No, the reason there can be a creationist geologist is that he is under no pressure to produce worthwhile output; he wouldn’t last ten minutes in the oil prospecting industry, because you need to know how real world not mythical, geology works.
Logically invalid, as I said. However, logically invalid does not mean factually false.
The problem is that we all tend to defer to authority, whether that authority is Moses, Arab tradition, or “the best new science.” Most people who scoff at Creationists are barely qualified to refute them.
I had a teacher in high school who had a Ph.D. (in physics, I think) and who, by all accounts, was a bona fide genius. He was a little eccentric, one of those guys who’s so smart he can barely dress himself in the morning, distracted by all the monumental thoughts spinning through his superior brain. He had his own electronics-repair business, and was an avid amateur meteorologist, in addition to teaching AP physics and Earth Science. Really, really smart guy.
And he was really into geology. When I had him for Earth Science, he brought in slides of his trip to Greenland to look at the glaciers. That was a vacation for him.
He was also very religious and took the Bible’s word for pretty much everything. He did admit that the meaning of a “day” was indefinite, as in “The Lord created the Earth in seven days,” but he absolutely rejected evolution. About a month before I graduated, I sat in his physics class and listened to his “debunking” of evolution. “You’re going to hear a lot about evolution in college,” he warned us, “and I just want to make sure that, at least once, you’ll hear it debunked.”
I barely remember the “debunking”, except that it had something to do with the fact that conditions were absolutely perfect for life on Earth to exist, such that they could not have arisen by chance. I was a little disappointed to hear the smartest person I’d ever met rejecting sound science in favor of untenable, faith-based inventions about the physical world. I wonder if he would’ve had a different opinion of evolution if his passion had been for biology, instead of geology.
To the people who seem to think that God’s days are 24 hours long. Prove it. The Bible states that God’s time is not our own and we can’t understand His way of thinking.
Based on what the Bible says, what the evidence says I believe (as many many other Christians do) that the world is probably 4.5 billion years old (give or take but I don’t split hairs with this). dives under a 2 billion year old rock to dodge the 1 year old bullets of the fundementalists.
To add to the young world theory stuff check out Ken Ham’s www.answersingenesis.org (I think that is the website).
I once did a google search on one of the systematic theology profs at my seminary. I was trying to find some of his articles. He (unfortunatly) happens to share the name of some apparently prominent young world researcher. I almost fell over with a heart attack. My seminary is big on diversity, opinions and otherwise, but I thought “come on!”. I eventually did find his real stuff which, happily, all had to do with theology, not geology.
We can’t understand it, lets make up a story that makes a little bit of sense.
Prove? Prove? Try proving some shit from the bible. Adam and Eve’s only offspring were Cain and Able, who screwed mommy? Wait, that’s not right, inbreeding is wrong. 'Splain please.
Clearly God could not have created the Earth in six days. Wait a second, I seem to recall him being some sort of ultimate deity. One that can do anything. One that could create countless universes in a second if he wanted, flawlesly.
Was God on an off week when the Earth came around? A week? Immigrant labor could have done it in 5 days at half the cost. Those people really love God too.
What’s worse, having millions of idiots believeing fairy tales, or having several agents enter all fields of science, in the hopes of supressing truth?
What a contradiction in statements, facts, and reality.
You are an idiot. God help us. Unless this is God helping us, in which case he can go perform miracles someplace else.
Oh dear.
dnooman, please read Mrs O’Malley’s Cow’s post again, and when come back, bring comprehension and non-splicing of quotes.
:rolleyes:
Maybe you would be so good as to explain all that to us stupid folk. Go on now.
Make your point. Not in terms of my words, but your own. Do it. Then defend it. Go.
No.
Show me how that bullshit makes sense. I can’t be held acountable for making lies seem like truths.
I’m not here to defend your words, or mine. I just think you misinterpreted Mrs O. Cow’s words, for the purposes of this discussion.
Let’s try reading it again, shall we?
I don’t see any inherent problem with this quote. FTR, I am an avowed atheist, but if ‘time’ is not calibrated in the Bible, then that is fine. I am not a biblical scholar either.
This one though is a bit more pertinent:
As you can see, you have cut up the quote here. *Your * quote says, and I quote:
…which includes a full stop at the end. Bad, bad boy dnooman. That is a complete misrepresentation of what Mrs O’Malley’s Cow was actually saying. He/She was saying that the presently accepted (by many Christians) view is that the world is indeed 4.5 billion years old, give or take a few.
Why do you have a problem with that??
The punctuation appears to have been mine. I did not intend to make others statement sound different. I clipped what i thought to be a pertinent statement, and subconciously edited it for grammar.
I apologize for any misrepresentation that might have occured. This, of course, implys that the public gives creedence to my statements, which we all know is not a fact.
I did misrepresent Mrs O. Cow’s words, though not for sinister reasons. I chose parts of her phrases that represented what I saw as flaws in her logic.
I still stand by my opinion that the entire first sentence of her post is utter bullshit.
"To the people who seem to think that God’s days are 24 hours long. Prove it. The Bible states that God’s time is not our own and we can’t understand His way of thinking. "
Prove the existence of God, then prove the accuracy of the bible, then rationalize our misunderstanding of God.
This makes me so sick.
I so love when people think that they can argue a point into reality. You win the debate, therefore what you say is actually so.
As usual, kambuckta is right. I just, nevermind.
Yer’ missing a vital point here dnooman. The Bible doesn’t HAVE to be accurate, and (at least in this thread) nobody is claiming it’s accuracy according to currently held methods and/or units of measurements. What they are saying (paraphrased here) is that the Bible was ‘true’ and that one cannot dispute a differently held measurement system just because our current paradigm is considered the ‘correct’ one.
It’s not just Sunday schools. There’s a Romany story along the same lines: that God left the first batch in too long; fearful of a repeat, he took the second batch out too soon (whence white people); and then learned enough about the process to bake the third batch to a nice brown.
Y’all ain’t read Genesis lately, I take it? :dubious:
This isn’t the Pit, dnooman. Insulting other posters isn’t allowed in MPSIMS. Please don’t do it again.
Using the dictionary to support the idea of “theory” in science as wild speculation is unwise, to say the least. What you cite from the ditionary are common-usage definitions, which differ vastly from the meanings used within scientific disciplines.
Let’s take “work”, for example. I can spend 16 hours at my desk, cranking out massive amounts of computer code to accomplish some pretty remarkable things. After that kind of a day, I would say that I have done a tremendous amount of work (common usage). A physicist would look at what I’ve done, though, and tell me that the elevator I rode to the 13th floor in this morning did far more “work” than I did all day (scientific usage).
A theory, in science, is a set of explanations based on rigorous testing and fact. Gravity is a great example of a theory. Disbelieve gravity all you like, but if you act on that disbelief, it’s likely to leave some bruises.
I must say, you have an interesting take on reading comprehension, my friend.
You quoted Cece very selectively there. You seem to have ignored all of the other evidence he presented for a round Earth.
And that article says not word one about whether a flat Earth was ever a serious scientific theory. So you dodged the question.
Wrong.
The definitions in that dictionary were delimited by numbers, meaning that they were seperate and discrete definitions. You took out the numbers out and ran all the definitions together in order to make your point. Naughty naughty.
This one:
“A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.”
Sure. The thing is, though, most Darwinists don’t do that. They take the attitude of “This theory is the best explanation we have so far. If you’ve got something better, we;d love to see it.”
Science, is, by its nature, open minded. It’s how we got the the ToE in the first place. We never would have come up with it had scientists just taken an a priori assumption and held onto it without question. If they had, they’d have come up with…
…creationism.
Try Googling for your cites. It’s not hard. It is not that newer, more accurate tests were used, it’s that they are arguing that the sample that was radiocarbon dated was a rewoven patch using later materials. I’m a bit dubious that a patch could be woven indetectably into a much older material, but it’s easy enough to test the hypothesis by repeating the radiocarbon dating on another piece of the shroud.
I have to say, I’ve never liked the “One of God’s days is like millions of years to us” explanation. It smacks of desperation.
If God had created the world in 4.5 billion years, why not just say that? Why not say four thousands of thousands of thousands of years instead of six days? Sure, we can say that God is a mystery, and we can never truly know Him. But if he writes a book intended for man to read, and for man to come to know Him, why include such a vastly misleading number?
Meh, but what’s 1,642,499,999,994 days between friends, right?
The six days= six very much longer periods (AKA Day-Age argument)thing doesn’t work anyway, for at least a couple of reasons:
-Plants are described as being created the ‘day’ before the sun; I think we could allow the problems of their survival during one night of cold and dark to be handwaved away, but if that period was millions and millions of years, well, it’s a different matter.
-The order of creation described in the six-day Genesis account contradicts a vast amount of physical evidence (in the fossil record) regarding the actual order in which plants, animals, sea creatures, etc, came to inhabit the planet.
The shop where I buy my suits farms out re-weaving work to a woman who does amazing things. I had a couple moth-eaten holes in one of my jackets, and when it came back, I couldn’t find where the holes had been, even though I knew where they were. If a re-weave can be that invisible the day after it’s done, I imagine one that has sat for a few centuries could be very difficult to distinguish.