Christian Evolutionists....

Okay it was satan...

Why? Wouldn't that go against the "clear and obvious meaning of the text"?
Dont you have to "touture the texts" to get that non literal meaning?

But let's say it was satan...

Does satan crawl on the ground and eat dirt now, after all the rest of the punishments seem to be in place?

Originally posted by LewisWildermuth

Ahh So evolutionist craw on their bellies and eat dirt?

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Yes, in secret. But I have it on film. I submitted it to "Ripley's Believe it or Not" so you guys are about to be exposed, big time.

Nick if it is possible for you to be serious a moment could you tell me is the snake is literaly a snake or not? If not, why?

Originally posted by LewisWildermuth
Okay it was satan...

Why? Wouldn't that go against the "clear and obvious meaning of the text"?
Dont you have to "touture the texts" to get that non literal meaning?

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The problem is that, although there are clear and obvious meanings to much of scripture, including much of what is in the early chapters of Genesis, there is no clear and obvious meaning here. The word for "serpent" is "nachash" which is also used to describe the sea serpent, Leviathan in Isaiah. So it's a pretty general term. Although from the context we can be pretty sure it was either a physical form of satan, or possessed by satan, we have no idea what this particular serpent creature really was or what it became when it was cursed. For all we know it was one of what we now think are dinosaurs.

So it's kind of silly to say anything tortures the text because you have to have a clear meaning before you can say someone has twisted it.

Does satan crawl on the ground? No, but perhaps the cursed creature did. I assume that creature is now extinct, but it is impossible to say unless someone can positively identify it, and I don't plan to hold my breath waiting.

So if one gets posessed through no action of their own will it is fair to punish them?

Why does the rest of the creation story have to be literal if this section in the middle of it is not?

By the way, it might help you to understand this passage if you also understand that supernatural beings can take on various forms. Angels are good examples, but Jesus is probably a better one. Jesus, once resurrected, appeared in various different forms to the disciples/apostles. For example, he had the holes in his hands and side at one time, but at another time he appeared like a normal person and the disciples didn't even recognize him at first.

So it is entirely possible this particular serpent wasn't a natural creature at all, but simply the physical form satan chose at the time. If so, then when G~d cursed the natural creatures satan imitated, then He obviously did so as a lasting symbol of His curse, not as a direct punishment of satan. Perhaps NONE of these serpents crawled on their bellies at the time, and the fact that some do to this day is a reminder of that curse.

All speculation, of course. But that's the problem when you don't have clear verses upon which to depend. But since it's not one of those issues you need to settle to understand the message of the Bible, it's not worth fussing over, IMO.

Originally posted by LewisWildermuth
So if one gets posessed through no action of their own will it is fair to punish them?

Why does the rest of the creation story have to be literal if this section in the middle of it is not?

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It may be perfectly literal. See my speculation above.

But Nick, if it is not worth fussing over and Gen is the only part of the Bible that does not allow for evolution then that means that it should not be worth refuting evolution.

Or are you saying that only the texts that might cause a problem with the literal interpretation of the creation story are not worth messing with?

Originally posted by LewisWildermuth
So if one gets posessed through no action of their own will it is fair to punish them?

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1. It's G~d's creation, and He can do whatever He likes with it.

2. We don't even know what creature is involved here.

3. Assuming the punished creature is a snake, what's the big deal? I don't hear snakes complaining, do you?

4. G~d cursed ALL of creation as a result of Adam's sin, so the serpent wasn't exactly singled out.

Originally posted by LewisWildermuth

Or are you saying that only the texts that might cause a problem with the literal interpretation of the creation story are not worth messing with?

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No, the question is whether you are saying that because we don't UNDERSTAND one or two verses in the creation account, should we disregard all those verses that are plain and easy to understand? This isn't about literal versus allegory. This is about what is clear and easy to understand and what isn't.

What is not plain and easy to understand about snake? If God ment satan why didn't he just say satan?

Originally posted by LewisWildermuth
What is not plain and easy to understand about snake? If God ment satan why didn't he just say satan?

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If it was so easy to understand, why are you still saying 'snake' when that's not the word being used there?

Ahhh so any word that has been used in a slightly different manner any where else in the Bible means that the literal meaning can be called into question... Cool, thanks for agreeing with me that the literal meaning of 99% of the Bible can be called into question because I bet I can find places where most of the words have been used to mean something different.

Originally posted by npetreley

As Lewontin pointed out, evolutionists interpret evidence with an a-priori commitment to material causes. This means that evolutionists cannot even entertain the possibility that the evidence falsifies evolution, because to falsify evolution would require that we got here by something other than material causes, which is prohibited by their a-priori commitment.

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Yet for all this blabber that we can never admit we're wrong, you can't present a single piece of evidence that is inconsistent with evolution. You also can't present any evidence against quantum mechanics, so scientists must be biased when they get confident in that area too, right? They just can't admit that fairies might be responsible for particle mass or electricity.

Even if evolutionists convince themselves that microevolution or speciation could eventually lead to the macroevolution that would account for species today, we've observed enough of what goes on around us to know that kind of evolution could not possibly have occurred quickly enough for the earth to be anything younger than a billion years or more. Therefore evolutionists must also have an a-priori commitment to believing the earth is very old. The exact age is irrelevant, but there is a threshhold of credibility they cannot cross, and that threshhold has gotten bigger as they've learned more about biology and genetics.

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But you see, your problem is that multiple fields unrelated to biology, from physics to geology to astronomy, all converge on the same old age of the universe and earth. Methods such as astrochronology/measured rates of sedimentary deposition/observed plate tectonic movement/ice cores/you name it, as well as other radiometric dating methods, all converge on the same results. You would have to show why they are all wrong yet highly consistent before any other interpretation would be possible.

This restricts the possible interpretations of evidence even further, because evolutionists cannot ever "discover" that the earth or many of the fossils it contains are younger than millions or billions of years old.

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Not really. However, given a trillion pieces of evidence that the earth is old which agree with each other, a single bad result in any given method is ridiculous to base doubts off of.

Cross-checking with other methods when a result is suspect invariably shows it was wrong because the other methods converge on accepted values. If they all gave wildly different results with no statistically significant agreement you would have a problem, but we don't.

That would mean the earth wasn't around long enough for evolution to occur, which means they would have to consider supernatural causes, which is ruled out by their a-priori commitment to material causes.

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Enlighten me how 'aliens planting life here' is supernatural. Or how 'interdimensional travelers made this universe' is. Both, as well as a variety of other hypotheses, are ad hoc, unfalsifiable rationalizations consistent with the data which give us no explanatory or predictive power whatsoever, just like your God. They don't, however, involve anything supernatural; and the kicker is that you can't show how they make less sense than a supernatural explanation!

Then one day an evolutionist calculated exactly how long it would take for abiogenesis to occur, and concluded that life could not possibly have started until so far into the future that the universe would be so cold and dead that it couldn't support the life produced by abiogenesis. So he reasoned that life was planted here by aliens. But then he had to explain how the abiogenesis occurred for the aliens. In the long run, the effort he had to put in to explain away this problem was so massive, and involved so much re-entrant logic that the reasoning collapsed in upon itself, creating a momentary black hole, through which your sock was sucked into infinity.

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Let's see. A scientist, who didn't know a single thing about the complexity of the protobiont abiogenesis would create, or how many different configurations would work for life, and ignoring the fact that chemicals naturally arrange themselves into certain complex patterns under the right conditions, calculated the 'odds' nevertheless.

Is there anything analogous here to saying that since the Ancient Egyptians wouldn't be able to build the Empire State building, they could build nothing at all? In other words, is this objection intellectually honest or yet another example of YEC white lies for the faith?

Also, and this is something that has been said many times, divine creation, alien seeding or abiogenesis, as well as a wide variety of other explanations for the origin of the original lifeform(s), have no bearing whatsoever on the validity of evolution, which deals with what happens once you already have that lifeform.

Why bring up red herrings then, except to confuse the ignorant masses, which is the only way any form of creationism will ever be believed?

Originally posted by sbbqb7n16

Can you give me a verse?....

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1 Chronicles 16:30

Fear before him, all the earth: the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved.

Psalms 96:10

Say among the heathen that the Lord reigneth: the world also shall be established that it shall not be moved: he shall judge the people righteously.

Or, consider the part where God stops the sun from moving. He doesn't change the way the Earth spins - he stops the sun from moving.

Suffice it to say that, for a couple hundred years, people *VEHEMENTLY* opposed attempts to argue that the earth moved around the sun, because that would imply that the Bible was false, and if you couldn't trust every word in the Bible, there was a real problem. People were *KILLED* for this.

But, since we were all raised to believe that the earth orbits the sun, we simply *AUTOMATICALLY* read these texts as mythical or allegorical, because we're not going to take one reading out of many over obvious experience and data.

The parallels between flat-earth and immobile-earth views, and modern young-earth creationism, are amazing.

The point I was making is that you don't have to believe that a single one of the things described in Genesis happened literally as described to accept the spiritual lessons it teaches us about God's nature and Man's nature. The literalist description is a red herring, which has the primary effect of driving people away from Christianity.

You would be well-advised to read Augustine's comments about Scripture and science, in a treatise titled _The Literal Meaning of Genesis_, written 1600 years ago:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

(end of quote)

Augustine was wise indeed.

Wow. Great quote, seebs.