then....your sentence starts with IF, but I see no then following....what then do you intend?
I meant that what you wrote is right, PROVIDED THAT everything after my IF is true. The "then" was the sentence I quoted from you.
Yeah, I can see you are not following me. Of course the people the text talks about are civilised people. They are the people who are
relevant to the history of Hebrews (which the Old Testament is focused on, do I know that right?). If I were writing a history of Hungary, I wouldn't mention the Mbuti - they are completely irrelevant to the story I'm telling. That doesn't mean I don't think they are people. If I was writing about something that shook the whole world and affected all people, that would also include them. And surely ancient Hebrews, at least the more educated kind, knew that the world consisted of more than the Fertile Crescent. IIRC, artefacts inscribed with the undeciphered Indus script have been discovered in Mesopotamia, so knowledge did travel far even in ancient times.
IOW, they had to know that "all people", "everything on earth" and "all mountains" included a bit more than their immediate surroundings.
we have two possibles, either 1. several single celled populations all developed the same creatures at similar times (something you said no one in their right mind believes) or 2. one single celled population evolved into humans while another into I don't know, take your pick....point is this we either had a single, single celled population of which science now says no, we had several single celled populations, or we have as science now says several single celled population.
Not quite. At the very base of the tree of life, there is a gene pool of single-celled organisms engaging in large-scale
horizontal gene transfer. Whether you want to call that one or several populations is a matter of taste. However, HGT gets far less significant as we move towards more complex organisms, and it's fairly safe to say that all
animals come from a single ancestral population (which was multicellular).
The biblical account would say that we started with several different strands of population. Which is what science now suggests.
Not at the level it would have to for the biblical account to be true. There may have been several single-celled ancestors merged together to create certain lineages, but that was before the last common ancestor of all animals or plants lived (see illustration below).
Genesis says that God created all the birds, creepy-crawly creatures, fish, beasts, whatever, according to their kinds, indicating that different "kinds" of bird, fish, etc. had separate origins. As I said above, that doesn't agree with the current scientific consensus.
(This is a hugely simplified "family tree" of life. For clarity, all structure within the branches of Bacteria and Archaea is omitted, as well as all eukaryotic groups other than plants, animals and fungi. AFAIK, on the branch leading to animals, the acquisition of mitochondria is the last major event of horizontal gene transfer.)
As to getting from what you wrote, there are only two possibles, if you adamantly reject one possible, then you must hold to the other. It's the logical conclusion.
Actually, there are more than those two possibilities - for example, the Biblical creation story (different multicellular lineages were created separately, WITHOUT unicellular ancestors). And, as you can see above, your "two possibles" actually include a whole range of possibilities.
only problem, the text does define people and the definition places it in the realm of civilized man....
If it defines people, you can quote the definition or explain where it is implied. As I said, not mentioning other kinds of people doesn't amount to a definition.
what didn't end up in the ark? Not following you here...
Noah took two (or seven, or whatever) of every kind of animal with him. Do you think seven was the
entire population of each kind?
Testable claims is indeed what we are looking for, which was the point...there is nothing in the text to explain how certain animals "survived" the ark, only that the did. Therefore, we can't test how they survived only whether or not there is evidence to suggest that they did.
Let's follow this train of thought a bit further.
The Bible claims that animals survived the flood. Let's accept this as a testable claim and call it claim (1).
There is a bit of a problem here, however.
For example, the Bible also claims that the flood happened within the time range of human civilisation (luckily, we can at least agree on that), and that only a few members of each "kind" survived it. Let's call this claim (2).
(2), in itself, is falsified by genetic evidence (many, if not most, species [
including humans] didn't go through a bottleneck so recently). To make it compatible with the evidence, you have to postulate details that are
not in the Bible.
The problem is this: you can do that to reconcile ANY biblical claim with ANY physical evidence. If the Bible said that animals
didn't survive the flood, you could say that God created them anew afterwards.
In the case of claim (1), you don't have to add extra details because the claim happens to match reality, but what, other than being correct, makes (1) different from (2)? Would the opposite of (1), which is clearly at odds with physical evidence, also be a testable claim?
You can't have it both ways. Either you have testable claims, or you allow extra explanations.
do you understand anything about the culture of the people who probably wrote the text?
Not much, which is why I hope you'll help me out
So bit of a history lesson. One of the most common theories is that Abraham wrote Gen. though it is true that no one knows for sure.
Is it? As far as I can tell, the
Wiki on Genesis doesn't even mention the idea
I know Wikipedia isn't the most authoritative source in the world, but I kind of expected it to mention the most accepted theory out there.
What we do know however is some about the culture of that people and that general time period. It would not be uncommon, in fact, it would be very common for the time frame we are referring (further back we go, more likely to be true) that heaven can refer to the skys that we see. In fact, the translation of the word used there is still in question as to the intended meaning....keep in mind this is ancient Hebrew without vowels or punctuation. So what we really have is a text that we cannot clarify it's intent as far as scope goes. Making matters even more complicated, is the fact that it is not written as a scientific explaination of anything, therefore could merely be a "poetic" way of speaking a truth that is intended. Bottom line, the text shows nothing concrete about how extensive the flood was, only what the outcome of that flood was.
Fair enough, thanks. However, that can also be turned around to argue that all the stuff about the origin of man etc. is just a poetic way of speaking a truth - so maybe Adam and Eve were not the first people, Noah's wasn't the 10th generation, the flood didn't actually kill everything outside the ark, etc. I'm sure you or your sources can tell poetry from the reporting of (what the author thought were) facts, so what makes these claims different from the one about the mountains?
You're
...missing the point...the point is that we can only test for the absolutes...the absolute is that God brought animals to the ark, to "rescue" them. Not how He took care of them while they were on the ark. So we can test for whether or not the animals survived (I'm guessing knowing that they existed in modern day is enough) but not for how it happened, that can only be speculation and that is the whole point. IOW's, we are testing to see if animals survived, not how they did....because the test does specify how they survived, only that they did survive on a big boat we call an ark.
I don't think I'm missing the point, but I explained this earlier in this post, so not going to repeat myself here.
no problem for the absolutes, which is currently the only thing we're looking at.
No problem for the absolutes, maybe, but a major one for their testability. To remove the problem (too little time or too many survivors), you have to add the unfalsifiable extra details.
where are you getting your time frame of a few thousand years?
For example,
here. According to the article, the Neolithic revolution, or the appearance of settled, agricultural societies occurred approximately 12000 BC, or 14000 years ago. In truth, I pulled the time frame from memory, but if Wikipedia is correct, my memories were pretty much spot on.
but hey, we can still deal with it, because the point being made is that biodiversity does not falsify the biblical account of the flood.
It doesn't falsify the biblical account if and only if the biblical account is unfalsifiable, or I'm missing my own point.
hummmm????? Not a clue in all this world what you are intending to say here.
Just quibbling about your choice of words, never mind.
yep, as talked about it some, but based on the above, I think we need to only discuss one thing at a time, you seem to be getting some of this confused with others things.
OK, you pick one, then. I agree this thread could use a bit of focus
several, unfortunately only a few are documented. Are you one of those who refuses all evidence because you don't want to believe, or one who accepts evidence and weighs it according to it's documentations? That will help me narrow down which to offer you.
Believe me, I would love to be able to believe, but why does that matter? Just give me your best example(s). If I'm so horribly biased, I'm going to dismiss it anyway, and if I dismiss it, you're probably going to think I'm biased. If I'm
not biased, why on earth would you give me anything but your best? (To spare us both some time, I'll say in advance that I will
not accept the Bible alone as sufficient documentation. Nor will I accept anecdotes about people's subjective experience.)
it is meant to explain, discribe if you prefer, why the things people worship as gods cannot be gods at all. Why there can only be one God.
We are talking past each other again. Are the events and things in the creation story (eg. the creation of the sun and the moon, or the Garden of Eden) meant to be true to the facts, or are they more poetic devices to make a point? (Oh, I see there's a link below...)
well, it would be helpful to actually study the text so that we could point by point point it out, but the basic just of it is that what is created cannot be the creator...here are a couple of sites to reference for more details
Is Genesis poetry / figurative, a theological argument (polemic) and thus not history?
Right, this link seems to argue that yes, Genesis is meant as a historical narrative, and the six days of creation are meant as six days, and people who interpret it otherwise are trying to twist it to fit the findings of science. (I can't find where it talks about other gods, but maybe I'm just not very perceptive.)
So, um... basically, this article accepts that science apparently falsifies the literal reading of Genesis?
so we can't and don't scientifically test for what is created and what is not? Compare what is man created to what is animal created...how do we know if we can't test? I'm confused, we see science testing for createdness, but when we want to test the natural world for createdness, suddenly science can't do it???? How does that follow? What is the logic of that?
I thought I've laid out the logic already: we are talking about different kinds of "createdness". One we can determine with some degree of certainty, the other, not so much.
Human-createdness is just a subset of createdness in general, and it's the only subset that we have a decent known sample of. Well, that's not quite true, since tool-making evolved independently in a few animal groups (primates and corvids, for example), and many creatures dig/build structures such as nests or bowers, but making generalisations applicable to everything is still problematic.
For instance, I can't think of a property that is unique or nearly unique to animal-made objects (animals here including humans). Taking purpose, for example, a blind process based on relatively simple principles (evolution by natural selection, that is) can generate things that seem to have a purpose*. Same with order (to make things worse, evolution can also yield a combination of purpose and order).
One thing many created objects do have in common is the lack/improbability of natural mechanisms - wind doesn't often generate fully assembled
crow nests up in trees, for example. However, appealing to a lack of natural explanation to argue createdness is a god of the gaps argument, which we both agree is stupid. And whereas it's reasonably easy to observe crows building nests (i.e. createdness is supported by more than GotG), I've never heard of a verifiable observation of God creating things.
*Whether you think that biological evolution is directed by a sentient being is irrelevant here. You can run evolution on computers and still get complex, ordered constructs with an apparent purpose.
