My apologies; I wasn’t thinking and forgot tomndebb’s wise advice.
I haven’t read through the whole thread (I’m really lazy today) but I always liked:
Can God™ create a rock so big that even he can’t lift it?
-XT
Harry Frankfurt argues that if God can do one impossible thing (create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it), then He can perform a second impossible thing (lift it). Viola! Problem solved. I mean, if you are not absolutely dead-set on the law of non-contradiction.
The irony burns like a lake of fire.
I was trying hard to bite my tongue. But it’s pretty hard when you are handed a straight line like that on a silver platter.
Well, to be sure. And if God™ could manage to do 4 more impossible things that morning s/he could round things up with breakfast at Milliway’s I suppose…
-XT
This is a tangent, but it brings up a point. Nowhere in the bible is god portrayed as omnipotent. He’s the most powerful, but there are clear limits to his abilities. In the garden of eden he asks “Who goes there” at one point. Mind you there are all of two physical beings in the universe at the time. He took six days to create the universe. An omnipotent being could do it instantly. He had to *rest *afterwards. Omnipotent beings don’t require rest.
He was a savage murderous dick in old testament times, yet is all touchy feeley, “let’s all be friends” around the time he rapes Mary. That implies personal growth, yet an omnipotent being would be at a state of perfection once he existed. He requires a sign of goats blood on the door frame of believers so that his clumsy death spirit can kill the gentile first born in Egypt, an omnipotent being could will them dead flawlessly. He savagely murders Lot’s family and servants then, when Lot has proven his loyalty gives him a new family. Anyone sane would have resurrected the old ones.
So no, the imaginary psychopathic monster depicted in the bible is certainly not omnipotent./tangent
Yeah, I used to think that you could rattle a fundamentalist by pointing out places where God is particularly dickish (e.g., ordering the Israelites not just to kill all the Amalekites (men, women, children, babies, elderly, etc.) but even their livestock). But fundamentalists are like the deaf adder who stoppeth its ears and hearkens not, charm you never so wisely. I would get responses like, “Well, it’s just hastening their deserved reward/punishment, so it’s not really wrong to perform genocide on them.” Makes me feel glad that religion is supposed to be the font of Western morality.
Okay, well, I’m a little late to the party but I have a question for Creationists:
Can you name one instance from history where the church has disagreed with science and then was later proved right? For example, the whole ‘The Earth is the center of the universe’ thing.
Okay, it isn’t really a solid attack on Creationism, but more or less an attack on their track record. But I still think it may be relevant.
That would be a good one. We’d have to compile a list to make it more impressive.
Okay, so there was the heliocentric universe–the Church pretty much screwed the pooch on that one. And…um…I was never very good at history, so I may have to leave the list-making up to someone else.
Ooh! Giardano Bruno was burned at the stake for suggesting (among other things) that the stars are other suns, perhaps orbited by planets, perhaps inhabited by life. Okay, we haven’t proved the life part yet, but the suns/planets thing is pretty much in the bag.
Perhaps in the US. In the rest of the educated world, creationists are viewed like the intellectual pygmies that they are.
All fine and well, but a) that has nothing to do with Creationism, per se, and b) just as showing a fault in evolution does not make Creationism true by default, showing a problem with Biblical inerrancy doesn’t make evolution true by default.
The only way to make the case for evolution is to argue the specific statements of evolutionary theory. You can’t argue for evolution by nitpicking the Bible.
The single trickiest part of trying to convince a Creationist that evolution could work is trying to convince them of the ancient age of the Earth. Most accept that natural selection occurs. Most do not accept that there has been sufficient time for NS to mold a “common ancestor” into the myriad forms we see today. One could perhaps start with questioning how they know what they know about Biblical history (i.e., anthropological / archaeological data, not just what is written in the Bible), then asking why that same logical processes and methods would not / should not apply toward examining the history of life.
Brilliant!
An old problem. I believe St. Augustine once wrote it is a sin (nowadays we would say “error”) to suppose God is any the less omnipotent just because He cannot do things that are logically impossible, such as dividing something into three halves.
That’s true, but the problem is: how do you convince a creationist of the ancient age of the earth? If they aren’t persuaded by the amount of time it would take the light from distant stars to have reached the earth, they certainly aren’t going to be convinced by something more difficult to grasp like radiocarbon dating.
There have indeed been several dozen pickup trucks’ worth of fossils of Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, etc., brought to light, and in any case the evolution of man is only a very small part of the picture. Unless you care to argue for a special creation of Homo sapiens combined with evolution of other species.
Well, as I said earlier, I think the problem is making the massive amount of time involved comprehensible to people. It’s difficult for people to picture even a million years…let along several million or a billion. Heck, a lot of people think that time since the Roman empire was kicking about is a long time…or even the Medieval period in Europe. It’s hard for some folks folks to grasp time even in human terms…let alone in cosmic terms.
If you could just convey (to anyone who even has a slightly open mind about this subject) just how long we are talking about here…well, I think that is more than half the battle.
-XT
Perhaps you could answer why a man such as Mr. Hovind is so obsessed with spreading this message. Why bother? If faith had more value that material things, why not leave science out of it. We certainly don’t have science seminars in the Catholic Church. As a Catholic, I could care less about evolution or a six day creation story. It has nothing to do with my relationship with God.
As a science junkie, my feelings are otherwise.
No need to come up with an answer yourself, the great scientist J.B.S. Haldane has already answered it:
“Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.”
Sorry I was just talking about Lot and the salt thing… obviously I meant Job. :smack: