evolution vs. Evolution

[Fascinated With God]

Actually, it uses "Yom", and that can mean various things, such as "day", "in my time", "ages" and so on. So it doesn't says "literal days." And, as the ancient Christians like Augustine noted, it was absurd to have literal mornings and evenings without a Sun.

Excellent points, so compelling that no Creationist could come up with any kind of rebuttal. And everything you say is true:

The word day in Gen 1 is translated from Strong's H3117 yowm, which includes the following explicit usages elsewhere in the Bible:

C. days, lifetime (pl.)
D. time, period (general)
E. year

 

[Fascinated With God]

BTW, I want to point out that I don't buy that man came from monkeys, at least not exclusively, because both of my grandfathers were Air Force colonels, and as a young major the grandfather that raised me was adjutant to Gen. Curtis Lamay, AF chief-of-staff during Roswell. An adjutant is head of office staff, all orders going out to troops are signed by the adjutant rather than the General himself for example, and virtually all paperwork coming into or going out of the General's office is seen by the adjutant. So my grandfather knew for a fact that UFO's are real.

So how would you combine evolution with ancient aliens poking around in our genetics? Our genetics actually go back much farther than the monkeys, they go to the stars.

 

[frogman2x]

Most Creationists don't just think they are correct, they think they are the only true Christians and that anyone who thinks differently is not really a Christian.

That is an unsjupportable opiniion and I have not found it to be rue.

That is fanatical religious bigotry rather than simple conviction.

Not necessarily. The other person might actually be either wrong or ignorant of the truth.

>> Atheists often demonstrate a very similar fanatical antireligious bigotry. They are both just two sides of the same coin.

There is a lot of truth to that but I ask you a question you did not answer. Do you think what you believe is right?

kermit

 

[frogman2x]

Excellent points, so compelling that no Creationist could come up with any kind of rebuttal. And everything you say is true:

The word day in Gen 1 is translated from Strong's H3117 yowm, which includes the following explicit usages elsewhere in the Bible:

C. days, lifetime (pl.)
D. time, period (general)
E. year

That is easy to rebutt. Throughout the Bible, anytime day is used with a number, it ALWAYS refers to a 24 hour day as we know it.

Also, plants were created on he third day and the sun wasn't not created until the fourth day. If the days in Genesis were millions of years, no plants would have survived.

kermit

 

[Fascinated With God]

There is a lot of truth to that but I ask you a question you did not answer. Do you think what you believe is right?

Naturally, but I do not think your being wrong on the matter has any bearing on your salvation or your status as a Christian. What I think does have a bearing on your salvation is how you hold your opinion, not what opinion you hold.

Most Christian Creationists strike me as very hard hearted and seem to hold anyone who disagrees with them in profound contempt. THAT is the sort of thing that has a bearing on your salvation, not what kind of opinion you hold, but how that opinion affects your heart. The Bible says over and over that God knows what it is in your heart, but Creationists want to focus on what is in other people's heads rather than what is in their hearts.

 

[Fascinated With God]

BTW, I don't accept evolution as scientists currently understand it because I was raised by my grandfather, a retired Air Force colonel, who had been the adjutant to Gen. Curtis Lamay, the Air Force Chief of Staff during Roswell. An adjutant is head of office staff, signs all the orders going out to troops rather than the General himself, and would see virtually all paperwork coming thru the General's office. As such he was in a prime position to know about Roswell and Area 51, and he accidentally let it slip a number of times that he knew UFOs are real.

So if UFOs are real it is extremely unlikely that they just showed up now and indeed history is full of accounts. For example in the 1890's there was a huge rash of "air ship" sightings across the Mid-West, with speeds estimates in the hundreds of miles per hour at a time when the fastest mode of transportation was a 35 mph steam engine. There was actually a Roswell-like crash and an alien body buried, as described on the 5th page of the local Texas newspaper in 1897. It was on page 5 because there were more than a dozen articles on air ships in that day's issue. Another example is Grimm's overview of Celt fairy lore, which were generalizations of numerously repeated accounts in the traditional lore, such as Rumpelstiltskin, a strange looking little man with a big funny hat (to cover a big head) who wanted her baby. In abduction accounts the aliens are always focused on our reproductive process and frequently show women their human/alien child. Rip van Winkle was a classic missing time story (abductees typically have shorter missing time accounts). Still another example is that in the Vatican archives are stories sent in by local priests across the centuries about what are clearly UFOs.

So the military knows about UFOs and abduction but was paid hush money in the form of trinkets of technology, not unlike the way Manhattan was sold by the local Indians for trinkets. And if UFOs are real then it is extremely unlikely that they just showed up. They've probably been here for a very very long time manipulating our evolution. Our evolution is actually the subject of a cosmic war called the battle of the angles.

So put it together, evolution and UFOs, and you get something entirely different from what scientists think today. You get something much older. Our genetics do not go back to the monkeys, mostly, they go to the stars.

 

[frogman2x]

Q: If the awesome size of the universe is not a threat to YEC's and is easily taken as a sign of God's awesome power, why is the awesome age of the universe not taken in the same fashion, as most Christians do?

First of all you do not know hat mot Christians think. Second because you cannot prove the age of the universe with any reliabel scientific meethod.

Creationists have a fundamental space/time mismatch. Why is time in your opinion so profoundly different than space and size in terms of whether or not it demonstrates the awesome power of God?

I have no idea what you ar talking about.

k

 

[frogman2x]

Naturally, but I do not think your being wrong on the matter has any bearing on your salvation or your status as a Christian. What I think does have a bearing on your salvation is how you hold your opinion, not what opinion you hold.

I think you have it backwards. Teh op;inion I hold i s wht determins my salvation. That makes me hold and try to defend what i beleive.

Most Christian Creationists strike me as very hard hearted and seem to hold anyone who disagrees with them in profound contempt. THAT is the sort of thing that has a bearing on your salvation, not what kind of opinion you hold, but how that opinion affects your heart. The Bible says over and over that God knows what it is in your heart, but Creationists want to focus on what is in other people's heads rather than what is in their hearts.

I doubt if you have know enough Christisn to have a statisticlly reliable result.

I have probabaly know many more Christians than you have and while some, may be hearted, most are not.

Most are very compassionate towards the needs of others.

kermit

 

[AceHero]

Oh and by the way. To say that these fields are no longer dominated by atheists is certainly not the same as saying that they are filled with a majority of believers in the one true and living God. Muslims are not atheists, but neither do they hold to the same truths that the one true and living God has made plain to all people. Hindus are not atheists, but neither do they hold to the same truths of the one true and living God. Buddhists are not atheists, but neither do they hold to the truths of the one true and living God. Friend, in order for there to be any hope that most scientists believe and hold to the truth of the one true and living God, then they have to be people who themselves who hold to the truths of the one true and living God. Otherwise, while we don't label them atheists, the truth is that they are still people whose faith and belief system is founded on something other than the truth.

So you have to be a devout Christian in order to be an effective scientist?

What about those Christians who have advanced degrees in a science discipine, have done researh for a secular company and who have taught in a major university and still reject evolution. How do you account for that.

They must be very ignorant if they've been well-educated in the subject and yet refuse to accept evolution as true.

How many are prominent in the scientific world? None.

Oh there are some prominent in the scientific world. Francis Collins is probably the best known because of his work on the Human Genome.

And he's currently the director at the National Institutes of Health. His book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief is excellent, and he also founded an organization called BioLogos which is essentially the theistic evolutionary antidote to the anti-science creationist think tanks.

 

[AceHero]

Can science prove there is no God. If it can't, and we both know it can't, the teh Creator of the Universe will always be needed.

We're not talking about the existence of God. We're talking about the validity of evolution.

Jesus said to them, "My Father is always at his work to this very day..."

It interesting that God did not work to bring the universe into being. He just spoke and it happened.

How is that not working to bring the universe into being?

Also, Creationists strive to limit God. The idea of God working over awesome timescales makes them insecure, so they deny that God can work over awesome timescales to accomplish His goals.

Trying to put limitations on God is a very bad idea.

Since I believe God created time I don't believe it takes Him billion of years to create something.

But that doesn't mean He didn't do it that way.

 

[AceHero]

Creationists have a fundamental space/time mismatch. Why is time in your opinion so profoundly different than space and size in terms of whether or not it demonstrates the awesome power of God?

I have no idea what you ar talking about.

Here's his full post:

Q: If the awesome size of the universe is not a threat to YEC's and is easily taken as a sign of God's awesome power, why is the awesome age of the universe not taken in the same fashion, as most Christians do?

Creationists have a fundamental space/time mismatch. Why is time in your opinion so profoundly different than space and size in terms of whether or not it demonstrates the awesome power of God?

In other words, if the vastness of the universe points to the amazingness of God, why can't its age do so as well?

 

[Fascinated With God]

I think you have it backwards. Teh op;inion I hold i s wht determins my salvation. That makes me hold and try to defend what i beleive.

So then where are all these verses in the Bible that talk about God knowing what is in your head vs. what is in your heart? You are just making up your own religion as you please, no matter how much it contradicts the Bible. No matter how much the Bible focuses on the heart, you can only focus on the intellect, much as the Nazi's focused exclusively on the intellect, as did Napoleon, the antichrist before Hitler. Napoleon actually referred to his movement as a "religion of intellect", setting up huge shrines to "reason".

I doubt if you have know enough Christisn to have a statisticlly reliable result.

I have probabaly know many more Christians than you have and while some, may be hearted, most are not.

Most are very compassionate towards the needs of others.

Please, no other religion can compare to the religious bigotry of Christianity except modern Islam. It has only been in the past 25 years or so that anti-Semitism, hatred towards the only religion Jesus ever practiced, has fallen out of style with Protestants.

(BTW, I was raised Methodist, which is why I am both Protestant and in utter loathing of Protestants who are religious bigots.)





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[frogman2x]

So then where are all these verses in the Bible that talk about God knowing what is in your head vs. what is in your heart?

What I believe is in my heart and in my head. Boh are necessary. Rom 7:22 talks about joyfully concuring with God's law in the inner man. That is where the heart is. Then Rom 7:25 talks about serving the law of God with our mind. True Christianyt cannot be based soley on emotion or on intellect.

You are just making up your own religion as you please, no matter how much it contradicts the Bible.

First of all you don't know me well enough to make such an accusation. Be specific, what have I made up. If you tell me I will show you IN THE BIBLE why I believe it.

No matter how much the Bible focuses on the heart, you can only focus on the intellect, much as the Nazi's focused exclusively on the intellect, as did Napoleon, the antichrist before Hitler. Napoleon actually referred to his movement as a "religion of intellect", setting up huge shrines to "reason".

Instead of making wild, unsupported accusaions, tell me specifically what you are referring to.

Please, no other religion can compare to the religious bigotry of Christianity except modern Islam. It has only been in the past 25 years or so that anti-Semitism, hatred towards the only religion Jesus ever practiced, has fallen out of style with Protestants.

Here you are misinformed. That is what happens when one tries to paint everyone with the same brush. What is true of liberal Christianity is not true of conservative Christianity. Our savior was a Jew, to hate Jewes would be to hate the One who saved us. The Bible tells us to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, so we do. DO YOU?

(BTW, I was raised Methodist, which is why I am both Protestant and in utter loathing of Protestants who are religious bigots.)

IMO any denomination the belongs to the National Alliance of Chriches is bigoted towards Israel and America. Not only do they not support Israel, they supported criminals like Angela Davis.

kermit

 

[Fascinated With God]

What I believe is in my heart and in my head. Boh are necessary. Rom 7:22 talks about joyfully concuring with God's law in the inner man. That is where the heart is. Then Rom 7:25 talks about serving the law of God with our mind. True Christianyt cannot be based soley on emotion or on intellect.

I have to acknowledge when you make a point that has some validity. I did a search on the word "mind" on biblegateway.com. It is going to depend on which translation you use of course, I used the RSV and came up with 250 hits on the word mind. But I came up with a 1000 hits on the word heart. So while I have to give you some props, I still think the heart is far more important than the intellect in being a proper Christian.

First of all you don't know me well enough to make such an accusation. Be specific, what have I made up. If you tell me I will show you IN THE BIBLE why I believe it.

As to knowing you well enough, I have not made any ad hominem argument directed at you personally, much less singled you out as different from other Creationists. I am making generalizations that are true of most Creationists.

Instead of making wild, unsupported accusaions, tell me specifically what you are referring to.

Which one of the 1000 references to the word heart in the Bible do you need in order to recognize that the heart is more important than the savage animal intellect in being a proper Christian?

Here you are misinformed. That is what happens when one tries to paint everyone with the same brush. What is true of liberal Christianity is not true of conservative Christianity. Our savior was a Jew, to hate Jewes would be to hate the One who saved us. The Bible tells us to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, so we do. DO YOU?

Of course I do. I pray for peace throughout the Islamic world, which suffers so much violence and oppression due to it being a demonic religion that promotes only extremely conservative ideologies, and conservatives tend to be much more bigoted, violent and intolerant of anyone different.

Liberal Christians have never been anti-Semitic, so I have no idea where you are coming from here. Only conservative Protestant Christians use to be anti-Semitic. Now they expect that all Jews will convert at the 2nd coming, so their attitude has changed from overtly bigoted to condescendingly patronizing. It is really only a slight improvement.

IMO any denomination the belongs to the National Alliance of Chriches is bigoted towards Israel and America. Not only do they not support Israel, they supported criminals like Angela Davis.

I googled National Alliance of Churches and came up with two hits, neither of which seem to be what you are talking about. The 1st is the National Alliance of Progressive Churches, which exists only in Florida, and the 2nd is the National Alliance of Covenanting Churches, which exists only in Canada.

As to Angela Davis, I never heard of her either, and what I found when I looked her up was a POLITICAL activist. It doesn't say the 1st word about religion in her bio on wikipedea, the closest it comes is when it identifies her as a Communist and thus likely an atheist, so I have no idea how this is supposed to apply to the subject of Creationism vs theistic evolution.








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[Fascinated With God]

BTW, I'm not all liberal, I think liberals can get fanatical too. I don't like fanatics of any stripe. Napoleon used liberal ideology for extremely violent purposes, for example. The Soviets were mislabeled as liberals for a long time when they are really extremely conservative. Outside of that, in the last 100 years virtually all political violence and bigotry in the world has come from conservative political factions. So in that regard my sympathies tend towards liberals, but I don't think I would qualify as a Progressive in the eyes of most Progressives. I'm too centrist.

 

[Fascinated With God]

Also I don't think the word "mind" is always representative of intellectual belief. Thus by comparison, the words "believers" and "unbelievers" occur only 17 times each in the Bible. And as I mentioned before, some of the references to unbelievers are actually positive rather than negative. So there is really nothing in the Bible to support your argument that the intellect is equally as important as the heart in being a good Christian.

 

[gluadys]

Of course I do. I pray for peace throughout the Islamic world, which suffers so much violence and oppression due to it being a demonic religion that promotes only extremely conservative ideologies, and conservatives tend to be much more bigoted, violent and intolerant of anyone different.

Liberal Christians have never been anti-Semitic, so I have no idea where you are coming from here. Only conservative Protestant Christians use to be anti-Semitic. Now they expect that all Jews will convert at the 2nd coming, so their attitude has changed from overtly bigoted to condescendingly patronizing. It is really only a slight improvement.

.

I agree with most of what you have been posting, but I have to take issue with these two points.

Islam is no more a demonic religion than Judaism or Christianity. The main problem in the West is that we get very little information about what I would call "normal" Islam. We only get information about the extremists like al-Quaeda and Hezbollah. Just as for the past few decades in the US, media have been playing up the religious right and ignoring liberal Christianity.

I have had the advantage of personal acquaintance with centrist and liberal Muslims. To them the extremists of right-wing Islam are as foreign and objectionable as violent extremists of right-wing Christianity are to you. They are fighting a fierce battle within their own faith community to restore a lost balance in Islam.

As for anti-Semitism, it was virtually unknown in Islam until after 1948. Modern Islamic anti-Semitism takes all its rhetoric from Christian Holocaust-deniers. For practically all the late Middle-Ages and early modern times, it was much easier to be a practicing Jew in Islamic countries than in Christendom. Not that either was a perfect situation, but there were many fewer restrictions and much more protection for Jews under Islamic rulers than under Christian rulers. They were not forbidden (as in Europe) from getting an education or practicing most any profession they chose and some had significant political positions. They were also allowed to administer their own communities under their own legal system.

And while I would love to believe that liberal Christianity was never anti-Semitic, unfortunately that is just not true. Until the horror of the Holocaust was revealed, liberal Christians were often anti-Semitic. It was the educated liberal class of Christians, for example, that forbade university education to non-Christians. Benjamin Disraeli would never have been permitted access to higher education had he not officially converted to Christianity. Across America and Canada, the practice of affluent, mostly well-educated liberal Christians in setting up and enforcing real estate covenants to prevent the sale of neighbouring real estate to Jews was common. While discrimination, both racial and anti-semitic, practiced by liberal Christians was more "genteel" than the violence of lynching or pograms, it was just as real right into the 1930s and beyond.

 

[Fascinated With God]

The end of WWII was well before I was born. I was only speaking to 30 years ago, at which point no liberal Christians were anti-Semitic.

As to the Koran being demonic, you are aware that Mohammed did not write it, he was illiterate? It was dictated to him by an entity that he only saw twice in his life. In modern terms we would call it channeled material. In one of the Hadiths Mohammed is described as going into a trance when hearing the entity, his lips would move but he would say nothing, and he would perspire intensely. That doesn't sound like a contact with an angel.

The 1st time Mohammed saw the entity he was so convinced it was an evil djinn that he was still shaking with fear when he got home. I think 1st impressions of spirits say a lot, people in the Bible feel fear briefly and then awe, they don't just keep being afraid when it is a real angel. The entity claimed that it was the archangel Gabriel, but it's words sound like an arch-demon rather than an archangel.

The Koran briefly covers many stories from the Old Testament in an extremely terse and scrambled manner, not in order to elaborate on OT stories, no Koran analog gives more elaborate information on any OT story, the stories are lobotomized in the Koran. The only reason for their inclusion is not to pay homage to the OT as they falsely claim. The real purpose is to distort the OT in order to claim that the OT was altered by the Jews.

They are so convinced that both the Jews and the Christians willfully distorted God's message to them that they also think that the New Testament was willfully changed with the intentional desire to contradict God. It is really a profound insult, not an attempt to pay homage. These attitudes run so deep among many Muslims that I have seen Muslims online claiming that Bush tried to force Arabia to change the Koran, which is utterly paranoid. One of them was the son of an Imam, so they weren't misunderstanding the Koran.

As to anti-Semitism, I made no connection between Islam and anti-Semitism. Their religious bigotry has mainly been directed at different factions of Islam. For example, just 200 years after Mohammed there was a bloody coup in which all but one of the surviving descendants of Mohammed were mass murdered. Whether Islam is good or bad depends on whether particular Muslims are focus on the character of Mohammed and the story of his life (good) or focused on the Koran. The only centrist or liberal traditional faction of Islam are the Sufis, and not surprisingly Sufis seldom quote the Koran.






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[frogman2x]

Here's his full post:

In other words, if the vastness of the universe points to the amazingness of God, why can't its age do so as well?​

Thanks for the rewind. We know part of the vastness of the universe. What would give more glory to God and reinforce His omnioptence more, creating the universe in billion of years or creating it in 6 days?

kermit​

 

[frogman2x]

So you have to be a devout Christian in order to be an effective scientist?

They must be very ignorant if they've been well-educated in the subject and yet refuse to accept evolution as true.

Someone with a PhD and has taught in a major university is not ignorant. Also many of them worked in private industry doing reseearch in their field and many have b een publiherd in scientific journals.

You are just biased and maybe the ignorance is on your part for accepting without any evidence what he evolutinist preach.

I always challange the evos to present the evidence for one thing the ToE preaches. So far none have done so. Please feel free to be the first. Just dont quote some evo who says it is true. Present the biologial evidence that makes it true.

k