When is it time to abandon a sinking ship? (YEC?)

AV1611VET · Apr 25, 2007

Jadis40 said:
Something else too, is it just me, or do you notice a disconnect in logic when they say the flood was global, when there are many scriptures using the word "world" to refer to a specific area, and not the entire planet?

Then why was Noah aboard the Ark for over a year?

Assyrian · Apr 25, 2007

AV1611VET said:
No --- the Bible indeed uses word pictures.

But you're not left wondering what the "house of bondage" is, as it is defined as Egypt:

[bible]Exodus 13:3[/bible][bible]Exodus 13:14[/bible]

So God writing it down doesn't actually mean it has to be literal? That is ok then.

Rule of Thumb: The best interpreter of the Bible is the Bible itself.

I think Moses and Peter not treating God's days literally is a pretty useful in interpreting the 'six day' creation. So is Genesis when it describes the creation as happening in a single 'day' in Gen 2:4. The fact that Exodus describes God being refreshed after resting on the seventh day is a pretty good indicator we are dealing with metaphor here too. God does not get tired.

I don't think we can discount science either, which exposed an awfully embarrassing misinterpretation when Copernicus came along.

gluadys · Apr 25, 2007

laptoppop said:
I, of course, would strongly dispute that YEC is "denying the evidence from creation". It disagrees with a particular conventional interpretational model in favor of one which agrees more closely with the more direct revelation of a loving God, but it does not deny the evidence - rather it seeks harmony with both of them instead of constructing theories using methodologies which specifically exclude God acting in BOTH a natural and supernatural manner.

Methodological naturalism does not specifically exclude God acting in both a natural and supernatural manner. But how can a supernatural action be investigated scientifically? You can only posit a supernatural action by faith. You may find evidence an alleged miracle has occurred or not occurred. (In the case of the flood we find the latter. In the case of a recent creation we find the latter.) But there is no way to find a scientific cause or explanation of a supernatural miracle.

That doesn't mean science or its methodology specifically excludes the possibility.

gluadys · Apr 25, 2007

AV1611VET said:
Rule of Thumb: The best interpreter of the Bible is the Bible itself.

Not a particularly good recommendation given the original rule of thumb.

captheo · Apr 25, 2007

We (as christans) live in the world. Sometimes when it seems that everyone else is saying somthing we start to wonder if it is true.
One of the proublems with evelolation is people who asert it's factuality tend to find anything that seems to fit the THEORY and jam it in someware. Even if it goes aganst the THEORY. Since only G_O was around when Earth was created. He can be the only good source for information. And he tells us only what he thinks we need to know. Please rember that the Bible was never designed to be a history or science text book. It was designed to give us information and guidlines.

Smile It makes people wonder ;}

gluadys · Apr 25, 2007

laptoppop said:
Again - we are much better off when we learn about the Potter from His love letter than when we try to figure Him out looking at the pot.

Then use scripture for that purpose. To learn about the Potter, not about the pot. And don't use creation to learn about God. Use creation to learn about creation. After all, it, too, comes from the hand of the Potter.

Creation can tell us something of the wisdom and power of its Maker, but not about his love, mercy or justice, nor about the purpose for which he made it or us. For that we do need the testimony of revelation.

The problems arise when we demand creation fulfil the role of scripture or demand scripture fulfil the role of creation.

gluadys · Apr 25, 2007

laptoppop said:
For the most part, I'm fine with how things work out with AIG in a practical sense. I've never actually seen a case where they have denied some sort of evidence.

That is because their preferred method of dealing with evidence they deny is not to mention it at all. They only mention evidence which they think supports their case, or for which they think they have a reasonable alternate explanation. In my experience, they usually mishandle the evidence even in these scenarios.

but I still give primacy to Scripture over interpretations based upon the Scientific method, especially when that method only accommodates natural processes.

You are running into the same problem as ID with this sort of statement. Can you restage a miracle over and over so that scientists can study it? Can you set up a control experiment in which the miracle is done without the God-factor so that you can determine exactly what difference God makes?

Just how do you propose science include study of supernaturally produced events?

Trying to expand science to include miracles only makes a shambles of science. Not to mention a shambles of theology. A God whose every action can be scrutinized by science is less than the scientists who study him. Such a God is not worthy of worship.

laptoppop · Apr 25, 2007

No, you don't need to restage a miracle. But when a global flood leaves worldwide deposits, consistent with the explicit revelation of a loving God, everything is fine because the evidence of the event is consistent with the description of the event.

Parmenio · Apr 25, 2007

Let's recap shall we? So far just about 0 evidence has been discussed as people have asserted that nothing, no matter how compelling, can change their minds about their belief in the age of the earth.

Have we come anywhere?

They assert that God Himself spoke to them and told them that he was speaking completely literally in Genesis. How can you refute God?!

So in essence it comes down to the fact that they hinge their entire faith in God and Christ on this small bit of scripture being interpreted literally. If they see this as the only rational was to interpret this scripture and they then accept that TE or general evolution is actually backed by hard science, they are logically forced to call into question the veracity of the entire Bible. It's a sad state. It's the exact same reason I've had so so many friends fall from the faith.

Parmenio · Apr 25, 2007

Laptoppop, you are mistaken in your assertion that there is any evidence to support a complete global deluge. There isn't any. None. In all actuality the evidence seems to indicate a localized flood and the rest of the world being completely unaffected. I suggest you check with your local geological survey and they'll be more than happy to run you through the data.

gluadys · Apr 25, 2007

Jase said:
My understanding of it is in Hebrew, there is a different word to mean world in the sense of a region or people, and the planet as a whole.

Until Copernicus, it was not recognized that the earth was a planet. "Planet" originally referred to a category of stars. There were fixed stars which maintained a fixed relationship to other stars within a constellation, and wandering stars (planet=wanderer) which moved from constellation to constellation with the progression of the years and seasons. IOW, the ancients believed Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn were stars like Vega, Sirius and Aldebaran. The only difference was that they changed their places in the sky.

The discovery that some of them were more like the earth than like stars came only with the invention of the telescope.

So no word in Biblical Hebrew could refer to the earth as a planet. Any time the Hebrew term for "planet" is used, the author is referring to what were thought at the time to be a set of stars.

Jadis40 · Apr 25, 2007

Assyrian said:
So God writing it down doesn't actually mean it has to be literal? That is ok then.

I think Moses and Peter not treating God's days literally is a pretty useful in interpreting the 'six day' creation. So is Genesis when it describes the creation as happening in a single 'day' in Gen 2:4. The fact that Exodus describes God being refreshed after resting on the seventh day is a pretty good indicator we are dealing with metaphor here too. God does not get tired.

I don't think we can discount science either, which exposed an awfully embarrassing misinterpretation when Copernicus came along.

Well, actually when Copernicus rediscovered what Greek astronomers like Aristarchus had figured out. It just happened that the Church leaders gave more weight to Ptolemy and Aristotle because both believed in the geocentric model to which the church leaders held to be more correct based on what their interpretation of scripture seemed to say.

AV1611VET · Apr 25, 2007

Assyrian said:
So God writing it down doesn't actually mean it has to be literal? That is ok then.

My pet verse for showing metaphor is Psalm 91:4

[bible]Psalm 91:4[/bible]

Assyrian said:
I think Moses and Peter not treating God's days literally is a pretty useful in interpreting the 'six day' creation.

I don't think Peter was addressing the days of creation when he said that.

But let's assume for a moment that the six days are actually six 1000-year periods.

Now it gets worse:

2000 years of water on the earth with no sun?
1000 years of plants on the earth with no sun?

We will now have to rearrange the verses in Genesis 1 to accommodate Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8.

But it gets worse --- now we have to change the wording of "second day" and "third day" around.

All to accommodate an allegorical interpretation of Genesis 1.

Assyrian said:
The fact that Exodus describes God being refreshed after resting on the seventh day is a pretty good indicator we are dealing with metaphor here too. God does not get tired.

Genesis says:

[bible]Genesis 2:1-2[/bible]

This means that God stopped --- not because He was out of breath or anything, but because He was finished with His work.

In fact, it is at this point that He institutes the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy.

Assyrian said:
I don't think we can discount science either, which exposed an awfully embarrassing misinterpretation when Copernicus came along.

It was scientists who first taught the sun circled the earth, and convinced a certain denomination to follow suit.

Other denominations, as far as I know, didn't buy into it.

(Certainly not my church, which wasn't even around until 1975.)

Jadis40 · Apr 25, 2007

Assyrian said:
So God writing it down doesn't actually mean it has to be literal? That is ok then.

I think Moses and Peter not treating God's days literally is a pretty useful in interpreting the 'six day' creation. So is Genesis when it describes the creation as happening in a single 'day' in Gen 2:4. The fact that Exodus describes God being refreshed after resting on the seventh day is a pretty good indicator we are dealing with metaphor here too. God does not get tired.

I don't think we can discount science either, which exposed an awfully embarrassing misinterpretation when Copernicus came along.

Well, actually when Copernicus rediscovered what Greek astronomers like Heraclides had figured out. It just happened that the Church leaders gave more weight to Ptolemy and Aristotle because both believed in the geocentric model to which the church leaders held to be more correct based on what their interpretation of scripture seemed to say.

gluadys · Apr 25, 2007

Jadis40 said:
Well, actually when Copernicus rediscovered what Greek astronomers like Heraclides had figured out. It just happened that the Church leaders gave more weight to Ptolemy and Aristotle because both believed in the geocentric model to which the church leaders held to be more correct based on what their interpretation of scripture seemed to say.

We should also note that those early Greek astronomers wrote no part of the Bible and apparently had zero influence on those who did. So it is no wonder Church leaders found geocentric models more compatible with scripture.

plainswolf · Apr 25, 2007

Here's an interesting article of which I typed out part, It's from 'Latin Mass Magazine' - Vol. 15, No. 4 * Fall 2006 that I think illustrates how the concept of 'science' has changed in the last few hundred years. I think it brings up some good points.

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
By Dr. Diane Moczar

"The scientific revolution is a somewhat heavy and involved topic, but it is vitally important for understanding much of our intellectual and cultural life today. The supposed opposition between science and religion; the current cult of everything 'scientific'; the status of the scientists, whose pronouncements are received with the reverence and respect formerly given to saints or theologians; the craze for popular science; the preference given to scientific studies in our schools; and the insertion of dubious "scientific" theories into textbooks on just about anything - all these features from are among the long-term consequences of the intellectual revolution that begun in the seventeenth century.

Before we take a deep breath and plunge into this complex and important series of developments, we should keep in mind three points. First, true science and technology are preeminently part of Western civilization; they flow from elements of the western mentality such as the idea of creation. This truth includes as a corollary the concept of the goodness and intelligibility of nature; it is therefore an encouragement to man to study nature and make use of it. (If matter is evil, as in the religious mentality of some cultures, you don't study it; if it does not exist, as in others, you can't study it.) Secondly, the Church had always fostered scientific studies, and the major Western scientists such as Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Copernicus were all clerics; Galileo himself was a Catholic. Thirdly, Catholic Europe had excelled for centuries not only in theoretical science but also in the applied science we call technology; it was practical scientific innovations that made posssible the transatlantic voyages of discovery, for example.

One other point needs to be stressed if we are to appreciate some of the truly revolutionary consequences of the changes that began in the seventeenth contury, and it has to do with the very definition of science. For the Greeks and their Western cultural heirs, science meant "certain knowledge through causes," and included all types of investigation that produce certitude. Ancient and medieval thinkers took as the obeject of their study all of reality; not just the study of nature, but theology, philosophy, ethics, politics, and many other disciplines were called sciences. These sciences were arranged in a heirarchy according to their objects. Natural science was the lowest of the sciences because it dealt only with material things, while the sciences dealing with man, such as phsychology and ethics, were higher. All these disciplines, however, deal with things that change. There were other sciences, higher still in the classical heirarchy, that deal with things that do not change: with being itself, and with God. We call these sciences metaphysics and theology. Different methods were used for each discipline, but all were considered sciences, and they were approached through their causes.

This question of causality may seem a bit difficult, but it is crucial to understanding the gulf that opened in the Western mind, beginning in the seventeenth century, between how earlier thinkers had approached reality and how modern man looks at it. The Greeks and their intellectual descendents approached anything they wanted to know through four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. They used the example of a statue to illustrate the operation of the causes. The material cause of a statue of Zeus in the marble from which it is made; the formal cause is the shape it takes, as an image of the god; the efficient cause is the sculptor who imposes the form on the marble; the final cause - the ultimate one, governing all the rest - is the purpose for which the statue is made: to be set up in a temple, for instance. In analyzing the operation of these causes in the objects they studied, the ancients accpeted the fact that for most of the things they observed they would be able to determine only the first three causes; physicas, biology, and astronomy, for instance, are incapable of providing information about final causality - their ultimate origin and purpose. For answers to those questions, the scientists turned to the higher sciences of metaphysics and theology.

Now how does the thinking of modern scientist differ from what I have just described? It would seem to diverge in almost every way. To begin with, only the study of material things is is now considered 'science," and it is generally much more highly esteemed than philosophy, theology, or any other field that the Greeks would have put at the top of their list. No modern thinker would consider philosophy or theology sciences, or think of them as productive of any type of certitude whatever. In fact, a major consequence of the Scientific Revolution was the divorce of natural science from philosophy and theology, and its eventual increase in status to the most highly valued field of study.

What about the four causes? Modern scientists still consider the matter and form of the things they investigate, as well as the proximate causes that affect them. What they repudiate, out of a sort of unspoken agnosticism, is final causality. It is ironic that what most interested Greek and Christian scholars was the true purpose of things - the ultimate Why - while contemporary thinkers are either totally uninterested in such questions or or think that qua scientists they have no business thinking about them. The modern scientific mind, in fact, denies the reality of nonmaterial causes and is thus reduced, should it be interested in final cuasality at all, to the futile exercise of looking for ultimate explainations in matter itself. I recall a modern textbook author who described how Roger Bacon accurately diagramed the working of the human eye and dsicovered the details of its operation. He remarked, disparagingly, however, on Bacon's comment that the seven parts of the eye were like the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, allowing supernatural light into the soul as natural light enters the body. For the modern writer, Bacon was dragging religion into what should have been a religion-proof scientific discussion; for Bacon, the delight of his discoveries included seeing the glory of Creator reflected in the details of His Creation.

We must not ignore the real scientific breakthroughs that resulted from the Scientific Revolution, such as the development of the experimental method, the use of mathmatics to formulate scientific propositions, and the invention and the use of new scientific instruments. All of this made possible enormous strides in modern science and technology. It could have occured, however, without the rupture with the past and the radical change in the mentality that accompanied the progress of the Revolution. To sum up its long-term consequences, we can observe that the old worldview that saw distinction but not conflict between faith and reason, or between theology and biology, that took all of reality, material and immaterial, as the object of its study, was destroyed. Science and philosophy parted company, and the work of old-fashioned thinkers such as Aristotle and Aquinas, who harmonized the many disciplines, was rejected. The emphasis on final causality, the answer to the ultimate Why, was abandoned in favor of the descriptive How - how it operates, not why it is there in the first place. Somwhere I read this shift described as a denial of the concept "That the world has a purpose more profound than its description." That is beautifully put, but the source eludes me; possibly it is from an article by Father Jaki. Natural science rose from the humblest area of research to its current position as standard for all others: science (narrowly defined) became the measure of all things, the final arbiter of truth, so that we may now say, "Scientists tell us..." or "A scientific study has shown..." when we really want to clinch and argument. This new science is defined so as to exclude all causality that is not material. The scientists is the new high priest of arcane knowledge (and if he is a rocket scientists, well! You can't get wiser than that, can you?)."

+

AV1611VET · Apr 25, 2007

gluadys said:
So it is no wonder Church leaders found geocentric models more compatible with scripture.

Not my church leaders.

Parmenio · Apr 25, 2007

Haven't we had discussions before about this paleontologist? I believe the general consensus was cognitive dissonance at its very finest. Doublethink if you will.

Jadis40 · Apr 25, 2007

gluadys said:
We should also note that those early Greek astronomers wrote no part of the Bible and apparently had zero influence on those who did. So it is no wonder Church leaders found geocentric models more compatible with scripture.

I just have a sense of history repeating itself in regard to TE and YEC, considering the following:

John Calvin also believed in geocentricism, see this quote: "Those who assert that 'the earth moves and turns'...[are] motivated by 'a spirit of bitterness, contradiction, and faultfinding;' possessed by the devil, they aimed 'to pervert the order of nature.'"

Guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.

hithesh · Apr 25, 2007

How about if one were to search the Bible for Truth.

So I assume a person who devotes his life to figuring out if Jesus is literally coming back as a lamb, or is going to have a metallic sword protruding out of his mouth, is a pursuing of Truth?

It seems to me that he wandering around with the lights off.

No, I would say what qualifies as proof is the issue.

Well, since it seems that you consider the Genesis account a "proof" of a six day creation, why don't you tell us why it qualifies as a proof?

So does the serpent in Genesis count as "proof" of talking snakes?

When is it time to abandon a sinking ship? (YEC?)

SCIENCE CAN TAKE A HIKE

Basically pulling an Obama (Thanks Calminian!)

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