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Evangelical Scientists Debate Creation Story
Hugh Pickens writes "Polls by Gallup and the Pew Research Center find that four out of 10 Americans believe humanity descend from Adam and Eve, but NPR reports that evangelical scientists are now saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account and that it is unlikely that we all descended from a single pair of humans. 'That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years so not likely at all,' says biologist Dennis Venema, a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile faith and science. 'You would have to postulate that there's been this absolutely astronomical mutation rate that has produced all these new variants in an incredibly short period of time. Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence.' Venema is part of a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century and say it's time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence."
evangelical scientists are now saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account and that it is unlikely that we all descended from a single pair of humans.
Science and religion rarely mess when comparing facts. I guess this is news because it's evangelical scientists? They're still pushing creationism, aren't they?
Where does the bible say is Kain's wife from?
The Land of Nod (Genesis 4:16) It also can be interpreted as nomadic peoples (at least that's what my Catholic school upbringing taught me).
My work here is dung.
The BioLogos Foundation and Center for Cognitive Dissonance
When I had religion in primary school they had basically told us that the Genesis was to be taken metaphorically and not literally, in secondary school we had a light analysis of certain Jewish cultural things in that story (like 7 days, and a garden being paradise for a tribe which lived in the desert...)
I didn't think people still believed it LITERALLY, this is news to me.
Genesis is allegory.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Why even bother with a theology you must admit contains errors? Which part of the Bible contains the facts, and which doesn't? And if you don't know, then what's the point of your faith? Only when it apparently contradicts science you can reject a doctrine, or what is the verification principle at play here for these "Christian" "scientists".
Notice I'm not coming out in favor or against either science or religion here. I'm pointing out, I think these people are nothing more than deep-cover atheists. Their entire movement hinges on reconciling contradictions, by discarding the one assertion (religious dogma) in favor of the other (science), and then claiming the religion saved - which is at worst, a willful deceit, at best (I'm being charitable here) a collosal failure in the history of all rationality, and casts their ability to do logical inquiry into doubt. Neither alternative makes me willing to trust them.
>it is unlikely that we all descended from a single pair of humans.
I thought that Lucy/African Eve was the one that we're all descended from. Or was that a single pair of humans ... Lucy and multiple males.
Or if we don't all descend from a common source (the rest having died or being killed off), does that give weight to racist arguments that blacks and whites are separate species?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
So, if the Church and 4 out of 10 Americans believe the Biblical version of creation, why are they so dead set against incest?
There is only one proper response.
BURN HIM!
If there was no fall, there was no need for redemption. If there was no need for redemption, there was no need for a savior. And without a savior, there is no Christianity.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
: Catholics have used the fourfold method of exegesis and Jews have Rabinnical texts - they still want to believe that the whole Bible is literal and that God through his holy scribes was incapible of metaphor?
We still love our Christian brothers and sisters - even when they're uncomforttible eating Dino-shaped chicken nuggets.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
"...no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence..."
Come on, you can do it, just one step further... -> No God!
There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence."
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. If there's any meaning in this story it's allegorical. It's just a framework which was contrived to carry an idea.
The story goes that man is created in a perfectly ordered universe, but has no active role except to assign labels to things. Adam and Eve decide to seize the means to take on decisions of greater consequence. As a result, they're cast out into the place where shit gets real and things have real consequences. If you want to make real decisions then those decisions have to have real consequences. Having free will means living in a world where you at times when you have to deal with suffering. That's the whole point of the story.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Now this is going to be interesting to observe the heads of evangelical Christians explode, that even the scientists who are themselves Christians no longer can maintain that those biblical stories have anything there but a fairy tale.
On a lighter note, here is some NSFW but still quite political material that may cheer some of those Christians up. On the other hand there are naked boobs there, so what do Christians say about naked boobs?
You can't handle the truth.
If they deny the fall, then they also necessarily deny the existence of sin. Therefore, in their worldview, the death of Jesus on the cross accomplished nothing, meaning these scientists are not Evangelical Christians.
The really funny part is that the Bible itself says that it uses allegory! (Trivia question! Name a word which occurs exactly once in the entire Bible!)
http://scripturetext.com/galatians/4-24.htm
Which things are an allegory...
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Cain married his sister, and they had children together before "this absolutely astronomical mutation rate" had had a chance to occur. There were two mutation spurts in Genesis: one after the fall of man and one after the flood. Only about a thousand years after the flood did Jehovah God make laws against incest.
Welcome to the 19th Century.
Sincerely,
Science
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
Drinks are in the kitchen, pizza should be here shortly. There's a game on later or you can just lounge around outside in the garden. I think there's even an apple tree.
Genuine question here. No, I didn't read TFA, but TFS indicates that it'd be an astronomical chance that all the genetic diversity in humans that we see today came from a single pair of humans. The alternative to that seems to be that there were multiple sets of humans who evolved into humans during a similar period of time on an evolutionary scale. Given the complexity of a human being as-is, the gradual change of humans over a period of several thousand years (assuming a Creation-based timetable of 10,000-50,000 years, no I don't believe the 6,000 number either) into the genetic diversity we see today seems no more remote a possibility than (switching gears to evolution and TFS) having multiple apes each independently evolving into human beings that have sufficiently equivalent DNA and reproductive systems compatible enough to themselves reproduce.
It was Adam and Eve.
These people are Evangelical Christian "Scientists"
But they can't say it that way because it'd be confused with Christian Science.
Of course there is no historical evidence there was an apple. No where does it ever say it was an apple. All Genesis ever refers to is a fruit, or in the Greek, froúto(phonetic).
We'll see how long it takes them to get to the next zebra crossing.
"Evangelical scientist"
One of the biggest problems with denying the Adam and Eve story is that it negates the fundamental reason Jesus appeared - that is, to take on "our sins" created by the fall. Denying Adam and Eve pretty much throws a wrench into the whole works of Christianity, so this is bigger than just admitting that it is allegory or metaphor...
tries to reconcile faith and science. ... Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence.
These guys are missing how faith works. It's not based on logic and reason; in fact, it is explicitly the virtue of believing something despite logic and reason. Reasoned arguments are pointless when the counterargument is "god guided evolution to create our diversity, and lovingly saved us from mutagenic self-destruction".
Trying to reconcile faith and the scientific method is nonsensical. Trying to do it in context of creationsim, one of the deadest horses to ever be beat, is just foolish.
Seems like an extremely poor evangelist. Lets see, you can believe God created the heavens and the Earth. You can believe God created man. But you also believe believe God CAN'T mutate man? God's powers are literally infinite except, of course, he lacks the ability to mutate and/or genetically manipulate man. WTF?!? The inability to use critical thinking here is astounding.
Impossible to look at this story as reporting on either extremely poor evangelists, scientists, or both.
Prozium has no negative side effects.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Here's a bad example: Westboro Baptist Church. The Phelps cult sure as heck aren't baptists, despite the name on the sign. They have also been officially disowned by all legitimate church associations, including the 'Primitive Baptist' movement they claim to be a part of, and other Baptist associations.
Yet still I get asked about them in regards to my faith.
Disclaimer: I am an 'evangelical' who volunteers at a nominally Southern Baptist college church in the Northeast USA. I'm an old-world creationist, which means I believe God created the universe way back a long time ago, and that he wasn't absent in our evolution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve :)
SZERVÃC Attila -
they still want to believe that the whole Bible is literal and that God through his holy scribes was incapible of metaphor?
Of course the Bible has metaphors. Jesus taught using "parables", the ancient counterpart to the modern "car analogy". Several "weeks" in the Bible have proven to be weeks of years as in Daniel 9, and some "days" may be a thousand years (2 Peter 3) or longer. Where the denominations differ is which parts of the Bible are considered literal and which metaphors.
We still love our Christian brothers and sisters - even when they're uncomforttible eating Dino-shaped chicken nuggets.
Of course dinosaurs were around in biblical times: what do you think taninim were?
I find I have to say something because someone somewhere may follow the links and give it a try. The obviously stupid first post just advertises a piece of junk from a known spyware vendor named CyberDefender.
The following link will give you a pretty clear idea: http://help.lockergnome.com/general/Avoid-Clean-PC--ftopict65244.html
This software is junk. Registry scanners/cleaners are junk (unless you mean a GOOD antivirus product scanning for virus related entries). The registry has no firm rules how it is to be used so there is no automated way to clean it.
There is no single magic bullet to remove a malware infection. The closest thing to a magic bullet (at this time) is a removal tool called "ComboFix" from a site called BleepingComputer.com, and it is free. It won't remove everything and it sometimes may remove a file used by a program but it is saved as a file in its quarantine. Run it in safe-mode with networking and it might get you out of an expensive jam.
"The land of Nod." (Genesis 4:16)
And I agree. Most people fail to realize several important contextual clues in the biblical genesis stories.
1) genesis 1:26 implies multiple humans, simultaneously. Not just adam.
2) genesis 2:5 says specifically that god had not yet created FARMING humans. (No man to "till the earth"). Hunter gatherers could well exist, but are not mentioned, since they are not the focus of the story. This is reiterated in genesis 3:22.
I would say that the genesis story does what many ancient histories/verbal accounts/stories of myth do, which is to focus on the people that are deemed important to the story and omit any extra content. For instance, the odd lack of female characters in the geneology section, except where there are extraordinay circumstances. The omissions do not mean that males greatly outnumbered females, it means the recorders of the tradition valued males more highly, and considered the women's names superfluous. By the same vein, mentioning nomadic hunters outside "eden" would be superfluous except where they come into the narrative though interacting with a major character, such as Cain. (In the land of Nod.) Keeping the story simple is essential for these early traditions because written language has not been invented yet. (Agriculture predated written language by several thousand years. As such any such traditions or origin stories would HAVE to be oral ones. That is why there are omissions for the sake of simplicity.)
Taking such a literal approach as to imply adam was the only human at the time is absurd both from the perspective of the narrative itself and from any biological perspective as well. As such this article only should upset dyed in the wool literalists and super fundies.
6-10 thousand years is a pretty trivial amount of time in evolutionary terms. There is simply no way that 2 people could produce in 10k years the diversity we actually see in actual living humans unless they mutated so fast that practically every single person would be born with fatal mutations.
Actually the evidence is much like you suggest in terms of there being one unique woman, Mitochondrial Eve, that falls in the female line of every living human being. There is probably likewise some point at which you can find a single male line in every living human lineage, but they didn't happen at the same time, weren't a couple, and nobody ever living at any one given instant was ever descended from those two people. Beyond that the timelines are MUCH longer. The last bottleneck was at least 50k years ago and there was probably another at 200ky.
The upshot is certainly that human lineages are vastly older than most bible scholars seem to think, at least those who are at all literalistic.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
-- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19956961/ns/world_news-europe/t/pope-creation-vs-evolution-clash-absurdity/ (article from 4 years ago)
Having had Latin in school, "malus" means both apple and evil; "malum" is just the neutral version of "malus" (in the second meaning, "evil").
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The Christian creation story is an allegory for the evolution of free will.
Humans evolved in their present form hundreds of thousands of years ago. But for some reason civilization didn't take off until about 7,000 years ago, give or take. The reason civilization could not take hold everything to do with man's ability to live in a herd.
We already know that humans can't deal well with herds of more than 150 people. For settlements to grow past 150 people meant that individuals would regularly come in contact with other humans that they did not directly know. For any stable settlement to occur, past 150 people, there had to be some new advancement in herd management, or as we call it: religion.
At some point, or possibly in multiple places, humans developed this idea of god. God was the invention that allowed humans to live in a herd of more than 150 because it created an immortal, infinitely powerful alpha that could not be toppled via violent means. We hacked our own evolution. By trusting in a god, instead of a human leader, herds could grow past the 150 person limit. By trusting in a god rules could be handed down in his name and people would follow them (for the most part) without having to be beaten into submission. These rules, like don't sleep with your neighbors wife and don't kill each other, laid the foundation for larger and larger settlements.
This advancement did not happen everywhere at once. It was a gradual transition. "Civilized" settlements would often come across humans who had not made this leap. To to the civilized, these rogue wanderers would seem like animals. They would be controlled by the desire to eat and rape and probably had no qualms about violence. Look at herds of baboons to see how aggressively they handle their herds.
Free will, as we know it, is the idea that we are not controlled by our basic animal impulses. Those who lived in religious settlements could control their desire to rape and make decisions for the good of the herd. Those who lived outside those societies were still animals with no free will -- they lived only to eat and rape.
The creation story is an allegory for this development. We used to live as animals (Garden of Eden) and were happy (though full of rape). Ignorance is bliss. Then, at some point we discovered free will (Tree of Knowledge). Forever after we would be cursed with the knowledge of our own death, but able to live with one another.
Seriously, I would have expected it was more like 8 out of 10, in the US.
Plus, rumours that pope may be head of a large religious organisation with catholic beliefs, and footage of an ursine-like animal defecating in a forested area - could this actually be a bear? More after the break... .
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
One day, you'll be able to recognize, and accept, that there is no evidence for the existence of a God.
You do your fellow atheists a great disservice by failing to realize that no evidence is required to *believe*.
There is no evidence against God. Why do you believe in his non-existance?
Heretic! Next you'll tell us that the bible also didn't tell us to praise the iPhone! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
This is utter bullshit. Jesus never talked about an original sin, he however talked about sins we commit against each other ever day.
The interpretation of the original sin and jesus saves us from it came later on by taking the old testament literally.
What he did was to say we should not sin against each other, which makes sense because only by being nice to each other a society can work in the long time
b) "Shit" on the shoes of the so called jewish church back then by questioning their opressive rules, because he saw religion as something which should people help to live but not which people should be forced to live for
c) Tried to tell the people that there is a god, and it is not the god who punishes but who loves all creation (all of it, so we do not have a god given right to pollute) and that he is the son of god who teaches the people and gives them a path to salvation (in my opinion in a sense to give them a path to live a good life, not to get rid of a mysterious sin they never committed)
d) Those who suffer in this life will be rewarded for it in the next one in heaven
e) Death is not the end
f) As a proof that all of this was true he died and resurrected
What he never did:
a) Question the political authorities, in fact he made a clear distinction between religion and politics, so modern distinction between religion and politics and not interference between one or the other, in its root is very christian from a NT point of view
b) He never said anything about a root sin we are all bound to, but he said there is no one without sin, and you should and can revert your live and will be forgiven
Everything else outside of that is church doctrine and interpretation.
But my views are that of an amateur philosopher.
"There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence."
In fact, there's no reason at all to keep sending us money.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You don't *believe* the Earth is only 6000 years old? Are you blind, man? Have you NOT counted the number of begats in the bible? It's as clear as freaking day!
And you call yourself a Creationist! I am ashamed!
Sheesh!
*EVERYONE* knows the Earth is only 6000 years old. And if you can't accept that, get out of the religion.
Oh, and the Earth is flat too.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I'll admit, it does seem remote, especially if you're dealing with time periods of 50,000 years or so. What do you think the likelihood of this event occurring is? A million in one chance, per year? One in a billion per century?
Let's go even further, way, way out there. What if it was one in 10^24 per 13 billion years?
Just so we're clear on the numbers we're using, that's 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance per 13,000,000,000 years.
This is really, really, really, really, really unlikely. However, statistically speaking, this means that there are... dum dum dum...! 9 planets in the entire universe where this has occurred so far. Earth is one of them. :)
This, of course, assumes the lifespan of the universe to be 13 billion years and the number of stars in the observable universe to be 10^24. Which, based on our current scientific estimates, is about right give or take (see sources). It could be off by, say, five or six planets either way -- although we're only dealing with the *observable* universe, so there could be many many many many many more.
The scientific world is an amazing, wonderful, powerful, inspirational thing that is just so incredible in its majesty and beauty that it seems so very belittling to claim that there's a divine hand behind this truly unique and awesome thing called existence.
Bonus question: If the universe created God, what created God? If X, why can't X apply to "the universe at whole"? If NOT X, then why can't the universe be held to the same standard? "It always was, and always will be..."
Further reading:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Improbable_things_happen
http://www.symphonyofscience.com/
Sources:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Is there such a thing as evangelical science? Isn't that mutually exclusive terms? You could formulate an hypothesis that states their beliefs, but doesn't that include the bible, which is full of "impossible" statements? Genuinely asking here.
Faith in a religion is separate from scientific fact. They are not possible to reconcile. A literal interpretation of the bible flies in the face of all scientific evidence. Fundamental issues that hold back all religions such as the existence of a soul can not be answered scientifically. What is the weight of a soul? The escape velocity of a soul as a person dies? You can't measure these things.
That is where faith comes in. Religious people have faith in a soul, a God and that their religion gives them purpose and comfort when science can't. For every person who thinks that evolution is a total myth there is a scientist that thinks we are just meat. It is a matter of where you put your faith and therefore find a purpose in your life. I would say that an evangelical evolutionary biologist is the ultimate oxymoron. For a true Christian, if you call a single part of the bible out as less than a literal account of history then the whole things comes into question. If no literal Adam and Eve then no literal original sin and no need for a literal messiah in the form of Jesus.
Now that these guys and Steven Hawking have disproven most religions we can now live in a scientific utopia or moralistic atheism, right? I prefer not to think of myself as just meat. I prefer to live in a world where suffering has a purpose and it is noble to give up one's life. I think that just as you can't see an atom with a magnifing glass you can't see a soul with one either. Perhaps our technology fails us, perhaps the world is more magical than we can currently understand. Maybe no one is wrong. And maybe faith is important.
Sure, which one? There are, what, 450 versions in English alone, although you cannot truly appreciate it until you read it in the original Klingon.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Do you believe in everything for which there is no evidence? If not, how do you decide?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's been 15 years, and still most people (including most Christians) have not picked up on the fact that the Catholic church concluded this long ago.
In a papal statement on the subject of evolution, dated Oct. 22nd 1996, pope John Paul II stated that "truth cannot contradict truth", and therefore the Genesis story of the Bible needed to be interpreted metaphorically, not literally.
For those who are interested, the message is available here: http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/jp961022.htm
How is it that Christian people (Catholics in particular; the pope is supposed to be your earthly representative for God) just seem to "forget" this ever happened?
Or is it called Genesis because the world we live in is a simulation running on God's Mega Drive?
I, er, disagree. Strongly. There are big differences between 'believing in something based on evidence', 'believing in something without evidence', and 'believing in something despite evidence'.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
We all descended from Adam and Eve. Then after Cain slew Abel and he was given the sign on his forehead so he wouldn't be hurt by the other peop... - oh, wait.
If we manage to gain new information about history, we will change the history books to reflect this. I don't believe the same is true for the bible.
At the very least though, it'll cause the various denominations* to update their views on which parts were supposed to be literal and which allegorical.
* Did I just type "demon" as a Freudian slip?
If one is not supposed to do a literal interpretation of, say, the bible, then who determines how to interpret it? Doesn't that leave us with an arbitrary number of interpretations? Fragmentation? Who is then interpreting it right? Wouldn't that make it a story which should not be "believed"?
Well, duh, haven't you read your source materials? After Caine was cursed with vampirism and driven out, he met Lilith, Adam's first wife, the Dark Mother, in the land of Nod, who helped him awaken his vampyric powers. Unfortunately, they did have a bit of a falling out and he staked her before moving on to sire the first antediluvians. And the rest you can find in the Book Of Nod.
What? It says so in the holy White Wolf scriptures.
Oh, wait, you were meaning the OTHER fairy tale? My bad ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Name a date, I am pretty sure your date is BEFORE Islam even arose or you somehow are talking about the rise of science AFTER the greeks which seems odd. You can claim the greeks were not the first but that then puts it far ahead of Islam. You do know it is the youngest of the Judaic religions?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Trivia answer: "reverend", "eternity", and "grandmother". Apparently. So says the interweb, anyway. Not sure if this takes into account various translations.
When the Unseen, the Eternal, the Divine Essence, caused the Day-Star of Muhammad to rise above the horizon of knowledge, among the cavils which the Jewish divines raised against Him was that after Moses no Prophet should be sent of God. Yea, mention hath been made in the Scriptures of a Soul Who must needs be made manifest and Who will advance the Faith, and promote the interests of the people of Moses, so that the Law of the Mosaic Dispensation may encompass the whole earth
This goes on for about as long as the time cube guy. For real? Just when I think there is nothing new to find on the web, sites like this are posted. I was going to click on the photo of baha, but worried my system may get infected with his holy spirit. Malwarebytes would have to work overtime to exorcise that out of the code.
No thanks, life is crazy enough; I don't need that introduce into my thought stream.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
"There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence." Of course there were, but only theological and metaphorically speaking... that's the BIG problem with fundamentalism...
And it took about 2,500 years after the creation of Adam for the human gene pool, which had been created in God's own image, to deteriorate to the point where God had to make a rule against inbreeding.
"Lilith" appears only once in the Hebrew version, but is translated various ways in English versions and so loses its uniqueness.
Amongst everyone I've ever known I can't point to a single person who ever took the religion story literally. Maybe it's a factor of the part of the country where I live. Even in Sunday school we were told it was metaphorical; that each of the seven days, for example, stood for dramatically longer period of time. If I recall correctly, even the Vatican has long stated this and sees no dispute between Christianity and things like evolution, the big bang or anything else. So I'm not sure who exactly is debating all this.
And yet, over the last couple of decades I've seen this rise in these odd denominations taking the bible literally. I've come to believe there are two things happening here:
1)Ssome religious leaders, particularly in America, are seeing a decrease in relevance and a rise of secularism and are trying to keep themselves relevant. One of the more effective ways to do that is to affect education, to push their beliefs as fact. They don't need to convince everyone, just enough idiots to establish themselves.
2) Many on the other side of this are seriously overstating how many of these kinds of people are actually are out there. The way some talk you'd think most of the country believes in the literal interpretation of the creation story. If that were the case why haven't I met anyone who believes that by now? Most of the people I know are closer to being agnostic than anything else, like myself, but I know a few people who are very religious and they completely embrace science. For them there's no question that evolution is real and that the world is billions of years old.
I'd be curious to know how that poll was conducted, how far they probed. Did they what aspect of the Adam and Eve story people believe? Literal or figurative. The number of people who believe might be high, I would expect that the people who believe it literally is a lot lower. Or maybe people have somehow mashed together ideas so that humans evolved from apes into Adam and Even and then went on from there? Who knows? But the picture certainly isn't clear.
The funny thing is that you have people on one side of the fence who want to demonstrate that people are still religious, and on the other you've got those who want to show how stupid people can be. So it's possible loaded questions will get asked that lead, interestingly enough, to the same results.
The thing is, the Bible says that the most recent common male ancestor (Noah) was significantly closer in time than the most recent common female ancestor (Eve). So, the Biblical account, also, says that the most recent common male ancestor was not the husband/mate of the most recent common female ancestor.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
This is the (beginning of the) age of maturity of mankind: interpret scripture yourself.
Before the return of Christ, there were rabbis, priests, mullahs, gurus, etc to guide the faithful. But now, God expects us to grow up and deal with multiple interpretations, seek out truth independently, consult with others as equals, and come to our own understanding.
Who?
No single pair of ancestors? Fine, that's science. No apple? That fruit is not in Genesis chapter 3... darn public school cutbacks must have fused religious art appreciation and theology into one class. No fall from grace? Well, it's pretty obvious that part has nothing to do with anthropology, and is pretty darn consistent with what we know about psychology.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Genesis 7:21-23 states:
So it doesn't matter how many descendants Adam and Eve had -- after the Flood, humanity was (canonically, if you take Genesis literally) down to a population of 8. Those eight were Noah, his wife, their three sons, and their sons' wives according to Genesis 7:13:
Could you get as much genetic diversity starting with 8 people (five of whom, at least, were related by blood) in a short period of time?
If Evangelical Scientists are too busy debating Genesis won't they have issues figuring out how to wire up angsty teenager into giant bioroid type robots after second impact in Japan?
Maybe they are debating the relationship Adam had with Lilith?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
So you're hoping they'll become either dismissive or willfully ignorant?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
...a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century and say it's time to face facts...
Better late than never, I guess. Thinking people managed to accept reality several centuries ago. They don't call it "The Age of Enlightenment" because some god provided that light. They call it that because thinking people more or less agreed upon a methodology for understanding our world that did not depend on mythology or the supernatural. It would be nice if the remaining retards could stop fighting about "God's plan" and similar superstitions.
I don't know where to begin. Your entire post reads like the introverted ravings of someone with entirely too many opinions. Here's a link on the growing obesity problem in China, clearly clinking urbanisation and economic growth to widening waistlines. Also, most people of European descent live not in America, but in Europe where waistlines are substantially slimmer. Genetics has nothing on diet and lifestyle.
We can never breed the stupid out. We can only educate it away.
May the Maths Be with you!
I would just like to point out that St Augustine in the late 4th century wrote a work called "The Literal Meaning of Genesis" (in this case "literal" means "literary"). He argued that an historical reading of the creation account was flawed for a number of reasons, most of which had to do with Christian theology (he was arguing against Arianism) and one of which had to do with the science of his day (which he accepted). This was of course more than 1000 years before Darwin.
It must be said that the Christians who fight against evolution in order to defend an historical reading of the creation account in Genesis are arguing against their own religious tradition. Further, those who think that disproving the historical reading is the same as disproving all of Christianity are just as naive as the Christians arguing for the historical reading.
One day, you'll be able to recognize, and accept, that there is no evidence for the existence of a God.
Not so. You are confusing evidence with proof. There is plenty of evidence for the existence of God (the "religious experience", for example), but it is not compelling evidence, and the scientifically minded favour other explanations of it. It does the scientific position no favours to misrepresent it, because the religious will see that what you are presenting is obviously false and think from that that the scientific position is obviously false.
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Creation Ministries International have put together this article which rebuts the claims of BioLogos:
http://creation.com/historical-adam-biologos
The conclusion of the article reads:
"It is disingenuous for Biologos to claim no evidence for Adam and Eve for several reasons. First, their conclusions are based on evolutionary assumptions. One cannot legitimately claim something to be proven without testing the assumptions behind that claim. To do otherwise amounts to circular reasoning and question begging, and a rejection of any alternative theory following from this is thus reduced to nothing more than a straw man argument. Second, the majority of data fit nicely into the straightforward biblical model, including a single starting couple a mere 6,000 years ago. While there are several unresolved issues with the biblical model as it relates to the data at hand, the same can be said about every evolutionary model, so one cannot conclude that the Bible has been invalidated by the available evidence. Albert Einstein is rumored to have opined, “A thousand experiments cannot prove me right. A single experiment can prove me wrong.” This is sound logic. Francis Collins and BioLogos would do well to heed his advice."
I find it somewhat amusing that they would choose to invalidate the snake, apple, adam and eve bit because it couldn't happen in the 5-6k range without crazy 5 assed monkey mutations.... it would be simpler to throw out the 5-6 thousand year old universe bit, which is even more difficult to ignore....
but this is all hypothetical and likely to be called heresy by those who give lip service to the flying spaghetti monster :)
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
There's also no evidence you're not the most prolific and successfully unnoticed serial killer in history. That doesn't mean I believe you are. Although... it would be my right to believe you were if I chose, right?
If you consider all the crazy things religions say in their respective texts that can be shown to be false, that should go somewhat far towards actually being evidence that at least the specific Gods in those religions are not correct. This article is saying that some smart now-ex fundamentalist christians decided something in their book was not literally true. That is either evidence their specific religion is at least partially incorrect, or they need to re-evaluate their book as containing some or all "life-lesson stories" instead of it being entirely literal truths.
Perhaps, but the whole flood story becomes vastly suspect in any case since it is clearly impossible that there was a worldwide flood within recent prehistory, nor can anything even close to a literal interpretation of the Noah story make any sense. Clearly it is at best an allegorical tale and/or cultural myth. Once we accept that any given Bible story is clearly not literally an accurate attestation of fact then there's no particular reason to expect any other part to be particularly either.
I'd say that tales like Genesis are actually pretty good summaries of the common sense reasoning of the day. People are seen to be related and families and people's increase in number over time, so logically you would expect to be able to go backwards to a time when there were "only 2 people", and likewise to some sort of time when the world began in some fashion or other.
In other words I just don't think there's much point in debating the actual scientific relevance of Bible stories. They're pre-scientific legends, informed by some common sense reasoning but no actual facts. They may happen to match with scientific findings in some random cases, but at best that shows that some science is also common sense, and at worst indicates that no matter what fantastical tall tale you tell sometimes you get lucky and the truth bears some (albeit faint) resemblance to your story.
In any case, most Christians throughout history have not held that there was any great specific literal accuracy to the Bible. Even ancient late classical Christian theologians pretty much took it all metaphorically, and so have Jews and Moslems going all the way back to ancient times. Other posters are right about the super literalism prevalent in some places in the US today being a recent phenomenon. I dunno what it is about the US, but we sure do breed a unique form of fanatics.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I'll admit, it does seem remote, especially if you're dealing with time periods of 50,000 years or so. What do you think the likelihood of this event occurring is? A million in one chance, per year? One in a billion per century?
Let's go even further, way, way out there. What if it was one in 10^24 per 13 billion years?
Just so we're clear on the numbers we're using, that's 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance per 13,000,000,000 years.
This is really, really, really, really, really unlikely. However, statistically speaking, this means that there are... dum dum dum...! 9 planets in the entire universe where this has occurred so far. Earth is one of them. :)
This, of course, assumes the lifespan of the universe to be 13 billion years (convenient) and the number of stars in the observable universe to be 10^24. Which, based on our current scientific estimates, is about right. It could be off by, say, five or six planets either way -- although we're only dealing with the observable universe, so there could be many many many many many more.
The scientific world is an amazing, wonderful, powerful, inspirational thing that is just so incredible in its majesty and beauty that it seems so very belittling to claim that there's a divine hand behind this truly unique and awesome thing called existence.
Bonus question: If the universe created God, what created God? If X, why can't X apply to "the universe at whole"? If NOT X, then why can't the universe be held to the same standard? "It always was, and always will be..."
Further reading:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Improbable_things_happen
http://www.symphonyofscience.com/
Sources:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
They believe we're all descended from 2 people. Actually, your interpretation is a lot scarier. If they believed that it'd make them some kind of master race, descended from God's true children. Religious zealots with a superiority complex do really nasty things...
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In Genesis chapter one, God creates humans all over the Earth on the sixth day of creation. Genesis chapter goes back to the day when earth and sea are separated just before plants are created, and discusses a little experiment with a garden called Eden. According to the Bible, Adam and Eve might have been the first humans, but they weren't the only humans created.
The real genetic choke point is with Noah and his children (and spouses).
I cannot be the only Christian to be a full-fledged scientist, so I wonder why the hullaballoo about the discoveries of science?
Every discovery made is a fascinating broadening of our understanding of this place. I'm intrigued and want to know more, as is my fellow mankind. The "fruit" chosen was from the Tree of Knowledge, after all. The curse we were warned against was loss of naivete, but also carried insatiability. It all fits, at least to me.
Picture yourself as an Egyptian-adopted guy being shown a timelapse of how the Universe and Earth came to be (ala the Genesis project animation in Star Trek) and then explain that to your recently-freed-from-slavery people. You don't expect a little fuzzy allegory?
Regardless, evolution as a driving force for change is completely natural. God uses it all the time. Let's just loosey-goosey some of this, as it's from the hip for me, so I won't bore anyone with Gospel quotes (and I'm not that well-versed), but I hope there's enough sense in the trends.
God let's things "go" in his arena, and then intervenes.
1. Mankind runs amok... until Noah selected out of the mess.
2. Mankind runs amok... until Abraham selected out of the mess.
3. Sodom and Gamorrah runs amok... until Lot selected out of the mess.
4. Mankind runs amok... until Jacob selected out of the mess.
5. Plenty more amoks... plenty of prophets selected out of the messes.
6. More amok... Mary selected out of the mess.
The list goes on and on. If we extend the pattern BACKWARD, what would be wrong with:?
0. Man evolves... until Adam chosen/created.
-1. The planet evolves... until humans develop and progress.
-2. The universe blossoms... until Earth selected/created.
-3. The void exists... until "let there be light" starts the process of Universe generation.
And don't let "6 days" trip things up, either. Think about the sped up Genesis thing that Moses sees and his rational explanation. Plus, if God exists outside of the Universe, adding light, energy, matter, and TIME to a void to start this show, why do people insist on George Burns or Morgan Freeman playing the part? Anthropomorphize all you like, but God is WAAAAY beyond that. Time is quite possibly an outside construct to that entity. Would explain why he reveals the "future". Don't get hung up on time. We haven't got any clues yet about the system OUTSIDE our system.
So, regardless, with each new scientific discovery, I find out more about how God baked this cake. He didn't necessarily tweezer each subatomic particle in place to do so, but he sure set the rules around it to make it happen. Bring on the discoveries! Stop being threatened by them!
I am pretty surprised that in America people still have that strange idea that the Scriptures are to be taken literally.
I live in Italy, which is after all the cradle of Cristianity, and I went to a religious private school; Several of the teachers were religious men, having taken vows, etc. During the discussions about religion, never was I told that the Genesis is to be taken literally. In fact, I recall that I was told the contrary, that the stories in there are meant as metaphores.
After all, Jesus used to express his ideas with moral tales, so why that specific part should be interpreted literally fails me.
Ander
@=
What I really can't understand - and believe me, I have tried - is why insist on the perfect veracity of the Bible at all? I mean, on one hand, unless even basic logic is false and all the evidence in the world is wrong, the text of the Bible just can't be true in any sense of the word; not taken in its entirety. And on the other hand, why does it matter? If you are looking for the truth, if God is truth and all that, then you should be keen on getting rid of untruths, even if it means giving up on the Bible.
If one is to believe the Bible, then God is treacherous, deceitful, anal-retentive, ... need I continue? Why follow that sort of God?
I do so love the fact that people with no critical knowledge of the Bible and little knowledge of evolutionary theory can make such wild claims and accusations. The article headline is sensationalist at that, when you consider that actual content of the article. If you can divorce yourself from your preconceptions, based on theories, unproven and constantly in flux, when it comes to creation and then look at the scientifically derived data in comparison to Genesis narrative of creation, flood, etc. you will find that there is no contradiction. Deciding to take what Stephen Hawking says on faith does not make you intellectually superior than taking what God has to say on faith. I would be more than happy to discuss this further via email for anyone who is interested, although I am not interested in poorly mannered conversation. jlself@cinci.rr.com
don't know the difference between real geology, flood geology, or pancake geology (a really interesting new science I'm developing for optimizing syrup distribution). They're rich because they're daddy was rich, and his daddy was rich, and if you go back far enough because one of the daddy's was really, really big.
As for the geologists themselves, well studies show the more education you have the less likely you are to believe this nonsense.
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And yet, at some point, you have to concede St. Augustine's point that invoking clearly false or irrational interpretations of the Bible to defend a particular theological view only makes the Bible look foolish. You're over the precipice now, forced to either concede that the story of the Fall is not literal, or basically rejecting two and a half centuries worth of science, or even worse, cherry picking the bits of science that you don't find offensive and tossing out the bits that you do.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Clearly it is at best an allegorical tale and/or cultural myth.
I don't think this kind of thing is ever clear enough, else there would never be a religion.
The book of Genesis isn't to be taken literally. The point of the "Creation Story" in a strictly religious context is that the earth was created for the purpose of God's plans; the "how" is irrelevant.
Furthermore, the careful observer will note that the book of Genesis is Moses's account. By my maths, that could be anywhere from 2,000 to 24,000* years after the fact. If you for a moment assume as a given that God did talk to Moses, then doesn't it stand to reason that God would have simply glossed over some bits of the story for brevity in order to get to more pressing matters? Perhaps the golden calf idol being constructed down in pinhead-ville?
In any event, people that interpret the Bible literally, and most specifically the OT, greatly amuse me.
* Many folks seem to think that 4,000 BCE is "the beginning," whatever the heck that is. I tend to associate the "family of Adam" with the advent of the Homo Sapien Sapien species. By my memory, our species has been around for about 26,000 years now. It also reconciles some anachronisms in the OT regarding races of giants, which I would then submit might be references to other un-evolved strains of hominids that needed to be purged to prevent interbreeding and therefore a recession in the gene pool. However, I'm not completely happy with this line of thought because it doesn't take a genius to figure out that evolutionary changes don't happen in gigantic leaps, but rather as incremental steps over periods of time.
Consider yourself spoken to.
And the answer is, do you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster god? He of the noodly appendages?
No? Okay, by your non-logic, you believe in two gods, Your God (you didn't say which one) and you don't believe in FSM, which makes you believe in him sorta kinda because of your lack of belief in him.
As I've said before, it's hard to argue with people who believe that Pi equals 3.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And here we have the classic Creationist line of thought. In one sentence you basically create humans as a special class but then create birds as an incredibly broader class. If birds are some sort of base kind, then how can you not lump in the Great Apes, heck all primates into the human class?
The fact is that no population of humans has been separated from the wider body of humanity for more than about 15,000 years. Speciation happens where you have two related populations that fall out of reproductive sync. If two populations never have a cessation of gene flow, then, while they're still evolving, they're still evolving together (with the exception of polyploidism, of course, which can produce a new species in a single generation).
I have no idea what this "plain old human" is supposed to be. Even modern humans have changed morphologically and genetically since they first arrived around 100,000 years ago.
You need to put down those moronic Creationist pamphlets and actually pick up a book on human evolution.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Okay, so let me get this straight - some "evangelical scientists" are considering whether the Genesis account is literal. Presumably if they are "evangelical", they believe in an omnipotent God. So they say, "Suppose God literally created the first man and woman within the last 10,000 yrs. That's impossible because of the genetic variation we see today - we can't mutate that fast". If you can accept (even for the sake of argument) the hypothesis that God created man from nothing, I don't see how you can then say a fast mutation rate is impossible.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
That is normal mental condition, the expected result is generally called "hope".
And upset the atheists that rely on the literalist interpretation to attack Christianity. That's basically their only form of attack and once you start pointing out how the Bible isn't too terribly different from how many ancient texts were written that we accept as truth the start to come up with anything worthwhile to continue attacking with.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Oh, I think it is clear enough, to anyone who is actually willing to engage their brain at all. There are what, 2-3 million species known to inhabit the Earth right now, with vast diversity. Even a few minutes of thought clearly shows it would be impossible for a boat to hold all possible animals, and if the entire Earth flooded to the top of every mountain then equally clearly nothing else survived. The story couldn't have made literal sense even to the people who wrote it. Even if you accept the basic story of Genesis whole cloth you can't match the story to the most basic plain facts you can see around you if you spend 5 minutes looking.
Thus we have to conclude that Biblical literalists LITERALLY cannot reason, even with basic facts accessible to every person.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Most people who identify as Christians have no problem with evolution or science. Really. Religion a separate thing for them.
I have worked at places (such as national labs) with thousands of scientist and engineers, with people who identify as Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, etc. All religions with creation stories. But they all accepted big bang model, evolution, etc.
You do your fellow atheists a great disservice by failing to realize that no evidence is required to *believe*.
Only if you are intellectually dishonest. An honest person actually cares if their beliefs are based in reality or not. If you don’t care if what you believe is true then sure, believe what you want.
I thought this was all explained by the Tower of Babel story. God got mad at mans' hubris and split us up into a bunch of different races, speaking different languages, all with a wave of his magic wand. That was a one-time instantaneous mutation that didn't require an ongoing high rate.
Of course it's ridiculous poppycock, but that's not the point. If you accept that god is omnipotent and omniscient then you can explain away any inconsistencies easily. There's little point in trying to convince the deluded.
The post says: "There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence."
Two points:
(1) How is genomic research going to prove that there was no fall from a state of innocence? It's not within the competency of the field. Regardless of whether the Fall was a historical event, I doubt we'll be seeing any proof on the issue published in Nature any time soon.
(2) The text in Genesis doesn't say that the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" had apples hanging from it.
Mr. Venema is not helping his case by overstating it.
Thou shalt have no god before me, presupposes the existence of other faiths.
This isn't a strong argument, because that commandment came down in the time of Moses, long after Genesis was supposed to have happened, so it doesn't imply or require people outside of the descendants of Adam and Eve.
What I remember from sunday school, is that Adam and Eve were not the first two humans. This is an american simplification of the bible, like the rapture. Nobody but a handful of inbred hicks believes that.
Not only does my experience counter yours (I was taught in Sunday School that they were literally the first two humans) but polls consistently show that a significant portion of the American public believe in the literal Genesis tale. It's not just a handful of any segment of the population.
Virg
Please don't invert the burden of proof. It's an old stupid trick. Won't you guys ever learn?
I heard it was 2 out of 5 of Americans.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
This argument is kept alive as a way of gaining political power and wealth by manipulating religious people. You won't stop that by having so many "evangelical scientists" no one has ever heard of making a statement.
Agreed.
I think probably the quickest question one can pose to make clear that the bible does not say Adam and Eve were the first humans to such a "super fundie" would be to ask "Was Eve created inside, or outside, the garden?"
To claim people didn't pre-exist Eve would cause major problems with the time and event sequence of the narrative of the "days" per your Genesis 1:26 reference, as well as give us the significant problem of God giving Adam and Eve the unfulfillable-by-them command of "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it"--as they were intended, per the narrative, to remain in the garden, and were ejected only due to their later sin.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
> to come up with anything worthwhile to continue attacking with.
You mean besides the fact that it's mostly ridiculous?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
A god that demanded the murder of infants, gives him...hope? That's a normal mental condition?
Occam's Razor.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If THAT was the philosophy of the most vocal of the fundies, I would have no problem with them. Quite the opposite.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, first off, it's not intended to convert the diehard. It's not intended to convert anyone by itself, even. It's intended to provoke thought and investigation. A little searching might turn up something like this.
Second, it's not even a scientific argument. Rather, I'm pointing out a discrepancy between stated beliefs and behavior in practice.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I can answer that question. My belief, even though it is not even theoretically possible to prove a negative, that there is no such thing as magic. By this, I mean that effect flows from cause by natural laws in every case. Sure, maybe some effects result from magic, but I believe that they do not.
Another way of saying the same thing, already said by another person who has responded, is that we naturalists start out epistemologically believing in nothing, then build up beliefs in things that can be demonstrated.
And that's the answer! I don't believe in the God described by most people, because most people describe a magical God, and I believe that there is no such thing as magic. On the other hand, I enjoy very much discussing the ways that there could be a 'god' which is non-magical -- and there are many such ways.
I was going to click on the photo of baha, but worried my system may get infected with his holy spirit.
You missed a really bad photoshop ...
Most of the mainstream Christian churches do not reject evolution (seeing as they're smart enough to take St. Augustine's advice to heart). Don't try to pretend your B.S. is somehow THE Christian tradition, because it's not. I
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Buddhism and the Dalai Lama also say to "Love one another" but no one really seems to have a problem with them. I wonder why that is....
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
To be fair, these scientists aren't 'coming out' -- this organization has existed since its inception as a means to try to convince Fundamentalists of Evolution and/or anything else they want them to believe that the Bible doesn't support. In other news, Focus on the Family is coming out now and saying sex before marriage is wrong.
I am always amazed my "Christians" that climb desperately to the Old Testament - that's the bible of a non-christian religion - Judaism. It's tenets and doctrine doesn't apply to a Christian - the fundamental way a Jew received salvation was by following the "Law" - which is contradictory to what Jesus said - "I am the way the truth and the life - no one gets to the father by through me". So, there's 39 books that can be removed from the Christian Scripture. And the epistles - why should the writings of some of the early church leaders (Paul, et al) given the same status as the record of Christ's life and teaching? There's another 21 books that can be removed. And Revelation - that should go too.
People claiming they hear voices is not evidence in favor of magic head-voices. It's evidence, but of mental illness. without any REAL evidence, I have no reasons to suspect that people claiming God "talks to them", or making any other claims about some magic sky fairy is any more "evidential".
Hey, you know what? Ducks talk to me. Well poop, I guess now there is evidence for talking ducks. Let's argue for the next 2000 years about whether ducks can talk or not, shall we? Let's not let the total and complete lack of any hard evidence at all stop us. I just said it happened. What more do you need?
Not so. You are confusing evidence with proof. There is plenty of evidence for the existence of God (the "religious experience", for example),
No. Anecdotes are not evidence. There is zero evidence for the existence of any gods. The fact that there's no "proof" of it is a direct result of the lack of evidence.
It does the scientific position no favours to misrepresent it, because the religious will see that what you are presenting is obviously false and think from that that the scientific position is obviously false.
The religious will think what they want to think - they have no problem dismissing any scientific evidence which disagrees with them, so I'm not particularly worried about pussyfooting around them. Let's call a spade a spade.
Thought that was supposed to be well established by DNA research.... and now we are being told that they can't get the count below 10,000? Make up your minds, science folks.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
No. Anecdotes are not evidence.
Testimony is evidence. Ask any court. If you tell somebody that they've not experienced what they've experienced it's you that's wrong (and it's not science). If you tell them that they have misinterpreted their experience then you might be on to something.
Let's call a spade a spade.
Indeed, let's. And let's not call it a JCB.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
A lot of us educated religious nutjobs have long known that science and religion are not polar opposites. There's plenty of us who appreciates the effort of science, whos admiration of God increases as each new scientific discovery adds to the percieved complexity of his work.
Our faith is not shaken by your discoveries. We do not care that you don't share out believe.
Sometimes though, it gets annoying to listen to these ignorant fundamentalistic atheists who honestly believe the abscense of God to be a fact. We're well aware that Gods existance is not a fact. That's why it's called "religious belief".
While fundamentalistic atheists won't shake our faith, they are among the most vocal group of obvious ignorants known to mankind.
Vocal obvious ignorance is annoying.
People claiming they hear voices is not evidence in favor of magic head-voices. It's evidence, but of mental illness.
It's evidence of both (and of other things). It's a pretty basic tenet of science that all evidence is open to multiple interpretations. The question is, how do you decide which interpretation of the evidence to prefer?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
http://www.icr.org/article/human-mutation-clock-ticking/
The one thing that most people seem to forget is that religion (and their associated texts) were never meant to be records of "literal facts". Religion and religious texts are really allegories, symbolic stories that often have a deeper, underlying meaning. Joseph Campbell, a writer who spent his life digging into the symbolism of religion (and finding surprising connections between seemingly disparate belief systems), made the point, once, that taking religion as literal fact is at the very least ridiculous. In his example, he used Jesus' resurrection and supposed physical ascension to heaven in his body. Now, the first thing to establish is that heaven, obviously, is not a part of our universe, that (despite the claims of some cult groups), heaven isn't residing on a distant planet or galaxy in the realms known to man. Further, Campbell pointed out, assuming that Jesus could somehow move himself at the speed of light (he is the son of God, after all), even after 2,000 years, Jesus would still be somewhere within our solar system. The problem isn't with the story, but with the human interpretation of it as some sort of historical record, that the allegory is actually literal fact. As with the creation myth in Genesis, the old story of Adam and Eve. As long as we keep interpreting the story as a record of an actual historical event, the tale will always seems "ridiculous", as "nonsense", or as one commenter called it here, "poppycock". Taken another way, though, as a symbolic tale of mankind and what seems to set him apart from every other living thing on this planet (that would be the knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong), we can realize that this tale actually has some hidden, philosophic merit to it.
"It's a trick. Get an axe."
To claim people didn't pre-exist Eve would cause major problems with the time and event sequence of the narrative of the "days" per your Genesis 1:26 reference
No, not really. Genesis2 says that Eden was created on the day God created dry land, but before he created plants all over the Earth. Adam might have gotten bored (or horny) very quickly, and God might have made Eve that same day. That was a few days before worldwide human population. The Eden story isn't a chronology, it's a flashback.
We were taught evolution (this was back in 72 or 73?) and we got our daily dose of Biblical studies. No one really cared to ask why dinosaurs were very old and how it related to Adam and Eve other than to ask if Dinosaurs would have tried to eat them or A & E would have had them as pets. We were kids, we never thought more about it that, well, dinosaurs, evil snakes, and the like.
It was a big non issue. Science classes and Religion were separate.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
That was a few days before worldwide human population.
Ah, no, the creation of male and female humans per se is in Genesis 1, and an entirely different, earlier, allegorical "day".
Such is my reading/interpretation, anyway. As for the rest, I probably agree more than you had anticipated, so will leave that aside for now.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
And lol how do you know which things are allegory in your favorite novel?
Possibly by using the reading skills you picked up in school? Are the writers of letters in the new testament for some reason forbidden from using common literary techniques?
For instance-- and this is meant to be instructive, because I have met people who actually think this-- the Bible does NOT teach that serpents eat dust. Nor does it teach that the individual elements of our bodies could be best expressed as dust motes. Nor does it teach that the sky is literally a sphere (whether or not the universe technically is, is irrelevant-- the language is very clearly metaphorical).
Good gracious, its like people try to be of little understanding. How do you ever read books?
Testimony is evidence. Ask any court.
Yuhuh.
"Your houour, I saw the accused murder the victim, right before he turned into a Green Lizard from Alpha Centauri"
"Well I've heard all I need to know! GUILTY!"
Sure, yeah, testimony rocks.
If you tell somebody that they've not experienced what they've experienced it's you that's wrong (and it's not science).
More bullshit.
If you tell them that they have misinterpreted their experience then you might be on to something.
Hah.
"You're not wrong, you're just misinterpreting!".
Right. What do you do for an encore?
"It's not rape, it's surprise sex!"
Why would a god who has infinite power and time let humans live in such a horrible environment? An explanation is that god is punishing humans for some transgression. So religious people will tell you that we would be living in paradise if it just wasn't for those two evil people. Adam and Eve could not have been that evil because they supposedly worked very hard and long to keep the human race alive. We would have to at least admit that they were heroes to do that since I would think that they could have gotten so depressed after being kicked out of paradise that they would have just gone to the nearest cliff and committed suicide. I think the story of Adam and Eve is a comedy. Eve is said to have given Adam the fruit. Adam could have just said to Eve that he was full and that he would eat it tomorrow. Since god had promised that if they ate of the fruit they would surely die that day than if Eve were alive the next day than Adam would have known if it was safe to eat. The story about Cain and Abel is stupid. Can one imagine two young men being alive and the only female alive is their mother? I can just see them waking up from a wet dream and thinking that they sure wished their mother and father would get busy and at least have a sister for them. Its no wonder why Cain was crazy enough to kill Abel. God knew that Cain was going to kill Abel and yet refused to warn Abel. I would think that god is at least as guilty as Cain. Cain would have had to return to Adam and Eve after more than a hundred years to find a sister to marry. I can just see some young 13 year old girl willing to have sex with her brother who just happens to be over a hundred years older than herself. Not only that she and all of her descendant would be cursed so who in their right mind would want that? So how come after thousands of years people still believe in such nonsense? I think that a false hope is better than no hope. So it either believe that life has no meaning and will end for everyone at the point of death or believe in a fairly tale to comfort oneself in times of trouble.
the creation of male and female humans per se is in Genesis 1, and an entirely different, earlier, allegorical "day".
Correct, Day6. After the chronological story is told, (and the resting on Day7), a flashback narrative is told regarding Eden being created on Day3 (note the "when dry land is created, but no plants yet; that means it's Day3 according to the chronology of Genesis1). It's not expressed how long it took before Eve was created, but worldwide population with humans and creation of Adam and Eve were separate events.
Ums...metaphor?
We can't debate the Bible's creation story any more than we can debate any story in Æsop's Fables literally.
Where's Spencer Tracy when we need him (again)?
Here's a group of scientists who have been studying the lineage of scripture for decades, and so far, their conclusion is that there has been significant drift from one version to the next over the centuries:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_ISRAEL_BIBLE_DETECTIVES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
Inerrancy is a DEEPLY FLAWED theological position.
In fact, it is somewhat akin to idolotry.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"Obviously false"?
Religious experiences are caused by unusual brain states, not communing with God. You can very reliably induce the same state of mind many claim to associate with "feeling god" by various drugs, and oxygen deprivation.
Anarchists never rule
I place the Bible roughly on par with what I remember about my childhood between the ages of three and five. The scraps I remember seem disproportionately important relative to much clearer memories from later on, yet also clouded by unbridgeable differences in mental perception and layers of reremembering.
Memory and Forgetting has some interesting content about the act of remembering rewriting memory. As usual, they sidle up to some really interesting stuff and gawk amusingly.
On the other side, memories of my later childhood and adult life are far less problematic having passed through the formative miracle of cognition and personality.
As I've matured my interests have changed. This double helix thing makes for fascinating reading. It's a great time and era to let the mists of time alone for a while; it's almost as if we lived on a clouded planet, and then one day the atmosphere cleared up and we could see the heavens for the very first time. Amazing as this development is, it doesn't seem to stop many people from rehashing starless origin stories, blind to the twinkle of a new cosmic perspective.
This also reminds me of conquest stories. The displaced tend to be the last group of people who lived somewhere without a writing system, regardless of how many other pre-literate peoples were chased off before them. An oppressor is any society with a written history. Amazing how that works.
It's quite the illusion to treat the Bible as a beginning point. Before I was four years old, I was two or three years old. Of this time I have essentially no memory at all. Neurologically, a lot of water has already passed under the bridge by the time you start recording conscious memories accessible (barely) to your adult mind.
Before Adam and Eve there was Mom and Dad.
"There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence, no god."
What kind of God would punish people who he made that didn't know the difference between right and wrong for doing something wrong?
The White middle to lower middle class in the US cannot face the facts that they are demonstrably poorer and soon to be an actual minority.
So, attaching themselves to intolerant piety (religious elitism) and actively rooting for apocolypse beyond their own personal experience becomes very attractive.
Well, arguing which elements are "flashbacks" would be an interesting discussion, but outside of my immediate purposes here on Slashdot. ;)
Though, it does seem like an opportune moment to quote this...
Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, "These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom."
They said to him, "Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?"
Jesus said to them, "When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom."
--Thomas
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
You really don't understand the foundations of science, do you? Why would a judge reject testimony that "I saw the accused murder the victim, right before he turned into a Green Lizard from Alpha Centauri"? There is a reason, and there's even a good scientific reason (which might or might not be the same as the judge's reason). But unless you dig down to what those reasons are, and what the strengths and weaknesses of those reasons are, then your bluster about science is just as much blind dogma as the religionist's bluster about God. Why do you prefer the explanation of mental illness over the explanation of magic voices in the head? Just saying that one seems ridiculous isn't good enough: somebody who disagrees can say that it's your view that seems ridiculous to them. Do you think science is just a vote on how many people find which account ridiculous? Many solid scientific theories seemed ridiculous before their time. Come back when you can tell me how science can distinguish between those explanations and why it should prefer one to the other.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
"Obviously false"?
Good enough for normal life. Not good enough for science. The heliocentric model of the solar system was "obviously false", until it turned out to be true.
Religious experiences are caused by unusual brain states, not communing with God.
That is your belief. It is not the belief of the religious.
You can very reliably induce the same state of mind many claim to associate with "feeling god" by various drugs, and oxygen deprivation.
That's better. Now you are moving on from "there is no evidence" to "here is a reason I prefer an alternative explanation of the evidence". (It's not a particularly strong reason, though: something similar can be said of the state of mind many claim to associate with "feeling hunger". Any logician can tell you that the move from "x can be caused by y to "x cannot be caused by z because z is not y" is questionable.)
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
What do you mean you've never seen that page? It's in my copy...
Cool post bro, highfive \o
God's "existence" and falsibility thereof depends on your definition of said god.
Perhaps, but the whole flood story becomes vastly suspect in any case since it is clearly impossible that there was a worldwide flood within recent prehistory, nor can anything even close to a literal interpretation of the Noah story make any sense.
I've heard a very plausible literal interpretation based on the idea that the Hebrew word used for "world" wouldn't exactly map onto "earth" in a pre-globe worldview. E.G., it's entirely possible the author literally meant "the known world" which literally meant "a chunk of the middle east." In which case the flood would have wiped out a dozen city-states, and the animals in the ark would have been the animals native to that region needed to reestablish Noah's flocks and herds.
It does feel like a bit of a stretch, but certainly plausible.
genesis 2:5 says specifically that god had not yet created FARMING humans. (No man to "till the earth").
Huh...I had never noticed that. Thank you.
You obviously don't know many MUD admins.
Just abandon Superstition. That simple. Put down the nonsense, repudiate the affirmation which is the REAL reason for the popularity of Superstition Societies, and free yourself.
There is no evidence to support any superstitions, and spirituality is beneath modern man.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Where are mod points when we need them?
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
The following comes from Revelation 22:18-19, NKJV.
18 For I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book; 19 and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the Book of Life, from the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.
And from Deuteronomy 4:1-3, NKJV.
4:1 "Now, O Israel, listen to the statutes and the judgments which I teach you to observe, that you may live, and go in and possess the land which the LORD God of your fathers is giving you. 2 You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take anything from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.
And so on.
You really don't understand the foundations of science, do you?
I understand it just fine. You seem to be having some problems, though.
Why do you prefer the explanation of mental illness over the explanation of magic voices in the head?
Occam's razor. We have evidence of mental illness, as well as some knowledge about how it operates. We have no evidence of magic voices, though we have noticed that they tend to correlate with mental illness. Unless you're applying a liberal dose of Occam's Shaving Cream, that situation is absolutely clear-cut.
Do you think science is just a vote on how many people find which account ridiculous?
Nope.
Many solid scientific theories seemed ridiculous before their time.
Not "many", no, unless you're considering the opinions of the average yokel. I can't think of a single "solid scientific theory [which] seemed ridiculous before [it's] time", but, for the sake of the argument, let's say there was. So what?
Come back when you can tell me how science can distinguish between those explanations and why it should prefer one to the other.
Once you've made the claim that "telling people they didn't experience what they think they experienced" makes me "wrong", you've pretty much given up any right to be taken seriously, especially when you then went on to contradict yourself in the very next sentence. You need to get these concepts straight in your head and stop jumping around like a retarded rabbit on speed.
So magic head voices, god, and talking ducks have evidence of roughly equal weight in terms of any objective, verifiable weight. I guess I'm comfortable with that, and I'm comfortable not really considering it "evidence" in favor of the existence of a god.
I do understand your point, and it's technically valid, but at a level I think you'd have to be a linguistic or an asberger's patient to appreciate it. The Evidence is so vanishingly weak it is, for all intents and purposes, negligible. The assertions of people raised within certain belief systems notwithstanding, there is no evidence for God.
Holy crap you are right! We'd best start now... with the founding of Æsopicanity! And because it's now a religion means that it must have had a divine hand guiding the writing of the stories, correct? :)
Well, and to add to that, the bible is not really a complete story, it's rather the story of God's covenant with Man.. More specifically, with Man that he created in his image, that caused the grief with Lucifer forcing him to be cast out of heaven and angels/demons mixing with humans which prompted the flood in the first place.
And with the entire story that we know with the bible, we do know that there was other people in the world when adam and eve left the garden because their children married them. We do know one of the reasons for the flood and destruction of the earth was because of the impurities in other people and that man had become evil. We know that fallen angels bread with humans creating the Nephilim and/or Rephaim (giants) both before and after the flood.
IT would appear to me that these biblical scholars possess less then a most basic understanding of a bible and creations story and are actually attempting to discredit it for the purpose of doing so instead of learning what they claim to know. It's the same simple mistake most Atheists make when they attempt to compare or contrast the wrath of the Jewish god with the love and peace of the Christian God. Yes, they are the same god, but the covenant is with a different set of people and contains different terms and the entire story of Jesus explains that quite well when he brought peace on earth. You just need to understand the old testament to some extent to get the big picture of the new testament. This is why the old testament is still taught even though it's been depreciated greatly.
"There are what, 2-3 million species known to inhabit the Earth right now, with vast diversity."
Oh, that's no problem. God miraculously diversified the species (although, one wonders why they needed to be on the Ark at all then - God could just re-create all the animals, birds, insects, whatever, right)?
I've sometimes wondered how to reconcile a global flood, with freshwater fish, and freshwater bodies. I mean, if there was a world wide flood that covered every mountain, wouldn't every lake be somewhat salty? The bible doesn't say anything about aquatic creatures being on the ark (hard to see how they could survive on the ark). Saltwater species could presumably survive a global flood, but wouldn't all the intermixing of salt water and fresh water kill off all the fresh water species?
I suppose there's a million such problems you could find with the diluvian hypothesis; anyone know if anyone has tried to systematically list out all such contradictions between the world as we find it, and the world as we would expect to find it if the flood had occurred?
P.S. I decided to do a quick search to see if any of the creationists had attempted to answer the question about freshwater species. The answer is quite interesting, in the self-contradictions it reveals:
"How did freshwater fish survive in the saltwater oceans?" There are two possibilities. First, there are many areas in the world today where we see freshwater and salt water together, and the two waters don't mix. So it's possible that certain organisms survived in pockets of fresh or salt water. Second, because of natural selection, which creationists accept, organisms today have become very specialized. Organisms at the time of the flood, however, would've been much stronger and able to tolerate many more changes than they can today. There's really no problem at all in answering this question.
So, on the one hand, they reject the idea that natural selection could have evolved complex adaptations over billions of years (e.g. the premise of Darwin's Black Box), but simultaneously embrace the notion that you can get still very significant adaptations over the course of a mere 5000-9000 years.
If you can embrace that rate of adaptation over a few thousand years, it should seem no stretch of credulity at *all* to get much larger adaptation over billions of years.
As such this article only should upset dyed in the wool literalists and super fundies.
Ah, I take it you've met my family then?
Joking aside, I think you are mistaken to think (as implied by that statement) that "dyed in the wool literalists" and "super fundies" are uncommon, perhaps even rare. If that group includes everyone who believes that Adam and Eve are the first humans and all others descended from them, that there were no humans outside of Eden until after the Fall (and of course then only those descendents of Adam and Eve) -- well, regardless of what is actually contained in the book of genesis that is a very common set of beliefs. Along with no idea of how the flood story is obviously merged accounts (two of each, versus seven; the enumeration of the animals included; etc.). Or how the story of Babel implies that man is His equal (his concern was that Man would be his equal once, not if, they completed the tower to heaven).
Most Christians are simply unaware of what is in the Bible.
Not to mention the totally daft lack of understanding of how natural selection even works, timescale aside. But ah well, we already know there's no logic here to start with...
Eh, whatever. There's no defeating that level of illogic. All we can do is live in the knowledge that nature cares not for man's ignorance. What is, is.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Venema is part of a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century and say it's time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence.
This summary is incorrect. At least, according to the articles, Venema doesn't deny the idea of original sin. That was John Schneider, who taught theology at Calvin College. The summary is lumping all of these Christian scholars into the exact same theology.
Keep in mind that the dude who said "Love one another" claimed his Father was the same guy who ordered genocide, infanticide, and rape on numerous occasions. Just sayin'.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
If you're willing to believe in an omnipotent God who can arbitrarily intervene in his creation (the Universe), this kind of analysis is surely missing the point. If God wants to speed up the rate of mutation just at the times and places we're not watching, he can do so. Heck, he can screw with scientific evidence-gathering to hide his tracks, too. Heck, he might have actually created the world five minutes ago. And if you're convinced that the Bible contains the literal word of God you can assume any amount of this gap-filling to make the evidence consistent with Genesis. Yes, this might seem a horribly illogical thing to do, but we mortals are not to guess at the motives of God. He had a purpose for all this trickery (just like the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, the tsunami in Japan, AIDS, smallpox, and the curse of the Bambino). So trying to convince a young earth creationist that their beliefs are inconsistent with evidence and logic is kinda pointless, when they're prepared to twist logic and evidence to any lengths necessary to remove the inconsistency.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Making a rational decision about what one believes based on evidence is not why the religious right in the US is a dominant political force. This will have little effect on the Christian fundamentalists in the US. Richard Dawkins rightly calls Christian fundamentalists in the US the "American Taliban" in The God Delusion; he is far more eloquent than I on just why rational arguments don't work with religious fundamentalists. And it will have zero effect on two of the three leading GOP presidential hopefuls (Bachmann and Perry) who are both fundamentalists and dominionists.
So magic head voices, god, and talking ducks have evidence of roughly equal weight in terms of any objective, verifiable weight.
You have now introduced the word "objective". That wasn't in the discussion before. The question of what actually counts as "objective" is fraught and is still not resolved in science (and as far as I am aware nobody has yet come up with an answer to there being no objective evidence of consciousness). The best models I am aware of consider that true objectivity cannot actually exist: the best you can claim is that evidence is more objective or less objective than other evidence. The distinction is important because...
I do understand your point, and it's technically valid, but at a level I think you'd have to be a linguistic or an asberger's patient to appreciate it. The Evidence is so vanishingly weak it is, for all intents and purposes, negligible. The assertions of people raised within certain belief systems notwithstanding, there is no evidence for God.
If you have the experience then you have evidence (not objective evidence), and it is rational to take that evidence into account, in addition to the testimony of those who do not have the experience but have alternative explanations of why you might have the experience. Most of us take most of our everyday decisions based entirely on subjective evidence. When I cross the road in the morning I do not call for a double-blind trial of whether there is a car coming. My subjective evidence that there isn't suffices. Similarly for the religious the subjective evidence they have of God might suffice, and that is not necessarily irrational. Second-hand religion is more problematic, but then most of what I believe about quantum mechanics I believe second hand based (usually indirectly) on the eye-witness (ie, subjective) accounts of those who have seen the relevant experiments (and no, not all of that stuff has made its way into technology yet).
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
"There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence."
Good. So I'm still innocent. Innocent as the driven snow.
You obviously didn't read the post closely enough. Please read spam carefully before responding, and, preferably, purchase said product so as to give an informed opinion.
I'm a software visionary. I don't code.
You really don't understand the foundations of science, do you?
I understand it just fine. You seem to be having some problems, though.
Well, up to then you'd just been making unfounded assertions and mocking those who disagree with you, which is common practice amongst those who believe something (science, religion, political dogma, etc.) without understanding it. But at least now we have:
Why do you prefer the explanation of mental illness over the explanation of magic voices in the head?
Occam's razor.
Yes, that is a possible reason for preferring one explanation over another, although it is one that is very selectively applied (used indiscriminately it leads to solipsism -- "no reality" is simpler than "one reality") but I suppose it's always best to apply a razor selectively. But now you have moved from "there is no evidence" to "there is a better explanation of the evidence", which is a different matter. By the way, what does Occam's razor actually tell you about the truth of competing explanations?
Many solid scientific theories seemed ridiculous before their time.
Not "many", no, unless you're considering the opinions of the average yokel. I can't think of a single "solid scientific theory [which] seemed ridiculous before [it's] time", but, for the sake of the argument, let's say there was. So what?
Not just the average yokel. I'm with Max Planck when he said “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”. I can't think of a major scientific breakthrough that wasn't first rejected, and usually mocked, by the previous generation of scientists.
Come back when you can tell me how science can distinguish between those explanations and why it should prefer one to the other.
Once you've made the claim that "telling people they didn't experience what they think they experienced" makes me "wrong", you've pretty much given up any right to be taken seriously, especially when you then went on to contradict yourself in the very next sentence. You need to get these concepts straight in your head and stop jumping around like a retarded rabbit on speed.
Do you think? If I now said to you "You don't actually believe that", would my words have any credibility? No, because you know what you actually believe; nobody else can possibly know what's going on inside your mind, the best they can do is make an informed judgement based on what you report and on their model of the world. By the way, where is my supposed contradiction? Do you believe that there is no distinction between an experience and the interpretation of the experience?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
You're putting words in GP's mouth. He never claimed that Jesus talked about original sin.
This is utter bullshit. Jesus never talked about an original sin
However, churches sure do. And they use it to scare people into attending.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Difference is that the guys is claiming that "x can be caused by y, and y is a materialistic statement", following "x cannot be caused by z, because z is not a materialistic statement'. And in this context,a 'materialistic statement', or equivalently a statement about 'how matter interacts', quite effectively defines the verb 'caused'.
Making the statement that you found questionable, almost tautological.
If humans existed outside of Eden then what was the purpose of Eden? Was it only for a select few?
Also, which part of the Bible are literal and which are not?
I wish I was logged in when I submitted this (
i have no sig
But now you have moved from "there is no evidence" to "there is a better explanation of the evidence"...
No, we're still on "there's no evidence". I'm not sure how you looked at "these people are hallucinating" and arrived at "there's evidence of gods".
Do you think? If I now said to you "You don't actually believe that", would my words have any credibility?
You think that an experience and a belief are the same thing?
Please tell me you're being deliberately obtuse.
By the way, where is my supposed contradiction?
I quote:
If you tell somebody that they've not experienced what they've experienced it's you that's wrong (and it's not science). ...
If you tell them that they have misinterpreted their experience then you might be on to something.
If their interpretation is wrong then they could not have experienced what they thought they experienced. If you sit a primitive tribesman in front of a TV, he will not experience magical pixies talking from inside of a box, regardless of what his personal interpretation may be. Unless you're a fan of Deepak Chopra, you should have a pretty clear grasp of the idea that your perceptions do not actually effect reality.
Now, granted, I learned English as a second language, but I'm willing to bet any amount of money you care to wager that anyone with a solid understanding of the English language and basic logic would spot the contradiction immediately. ARE you a Chopra fan?
The mythology ( and all mythologies ) is to be interpreted as a description of the nature of consciousness. Thus the sin is to substitute consciousness with a material satisfaction. The breast (apple) is the original substitute for consciousness, to be followed by cars, societies, religions, cigarettes, etc. Yer welcome.
At what rate would we have to procreate to arrive at todays earth population? I also would be very concerned about Noah and the ark. Two of every kind would have to include every pair of people from every human race. I also question the flood. Why no dinasaurs on the ark, but why all the germs, such as polio, german measles, etc. etc.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
My apologies - I didn't notice I hadn't signed in. The above message is from me, I don't write usually as AC.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Religion has always been at odds with Science, since Galileo started reasoning on astronomical observations, which blatantly contradicted the bible. The universe was not created 5000 years ago, we don't descend from a single couple, different species evolved and were not "created". So what? Being an European I find this is amusing but utterly irrelevant, I fail to notice why this is news at all. You are free to believe that earth is flat, if you really want to ignore evidence.
Oops wasn't logged in. Anyway, this was me. =P
Let's put the genes back in Genesis.
Or how the story of Babel implies that man is His equal (his concern was that Man would be his equal once, not if, they completed the tower to heaven)
Well it did take the goddamn commies and their "space firsts" to get the ball rolling, right? (even if ~"I didn't see any god up there" is merely allegedly by Gagarin, apocryphal)
One that hath name thou can not otter
having an experience is one thing. but it is entirely irrational to assume that your experience points to the existence of an immortal, ominpotent being. that's a massive leap that is supported by no facts at all, and can only be supported by an irrational leap into 'faith'. The alternate theories to explain whatever experience you have that might even begin to point in that direction are prevalent, simple, and easy to understand in most cases.
Just because someone has a certain INTERPRETATION of the facts around them does not make it rational or weighty in any way. In the face of a complete lack of objective evidence, I fail to see why it should even be taken seriously, or why we would possible dignify the behaviour with words like "evidence".
The evidence that exists is, again, no more compelling in any fashion than my assertion that ducks talk to me, other than being more common to believe in god than it is to claim we can talk to ducks. But on the god side, We have billions claiming other billions are wrong about what they are experiencing and claiming THEIR own experience is the right one. I would certainly think that would, to a very large degree, remove any weight such "evidence" should be given. Obviously, at a minimum, billions of people are mistaken about the experiences they are having. I just think it's a billion or so more than believers of those religions do.
I can read ancient Greek. Koine ("common") Greek is basically an ancient form of ebonics. The grammar is so sloppy it's painful to read. Every Greek professor I had rolled his or her eyes whenever someone would bring-up the New Testament. It's hillbilly blather written by folks who had minimal education and were only semi-literate, and most in the field regard it as a waste of time because it honestly doesn't matter what it actually says.
You might wonder why I say that. Of course seminarians embrace the notion that they don't need to learn to read no stinkin' Greek. They already "know" what the Holy Scriptures say, so why would they need to question or interpret it further? All of those so-called "independent" translations you mention, hate to break it to you, but they're only independent insofar as the authors' choice of language, but they all carry the preconceived notions that would be best referred to as "Biblical canon" and twist their translations to match that canon perfectly, regardless of what the texts actually say. Since they have a good handle on Truthiness, they're obviously qualified to "correct" all the "mistakes" that were made by the original authors. The ambiguity that comes along with the atrocious grammar makes it particularly easy to twist several key passages into bizarre meanings.
As far as the Dead Sea Scrolls go, one of the biggest myths circulating around Christian culture these days is that they bolster the historical tradition of the Bible. In reality, they seem to do just a tiny bit of that, and add a lot of apocryphal stuff. Of course, the Apocrypha and the gnostic gospels were really all about as sound as the rest of the hodgepodge as the rest of the accepted Christian Bible aside from the contents of the Torah, but they didn't agree so much with the way the Roman Catholic Church wanted to deify Peter and Paul, so they declared other books that didn't fit with their agenda as heretical, edited them out, and tried to burn all of the Gnostic gospels. Some survived, and they're interesting reads if not just as bizarre as most of the New Testament. Your Bible is complete and true, though...why? Because it MUST be true since God wouldn't have allowed His Word (tm) to be destroyed. Oh, right. The Gnostic gospels survived the deliberate Catholic purges and book burnings, some would almost regard that as a miracle in itself.
In short, the things you and those so-called Biblical scholars take on faith tend to be tragic and make you utter fools. You pick on some parts of the Catholic canon and call them "troubling", anyone who can read terrible Greek and cares to do so would pick on you for all the foolishness that your Protestant Bibles pass-off as "translation". I did it for shits 'n giggles a little bit, it's good for little more than an insight into the directions the early Christians who were established rival sects, and were trying to steal market share from other religions, were going. It would be kind of insane to base your dogmatic worldview on anything written in that book, though.
Once we accept that any given Bible story is clearly not literally an accurate attestation of fact then there's no particular reason to expect any other part to be particularly either.
This is exactly the sort of thinking that led to Biblical literalism in the first place. Apparently, despite millions of other books to the contrary, it is just impossible for an allegory and a true story to coexist in the same book. So people began to espouse that the whole Bible was literally true. This clearly backfired, because the Bible contains much that is allegorical, and also much that is true, and attempting to pervert this substance can only lead to trouble.
As far as the Noah story goes, the entire Earth may not have been flooded, but the entire world as they knew it was flooded.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
But now you have moved from "there is no evidence" to "there is a better explanation of the evidence"...
No, we're still on "there's no evidence". I'm not sure how you looked at "these people are hallucinating" and arrived at "there's evidence of gods".
"These people are hallucinating" is one explanation of the evidence. Another is that somebody has planted a walkie-talkie system in their room and is tricking them. Another is that magic head voices are real.
Do you think? If I now said to you "You don't actually believe that", would my words have any credibility?
You think that an experience and a belief are the same thing?
Please tell me you're being deliberately obtuse.
I think that belief can be based on experience. Don't you?
By the way, where is my supposed contradiction?
I quote:
If you tell somebody that they've not experienced what they've experienced it's you that's wrong (and it's not science). ...
If you tell them that they have misinterpreted their experience then you might be on to something.
If their interpretation is wrong then they could not have experienced what they thought they experienced. If you sit a primitive tribesman in front of a TV, he will not experience magical pixies talking from inside of a box, regardless of what his personal interpretation may be.
He will experience seeing moving pictures, and you would be wrong to tell him he doesn't. If he interprets the moving pictures as magical pixies talking from inside of a box then you would be justified in questioning his interpretation of the experience.
Unless you're a fan of Deepak Chopra, you should have a pretty clear grasp of the idea that your perceptions do not actually effect reality.
Now, granted, I learned English as a second language, but I'm willing to bet any amount of money you care to wager that anyone with a solid understanding of the English language and basic logic would spot the contradiction immediately. ARE you a Chopra fan?
No, I'm not, though I have a major in English language with philosophy as a subsidiary subject, so I have some claim to "a solid understanding of the English language and basic logic". The problem seems to be that you are confusing experiences -- technically 'qualia' -- with interpretation of those experiences.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
having an experience is one thing. but it is entirely irrational to assume that your experience points to the existence of an immortal, ominpotent being. that's a massive leap that is supported by no facts at all, and can only be supported by an irrational leap into 'faith'. The alternate theories to explain whatever experience you have that might even begin to point in that direction are prevalent, simple, and easy to understand in most cases.
And based on metaphysical assumptions that seem obvious to me and probably to you, but that don't seem obvious to religionists. If you change those assumptions then religion makes sense, and because they're metaphysical we can't prove them wrong. Yes, science does have metaphysical foundations: Popper (and others) pretty thoroughly demolished the positivists attempts to build a science without metaphysics.
But on the god side, We have billions claiming other billions are wrong about what they are experiencing and claiming THEIR own experience is the right one.
Are you sure they're disagreeing about what they experience, not about the interpretation of the experience? "God told me to do it." "No, it was Satan that told you!"
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
He will experience seeing moving pictures, and you would be wrong to tell him he doesn't.
OF COURSE. Why would I disagree with him if that were the only claim he made?
I see the problem now. You're saying that I would be wrong if I told religious people that they didn't hear a voice in their head. Well duh. Why would I ever object to that? Why would anyone object to that? That's not the "experience" they're claiming to have; the experience they claim to have is that "god spoke to them", or some crazy shit like that.
I swear, this is the stupidest strawman I've ever seen. That you seem to have built it unintentionally is just mind-boggling.
He will experience seeing moving pictures, and you would be wrong to tell him he doesn't.
OF COURSE. Why would I disagree with him if that were the only claim he made?
I see the problem now. You're saying that I would be wrong if I told religious people that they didn't hear a voice in their head. Well duh. Why would I ever object to that? Why would anyone object to that? That's not the "experience" they're claiming to have; the experience they claim to have is that "god spoke to them", or some crazy shit like that.
I swear, this is the stupidest strawman I've ever seen. That you seem to have built it unintentionally is just mind-boggling.
The experience they claim to have is hearing a voice. The interpretation is that it's God. It's not a strawman, because it goes to the heart of a fundamental problem of science: what counts as an observation. A good place to start would be the debate over classical foundationalism -- why it's flawed, and what attempts have been made to repair or replace it. You might also try checking out Karl Popper's arguments for why the distinction between science and metaphysics can only possibly be a social convention.
Unfortunately I'm now going to be AFK for a few days, so I will have to leave you to your own devices. But trust me (or research it), the issues are far more complicated and intractable than most people realise.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Adam may have been the name of the founder of a dynasty that invented written, symbolic language. IF written language IS the definition of what MAN is then yes, Adam could be considered the first man. By the way this isn't just my idea it's fundamental Judeo-Christian theology. Most Pentecostals are theologically clueless.
The experience they claim to have is hearing a voice. The interpretation is that it's God.
Nope. Your misunderstanding of this basic point is what caused the whole disagreement. Just try and find a religious person who'll say their experience is "hearing a voice". Doesn't happen. All the rest of what you've been saying is completely irrelevant due to this one little detail.
And that one does describe a bottleneck event, so you have a point there.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
That between 1 in 2^2400 to 1 in 2^4000 nucleotides from either individual. Admittedly that indicates 0 inbreeding, but even cutting those powers down to 10% of their values, that's a lot of room for divergence.
Yes, there is more than enough time for the divergence we see. Also, regarding mitochondrial eve - Adam and Eve had *SONS* their sons wives came from elsewhere, there's no way in hell her mitochondria would be passed on.
Sorry, you knowledge is either lacking in the field of genetics, what the bible states, or both. The individual posting about Noah makes a better case.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
True, but if you are going to find flaws, there are plenty of real flaws to target, without making some up.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
The ark is a valid criticism.
Lets say the population doubled every generation. that gives us between 2^2400 and 2^6000 people. I think that EASILY covers the population of the earth.
Even at 1%/generation you have
>>> 1.01**2400
23512406327.088676
~3x the worlds population today.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).