Opinion on a creation v evolution summary

Not_By_Chance said:

Probably, so far as I know, every professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university believes that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that:

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Those first four words out of the serpent's mouth are still being asked today:

"Yea, hath God said ..."

Not_By_Chance said:

I'm going to try to contact Professor Barr by e-mail to find out exactly what he does believe.

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That should settle the matter.

Not_By_Chance said:

Papias wrote:

D So are you saying t......

Simply false. Hebrew scholars are clear that Genesis contains poetic language.
https://www.scienceandchristianbelief.org/serve_pdf_free.php?filename=SCB+12-2+Marston.pdf
..........You already see much of your Bible symbolically, as I've we've seen.
You also didn't address most of my points, A, B, C, E, etc.

In Christ-

Papias

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Sorry, but there is too much posting going on here for me to respond to everything.

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Well, that's because you keep bringing in new topics, like transition fossils, how Jewish Scholars see Genesis, and so on. In each one, you've been shown to have been misled, and then you bring up a new topic instead of admitting that. This is a common creationist activity which is so common that it's been given a name: The Gish Gallop. Look, here are the original points I brought up in response to your OP, way back on page 1. You might want to pick one (or pick any of the topics you've brought up) and start a separte thread on it, and stick to the topic until it is resolved.

• • Practically all scientists support evolution, and have for decades. It's simply not a controversy. This includes the thousands of scientists who are Christians. Everyone recognizes that creationism is as factual as a flat earth.
  • The evidence for evolution includes all kinds of stuff, not just fossils. DNA tests alone would be enough to prove evolution beyond a shadow of a doubt, even if there were no fossils. Others are phylogeny, biogeography, ontogeny, pathology, agriculture, and many others. All these fields agree not only on the fact that one animal can evolve, over generations, to another, but that the same transitions have happened - building the same family tree of all life.
  • There are tons of excellent series of clearly transitional fossils. The horse, whale, mammal, fish to amphibian, amphibian to reptile and many others series are so clear that creationists generally just avoid them, and don't deny that they are clear.
  • Creationists don't agree on their basics. You can see this from OEC websites. Those creationists say the earth is billions (>2,000,000,000) of years old, while most creationists say it is about 6,000 years old.
  • Geologists (including thousands of Christians) worldwide overwhelmingly reject the idea of a young earth and a global flood, based on evidence. More than 150 years ago, it was Christians who disproved the myth of a global flood, deciding this long before Darwin published his book.
  • Creationists rely almost solely on a handful of deceptive tactics. These include moving the goalposts, being evasive/misleading (AiG does that alot), quote mining (which you’ve no doubt seen – google it), ignoring/hiding evidence (very common), Gish Galloping, and less often, outright fraud.
  • The majority of Christians worldwide are in churches that accept evolution. Evolution is as firmly proven as the existence of the Civil War, and the harder fundamentalists fight against it, the more damage they will do to Christianity, by making people think the Christianity is deception.

However, in answer to your point about the Hebrew Scholars, it would seem that others would disagree with you:-

"Professor James Barr, Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford, has written:

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That quote is useless for a number of reasons.

First of all, we can't check if it's even real. It is posted on a creationist website, claiming to be from a private letter from over 30 years ago. They could have fabricated the whole "quote", and claimed it was in a private letter that they don't have, from anyone. That's like saying I have a private letter from Hillary Clinton saying that she's had orgies with Mit Romney - but I won't show you the letter.

Second, even if real, the context isn't shown, so we don't know if the letter even makes the point being claimed. It could well be proceded with something like "One day, I heard a colleage say, that: (insert quote), .... but I know that's wrong." Or a hundred other out of context things. Sadly, creationists routinely quote mine all kinds of people, as you yourself have been fooled by on this thread (the quote from Darwin). So we don't know that this isn't just another creationist quote mine.

Thirdly, even if real and in context, he could realized he was wrong, and corrected himself a decade later, or two decades later, or whatever.

Fourthly, even if real and in context and still believed, he's demonstrably wrong. Plenty of scholars of the Old Testament scholars support an allegorical reading, such as Dr. John Goldingay, and others. Here's but one example: https://books.google.com/books?id=y...epage&q=goldingay genesis not literal&f=false All this has been pointed out back when BobRyan was using this same supposed "quote".

Fifthly, I thought you wanted info from scholars who were themselves Hebrew (you asked for "Hebrew Scholars"). I gave you info from them (scholars of the Jewish scriptures who are Jewish) showing that they've known for a long time that Gensis 1 is not neccessarily literal. I can give you more too.

Do you now agree that the Barr story doesn't show that Genesis is literal?

It's clear that there are many different opinions about all aspects of creation/evolution and even within Christianity itself. ..... ....At the end of the day, I suppose the only thing that really matters is that one is content in their beliefs.

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Yep, agreed. Creationism/evolution is not a salvation issue. I'm sure that many are saved, including both those that accept evolution as well as creationists.

In Christ -

Papias

AV1611VET said:

Those first four words out of the serpent's mouth are still being asked today:

"Yea, hath God said ..."

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How many times have you used those four words?

Not_By_Chance said:

It's clear that there are many different opinions about all aspects of creation/evolution and even within Christianity itself. No-one can claim to be sure of having all the answers and numbers of supporters for each idea don't have any bearing on the ultimate reality of what is true and what is not. For myself, I believe that only God has all the answers, but His ways are so much higher than ours that we could not possibly begin to fully understand His creation. At the end of the day, I suppose the only thing that really matters is that one is content in their beliefs.

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It is clear that less than 0.1% of relevant biologists reject the theory of evolution.

"Of the scientists and engineers in the United States, only about 5% are creationists, according to a 1991 Gallup poll (Robinson 1995, Witham 1997). However, this number includes those working in fields not related to life origins (such as computer scientists, mechanical engineers, etc.). Taking into account only those working in the relevant fields of earth and life sciences, there are about 480,000 scientists, but only about 700 believe in "creation-science" or consider it a valid theory (Robinson 1995). This means that less than 0.15 percent of relevant scientists believe in creationism. And that is just in the United States, which has more creationists than any other industrialized country. In other countries, the number of relevant scientists who accept creationism drops to less than one tenth of 1 percent."
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA111.html

There is no controversy in the sciences. What controversy there is over evolution is within religious circles, and it has zero to do with the science. It has everything to do with dogmatic religious beliefs.

Not_By_Chance said:

For me, I believe the Bible to be the inspired, inerrant Word of God and therefore to be trusted.

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Why?

I mean, what we have here is a clear case of the bible saying one thing, and actual scientific inquiry saying another. As much as you like to think that there's some controversy, the fact is that there is none. Hell, we don't even have to go to evolution. Find me one doctor who thinks that the bible's cure for leprosy is the way to go. It's patently obvious that what the bible recommends is, in some cases, simply not what we see in nature.

So what do you do in this case? Do you reject the scientific method? The results of empiricism? The clear benefits drawn from them? I mean, in the case of leprosy, it's the difference between suffering from a crippling, chronic, contagious disease that will leave you scarred, disabled, and maimed, and healing from it in a matter of months. And you'd reject this in favor of the far more expedient, albeit considerably less effective biblical method. Why?

See, this is the stopping point I always hit with Christians. "The bible is literally true." "Why do you believe that when it says things that are clearly false?" "The bible says it, it can't be wrong." "But here's really strong evidence indicating that it is, in fact, false!" "The bible says it, it can't be wrong." Why? How are you so sure that the bible is literally true? How do you place this much trust in a book? If the bible described a flat earth, would you reject the experiments you could easily reproduce yourself that demonstrate that it is, in fact, not flat? Why? What justification do you have for giving the bible the final word? What affords it this degree of trust?

Furthermore, I believe that creation scientists have done a wonderful job explaining to the public, in a way that most non-scientists can understand, the massive problems with the theory of evolution.

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You're wrong. These "scientists" are laughingstocks in their disciplines. They're the biological equivalent of the Flat Earth Society. What they say makes sense until you actually examine the evidence, at which point it falls apart. Often, they appeal to views of science which are simply not true - Ken Ham's "historical vs. observational science" line, while oft-repeated by creationists, is not how science works and simply does not apply in any meaningful sense (whack Ken Ham with a baseball bat, and watch how quickly he wants "historical science" to piece together how his kneecap was shattered). The explicit claims made are never published in the scientific literature and are often debunked within hours by internet skeptics, because they're based on a fundamentally flawed understanding of the science involved. This is why I brought up the scientific consensus in the first place. You find this convincing. However, among the people who study biology, almost nobody does. Why is that?

I have yet to come across the same situation in the world of evolution.

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Oh?

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_01

Here's an introductory course on evolution, what we know, and how we know it, from one of the leading universities in the world. It's written for the high school level, and everything therein should be perfectly clear to anyone. Yeah, the responses to certain objections can be complex. When the objection is "the bacterial flagellum cannot have evolved", the answer will necessarily have to delve into the genetics of bacterial evolution. Science is hard, and understanding it can take work. It's always easier to poke holes in a scientific theory than it is to defend that scientific theory. Watch, I'll do it:

"If vaccines are safe, why are there so many reported cases in the VAERS database?"

In order to answer this question, you have to understand how epidemiology works, and what the VAERS database actually is for. And a lot of people get suckered in by this, and think that because people report vaccine reactions to VAERS, it means they must be true. It takes a lot more work to debunk false claims than it does to make them. This is why the "Gish Gallop" is such an effective tactic in formal debates.

Rom 1:20 “For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Rom 1:25 “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.”

The above quote from the New Testament makes it clear that man has been able to understand about God from the very beginning and not at some distant point in the future when animals supposedly evolved into humans and became "in the image of God." It also makes it clear that God is the source of all truth and not fallible mankind. Amen to that.

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This is probably my favorite verse in the entire bible. "Men are without excuse". Yeah, we might be, if there was actually evidence to support the claims made. There isn't. Look, I can do this too.

"The flying spaghetti monster is known in the heart of all men. Those who deny him do so because they are corrupt and must be purged."

It's nothing more than psychological manipulation. "No, they don't really disagree with you, they're just lying to themselves, and any evidence presented must be wrong because you're right". Well, guess what: there's another point where the bible is wrong. Epistemology. The list of people who knew about the existence of this particular god before being told about it is very, very short.

Not_By_Chance said:

Actually there is. It is called "gravity".
I would recommend watching the second DVD by Spike Psarris for further explanations about the many problems with the naturalistic interpretation for the origin of the universe, including why gravity would not be a valid explanation for the formation of the first stars.

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Of course it wouldn't be a valid explanation. Stars are plasma and form by the electromagnetic laws. The problem with modern cosmology is they try to apply the behavior of "neutral matter" (Planets) to charged matter (stars - plasma) and think it is perfectly valid to do so when no plasma physicist does so in any plasma laboratory. Go Figure. Cosmology is a lot like evolution, they both have their own dogmatic beliefs that can never be falsified because they ignore the science.

The Big Bang Theory doesn't propose everything from nothing.
Well. I've heard it called a "singularity", but even if that were what really happened, it would have had to have come from somewhere. Whichever way it is presented, it sounds like magic to me and therefore just a faith-based statement as no-one can prove it one way or the other.

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The BB doesn't propose everything from nothing. They propose everything from a point of zero volume. Now get a load of this contradiction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity
"According to general relativity, the initial state of the universe, at the beginning of the Big Bang, was a singularity.[4] Both general relativity and quantum mechanics break down in describing the Big Bang,[5] but in general, quantum mechanics does not permit particles to inhabit a space smaller than their wavelengths."

SO according to GR the initial state was a singularity, but GR breaks down in describing it, yet they still claim it describes it.
Basically the very math they claim to use simply shows the impossibility of their claims as it shows their beliefs are mathematically impossible or the math would not break down. A miracle by any other name is still a miracle. Science just needed their creation event is all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître
"He proposed (independently of Russian physicist Alexander Friedman) the theory of the expansion of the universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble.[2][3] He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article.[4][5][6][7] Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his "hypothesis of the primeval atom" or the "Cosmic Egg"."

Not to mention black holes are pure fiction. Are merely an electromagnetic event within plasma. (don't forget to turn closed caption on, unless you speak Russian ).

You do not seem to realize that the actual universe could be much much larger than the observable universe.
Yes, it could be, but that would still mean that galaxies had formed long before even stars were supposed to have formed. Again, I would recommend Spike Psarris's excellent DVD for more on this.

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That's why they are constantly surprised when the real data comes in. They have too much dogma in their science. Another good one.

Please explain to us why there should be millions of transitional fossils.
Even Darwin stated that this should be the case. I don't understand why you would say that there shouldn't be large numbers of intermediate forms in the fossil record if macro evolution had really taken place.

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Yes, they like to forget that little fact don't they. All the while ignoring what we see with our very eyes. That the English Mastiff and Husky breed mate and produce the Chinook. And hence there would naturally appear to be sudden appearances within the fossil record as a new breed appeared. At no time did the Husky or Mastiff evolve into the Chinook, gradually or suddenly.

Plant and animal cells appear to be the result of symbiosis between two prokaryotic organisms
I'll need to look that one up, but (and I'm not a scientist myself), I would have thought that these organisms were more complex that the single living cell I referred to in my original text.

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No he is correct, then ignores that in the fossil record and pretends new breeds of animals come about by evolution instead of breed mating with breed, or the result "of symbiosis between two prokaryotic organisms."

Actually there could have been something before our current universe existed.
But that doesn't solve the problem; it just pushes it farther back in time.

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And asks us to have faith that this is so, despite objecting to our faith. Even if their math breaks down so their faith must be even greater as it declares the impossibility.

The fossil record can only be explained by the theory of evolution. Creationists have no explanation of it at all.
Yes they do, it's called Noah's flood.

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No it's called reproduction. Mastiff mates with Husky - new breed Chinook comes into the record overnight. No transitional forms exist between the husky and Chinook or Mastiff and Chinook. They simply misclassified breeds as species in the fossil record.

Don't confuse the prior creation with the present creation.

"And the earth (became - hayah) desolate and waste, and darkness (became - hayah) upon the surface of the deep. There have been 5 major extinctions - man is the sixth creative act. Man is a recent creation, not the dinosaurs.

Even if life was magically poofed into existence it would still have evolved once it was here
Not according to the information I have seen. There are many excellent DVDs on this subject, including the latest "Evolution's Achilles Heels", but others such as Dr David Mentons "Evolution - Not a Chance" cover this very well.

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You are correct. It would continue on just as we observe in the real world. Breed mates with breed and makes new breeds within the Kind. Nothing else has ever been observed. At no time did one animal evolve into another. Evolutionists simply disregard everything known about how reproduction works. No new species ever arise.

I am sorry but that is simply a quote mine and quote mining is extremely dishonest.
This wasn't intended to be a dishonest quote. It's something I found stored on my PC. I cannot remember where I got it, but if that's what the man actually said, in what way was he misrepresented?

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In other words they don't want to hear the evidence.

Subduction Zone said:

You do not seem to realize that any arguments claiming that something had to create the universe are equally valid at pointing out that something had to create your God.

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So are you claiming energy had to be created?????? Are you now invalidating the science you claim to follow just to make a silly argument?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy

"but cannot be created or destroyed."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy

"In physics, the law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant—it is said to be conserved over time. Energy can be neither created nor be destroyed, but it transforms from one form to another, for instance chemical energy can be converted to kinetic energy in the explosion of a stick of dynamite."

Or for instance God when He created the universe from Himself, and from that dust created us and to God we will return when we die.

You know, that energy that makes up all things and permeates the universe that you constantly ignore and make excuses for. The very energy the universe came from?

Justatruthseeker said:

So are you claiming energy had to be created?????? Are you now invalidating the science you claim to follow just to make a silly argument?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy

"but cannot be created or destroyed."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy

"In physics, the law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant—it is said to be conserved over time. Energy can be neither created nor be destroyed, but it transforms from one form to another, for instance chemical energy can be converted to kinetic energy in the explosion of a stick of dynamite."

Or for instance God when He created the universe from Himself, and from that dust created us and to God we will return when we die.

You know, that energy that makes up all things and permeates the universe that you constantly ignore and make excuses for. The very energy the universe came from?

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No, the energy of the universe did not need to be created. Physicists can and have measured the total energy of the universe. The total is zero. There is both positive and negative energy and to the best accuracy possible the universe is shown by gravity to be "flat", that means its total energy is zero. And you will need to talk to Essential Saltes here for an explanation.

Not_By_Chance said:

For me, I believe the Bible to be the inspired, inerrant Word of God and therefore to be trusted.

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The universe does not shape itself to match our beliefs. Your beliefs are irrelevant.

Not_By_Chance said:

That's not what it says above. If you take away the double negative, you end up with this:-

Probably, so far as I know, every professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university believes that the writer(s) of Genesis 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that:

• (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience
• (b) the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story"

It couldn't be more clear and if that's the case, they certainly don't believe that the Genesis account is myth.

I'm going to try to contact Professor Barr by e-mail to find out exactly what he does believe.

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I'm afraid that you're 8½ years too late. According to Wikipedia, Professor Barr died in October 2006.

USincognito said:

The Big Bang Theory doesn't propose everything from nothing. You need to learn what the theory actually says.

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Learn from the best! Hawking says in his book
"The Grand Design" that, given the existence of gravity
, "the universe can and will create itself from nothing," ..

Subduction Zone said:

And you will need to talk to Essential Saltes here for an explanation.

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Right - ask someone who knows. Better yet, maybe skip this Big Bang tangent? It seems like a tangent from the OP.

Papias said:

Right - ask someone who knows. Better yet, maybe skip this Big Bang tangent? It seems like a tangent from the OP.

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Right on both. When something is well outside of my comfort zone I am not afraid to admit it. These tangents are a tactic that certain creationists adopt when they have lost the original battle.

Not_By_Chance said:

LM wrote:

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA111.html

There is no controversy in the sciences. What controversy there is over evolution is within religious circles, and it has zero to do with the science. It has everything to do with dogmatic religious beliefs.

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It seems clear to me that we are never going to agree over these issues, and I don't have the time to endlessly research and debate the finer details that scientists have to deal with ....

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Um, LM simply stated a demonstrated fact. Refusing to agree with it is like refusing to agree that most Americans can read. It's a simple statistical fact that practically all scientists accept evolution. You may or may not accept evolution yourself, but denying that most scientists do is simply denying reality.

For me, I believe the Bible to be the inspired, inerrant Word of God and therefore to be trusted.

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That's fine. So do I, and so do millions of other Christians who accept evolution, gravity, germs, and their Bibles.

I do not believe that God used such a wasteful method such as evolution to bring humans into existence,

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but instead you believe He used 6 days (144 hours) to do what he could have done in an instant? Isn't that wasteful too? Whichever it was, it was millions of times longer than it could have been, right?

I believe that God could not have made it clearer that Genesis was meant to be read in a literal way .......

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Again you contradict what has been shown to you over and over. You've seen the fact that Jewish scholars have said that Genesis is poetic, and that even some early Christians rejected a literal interpretation of Genesis, and that you yourself already accept that Genesis has symbolism, like the snake being Satan, etc. You are not only contradicting Jewish scholars, who know Genesis better than you, but yourself as well.

He always presented what had been written as being the truth. Look at these words of our Lord:-

Jesus replied

Mar 10:6 "But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.'

Notice that Jesus says, "but at the beginning of creation God made them male and female." He did not say or in any way imply that this occurred millions of years after he created the earth or the first life on the planet.

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Notice that he also didn't say that this was on the 6th day. If it was on the 6th day, then that's obviously not the "beginning of creation", which was the 1st day. Jesus himself is showing here that you can't just read it literally, and you are ignoring the words of our Lord.

He could easily have said something like, "You remember that story that Moses used to tell you about how I made the world. Well, it wasn't quite like that really. I actually made the first life from pond scum. Then I gradually changed that over millions of years to become the first animals and plants. Finally, after another huge amount of time I changed the animals into humans and added my spirit to them, so that they would become more like their creator.

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Sure. He could easily have also said "God made humans male and female after 6 literal 24 hour days of creation". But he didn't. Why not? Maybe because God didn't do so?

The final authority for a Christian has to be the Bible and I don't believe as I've said before that we can pick and choose which parts we want to believe and which parts we can relegate to merely myth or allegory.

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So do you reject Jesus' parables because they are "mere" symbolic speech? Do you reject the Fall because it is described in Genesis using "mere" allegory? It seems that you are one denigrating our Holy Word because you are suggesting that non-literal speech is somehow lesser, while many of the most important parts of our scripture are non-literal, as you admit yourself.

Some may wish to do so, but they will be constantly having to adapt their thinking to the latest ideas from science at how the Bible can be interpreted to try to harmonise the differences.

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So you reject the idea of germs and gravity, both of which are the latest ideas from science that aren't supported by a literal reading of our scriptures?

Furthermore, I believe that creation scientists have done a wonderful job explaining to the public, in a way that most non-scientists can understand, the massive problems with the theory of evolution.

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They've done a great job of tricking millions of them out of billions of dollars, that's for sure.

In several place, such as in post #108, you have places to check on things. Best of luck in your search.

In Christ-

Papias