Ok, regardless of the dates for Mark, which we can't come to agreement on since the scholars can't either, this still doesn't say why you disagree about the makeup of the Bible having not really changed from the early 100's.
Yes, John MacArthur. I realized that I had left out the 'a' a while after I posted.
Well, I'm giving information from a Biblical scholar that I personally heard lecture a few months ago. I checked my notes from it to make sure that what I said before was accurate as far as the names of the two books the early church circulated, and when they were complete. What scholars are you referring to?
According to John McArthur, the gospel of Mark was probably written in the 50's, and almost certainly before 63. I was mistaken in saying that it was written in the 40's. My bad.
I'd appreciate evidence on your other two points. Just declaring something false doesn't make it false.
I haven't heard this before, and I doubt that it holds a lot of water. Most Biblical scholars agree that Jesus was born around 3 AD. To try to put a month and date to His birth is ridiculous I think, and I question the authority of anyone who tries. I'm willing to accept that we can know what season He was born in, but little more.
I've studied the events surrounding the Bible in the first century, and I've never come across anything like this. I think that the writer of that website means well, but is frankly wrong. Even if the dates before 45AD are unreliable (which I don't think they are), it's not like they're going to be off by more than a few years.
Apparently there was a bit of ignorance on my part of where the information on information theory that I was referring to came from. It falls under information theory, but is more specifically called the 'law of conservation of information.' It was coined by a man named Medawar "to describe the weaker claim that deterministic laws cannot produce novel information." A man named Tellgren claims that it is mathematically invalid, Dembski disagrees, and the mathematical proofs thereof are all above and beyond my capacity for understanding. It basically states that in a closed system, there can be no increase in information without an outside influence.
According to Rudolf Clausius, "The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium." What definition of the second law are you using that gives my point trouble?
As far as energy is concerned: energy is only useful when it is focused. You can put a bull in a china shop and generate a ton of energy, but nothing good can come of it. I've seen people in pools expend huge amounts of energy to get to shore and fail because they didn't know how to focus it (they made it out ok). You can take the pieces of a clock, put them in a bag and shake it for eternity and it'll never actually come together to make the clock. You can put a frog in a blender and expose it to a lot of energy, but no life will come of it.
With the salt crystals: That's how salt comes together; it just won't happen any other way in normal circumstances. However, the same is not so for DNA. There is no particular order that the 4 nucleotides have to go in. The fact that they do go the way they do for whatever animal or organism we're talking about is just because that's how they're programmed to form, not because there's any particular force that makes them form that way. Besides, although the sequence AGCAGCAGCAGCAGC is very ordered, there's really nothing that you can do with it. You need a huge amount of variety to make DNA that will accomplish anything, and if even a few nucleotides are in the wrong place, the results could very well be disastrous.
If I'm defining my terms incorrectly or being less than forthcoming, please be aware that it is not intentional. However, as opposed to just telling me that I'm using them incorrectly, show me the right way and why.
Nowhere in my two choices did I mention evolution. I specifically made it in the form of whether or not there is an outside influence of any kind, as would exist in the presence of a deity of some kind. I also object that you refer to the second of the two forms as "magic." I don't think evolution is possible, but I'm not going to insult your intelligence by calling it magic or stupid or retarded or anything like that. I've been saying that I disagree with it for X reason.
As far as other things instead of evolution: why is it so offensive to you that a deity created the world? If he did, then he couldn't possibly have violated the laws of physics or thermodynamics. He created them. He is outside of them, not subject to them. If you are fundamentally different from what you create, you aren't subject to it.
I hypothesize this: Around 6,000 years ago, God created the world and everything in it. He created it with the appearance of age, although I don't think He created it with the appearance of millions or billions of years. He created it in six literal days, with the light being created before the earth, which is why we can see stars that are so far away. Most fossils were formed during the flood, as well as a lot of major land-masses.
As far as the big bang: Scientists view the universe as a big clock that is slowly winding down. As they rewind it to see how it formed, they reach the point where it actually started but don't know it and drive on to where it becomes this little infinitely dense point. The point never existed, but they don't know that they rewound farther than they should have.
You are correct in saying that Muslims call him a prophet. I didn't say that they didn't. What I am saying is that for Christians, such assertions are inherently insulting. Christians see Jesus as a lot more than a prophet, whereas Muslims see Him as little more than a good man and prophet. Now, had you had merely pointed out that Muslims see Jesus as a prophet, and not referred to Him as merely a Muslim prophet, I don't think that I or anyone else would have had a problem.
The difference:
The Muslim prophet Jesus lived in the first century.
Jesus, whom both Muslims and Christians regard as a prominent figure in their respective religions, lived in the first century.
One is potentially insulting, whereas the other is informative. That was what I was getting at.
Evolution, in the sense of molecules to man, requires an input of information. When you make an amoeba, that thing has a lot of information stored in it. When you give that amoeba the ability to consume food, that's more information. When you give it the ability to reproduce by dividing, there is a lot more information that has to be input. DNA and RNA are really little more than information on how the cell, and the organism overall, is supposed to act. Information theory basically says that the information of a system can not increase without an outside influence, and the second law of thermodynamics says that as time goes on, order tends towards disorder. Evolution, however, requires the opposite on both counts. That is what I mean when I say that macroevolution flies in the face of those two theories.
The reason that the seed acts like it does is that the information for that tree is already in the seed. The seed effectively runs on a program that says "Do this, then do this, then do this." That's information. The cells are programmed to divide like that.
Actually, I think it isn't a big if. There are inherently two choices:
1. We got here through some method that doesn't involve outside influence.
2. Some intelligent entity made us.
There really aren't any other choices. Therefore, the 'if' isn't very big. It's going to be one or the other.
You know, when I was typing all that into the text box, I had it formatted by point and paragraph, but apparently I haven't figured out how to use the text editor thing yet...
Everyone keeps mentioning this "evidence" for evolution all the time. "How can these people believe (Creationism/the Bible/anything other than evolution)?"
I'm curious, what is this evidence? I'll go over a little of what people would probably say, then point out a few problems. I realize that some if not all of this may have been said already, but frankly, I'm a college student; I don't have time to go through each post.
Carbon dating: people always throw out carbon dating as a reason that evolution is true. First off, if you throw out carbon dating, then you clearly aren't aware of what you are talking about anyway. No one who is trying to find the age of something older than about 60k years will use carbon dating. They will probably be using uranium-lead or some other method. The point is that they are going to use the dating method that will give them a number that they are looking for. This strikes me as stacking the cards in your favor. "Well, this thing must be about this old. Which of these will give us a number in that range?" After experimentation, "Aha, look! It's as old as we thought that it was!" This is ridiculous. Also, the numbers can be way off anyway. We can't even date things correctly that we know the age of. For instance, I think it was Etna that erupted about a thousand years ago. When potassium-argon dated, the date came out to be 100-200k years. You can carbon date a live clam to 3000 years old. If we have a system that doesn't work on stuff that we know the age of, and then assume it to be correct when applied to things that we don't know the age of, that's also ridiculous. Dating methods are not a good argument for evolution.
Survival of the fittest: This is not an evolutionary theory. Charles Darwin didn't come up with this, and even if he did, it doesn't make a difference. It's just the method that he chose as the vehicle for his theory.
natural selection: Also not an evolutionary theory. We can see this in nature. People have extreme difficulty disassociating the two. Natural selection does not equal evolution.
The fossil record: The fossil record proves one thing: stuff died. I have met people who think that when God created the world, He created it with the the fossils already in the bedrock and that the animals never actually existed. I think this is ridiculous. However, I also think that it's foolish to assume that it proves anything other than my first point. Relative depth doesn't mean that something is older, and more and more index fossils are being found to still be alive. There are huge holes in the fossil record all over the place. It doesn't support much of anything.
Biology: There are a few things that we learn in biology pretty early on. One of them is that life doesn't come from non-life. Evolution necessitates this. Evolutionary scientists have no idea how it happened. The Miller experiment in the middle of the century didn't prove anything. He made amino acids. That's pretty much the same as saying he made a hunk of metal, but a hunk of metal is phenomenally different than an engine or a clock or a building. Besides, his simulated atmosphere wasn't correct anyway. The actual atmosphere that would have existed would have made two organic compounds: cyanide and formaldehyde. I don't think that I need to tell any of you how conducive they are to life. Regardless, the probability of a long string of amino acids coming together in a specific manner to form a single protein, and then that happening a bunch more times in a small area so that the correct proteins come together in the correct manner to make a single living cell are laughable. Not only this, but the cell would have to be able to consume food and reproduce. It wouldn't have either of those abilities automatically just because it was alive, and the probability of them all happening at the same time make it impossible. Your response to this could be "Well, I know it was unlikely, but we're here, so it must have happened." That argument works for me as a Creationist
Your statement on when the Bible was formed is erroneous. Christ died in about 30 AD, and the first books appeared some ten years later. The last book was written probably around 80-90 AD. By the early 100's, the early Christians were circulating two books that they called "The Gospel," which included the four gospels, and "The Apostle," which had the writings of Paul plus the letters of Peter, Jude, etc. The point is that the Bible as we have it today was complete in its entirety before 120 AD. The Roman councils on the subject just left everything as it had already been for some time. The manuscripts that we have from the time match those that we have today, with minor variations for different spellings of the same name, that kind of thing.
If you want to insult a great number of people, which you apparently do, go ahead and call Jesus a Muslim prophet. However, if you want to enjoy an actual discussion on the subject like a mature adult, you might want to refrain from such bigoted comments.
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Ok, regardless of the dates for Mark, which we can't come to agreement on since the scholars can't either, this still doesn't say why you disagree about the makeup of the Bible having not really changed from the early 100's.
Yes, John MacArthur. I realized that I had left out the 'a' a while after I posted.
Well, I'm giving information from a Biblical scholar that I personally heard lecture a few months ago. I checked my notes from it to make sure that what I said before was accurate as far as the names of the two books the early church circulated, and when they were complete. What scholars are you referring to?
According to John McArthur, the gospel of Mark was probably written in the 50's, and almost certainly before 63. I was mistaken in saying that it was written in the 40's. My bad.
I'd appreciate evidence on your other two points. Just declaring something false doesn't make it false.
I haven't heard this before, and I doubt that it holds a lot of water. Most Biblical scholars agree that Jesus was born around 3 AD. To try to put a month and date to His birth is ridiculous I think, and I question the authority of anyone who tries. I'm willing to accept that we can know what season He was born in, but little more.
I've studied the events surrounding the Bible in the first century, and I've never come across anything like this. I think that the writer of that website means well, but is frankly wrong. Even if the dates before 45AD are unreliable (which I don't think they are), it's not like they're going to be off by more than a few years.
Apparently there was a bit of ignorance on my part of where the information on information theory that I was referring to came from. It falls under information theory, but is more specifically called the 'law of conservation of information.' It was coined by a man named Medawar "to describe the weaker claim that deterministic laws cannot produce novel information." A man named Tellgren claims that it is mathematically invalid, Dembski disagrees, and the mathematical proofs thereof are all above and beyond my capacity for understanding. It basically states that in a closed system, there can be no increase in information without an outside influence. According to Rudolf Clausius, "The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium." What definition of the second law are you using that gives my point trouble? As far as energy is concerned: energy is only useful when it is focused. You can put a bull in a china shop and generate a ton of energy, but nothing good can come of it. I've seen people in pools expend huge amounts of energy to get to shore and fail because they didn't know how to focus it (they made it out ok). You can take the pieces of a clock, put them in a bag and shake it for eternity and it'll never actually come together to make the clock. You can put a frog in a blender and expose it to a lot of energy, but no life will come of it. With the salt crystals: That's how salt comes together; it just won't happen any other way in normal circumstances. However, the same is not so for DNA. There is no particular order that the 4 nucleotides have to go in. The fact that they do go the way they do for whatever animal or organism we're talking about is just because that's how they're programmed to form, not because there's any particular force that makes them form that way. Besides, although the sequence AGCAGCAGCAGCAGC is very ordered, there's really nothing that you can do with it. You need a huge amount of variety to make DNA that will accomplish anything, and if even a few nucleotides are in the wrong place, the results could very well be disastrous. If I'm defining my terms incorrectly or being less than forthcoming, please be aware that it is not intentional. However, as opposed to just telling me that I'm using them incorrectly, show me the right way and why. Nowhere in my two choices did I mention evolution. I specifically made it in the form of whether or not there is an outside influence of any kind, as would exist in the presence of a deity of some kind. I also object that you refer to the second of the two forms as "magic." I don't think evolution is possible, but I'm not going to insult your intelligence by calling it magic or stupid or retarded or anything like that. I've been saying that I disagree with it for X reason. As far as other things instead of evolution: why is it so offensive to you that a deity created the world? If he did, then he couldn't possibly have violated the laws of physics or thermodynamics. He created them. He is outside of them, not subject to them. If you are fundamentally different from what you create, you aren't subject to it. I hypothesize this: Around 6,000 years ago, God created the world and everything in it. He created it with the appearance of age, although I don't think He created it with the appearance of millions or billions of years. He created it in six literal days, with the light being created before the earth, which is why we can see stars that are so far away. Most fossils were formed during the flood, as well as a lot of major land-masses. As far as the big bang: Scientists view the universe as a big clock that is slowly winding down. As they rewind it to see how it formed, they reach the point where it actually started but don't know it and drive on to where it becomes this little infinitely dense point. The point never existed, but they don't know that they rewound farther than they should have.
You are correct in saying that Muslims call him a prophet. I didn't say that they didn't. What I am saying is that for Christians, such assertions are inherently insulting. Christians see Jesus as a lot more than a prophet, whereas Muslims see Him as little more than a good man and prophet. Now, had you had merely pointed out that Muslims see Jesus as a prophet, and not referred to Him as merely a Muslim prophet, I don't think that I or anyone else would have had a problem. The difference: The Muslim prophet Jesus lived in the first century. Jesus, whom both Muslims and Christians regard as a prominent figure in their respective religions, lived in the first century. One is potentially insulting, whereas the other is informative. That was what I was getting at.
Evolution, in the sense of molecules to man, requires an input of information. When you make an amoeba, that thing has a lot of information stored in it. When you give that amoeba the ability to consume food, that's more information. When you give it the ability to reproduce by dividing, there is a lot more information that has to be input. DNA and RNA are really little more than information on how the cell, and the organism overall, is supposed to act. Information theory basically says that the information of a system can not increase without an outside influence, and the second law of thermodynamics says that as time goes on, order tends towards disorder. Evolution, however, requires the opposite on both counts. That is what I mean when I say that macroevolution flies in the face of those two theories. The reason that the seed acts like it does is that the information for that tree is already in the seed. The seed effectively runs on a program that says "Do this, then do this, then do this." That's information. The cells are programmed to divide like that. Actually, I think it isn't a big if. There are inherently two choices: 1. We got here through some method that doesn't involve outside influence. 2. Some intelligent entity made us. There really aren't any other choices. Therefore, the 'if' isn't very big. It's going to be one or the other.
You know, when I was typing all that into the text box, I had it formatted by point and paragraph, but apparently I haven't figured out how to use the text editor thing yet...
Everyone keeps mentioning this "evidence" for evolution all the time. "How can these people believe (Creationism/the Bible/anything other than evolution)?" I'm curious, what is this evidence? I'll go over a little of what people would probably say, then point out a few problems. I realize that some if not all of this may have been said already, but frankly, I'm a college student; I don't have time to go through each post. Carbon dating: people always throw out carbon dating as a reason that evolution is true. First off, if you throw out carbon dating, then you clearly aren't aware of what you are talking about anyway. No one who is trying to find the age of something older than about 60k years will use carbon dating. They will probably be using uranium-lead or some other method. The point is that they are going to use the dating method that will give them a number that they are looking for. This strikes me as stacking the cards in your favor. "Well, this thing must be about this old. Which of these will give us a number in that range?" After experimentation, "Aha, look! It's as old as we thought that it was!" This is ridiculous. Also, the numbers can be way off anyway. We can't even date things correctly that we know the age of. For instance, I think it was Etna that erupted about a thousand years ago. When potassium-argon dated, the date came out to be 100-200k years. You can carbon date a live clam to 3000 years old. If we have a system that doesn't work on stuff that we know the age of, and then assume it to be correct when applied to things that we don't know the age of, that's also ridiculous. Dating methods are not a good argument for evolution. Survival of the fittest: This is not an evolutionary theory. Charles Darwin didn't come up with this, and even if he did, it doesn't make a difference. It's just the method that he chose as the vehicle for his theory. natural selection: Also not an evolutionary theory. We can see this in nature. People have extreme difficulty disassociating the two. Natural selection does not equal evolution. The fossil record: The fossil record proves one thing: stuff died. I have met people who think that when God created the world, He created it with the the fossils already in the bedrock and that the animals never actually existed. I think this is ridiculous. However, I also think that it's foolish to assume that it proves anything other than my first point. Relative depth doesn't mean that something is older, and more and more index fossils are being found to still be alive. There are huge holes in the fossil record all over the place. It doesn't support much of anything. Biology: There are a few things that we learn in biology pretty early on. One of them is that life doesn't come from non-life. Evolution necessitates this. Evolutionary scientists have no idea how it happened. The Miller experiment in the middle of the century didn't prove anything. He made amino acids. That's pretty much the same as saying he made a hunk of metal, but a hunk of metal is phenomenally different than an engine or a clock or a building. Besides, his simulated atmosphere wasn't correct anyway. The actual atmosphere that would have existed would have made two organic compounds: cyanide and formaldehyde. I don't think that I need to tell any of you how conducive they are to life. Regardless, the probability of a long string of amino acids coming together in a specific manner to form a single protein, and then that happening a bunch more times in a small area so that the correct proteins come together in the correct manner to make a single living cell are laughable. Not only this, but the cell would have to be able to consume food and reproduce. It wouldn't have either of those abilities automatically just because it was alive, and the probability of them all happening at the same time make it impossible. Your response to this could be "Well, I know it was unlikely, but we're here, so it must have happened." That argument works for me as a Creationist
Your statement on when the Bible was formed is erroneous. Christ died in about 30 AD, and the first books appeared some ten years later. The last book was written probably around 80-90 AD. By the early 100's, the early Christians were circulating two books that they called "The Gospel," which included the four gospels, and "The Apostle," which had the writings of Paul plus the letters of Peter, Jude, etc. The point is that the Bible as we have it today was complete in its entirety before 120 AD. The Roman councils on the subject just left everything as it had already been for some time. The manuscripts that we have from the time match those that we have today, with minor variations for different spellings of the same name, that kind of thing.
If you want to insult a great number of people, which you apparently do, go ahead and call Jesus a Muslim prophet. However, if you want to enjoy an actual discussion on the subject like a mature adult, you might want to refrain from such bigoted comments.