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

[vossler]

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.

LOL!!! Who hinges their entire faith in God and Christ on Genesis? Talk about hyperbole!

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.

This would be funny if it weren't so sad. To put our trust in man's measurements of things that occurred thousands of years ago when man can't agree on what happened yesterday is foolishness. It's all the more foolish when God Himself already told us what happened.

Thank you for that story.... I think I'll try and find the book. It might help a few of my friends.

Please, I pray that isn't the type of help you give them.

 

[hithesh]

I'll ask you the same question I asked another poster: What process do you go through to interprete God's Word? Please discribe the process.

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[pastorkevin73]

"You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

and everything else revolves around this.

and what is your process?

Yes we are to love God with all our being; heart, soul, mind and strength. Loving with all our being is a part of interpreting God's Word. Now I ask you again, what is the process for interpreting God's Word? This time try not to dodge the question.

 

[hithesh]

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[gluadys]

So they clearly saw that the Flood was local? Or didn't happen? Is that what you're saying? Just by looking at Mother Nature?

Yes. Looking carefully of course. Really studying nature, not just looking superficially. That the flood was global was falsfied by 1831 (before Darwin even conceived of the theory of evolution.)

Is this verse not talking about atoms?

No. The bible does not speak of modern scientific concepts developed centuries, even millennia, after it was written.

Some people like to read such information back into the bible, but that is human interpretation, not the meaning of the text as written.

And what is the "current view of creation"? Big Bang? Solid State? Multiverse? (I'm asking about this year's current view, by the way.)

Do you mean Steady State? That was falsified in the 1970s. Whether Big Bang is synonymous with creation is not something science can determine. Especially as science cannot describe the moment of the Big Bang itself as the math leads to a singularity at t+10^-37 seconds after the Big Bang. The Multiverse is one possible scenario if the Big Bang is not the first moment of creation.

FWIW, I don't believe Adam had a belly button.

Good. That is being consistent with your belief. I take it you also believe that instantly created trees did not have multiple tree rings indicating they had been growing for decades.

 

[AV1611VET]

Yes. Looking carefully of course. Really studying nature, not just looking superficially. That the flood was global was falsfied by 1831 (before Darwin even conceived of the theory of evolution.)

By "they" I meant those Paul was talking about in Romans 1.

Some people like to read such information back into the bible...

That's the way it was intended to be done.

[bible]John 12:16[/bible][bible]Acts 11:16[/bible]

...but that is human interpretation, not the meaning of the text as written.

Are you insinuating that human interpretation and the meaning of the text as written cannot coincide?

Do you mean Steady State?

Yes --- thank you.

That was falsified in the 1970s. Whether Big Bang is synonymous with creation is not something science can determine. Especially as science cannot describe the moment of the Big Bang itself as the math leads to a singularity at t+10^-37 seconds after the Big Bang. The Multiverse is one possible scenario if the Big Bang is not the first moment of creation.

I take it this is techno-babble for, "I don't know"? Or is there an answer to my question embedded in there somewhere?

I take it you also believe that instantly created trees did not have multiple tree rings indicating they had been growing for decades.

That is correct.

 

[Assyrian]

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.

Nobody gave any weight to the strange ideas of Aristarchus. His ideas were rejected by Greek Astronomers and he was even accused of impiety. Until Copernicus came along a thousand years later and showed that he was right, Aristarchus was just a minor footnote of history.

Aristarchus was never in play, that being said, the church had no problem with Ptolemy because it fitted the plain reading interpretation of geocentrism in the bible that was completely unchallenged before Galileo.

 

[Assyrian]

My pet verse for showing metaphor is Psalm 91:4

[bible]Psalm 91:4[/bible]

You mean he doesn't have feathers?

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

Actually his discussion spans the creation to the end of the world. But his point was you can't try to fit God into a human timescale of how quickly you think he is supposed to work. People thought Jesus was slow in coming back, but from creation to the end of the world God's days are not the same as ours.

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.

That is simply trying to work out another calendar to squeeze God into.

Instead of tying Jesus into a return in the first century, the day/thousand years says Christ's return and the millennium start 6000 years after the creation in 4004BC, that would be ten years ago. Oops Ussher must have got his dates wrong. (Ussher was a fan of the day/millennium code but it didn't work did it?) But neither Moses or Peter are saying simply multiply days by 360x1000. They are saying you can't tie God's days down at all.

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.

Exodus 31:16 Therefore the people of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, observing the Sabbath throughout their generations, as a covenant forever. 17 It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.

God says he was refreshed after having a rest on the Sabbath. But the bible tells us God does not get tired. The passage is a metaphorical as God having wings. This is God identifying with children and foreign workers worn out after six days work in the fields.
Exodus 23:12Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; that your ox and your donkey may have rest, and the son of your servant woman, and the alien, may be refreshed.

It is a metaphor, an anthropomorphism. In fact God never stopped working. John 5:16 And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. 17 But Jesus answered them, "My Father is working until now, and I am working." Apparently Jesus didn't take the OT account of God having a break literally.

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

I must have missed that verse. What translation are you using AV1611?

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

Scientists like Solomon?
Eccles 1:5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.

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

Luther called Copernicus a fool and quoted Joshua commanding the sun to stop as proof against Heliocentrism. Melanchton used the Ecclesiastes quote I just gave. Calvin was a geocentrist before the controversy and wrote in his commentary on Psalm 93:

The Psalmist proves that God will not neglect or abandon the world, from the fact that he created it. A simple survey of the world should of itself suffice to attest a Divine Providence. The heavens revolve daily, and, immense as is their fabric, and inconceivable the rapidity of their revolutions, we experience no concussion — no disturbance in the harmony of their motion. The sun, though varying its course every diurnal revolution, returns annually to the same point. The planets, in all their wanderings, maintain their respective positions. How could the earth hang suspended in the air were it not upheld by God’s hand? By what means could it maintain itself unmoved, while the heavens above are in constant rapid motion, did not its Divine Maker fix and establish it? Accordingly the particle אף, aph, denoting emphasis, is introduced — Yea, he hath established it.

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

They don't have much experience in this area the do they?

 

[Assyrian]

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.

I am not sure that quote is reliable. I tried to track it down in Calvin's writings, the ones online anyway, and I couldn't find it. The Psalm 93 reference is authentic though you can find it here http://www.ccel.org/c/calvin/calcom11/cache/calcom11.html3

 

[Assyrian]

How is it "deceptive" when He put it in writing and gave us the Great Commission to spread it around?

Are you seriously claiming preaching a global flood is part of the Great Commission?

 

[artybloke]

as He stipulated in writing.

God never wrote anything down.

 

[busterdog]

God never wrote anything down.

But, He "said" to you evolution was the way. Come on. Let's stop messing around.


Yes, when is it time to abandon a sinking ship?


Rev 3:14 ¶ And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God;

Rev 3:15 I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.

Rev 22:19 And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and [from] the things which are written in this book.

 

[artybloke]

But, He "said" to you evolution was the way.

And you can't prove he didn't. So there, nyaaah.

Which is why, of course, my claim that God told me is as nonsense as saying that God wrote the Bible.

God didn't write Revelation either. Some bloke with an over-lactive imagination wrote it, then claimed he'd got it from God.

Just because some bloke claims it's straight from God doesn't mean it is.

 

[busterdog]

I'll ask you the same question I asked another poster: What process do you go through to interprete God's Word? Please discribe the process.

Isn't it obvious?

1. You study secular teaching and then bend the BIble to make it fit secular teaching, with respect to Genesis and Revelation.

2. When you do believe in miracles and things like the resurrection, as many do here, you apply a different method based on the available witnesses. But you refuse to accept any witness for 1., including the witness of those validated in step 2.

3. As for interpretive methods, they are ad hoc. When "sunrise" can be used to say the Bible writers were ignorant, then use geocentrism. When you want to argue against literalism, argue that the writers of Gen. were too sophisticated to write of a literal six day creation or global flood. If someone has a literary basis for literal truth of a particular passage you don't like, put forth a clear metaphor and ask whether it is to be taken literally, such as Jesus actually being a mother hen. But, of course, there is no interpretive method to show God has no feathers other than 1.

4. Refuse all literary methods (as in refuse to even acknowledge such methods) indicating that the authors of the Bible demand that the Biblical view prevail over all others.


I will note that some folks have stopped using the geocentrism canard improperly, though it does recur, unfortunately.

 

[artybloke]

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You study secular teaching and then bend the BIble to make it fit secular teaching, with respect to Mt 1 through about 1 Peter.

Or, in the case of fundamentalists, you ignore the fact that your own way of reading the Bible has already been horribly distorted by a 19th century materialist epistemology that can only see truth = fact.

 

[Assyrian]

Yes, when is it time to abandon a sinking ship?

When the Jumblies start singing

'Our Sieve ain't big,
But we don't care a button! we don't care a fig!
In a Sieve we'll go to sea!'

 

[Assyrian]

Isn't it obvious?

1. You study secular teaching and then bend the BIble to make it fit secular teaching, with respect to Genesis and Revelation.

2. When you do believe in miracles and things like the resurrection, as many do here, you apply a different method based on the available witnesses. But you refuse to accept any witness for 1., including the witness of those validated in step 2.

3. As for interpretive methods, they are ad hoc. When "sunrise" can be used to say the Bible writers were ignorant, then use geocentrism. When you want to argue against literalism, argue that the writers of Gen. were too sophisticated to write of a literal six day creation or global flood. If someone has a literary basis for literal truth of a particular passage you don't like, put forth a clear metaphor and ask whether it is to be taken literally, such as Jesus actually being a mother hen. But, of course, there is no interpretive method to show God has no feathers other than 1.

4. Refuse all literary methods (as in refuse to even acknowledge such methods) indicating that the authors of the Bible demand that the Biblical view prevail over all others.


I will note that some folks have stopped using the geocentrism canard improperly, though it does recur, unfortunately.

If your canard walks like a duck and talks like a duck...

I see no reason to reinterpret the geocentrist passages Joshua 10, Psalm 93:1, Eccles 1:5 other than a desire to conform the passages to the 'secular view'.

What I cannot understand is people insisting these passages must mean anything other than the plain reading (which seemed quite clear to the church before Copernicus), while rejecting science and insisting on a literal interpretation for the six day creation.

I would understand people being consistent and basing their cosmology completely on scripture. Of course you end up with a flat earth and geocentrism as well. There is nothing in a 'scripture interprets scripture' and science is just 'man's wisdom' or 'a deception of the devil' approach that will tell you the 'sun rushing around the earth' and the 'earth set on pillars' are not literal descriptions. The only reason to look for another meaning is science.

Throughout the history of the church we have had the same debate come up. There were literalists who insisted on a flat earth and rejected the pagan philosophy that said the world was round. But serious theologians rejected that. As Augustine said, you only make the bible look foolish if you set your interpretation of scripture against accepted science.

The church was caught on the hop with Copernicus, but when the evidence began to come in and heliocentrism became established science, the church revised it interpretation.

We had the same debate when geology showed that the earth was far older than Ussher and a 'six day' creation allowed, but by the 1900s even fundamentalism had accepted an old earth.

What is really odd with present day YEC is their insistence that science cannot contradict the literal interpretation for the age of the earth while blissfully accepting what science says about the earth being round and spinning without question and interpreting scripture to fit.

 

[hithesh]

Yes we are to love God with all our being; heart, soul, mind and strength. Loving with all our being is a part of interpreting God's Word. Now I ask you again, what is the process for interpreting God's Word? This time try not to dodge the question.

"You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

and everything else revolves around this.

Allow me to explain, if I was telling my Children the story of the Tortoise and the Hare, I would not be doing so that they could wonder about the pattern of the Hare's fur. The moral, is what I want them to understand.

The Word of God is similar, in that God wants us to understand that, "we should love our God, with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind, and that we should love our neighbor as ourselves". For the children of the world that focus on the pattern of the fur, are as those whose eyes do not see.

(I see that you omitted the second part, and here is our dilemma. If you do not understand that the first commandment does not exist without the second, than your understanding of the word of God, is as that of a blindman)

 

[busterdog]

And you can't prove he didn't. So there, nyaaah.

Which is why, of course, my claim that God told me is as nonsense as saying that God wrote the Bible.

God didn't write Revelation either. Some bloke with an over-lactive imagination wrote it, then claimed he'd got it from God.

Just because some bloke claims it's straight from God doesn't mean it is.

But when that block is Isaiah, Jesus, John or Moses you have to make a choice. If the writer claims it is absolute reality or that it is from God, who are we to cherry pick what we like and ignore or snicker at what we don't.

That's my problem. The inconsistency -- and the inability to acknolwedge some doubt over whether a particular witness should be believed. Was Jonah actually in the belly of a fish? Jesus says so. You want to go on the basis of what the world says about such possibilities, well, that is your choice. But, let's acknowledge when the Bible is claiming the improbable as something completely serious.Aand lets' acknowledge that our "sample" of reality is very small indeed as western, albeit educated people.

We can get a lot farther if you can at least admit a tiny sliver of doubt about what is possible and give the respect that goes with it.

 

[busterdog]

If your canard walks like a duck and talks like a duck...

I see no reason to reinterpret the geocentrist passages Joshua 10, Psalm 93:1, Eccles 1:5 other than a desire to conform the passages to the 'secular view'.

What I cannot understand is people insisting these passages must mean anything other than the plain reading (which seemed quite clear to the church before Copernicus), while rejecting science and insisting on a literal interpretation for the six day creation.

I would understand people being consistent and basing their cosmology completely on scripture. Of course you end up with a flat earth and geocentrism as well. There is nothing in a 'scripture interprets scripture' and science is just 'man's wisdom' or 'a deception of the devil' approach that will tell you the 'sun rushing around the earth' and the 'earth set on pillars' are not literal descriptions. The only reason to look for another meaning is science.

Throughout the history of the church we have had the same debate come up. There were literalists who insisted on a flat earth and rejected the pagan philosophy that said the world was round. But serious theologians rejected that. As Augustine said, you only make the bible look foolish if you set your interpretation of scripture against accepted science.

The church was caught on the hop with Copernicus, but when the evidence began to come in and heliocentrism became established science, the church revised it interpretation.

We had the same debate when geology showed that the earth was far older than Ussher and a 'six day' creation allowed, but by the 1900s even fundamentalism had accepted an old earth.

What is really odd with present day YEC is their insistence that science cannot contradict the literal interpretation for the age of the earth while blissfully accepting what science says about the earth being round and spinning without question and interpreting scripture to fit.

Lots of people can be much brighter people and better Christians than me. But, let me give an example of what I am looking for. I admit a problem in consistency between "this is my body" and a literal view of Genesis. I believe they can be reconciled, but my methods have not provided the consistency that I would like to have.

What TE is not giving me is any acknowledgement of TE's inconcistency on important issues in the Bible or in science. Believe what you want about what God expects in terms of how you view reality. But, lets be clear about the inconsistency in claiming to "take scripture seriously" while chucking some measure of plain meaning.

You needn't become YEC as a consequence of admitting the problem. But I don't think you will be offering God's feathers as a helpful argument if you acknowledge the common problem of consistency in reason.