but became extinct later. Some argue that the speed of light is much slower now, some say the light from distant stars was created “in transit”, some say the measurements of distance by astronomers is inaccurate and no heavenly body is more than 10,000 light years distant, etc.
Of course. HOWEVER, if the creator of the series were to personally appear to you and tell you otherwise…that the first existence of the characters was in the first episode, and that nothing that you derive had occurred to the characters prior to that actually existed as concrete events…you’d be obliged to believe him, wouldn’t you?
The above of course is based on the assumption that the person who appeared before you is, unquestionably, the series’ creator. Obviously, someone with a greater degree of credibility about the nature of the series than an outside observer, whatever the depth of his observations.
There’s any number of arguments against that sort of Bible criticism. That’s hardly the point of this thread.
You seem to have a knack for bold assertions without any factual support, and on a topic which is quite easily demonstrated to be false, no less. Not only are you insulting the many fine paleontologists around the world by insinuating their field is on the same pseudoscientific level as psychics and ufologists, but you obviously do so without ever having considered this issue for more than 10 minutes, as if you had discovered some secret, while they have devoted a lifetime to this work. At least I hope you haven’t spent any more time while reaching such a flawed conclusion.
cmkeller, here are a number of predictions that you could falsify with paleontology:[ul]
[li]I predict that you will not find any dinosaur bones above the K-T boundary, dated some 65 million years ago. [/li][li]I predict that you will find no evidence of a global flood. [/li][li]You will find no hominid fossils until approximately 5-7 million years ago. [/li][li]You will find a gradual progression of fossils, such as fish in the late Cambrian, to amphibians in the late Devonian, followed by reptiles in the Pennsylvanian, and mammals in the late Triassic. [/li][li]Likewise, you will notice a succession of plants, with Ferns appearing in the Devonian, then Ginkos in the Permian, and finally flowering plants in the Cretaceous.[/ul]Grab a shovel and start experimenting.[/li]
The late Steven J. Gould would turn over in his grave if he could hear your baseless accusations. I suggest you spend less time poring over bible verses and more time researching scientific literature if you wish to continue discussing this topic with any hint of authority.
Correct me if I’m wrong here. You claim that fossils were placed in situ by God so that Man could discover scientific principles. Then you further state that most of paleontology is unfalsifiable. When I point out the obvious contradiction between these viewpoints, you now say “well… it’s not all bad, and maybe it will be better in the future, and besides there’s other stuff in the universe.” Is there any wonder you seem to have no problem with logical discontinuities?
Oh, it’s tortured all right, but it is not what I was asking about. I was specifically wondering how you ever decided that paleontology was unfalsifiable, and how “pseudoscientific” paleontology can teach anyone about science. While you’re at it you might tell me why you haven’t as yet claimed your Nobel Prize for overturning such a hallowed scientific discipline in your spare time.
Given your grasp of logic displayed thus far, I doubt you need to be lecturing anyone on the proper application of Occam’s Razor.
What I am suggesting you should consider is the possibility the evidence you see with your own eyes concerning the nature of reality means exactly what it portrays. If you wish to think an invisible sky daddy did it to yield only the appearance of age, then revealed this subterfuge by whispering the lineage of Jesus to ancient sheepherders, by all means, go right ahead. Just don’t pretend it is the simpler approach.
And you might even be in the same ballpark as an actual point if you could find a Bible verse stating “God created the Earth in the year 3670 BC.” But that is all beside the issue I’m trying to get you to address, which is the implication of deceitfulness, and the willingness to believe stories from flawed Man instead of the evidence direct from the hand of God himself. Care to broach this subject yet?
Me: Your claim of fake fossils makes your deity appear deceitful.
You: What deceit? It’s plainly stated in the Bible that they are fake.
Me: Yeah right. I haven’t seen it, and other theists don’t either, so one of you is being deceived.
You: I posted the view of Orthodox Jews, and I don’t intend to offend other theists.
Me: ???
Regardless of whether you intended to give offense, do you agree that some large group of theists is being deceived?
Let’s just stick with the definition from The Skeptic’s dictionary, which states, “An ad hoc hypothesis is one created to explain away facts that seem to refute one’s theory.” Furthermore, we can add the stipulation that it must be nonfalsifiable in order to qualify. Agreed? So for the third time, care to address the actual question?
[quoteif the creator of the series were to personally appear to you and tell you otherwise…[snip]
…you’d be obliged to believe him, wouldn’t you?
[/quote]
If a child told me that a friend had heard that Walt Disney had appeared to some other child and said that Mickey Mouse was real, no I wouldn’t believe her. That’s hearsay.
My point is that there is a basis for contrasting the fake world of a TV show with the real world of the real world. There is no factual basis for supposing that fake planets are created to simulate non-existent real planets.
The (alleged) witnesses to the Sinai revealation were not a single individual, nor were they all children. But once again, that’s irrelevant. You’re mixing issues here. I’m not arguing (in this thread) for the veracity or non-veracity of the Bible. I’m merely pointing out that it is not inconsistent to trust what science says about fossils, etc. and to believe in the Bible as well.
hardcore:
<actual opening quote snipped>
All the predictions you made are predictions of what fossil-hunters might find, which is hardly the extent of what paleontology covers. Paleontologists also make statements about the diet, behavior, and evolutionary tree that cannot, based on present technology, be proven false. Maybe at some point in the future, scientists will be able to whip up a T-Rex and its keepers can test for certain whether it hunted its meat or ate carrion or heck, maybe it was even an herbivore and plants in the T-Rex’s range were particularly tough, accounting for the sharp teeth. Maybe then, they’ll be able to tell whether the T-rex stood like a kangaroo as the museum models showed until just a few years ago, or horizontally like they show now, and they’ll know just what a T-Rex actually used to do with its stubby little arms. But for now, such theories and guesses are non-falsifiable, but are treated as pure science.
Let Stephen J. Gould turn over in his grave. Hell, if I’m correct in my religious beliefs, he’s probably not very much enjoying seeing how wrong he had been about such things.
Come again? Let’s break this down:
I say, in my initial post on the subject, the word “most.” You declare a logical inconsistency which would require that “most” to have been “all”. When I point out that “most” and not “all” is what I said in the first place, you accuse me of backtracking?
Doctor of logic, heal thyself.
Again, a twisting of Occam’s razor. Occam’s razor does not speak to the inherent complexity of a theory, it speaks to the multiplication of different factors needed for it to be true. Since my position posits only a single factor - G-d - then, no matter how complex it is internally, it will not lose an Occam’s razor evaluation. I don’t need to pretend a thing to say that your debating methodology is flawed.
I suggest you then spend more time studying the Bible if you wish to dispute it intelligently (as you challenged me earlier). The chronology of world history set forth in Genesis and Exodus up to the point of the Exodus from Egypt (which is when the Bible was said to have been revealed) is easily calculated to a date of 2248 years prior to that event, which by our dating system is, is 3670 BCE.
Once again, you postulate the Bible as the work of man in order to ask your question. I do not agree with that postulate. Care to acknowledge that the subject you expect me to broach is a moot issue in this context?
I agree that there is a conflict of interpretation, and one camp is right and the others wrong. I do not state with authority but my own opinion that my camp is right. That does not mean an intent to deceive on the part of the author/creator whose writing and work are being interpreted.
No, I do not agree. I never claimed any form of theology to be falsifiable. And I do not agree that ad hoc hypotheses are out of place in a thread where the OP explicitly asks how a believer reconciles two apparent contradictory facts. The question at hand does not ask how the Bible can be proven true. The question at hand is how the existence of extermely aged artifacts, such as fossils, could conceivably not prove it false. As such, any answer to the question in the OP is by the “Skeptic” definition ad hoc. It is also, however, a genuine answer to that OP.
Ok, well I’m going to chime in again, 'cause I can’t help it. Chaim’s opinion (Supported with some facts outside of the Bible as well.) is cool, but there are other possibilities as well. As a precursor, I don’t claim to be a creationist(Again).
As I read these discussions about science vs. the Bible and the Big Bang theory, coupled with the spontenious generation of life in the primordial soup(According to experimentation which produced an amino acid under similar conditions, there’s another thread about this.), abiogenesis(Thanks Ben) and the evolution of the species of our world, I’ve often wondered at the argument at all.
It seems to me, and I think Ben had verified this for meto a large extent, that each of these things had to be in place and occur for the generation of the universe without God, combined these theories and experiments comprise what could be called an atheistic ‘Genesis’ if you put them in order and compiled them into a book. These are not just scientific theories that deny the bible, but comprised together produce a universe that ‘created itself’ without a God at all.
I began to ponder whether all these things wouldn’t be necessary in the plan of God, and whether it would be deceitful for God to create a universe as we know it 5700 years ago with the ‘backstory’ as Chaim presents it. From what we know about the consequence that God would produce if He were verifyable fact, we can surmise that this was not a part of the plan. If the absolute knowledge of God were a part of His plan, He presumably would have made us in Heaven, where we could walk down the street and say, “Look, there’s God. See, I told you He’s real.”
You see, these things would have had to happen in the way that they did in order to produce a universe without God’s express hand. By creating such a ‘backstory’ He could have been wiping His fingerprints from the universe.
If science had pointed towards an Earth created 5700 years ago, the Bible would be accepted, largely as fact. There are other issues of course, but what would be the result of this?
A population, probably a large one, of humans who sit on their ass and wait for death. When we die we go to Heaven, and we know there’s a God and his word is fact, so we sit, eat, live by the Bible and wait to die. I would contend that so large a population of humans would pass through this so easily and arrive in Heaven that it would be a much easier task for God to simply create us there. Without the removal of His fingerprints, there would be no purpose to this endeavor at all.
The problem for me in this is that if one assumes that He did indeed “wipe off the fingerprints” we’re left with a world that testifies to great age and to a changing suite of plants and animals leaving fossils that so strongly suggest as to “prove,” in an empirical mode, evolution.
Secondly, the narrative in Genesis and the overt words of John say that God created by His Word.
So one way or the other, if Genesis 1 is a literal account of a six-day creation with embedded false evidence, God is proven to be a liar.
The way out of this conundrum to me is that while Genesis 1 is true as what it is, ** the theory that it’s a literal account is both a human invention and goes against the internal evidence that it’s written in myth form**. That’s in no way casting aspersions on it in the traditional pejorative use of myth to mean a false belief – it’s saying that it’s one of those things that gives a simplified, children’s-story narrative of an event that’s fraught with highly significant meaning while abstracting the truth into a particular stylistic form – in this case, one that’s marked by repetition and emphasis on certain points – God creates by saying “Let there be…” and nature responds by coming into existence in accord with what He says, and each day’s work is seen by God as good. The six-day format allows for the traditional importance of the Sabbath, believed by devout Jews to be one of the “eternal things” existing before the world – effectively, on the seventh day God created the Sabbath and sanctified it by Himself resting from His creative work.
But the veracity of the Bible is the sole basis for your argument, which potulates this bizarre dual reality and which I am challenging on the grounds that it relies entirely on hearsay, that being an understatement.
No. You cannot establish the rules to suit yourself; you cannot start of f by saying “let’s say I’m right”. You need not accept as a shared premise that the Bible was wriiten by men, but if you don’t then it gets stamped “origin unknown” and it gains no additional veracity.
Polycarp: I get where you’re coming from on this, and until I read into these areas of science much more clearly(Once again, thanks Ben, I wish I could find that link.) I saw it that way as well. However, it’s my understanding now that at each level of these issues it would not only increase faith if a step were missing, but produce an absolute faith, at least in a God of creation.
Take evolution, without a clear evolutionary link it invalidates the idea of spontaneous generation of life(Which would have to have been an amino acid based simple bacteria.) producing humans, as unless the bacteria evolved there would still be a planet full of bacteria. No one would suggest that lightning struck a primordial soup and produced a fully grown human. If there were not an absolute evidence of evolution, it shoots the picture to crap.
I’m not a creationist(3rd time) but it makes quite a bit of logical sense. It doesn’t invalidate the idea of God creating by His word, and it doesn’t make him a liar. It sounds like a loophole, it sounds like a cop out, and it’s certainly not a basis for religious faith, but for an explanation that can settle an issue that covers .0000001% of my faith I’m willing to let it go as it is.