vossler said:
An unsubstantiated claim if there ever was one, but one you are free to make.
It is a simple fact that communication requires interpretation. Every message one receives, one must interpret in order to understand it. That goes for spoken as well as written communication and applies as much to Jack and Jill as to Adam and Eve.
Interpretation is not a bad thing in itself. It is a necessity of inter-personal communication. But interpretation varies in its quality and includes the possibility of misinterpretation.
Oh contraire my dear friend, that is exactly what I am doing. I'm dealing with reality and reality only.
But not all of reality. You are not taking the reality of creation into account. You act as if the scriptures exist in a vacuum sealed off from God's creation and can be used as a judge of creation. Does God judge God, God's Word or God's work? How can you assign a priority of truth-value to God's inspired scripture vis-a-vis God's created world? Are not both a product of the Word of God?
Reality tells me that God's Word said He created everything in six days and that He created man from the dust of the earth.
But it is your interpretation of scriptures that tells you this occurred about 6,000 years ago, that the six days were ordinary solar days, that the presentation of the six days is wholly chronological and that the dust of the earth was instantly transformed (rather than, as scripture says "formed") into an adult human being. So it is not reality speaking here, but your interpretation of the text.
Your reality, based upon man's measurements, says that He created over billions of years through a process called evolution, goo to you. My truth claim comes straight from God, yours comes from man. Which one is reality?
Creation is reality and it comes straight from God. One of the reasons I object to YECism is that its rejection of nature's evidence leads logically and inevitably to the proposition that creation is either unreal or unknowable. This I take to be a disavowal of the doctrine of creation. (Granted most YECs think they are defending the doctrine of creation and do not intend this disavowal. Strikes me a bit like that oxymoron of the Vietnam war: "In order to save the village, we had to destroy it." The YECist defence of creationism leads to undermining the doctrine that God created a real, knowable world.
For me the controversy is solely; do we believe what God clearly and emphatically tells us or are we our own gods who will believe whatever tickles our fancy?
And what God clearly and emphatically tells us in His creation is that it is billions of years old and that humanity is a product of evolution.
It is here that I will make a concession to the scientific evidence. Based upon our best estimates, according to everything we presently know, the earth is far older than the 6 - 10 thousand years YECs believe it to be. That, I believe, is a nature derived answer and I won't argue too much on it.
So you accept the evidence, yet reject the conclusion. I wonder, given this, why you do not at least affirm Old-Earth Creationism.
However, the theory that we, man and all other creatures, came from some sort of primordial soup and eventually arrived into our present forms is nothing but conjecture and speculation.
Oh, it is far more than conjecture and speculation. However, to fully understand it, I think you need a better foundation in the role of hypothetical prediction/retrodiction.
The science to support this is, at best, weak and very shallow. There isn't a single test that I'm aware of that can truly and emphatically support this. I've looked at a lot of so called evidence that evolutionists claim supports this, but none of it even remotely convinces or even slightly sways me. You would probably respond with that is because I've arrived at my position with a preconceived view and I would respond to you, yes I have. The Bible clearly tells me this is not so and for someone to challenge the truth of Scripture they had better have something far stronger than conjecture or speculation to do it with.
I think, as the evidence is usually presented in these forums, in little snippets without context, it does appear weak. Although in part this is because people sometimes have unrealistic expectations of what the evidence should show--witness laptoppop's thread on beneficial mutations. However, I would say that there is a context needed to appreciate the strength of the evidence. Some important parts of that context are:
1. The role of hypothesis and prediction in science
2. A clear understanding of cladistics and phylogeny in order to understand why the nested hierarchy is such a strong support of the theory of evolution.
3. A fairly detailed knowledge of areas which creationists sources of information tend to treat superficially e.g. the fossil record.
I'm not that strong on 3. myself, but it never ceases to amaze me how much information is available that the average layperson knows nothing of. The more one learns, and the more detail one learns, the more clearly the picture of and old earth and evolution emerges from the evidence--not as conjecture or speculation, but as derived directly from the testimony of nature.
In other words it is free to use conjecture and speculation when the evidence doesn't conclusively show something.
Only as an initial step toward forming a hypothesis to be tested. With hypotheses come predictions, followed by observation and/or experiment, leading to evidence-based theories.
That sounds all fine and dandy if, and this is a BIG IF, we can show our scientific understanding to be truly scientific. That is, is what we hypothesize or theorize is based upon observable, testable evidence via experimentation, not on conjecture or speculation. If it does that, then science deserves respect.
Well this accurately describes the physics and geology which date the universe and the earth in billions of years and the paleontology and biology which support the theory of evolution.
Amen
Isn't it interesting that you hold that the Word of God isn't able to interpret itself and requires an outside source like science, but science doesn't need an outside source to hold it accountable. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
But science does need an outside source. Science is held accountable to the reality of nature. And the reality of nature is the work of God's Word. So, in effect, science (whether scientists acknowledge it or not) is accountable to the Word of God.
As you are free to believe. However I would tell you and everyone else that my interpretation, as much as possible, isn't based upon any other preconceived notion other than the Bible is a book of absolute truth.
I believe you. I even agree with you. Where we part company is that you equate absolute truth with a literal, factual presentation of the truth. To me, the story of Adam and Eve is absolutely true as an inspired myth.
There are no lies or half truths within God's Word, it is faithful to only God.
Agreed, but are you listening to all of God's Word or only to the scriptures, or actually, only to your interpretation of the scriptures?
It is here we differ. The nature of science should do exactly as you state, but when those who practice it cannot see without a view skewed by the world and its precepts then it can hardly be called a ruthless questioning of its theories. I see only a tainted view that looks to support man established precepts because to do otherwise would not provide the funding so disparately needed to sustain most scientists. Once they challenge those precepts it is akin to cutting off their ability to work and we all know how the world would react to that.
I see two errors here. First, you are not looking at how those precepts became established. Check out the history of science. It is not a fact that scientists jumped enthusiastically onto the bandwagon when first presented with the new concepts of Copernicus, Galileo, Hutton, Mendel, Darwin,Lemaitre or Wegener. Every one of their hypotheses was questioned, criticized, analysed and judged against the evidence.
Second, you are not looking at the rewards of successfully challenging a scientific paradigm. Lemaitre and Wegener were both practically laughed out of court when the concepts of a big bang and continental drift were first launched. It took evidence, evidence which had no other comparable explanation, to convince the skeptics. But, in spite of the fact their hypotheses went against "established precepts", the funding was scraped together and the evidence was found. So "established precepts" and accepted world views are not really a barrier to changing paradigms in science. In fact, today a Nobel prize is often the consequence of changing a scientific paradigm. What scientist would overlook the chance to win such prestige?
Surely the Scriptures have had no limits put to it. They have been perpetually attacked and hammered for thousands of years. In fact they are probably the only thing, throughout all of time, that has ever been thoroughly dissected, questioned and put to the test. I can't think of any other thing that has been even remotely challenged to the degree that the Bible has and yet throughout it all it has always come out true.
Yet in all ages there have been controversies over the correct interpretation of scripture, and many of these controversies continue today as witnessed by denominational differences. By contrast, science has successfully resolved many controversies in its domain and there is no scientific equivalent to denominational divisions.
Well, kind of. The nature of self-validation proves part of the problem. This is a fundamental property of human knowledge. It may not prove active and hostile jamming in every area of knowledge. But, it does prove that without God and His knowledge, we are irretreivably bent. Lots of standard, non-conspiratorial philosophy leads to the same place. As for the more standard brand of conspiracy theories, as TE, your basis of belief has been asssaulted by billions of dollars of counter-incentives. In China and Russia alone, massive institutions are conspiratorially slanted against you, not to mention the YECs. Certain interpretations of C14 are conspiratorially censored and suppressed. You can argue that the effect is minimal if you wish, but the conspiracy is quite well-accepted. The bias in this country is somewhat different. But again, the conventional bias is against the beliefs of TEs. Belief in the actual resurrection of Jesus is actively supressed in American institutions. You can argue that this affects geology and physics minimally, if at all. But, the freakin' poison is in the water, everywhere, regardless of whether you have acquired an immunity. Its effects on TE scientists are at best more subtle, if there is any effect at all, but they are in fact shoulder to shoulder with card-carrying members of a hostile conspiracy. We are just arguing about in what relative proportions and to what effect. 
