Who does Ken Ham appear to have so many more fans than Dr. Francis Collins?

ThouShaltNotPoe said:

I see what you mean. But keep in mind that there are plenty of Christians who also believe in Bible inerrancy who NEVERTHELESS consider Genesis 1 & 2 fully compatible with evolution. (I'm one of them.)

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This relates back to a concept that still intrigues me. How can a young earth creationist conclude that the Bible is inerrant when it conflicts with the very creation it is describing?

In my view, the Bible would need to be compatible with evolution and the rest of the scientific discoveries in order to be inerrant.

And so some might say that it is INERRANCY plus LITERALISM which forces one into creationism.

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I would say that creationism forces one to ignore the errancy of a literal interpretation.

Notedstrangeperson said:

Technically that's exactly what I'm arguing: even if we look at it from a strictly secular point of view (that everything in it was written by fallible humans and God had nothing to do with it), it would still mean the Bible has far fewer errors than we think simply because people hold it in such high regard.

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I think we are talking about different types of errors.

We have the direct writings of Darwin. We know exactly what he intended to convey when he wrote Origin of Species. There are no errors in understanding what Darwin concluded or proposed. There never will be.

At the same time, Darwin was wrong about many things in Origin of Species. His conclusions contain errors.

These are two different types of errors. You seem to be conflating the two.

Loudmouth said:

I think we are talking about different types of errors.

We have the direct writings of Darwin. We know exactly what he intended to convey when he wrote Origin of Species. There are no errors in understanding what Darwin concluded or proposed. There never will be.

At the same time, Darwin was wrong about many things in Origin of Species. His conclusions contain errors.

These are two different types of errors. You seem to be conflating the two.

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(My emphasis) I disagree. Origins of Species was written just over 150 years ago, whereas the oldest book in the Bible - thought to be the book of Job - was written 3,500 years ago. The youngest book, Revelations, was written 1,900 years ago.

How do we think Origins of Species will look in 3,000 years? By then science will have greatly moved on and it will probably have been translated into languages which don't even exist yet - and that's presuming the original books will still be around, or that people will bother to read it. After all, the very first edition of the book was kept in a toilet cupboard for years, and even today the majority of evolutionists haven't bothered reading it.

Another user (verysincere I think) made a very good point on separate thread: it's ridiculous to blame people who lived over three thousand years ago for not making their writings "clear enough" for modern readers. Similarly, I would add that it's ridiculous to assume that things will are clear to us now will be clear to people living in the far future.

Notedstrangeperson said:

How do we think Origins of Species will look in 3,000 years?

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The same that any other modern book will look like. It may need to be translated if languages have changed, but there will be very, very few translational errors. Future generations will have the same understanding of what Darwin proposed and claimed as we do. We have already outgrown the oddities of Victorian attitudes and philosophy that undergird Darwin's work, but we can still fully understand where he is coming from. All in all, it is rather well written book.

Loudmouth said:

The same that any other modern book will look like. It may need to be translated if languages have changed, but there will be very, very few translational errors. Future generations will have the same understanding of what Darwin proposed and claimed as we do.

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I highly doubt that. Aside from the fact many translation problems (not necessarily errors) have less to do with mistakes and more to do with difficulties between languages, we have no idea what the world will be like in that far into the future. Thinking future generations will have the exact same understanding and attitudes towards Origins of Species as we do seems very naive. After all, do we have the same understand and attitudes towards science today as they did 3,000 years ago?

Notedstrangeperson said:

I highly doubt that. Aside from the fact many translation problems (not necessarily errors) have less to do with mistakes and more to do with difficulties between languages, we have no idea what the world will be like in that far into the future. Thinking future generations will have the exact same understanding and attitudes towards Origins of Species as we do seems very naive. After all, do we have the same understand and attitudes towards science today as they did 3,000 years ago?

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The difference here is that we have a written record of how Victorian thought and prose works, and how it relates to modern prose. It's not that hard to work out. Do you really think that this explanation will be hard for future generations to understand:

"In looking for the gradations by which an organ in any species has been perfected, we ought to look exclusively to its lineal ancestors; but this is scarcely ever possible, and we are forced in each case to look to species of the same group, that is to the collateral descendants from the same original parent-form, in order to see what gradations are possible, and for the chance of some gradations having been transmitted from the earlier stages of descent, in an unaltered or little altered condition."

Loudmouth said:

The difference here is that we have a written record of how Victorian thought and prose works, and how it relates to modern prose.

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What makes you think they will last, fully intact, for 3,000 years? We've lost an astounding amount of written works over millenia. I'm not sure why you have such confidence that Origins of Species, or any other scientific texts, are somehow immune to the same decay and change in attitudes as any other historical texts.

Loudmouth said:

It's not that hard to work out. Do you really think that this explanation will be hard for future generations to understand <snip>

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Depending on the languages which may exist in future, yes - it may be very difficult for them to figure out. Greek texts, such as Homer's Odyssey, use phrases which are bizarre to modern English-speakers.

Notedstrangeperson said:

What makes you think they will last, fully intact, for 3,000 years?

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Technology. This will also probably be the reason that languages don't change that much going forward. When large swaths of people are literate and read regularly languages don't change as much.

Depending on the languages which may exist in future, yes - it may be very difficult for them to figure out. Greek texts, such as Homer's Odyssey, use phrases which are bizarre to modern English-speakers.

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And yet Homer's Odyssey is an all time classic that we understand and can read just fine. Principia has withstood the test of time over the last 350 years.

Science is the language of nature, and nature isn't going anywhere. We will always have that Rosetta stone.

Loudmouth said:

Technology. This will also probably be the reason that languages don't change that much going forward. When large swaths of people are literate and read regularly languages don't change as much.

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I don't see why technology should matter that much - indeed if anything technology such as the internet only makes it more likely we will lose its original meaning: how often have we seen quotes from Origin of Species misconstrued on creationist sites?

I'm also not sure where your claim that technology slows down the changes in language comes from. If anything it speeds it up.

Loudmouth said:

And yet Homer's Odyssey is an all time classic that we understand and can read just fine. Principia has withstood the test of time over the last 350 years.

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350 years is nothing considering we're comparing it to a book which is over ten times its age. As for Homer's Odyssey, he frequently uses descriptions which makes no sense to English-speakers (he refers to the sea as "wine-coloured", honey as "green" and hair as "blue") - not to mention the last part of his epic has been lost to the ages.

Loudmouth said:

Science is the language of nature, and nature isn't going anywhere. We will always have that Rosetta stone.

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I'm not talking about science itself, I'm talking about the book Origin of Species: book that was not written as the result of vigorous experimentation or even written by a scientist. You began your argument by saying "We have the direct writings of Darwin. We know exactly what he intended to convey when he wrote Origin of Species. There are no errors in understanding what Darwin concluded or proposed."

I hope this doesn't sound too rude, but now you seem to be changing your argument to mean: "Books about science will never decay or be lost or be mistranslated because science itself is immune to the problems every other subject faces."

Split Rock said:

It is the insistance that their interpretation of the bible cannot be wrong that starts the ball rolling. This is usually accompanied by a hubris associated belief that "God's Word" and one's interpretation of scripture are one in the same.

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A year or so ago I looked at a history of Biblical interpretation. Given the way they grew up, I think inerrancy and literal interpretation pretty much have to be coupled. They seem to have developed shortly after the Reformation, as an answer to Catholic criticisms that Scripture can't be an effective standard, because without an authoritative Church the interpretation is up for grabs. In order to answer that, we need more than just an inerrant Bible. We need an interpretation that everyone can agree on. The idea seems to have been that if the interpretation is sufficiently literal, everyone can agree upon it.

If you take the Bible as what I think it really is, a complex work of literature with lots of voices that agree in only the broadest sense, it's nearly impossible to get guaranteed answers to many of the questions people want to ask.

To me the answer is that God presumably was willing to accept a fair amount of disagreement, and expected us to use that as an occasion to learn how to work with people with whom we disagree. But lots of Protestants felt that to answer an inerrant tradition they needed something else inerrant. No one seemed to be willing to accept that we don't have anything inerrant except God himself.

But the alternative had to be a combination of inerrant Scripture and an inerrant interpretation. Few Protestants are willing to state that their interpretations are inerrant. So instead the claim is that "literal" interpretation is so obvious that no significant human judgement is needed. How many times have we heard "I'm not interpreting Scripture. I'm telling you just what it says." I don't see any even halfway plausible way to do that without adopting the most literal possible reading, plus a set of traditional interpretations needed to harmonize the multiple voices (e.g. the weird readings of Gen 2 needed to make it consistent with Gen 1).

Notedstrangeperson said:

I don't see why technology should matter that much - indeed if anything technology such as the internet only makes it more likely we will lose its original meaning: how often have we seen quotes from Origin of Species misconstrued on creationist sites?

I'm also not sure where your claim that technology slows down the changes in language comes from. If anything it speeds it up.

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Look at how spelling changed over the last 300 years. Once we decided to use technology to nail down an agreed upon spelling of a word it hasn't changed where it changed quite a bit before that.

And we are also moving away from your original claim.

"So basically - the Bible has far fewer errors than we think because its followers are doing their utmost to preverse what they believe to be the holy word of God. Science is much more likely to have errors because discovering new evidence and disproving old theories is part of its methodology. "

You are conflating two different types of errors, which is what I was originally commenting on.

I hope this doesn't sound too rude, but now you seem to be changing your argument to mean: "Books about science will never decay or be lost or be mistranslated because science itself is immune to the problems every other subject faces."

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Books about science are rooted in evidence which is available to everyone. That is what makes it different.

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AV1611VET said:

Tell that to the parents of Thalidomide babies.

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What shall we tell them? Remember, don't use science.

Loudmouth said:

Look at how spelling changed over the last 300 years. Once we decided to use technology to nail down an agreed upon spelling of a word it hasn't changed where it changed quite a bit before that.

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I still doubt it. Compare British and American spelling for example - spelling "colour" with or without a "u" is acceptable depending on which country you go to. Living in the age of the internet hasn't changed that. Agreeing on the spelling doesn't stop the meaning of a word changing either.

Loudmouth said:

notedstrangeperson said:

I hope this doesn't sound too rude, but now you seem to be changing your argument to mean: "Books about science will never decay or be lost or be mistranslated because science itself is immune to the problems every other subject faces."

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Books about science are rooted in evidence which is available to everyone. That is what makes it different.

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Science - or in this case, books about science - aren't magically immune from the same forces of decay and change that every other subject. In some ways Darwin's book is already highly out of date. Evolution actually went against the theory of genetics and inheritence they had in the 19th century, so Darwin had to make up his own theory: "pangenesis". Needless to say, it never caught on.

Loudmouth said:

You are conflating two different types of errors, which is what I was originally commenting on.

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The type of error you were commenting on was that even though Darwin himself made mistakes (such as his pangenesis theory mentioned above), his intent was still clear - and always will be clear, even thousands of years into the future.

But I think you're being very naive and seriously underestimating the changes that will undoubtedly occur in the distant future. Anyone reading about Darwin's "pangenesis" theory today (let alone in 3,000 years) would be baffled, because it was completely wrong. It was based loosely on Lemarckian inheritence, which by this time had already been disproven. How can we say Darwin's intent was clear when the evidence he used to try and back it up was totally wrong?

You would need to have a fairly good understaning of the history of genetics and inheritence to fully understand what he was talking about - just as you need to have a fairly good understanding of Middle Eastern and scriptural history to fully understand the Bible.

AV1611VET: I'm the one who wrote "Science is much more likely to have errors because discovering new evidence and disproving old theories is part of its methodology" - not Loudmouth. So is your comments directed at me or him?

Notedstrangeperson said:

The type of error you were commenting on was that even though Darwin himself made mistakes (such as his pangenesis theory mentioned above), his intent was still clear - and always will be clear, even thousands of years into the future.

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Again, this was in response to your conflation of two different types of errors.

Do you understand why that conflation is wrong?

Notedstrangeperson said:

AV1611VET: I'm the one who wrote "Science is much more likely to have errors because discovering new evidence and disproving old theories is part of its methodology" - not Loudmouth. So is your comments directed at me or him?

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Oh, I'm sorry! I was wondering why he had it in quotes.

I'll withdraw the comment.

Your user title does say "Loudmouth" though.

Loudmouth said:

Again, this was in response to your conflation of two different types of errors.

Do you understand why that conflation is wrong?

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I'm not to sure it is wrong - saying that Darwin's intentions were clear even though some of his conclusions were wrong doesn't make sense. Of all the subjects there are, science is the one that relies the most of evidence and the least on intention. If the evidence doesn't back it up, the idea is thrown out.

If we were talking about the Bible however, intention is less of a problem because not all of the books have an intention. Some of the books are poems, some are personal letters, and many of them are intended to be historical documents.

AV1611VET said:

Oh, I'm sorry! I was wondering why he had it in quotes.

I'll withdraw the comment.

Your user title does say "Loudmouth" though.

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I'll answer your question anyway. If I'm being brutally honest / completely tactless, I think you're only withdrawing it because I've been nice to you in the past and you don't want to alienate me if we get into a fight about science.

There have been (many) cases where humans have been used as experiments to further the cause of science; I can think of several and they're all pretty barbaric. The thalidomide victims however were not guinea pigs - they were a terrible mistake. They originally tested the drug on animals which did not show the side-effects.