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> Does your particular religion really posit that the entire book is directly authored by God?

There are various viewpoints, but the general evangelical Christian view is that all is somehow inspired, maybe not word for word, but God managed to get His thoughts through. Also the doctrine of inerrency usually applies to just the original manuscripts.

Sure, there are parts where I might wonder what God was thinking, but for one thing, it's maybe a bit arrogant for any human to think he knows better than the One who created the universe.

Also you mentioned the bear incident with Elisha in another post. My brief attempt to explain that one: Elisha did not necessarily do what was right when he cursed the kids. In fact it's probably a warning to us not to take curses lightly!

> And what is your stance on translations?

We have several good modern translations today, but none are by themselves authoritative. My favorite is the NET Bible (New English Translation), as it has boatloads of notes about the original languages, as well as study notes.

I also believe that there is plenty of perfectly good evidence to believe that the Bible IS authored by God. The accuracy of the creation account, for example. The Old Earth Creationism model, IMHO, does a very good job at reconciling the Bible and science, and in fact if you take "day" in Genesis to mean millions of years, which is a perfectly acceptable Hebrew definition of the word, the whole Genesis 1 story fits amazingly well with our current scientific understanding. No time now, but I can explain more later if you're interested.

> In my opinion the "great flood" was perhaps a severe localized flood

I'm a Christian who takes the Bible fairly literally, and I actually agree with this statement. It is the position of Old Earth Creationism, which I believe in.

Look what I found, the table of attributes necessary for life in a table. This is, I think, the same one as in Creator and the Cosmos. The book goes into much more detail obviously.

Obviously, some of these factors are subjunctive, but he's have to be wrong by many orders of magnitude for it to really matter...

> I beseech you to offer ONE accurate example about the formation of the Universe

OK. Let's start with the first three verses of the Bible.

Verse 1 of Genesis 1 tells us that IN THE BEGINNING God created the heavens and the earth. The first three words are quite profound in themselves. Ancient man probably would have assumed that the universe had always existed. But no, the revealed word of God in Genesis said that it had a beginning. Science has shown that in the past century with the Big Bang and relativity. Relativity shows that time itself very literally began at the instant of the Big Bang.

Now we shift in frame of reference from the universe as a whole to the surface of the earth. Verse 2 tells us that the earth was empty and void. Science tells us that the early earth was molten and void. It also tells us that the early earth had a thick atmosphere. Little or not light would have reached the earth's surface. The Bible goes on to say the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Life was first formed in the early oceans about 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, so we know what the Spirit of God was doing ... creating life! (Now, if the biologists who can't for the life of them figure out how life started would just accept this as a possibility, we'd be making progress!)

Verse 3 is when the atmosphere clears out enough for sunlight to reach the surface of the earth for the first time. It is NOT when the first light in the universe existed. Remember the frame of reference!

That's barely touching on the first 3 verses. I hope you can see that it can be fitted with science reasonably well, and is NOT simply symbolic mush that can be interpreted any way. I will in turn beseech you to show me any other ancient text with half as much scientific detail as to the origins of the earth.

For more info on Biblical creation (and not the demonstrably wrong fundy mush that comes out of groups like Answers in Genesis), you might want to watch some of the archived Reasons to Believe TV shows. There's an excellent (and lengthly) series on Psalm 104 from back a couple years. Hugh Ross goes into quite a bit of detail as to how Psalm 104 shows what God did and why it was important for life to exist.

It should be noted that the Bible was not meant to be a science text. Its purpose was to unmistakeably show that God created the universe. Much detail was left out. But the verses that are there are, indeed, accurate, and I'll stand by that statement.

I'll close by mentioning Jeremiah 51:15, which says God "stretched out the heavens by His understanding." Are you aware that if the universe had expanded from the Big Bang the TINIEST bit faster, stars with heavy elements would not have formed and no life would be possible at any time or place in the universe? Similarly, the tiniest bit slower, and too many heavy elements would have formed (not enough hydrogen and helium), and/or the universe would have collapsed on itself. That implies quite a bit of understanding if you ask me!

Sigh.... hate to reply to off-topic posts, but...

> Not to mention scientific cosmology in Galileo's and Kepler's day wasn't even remotely advanced as it is today.

Correct. It is much more advanced. And all the latest cosmological evidence points solidly to the existence of God.

If you doubt that, please read Creator and the Cosmos. I triple dog dare you to read that book and remain an atheist. Don't think you can. :-)

Actually, I doubt it. One relatively famous "day-age" creationist I know of (who, incidentally, all the "real" creationists hate) speculated years ago that we would probably eventually find evidence of life on mars. Here's a link to a more recent statement his organization has made. Quote: "Will NASA ever find evidence of life on Mars? I expect so, if NASA searches with sufficient diligence. Just as meteors travel from Mars to Earth so also do they travel from Earth to Mars. Over the past four billion years at least several billion tons of Earth material, much of it life-carrying material, has landed on Mars."

Hugh Ross is an "Old-Earth" Christian who argues that the universe itself gives evidence for design.

Michael Behe is the point-man for the Irreducible Complexity argument.

Alvin Plantinga (link found in first post) rejuventates a much older line of thought called the "Transcendence Argument".

Those will get you started; some other time, if you are interested, I can give you links and bibliography for the philosophical side of things. Gotta go teach!

Regards,
Jeff Cagle

Tough call.
Having barely passed a biochemistry class, I can say that the implementation of life is non-trivial.
The question then becomes, assuming The Creator implemented the periodic table consistently across Creation, how unique (and strict) are the life-requirements which Earth supports?
Hugh Ross is quite an interesting read on the topic.
BTW, what happened before Creation? See, everyone, at some point, gets backed into the taking-something-on-faith corner. Some are just more explicit about it than others.
HAND.

With this in mind, there's another crazy idea I've been reading up on lately. Intelligent Design, a recent theory that has gained enough respect from the scientific community that it is being taught alongside evolution in many schools and colleges, explains that to even reach the stage at which we exist there are no fewer than twenty-six variables necessary for our universe to even consider permitting life and a further sixty-six within our galaxy and Earth itself that allowed the multitude of living beings not only to come into being but to flourish (this whitepaper that was in My Favorites breaks these criteria into probabilities -- great read if you prefer to see the evidence of this hypothesis); in a nutshell, this concept is summed up in Asimov's fantastic quote "In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

Some perhaps are content with chaos theory, but I'm glad there's another scientific viewpoint that can rationalize the concept that free will is the only variable that yet seems unaccounted for... and with all likelihood, scientific viewpoint that can rationalize the concept that free will is the only variable that yet seems unaccounted for... and with all likelihood, that too was carefully strewn into the universe to keep a perpetual working model. Although I suppose we have to keep in mind that this too is only a theory, and while it's possible everything was made to work smoothly from the beginning (on the whole) I'm more comfortable with the idea that somebody's looking in from time to time. One has to start somewhere to reconcile observation with history in order to get closer to the truth.

Yes, there are many competing and contradictory claims out there, and anyone can make one up. But the Truth is out there too, and life is all about weighing evidences of claims and making decisions about what is worth putting faith in.

Everyone puts faith in somethings, and acts on that faith. If not in God, then perhaps quantum chromodynamics, or a spouse, or an investment in the American economic system. And we eventually face the consequences of our faith-based choices. Therefore it is a "waste" to put faith in a lie.

The real, living God does ask for faith, but not blind faith. He has given a lot of evidence, but requires you to seek it out for yourself. The act of seeking for evidence is an act of faith, which God will honor if you do it with all your heart.

If anyone wants evidence for God, an obvious place to start looking would be the history of Israel and the Jewish people. If you are interested in science, here are other reasons to believe in the Bible.

Some perhaps are content with chaos theory, but I'm glad there's another scientific viewpoint that can rationalize the concept that free will is the only variable that yet seems unaccounted for... and with all likelihood, that too was carefully strewn into the universe to keep a perpetual working model. Although I suppose we have to keep in mind that this too is only a theory, and while it's possible everything was made to work smoothly from the beginning (on the whole) I'm more comfortable with the idea that somebody's looking in from time to time. One has to start somewhere to reconcile observation with history in order to get closer to the truth.

So I'm glad that there are still some minds out there, like Copernicus and Einstein, that are not satisfied with science by rote, and I think that if we allow ourselves break out of the current dominant paradigms for just a little bit the change in perspective can open many new insights.

Make that http://www.reasons.org as the address. Sorry about that. I got ahead of myself when I was replying.

For those interested in really seeing what the Bible teaches and how science the Bible compliment one another nicely, please visit Reasons To Believe

Short 4 minute astronomy video clip here.. Homepage here. They deal with the Biblical material within an old universe model.

Short 4 minute astronomy video clip here.. Homepage here. They deal with the Biblical material within an old universe model.

You won't believe this...or will you?
http://www.reasons.org/

Visit RTB. There's no question about it, the universe was created with life, no, human life in mind.

Either you believe God's word (and He was there), or you believe an unprovable hypothesis (Big Bang or whatever).

Both take assumptions, such as the Big Bang cosmologist have to assume the visible universe is on the surface of a fourth-dimensional sphere to explain why all the galaxies are receding from our frame of reference (the alternative is that we are near the center of the universe).

Of course, you are correct that all theories rest on assumptions.

And realize that the Bible contains scientific facts millennia ahead of their discovery by men

Or if you'd like to understand how 6 24-hour days can be reconciled with billions of light-years of starlight, check out the white hole cosmology in "Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe"

Most probably, God did it.

I know, this is as unpopular on /. as saying BillG runs a super-duper company that's really good to people.

But did you know that the Bible, written millenia ago, says "God stretches out the heavens"? Yes, now we know that the universe is continually expanding, but that sure wasn't a human concept when Isaiah wrote that thousands of years ago.

There are tons of other points in the Bible that show more than human origin in writing it. Like the fact that the universe just leapt into existence when God spoke a word. The Big Bang was not a theory developed in the first century, but while we now know about the big bang, humankind then didn't.

Or did you know that the Bible predicts 10 dimensions, with 6 collapsed (heard of String theory) shortly after the Bang?

Perhaps if some of you took the time to check out books like this you might learn what the Bible really has to say, rather than taking the opinions of others.

There is such a thing as a Testable Creation Model (Dr Hugh Ross). In this framework creation is testable, therefore falsifiable, and therefore entirely scientific. Just because you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I'll second that. Taking your suggestion to a broader level, it's very important for young people to establish a firm foundation that will enable them to apply their knowledge in a responsible and ethical manner. Think: white hat hackers vs. black hat hackers, or Allies vs. Axis Powers (Nazis).

The ethics issue is especially important in this age of nanotech, biotech, cloning, spying technology, and advanced warfare. What kind of perspective toward people do you want to be possessed by the future leaders of [Big Brother] governments and [evil, greedy] mega-corporations?

Fill in the blank: All humans are _________ .
a) accidents
b) monkey mutants
c) sacred creations of God
d) figments of your imagination
e) CowboyNeal

How one answers this question is far more crucial than which branch of science one studies. Having realized this, I can't suggest a better study material than the Bible.

Lest you dissent from my opinion (a little Ginsberg lingo :-), check out the Skeptics Center.

If you'll take note of the quote, you'll find that Hugh Ross made that particular point, and that he's also a devout Christian. His website Reasons to Believe focuses on demonstrating how science and the christian Bible complement one another. It's quite an interesting read.

If you'll take note of the quote, you'll find that Hugh Ross made that particular point, and that he's also a devout Christian. His website Reasons to Believe focuses on demonstrating how science and the christian Bible complement one another. It's quite an interesting read.

She has a hard time understanding the big bang theory, being unable to get along well with what are called "exact sciences".

After 4 years of discussion together and with representants of various christian religions, the answer for her is that the Big Bang happened and God was the one who initiated it, then He created Adam and Eve and put them on Earth (forget the monkeys :) ).

I, for one, consider that there was a quark/gluon soup, but whatever lies before 1E-43s is not my problem, the anthropic principle being enough to satisfy my curiosity.

It is also to be noted that the Bible and the Big Bang theory are not in contradiction. If you remember well, Monseigneur Lemaitre, the belgian monk who designed the "primitive atom" theory (in 1927 if I remember well) - the prelude to the Big Bang theory - did have the christians support. Albert Einstein even reproached him to create a theory that was too close of what the Bible :).( I have no link to this as this was told to me by one of Lemaitre's students ).

For those who agree with the "there is more than one universe" or the "Big Bang-Big Crunch" theories, it is to be remembered that the first words of the bible, commonly translated to "in the beginning" can also be translated to "in the beginningS".

Conclusion: What I think is that the universe exists, we exist, if the universe didn't evolve into what it did, there would be no one to wonder why it evolved the way it did (this is relevant too if another lifeform asks itself why it exists). The cause of the Big Bang being God or nothing is irrelevant (to me) but both the Big Band theory and the Creationsim can certainly coexist.

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

>A tenet of Christainity is that "proof denies faith" and Pope JPII recently called apon young people to follow the Path of Faith, rather than the path of Reason, because it was deceptive.

I find it disturbing that many christians unfortunately do believe this. I'm a Christian, and I most certainly do not. A few weeks ago while googling around, I found this orginization and was plesently suprised to see that I'm not alone. From their mission statement (please forgive me for quoting a stinkin' mission statement :-) :

The mission of Reasons To Believe is to show that science and faith are, and always will be, allies, not enemies.

Interstingly enough, their founder became a Christian from studying science.

Be sure to check out this group's interesting article on string theory and Christianity.

It isn't necessary to "...surrender [your] personality to the political and social programs fostered by churches..." in order to be a Christian. To the contrary, my faith is frequently stregenthened by science, and in some cases "pseudo-science" that jumps through hoops in order to get around the idea of an intelligent creator. Faith does indeed require belief in things that can't be proven, but then again, the same is required to believe that the universe "just happened" (which is why many quantum physicsts at least believe in some sort of pantheistic notion of god.)

>A tenet of Christainity is that "proof denies faith" and Pope JPII recently called apon young people to follow the Path of Faith, rather than the path of Reason, because it was deceptive.

I find it disturbing that many christians unfortunately do believe this. I'm a Christian, and I most certainly do not. A few weeks ago while googling around, I found this orginization and was plesently suprised to see that I'm not alone. From their mission statement (please forgive me for quoting a stinkin' mission statement :-) :

The mission of Reasons To Believe is to show that science and faith are, and always will be, allies, not enemies.

Interstingly enough, their founder became a Christian from studying science.

Be sure to check out this group's interesting article on string theory and Christianity.

It isn't necessary to "...surrender [your] personality to the political and social programs fostered by churches..." in order to be a Christian. To the contrary, my faith is frequently stregenthened by science, and in some cases "pseudo-science" that jumps through hoops in order to get around the idea of an intelligent creator. Faith does indeed require belief in things that can't be proven, but then again, the same is required to believe that the universe "just happened" (which is why many quantum physicsts at least believe in some sort of pantheistic notion of god.)

>A tenet of Christainity is that "proof denies faith" and Pope JPII recently called apon young people to follow the Path of Faith, rather than the path of Reason, because it was deceptive.

I find it disturbing that many christians unfortunately do believe this. I'm a Christian, and I most certainly do not. A few weeks ago while googling around, I found this orginization and was plesently suprised to see that I'm not alone. From their mission statement (please forgive me for quoting a stinkin' mission statement :-) :

The mission of Reasons To Believe is to show that science and faith are, and always will be, allies, not enemies.

Interstingly enough, their founder became a Christian from studying science.

Be sure to check out this group's interesting article on string theory and Christianity.

It isn't necessary to "...surrender [your] personality to the political and social programs fostered by churches..." in order to be a Christian. To the contrary, my faith is frequently stregenthened by science, and in some cases "pseudo-science" that jumps through hoops in order to get around the idea of an intelligent creator. Faith does indeed require belief in things that can't be proven, but then again, the same is required to believe that the universe "just happened" (which is why many quantum physicsts at least believe in some sort of pantheistic notion of god.)

>A tenet of Christainity is that "proof denies faith" and Pope JPII recently called apon young people to follow the Path of Faith, rather than the path of Reason, because it was deceptive.

I find it disturbing that many christians unfortunately do believe this. I'm a Christian, and I most certainly do not. A few weeks ago while googling around, I found this orginization and was plesently suprised to see that I'm not alone. From their mission statement (please forgive me for quoting a stinkin' mission statement :-) :

The mission of Reasons To Believe is to show that science and faith are, and always will be, allies, not enemies.

Interstingly enough, their founder became a Christian from studying science.

Be sure to check out this group's interesting article on string theory and Christianity.

It isn't necessary to "...surrender [your] personality to the political and social programs fostered by churches..." in order to be a Christian. To the contrary, my faith is frequently stregenthened by science, and in some cases "pseudo-science" that jumps through hoops in order to get around the idea of an intelligent creator. Faith does indeed require belief in things that can't be proven, but then again, the same is required to believe that the universe "just happened" (which is why many quantum physicsts at least believe in some sort of pantheistic notion of god.)

Reasons to believe is a good site about the Christian creation model. There is much proof of the Genesis story. (Reasons to believe is an organization founded by Hugh Ross, a brilliant astro-physicist)
It's nice to see a connection between science and God for once.

First, I disagree with removing evolution from the curriculum. I do not see where evolution and God are diametrically opposed. To me Genesis chapters 1 and 2:1-3 have always been an allegory for actions God took,(creation), that are beyond my understanding. The same way infinity, eternity, omniscience, and omnipresence are bigger than my mind's ability to wrap itself around. In short, I can reconcile my faith and science. (I struggle, but my solution is not "Bury your head in the sand.")

What bugs me is the type of arguments that I'm seeing made in this discussion. Emotional attacks (I was scarred for life by my Christian parents!), stereotypes (All Christians agree with this action!), and insults (All Christians believe in strict Creationism, and therefore must be stupid!).

Belive it or not, there are many intelligent Christians out there, and some (gasp!!) might be more intelligent than you (there are plenty smarter than me). Before attacking their beliefs, character, intelligence, etc., you might want to read what they have to say. I'd suggest starting with Reasons to Believe.

You might find some provocative arguments to research further.

Putting on my asbestos underwear,

jeff_C