BWE

He does understand them. He just wants to dissect them anyway. Maybe if you fiddle with it long enough you'll figure out a way to confuse everyone. The best way to do that dave, is to make sure you are thoroughly confused. Your odds go up. Er..., never mind. Scratch that.

SpaghettiSawUs

Ok, I thought I'd help with a little creo-reasoning for those struggling to understand what the hell Dave is going on about re: circularity and other books of the bible.
It's quite simple really:
Since Jesus (and the NT authors) quoted genesis then they believed it was true.
Therefore to doubt genesis is to doubt these authors.
To doubt these authors is to doubt the veracity of the NT.
To doubt the veracity of the NT is to doubt the gospel.
To doubt the gospel is to doubt salvation.
Therefore: in order to be truly christian one must accept genesis, since to reject it is to reject the gospel by extension.
And if you doubt the gospel then you can't be truly saved.
And christians want to be truly saved:ergo they do not doubt the gospel.

So in all it's kind of a mix of circularity and argument from authority: these authorities thought it was true and I agree with them as they're christian authorities. What's more to disagree with them is to reject christianity.

Thats essentially the reason that Dave says CM isn't really a christian.

How Dave arrives at this position is interesting also: Dave says that Jesus taught that genesis was true. Of course CM said that Jesus did no such thing. Yet Dave reasserts that he did. The point is that Dave sees no dichotomy between quoting genesis on one hand, and teaching that genesis is literally true on the other. To Dave they are both the same thing. Dave wouldn't claim that Jesus actually held "genesis is true" classes for the disciples, but he does think that by quoting genesis (for example when answering the pharisees' trick question on divorce) Jesus was therefore taking genesis to be literally true.

Of course this is itself a false conclusion: all NT quotes/references of/to genesis are establishing theological arguments, not historical ones. It is not logically necessary to believe that genesis is historically true in order to believe that it is theologically true*. Dave does not understand that genesis can be theologically true (it is to most Christians) without necessarily being historically accurate.

This is a clever trick of the biblical literalists who are very adept at making converts of existing believers, I fell for it myself once (raised RC before being fundified in my early twenties). When someone makes the argument that you can't be truly following Jesus (therefore not truly a christian) unless you believe that genesis is historically accurate (as Jesus did) the believer is bound to examine their faith. At this point they meet reinforcement arguments like: if we toss out this bit and that bit then before we know it we're left with nothing as the bible is a coherent whole (cue argument as to the "miraculous nature" of the bible's internal consistency). IOW: how do we define which is literal and which is metaphor? Answer, we cannot. Therefore a metaphoric interpretation is a slippery slope to rejection of christianity.

In short, this whole "jesus believed in a literla genesis" schtick is the thin end of a particular reasoning wedge which suckers many mainstream christians into biblical literalism and YEC.

Ironically, most of what Dave believes is not to be found in the bible: where the flood waters came from, where they went, moving continents, asteroids/meteors originally blasted into space from earth, accelerated nuclear decay etc... none of which are found in the pages of the bible. This is a strange irony: in order to defend a literal interpretation of the bible Dave relies on the oddest collection of extra-biblical hypotheses and assertions.

Cheers
Spags

*My own term, potential objections as to oxymoronic potential noted.

Mike PSS

Spags,
I had the same questions about Jesus and the NT apostles in the "Adam, Eve, Genesis" thread.

There are a few references from the gospels to the OT but there is no real teaching of the OT. I mean, the OT was an old book in Jesus's time but was still considered scripture.

I have yet to hear anyone use only NT references to pooh-pooh science. All the pooh-pooh comes from the OT sources. So why is it that the fundaforms are Christian in nature and not Jewish?

ericmurphy

I think it's one of those things where he is straining mightily not to understand calibration curves (there's really not much to understand, frankly), and in the meantime trying to simultaneously avoid all discussion of them while at the same time trying to keep up the pretence of not understanding them ("That's not an explanation"). But the mere fact that he managed to completely avoid even mentioning them in his most recent post is that he's very much aware of how fatal they are to his argument.

I just wonder whom he thinks he's fooling by avoiding the issue entirely. Where's the puppet-show audience he's performing for, I wonder.

But I think Dave knows the end is near. He's been slapped around here as hard as he ever has anywhere, had threads locked left and right, and I think he's beginning to feel like he has nowhere left to run to.

Is UD next? I don't think Dave would like it much there, and besides, DS would ban him in a day or two.

Faid

I have afdave to thank for realizing this for the first time, Spags. It still amazes me, though: A remarkable example of the thought processes in the YEC mind.

Calilasseia

It's worse than that. Dave is relying upon the output of assorted incompetents, charlatans and in some cases, outright frauds. Not only that, he's relying upon output from these disreputable sources that violate known laws of physics, including laws that I learned at school when I was twelve years old.

Moreover, the kind of event he's banging away trying to prove happened - namely a global flood that covered every known land mass and submerged all extant land - would have resulted in the extermination of whole swathes of biological taxa that are happily alive and kicking today, which includes all the stenohaline marine fishes and the corals. First of all, anyone who has kept coral reef fishes in an aquarium knows that they are very sensitive to changes in water chemistry, which is why setting up a marine aquarium successfully invovles considerable capital expense vis-a-vis filtration technology AND the acquisition of a range of management skills with respect to controlling the chemistry of the aquarium water. Among the factors that need to be controlled is salinity - specific gravity for Indo-Pacific fishes, for example, should be kept between 1.022 and 1.025, corresponding to a solution of 35 parts per thousand of NaCl per litre of water. If those fishes are suddenly transferred to water with a significantly different salinity, their osmoregulatory machinery cannot handle this. Seawater fishes have evolved to live in a hypertonic solution - one that has a higher concentration of dissolved salts than their tissues - and consequently they have evolved osmoregulatory machinery designed to extract salt from ingested water and excrete the excess through special salt secreting cells in the gills and the kidneys (marine fish urine is a concentrated salt solution with other constituents such as ammonia). Put these fishes into fresh water - a hypotonic solution - and water starts entering their bodies osmotically because now, the relative concentration of dissolved salts is reversed. Since they do not have osmoregulatory machinery designed to eliminate large quantities of excess water entering their bodies in this manner, the concentrations of dissolved salts in their tissues falls to dangerous and ultimately lethal levels, and they also suffer organ damage due to the fact that the cells of delicate and critical tissues start to swell and burst with the excess water present.

Now, if we let loose enough water onto the Earth to cover all extant land masses, which requires an additional ocean depth of 9,000 metres (no, I do NOT subscribe to the idea that the height of the Himalayas was significantly less than now, Dave hasn't supplied any evidence for this, so I'm running with the accredited geologists on this one, surprise, surprise), then you end up with a huge dilution of sea water. The volume of the world's oceans, as supplied by this page, is 1.37 x 10⁹ Km³, which is 1.37 x 10¹⁸ m³ of sea water. Flooding the Earth to a depth of 9,000 metres results in the addition of an extra 1.088 x 10²¹ m³ of fresh water to the oceans, which results in a dilution of 794 times. Thus we have gone from a concentration of salt of 35 parts per thousand, to a concentration of 0.044 parts per thousand, which is well into the region of being sufficiently hypotonic to kill stenohaline marine fishes. After all, it's not as if they have anywhere else to go in a global flood, is it?

Now, this will not immediately impact the freshwater fishes, but the increased depth - resulting in an increased pressure at the original sea level of 900 atmospheres - is going to kill off all the bottom dwellers that haven't evolved to withstand these pressures. This means fishes such as the Corydoras catfishes, which I've already described elsewhere as having been documented as a part of the Amazonian fauna for 50 million years. Which means that I would not now be keeping Corydoras panda in my aquarium, let alone breeding numerous generations of their offspring.

Likewise, sessile organisms that originally lived in shallow depths and never evolved to withstand abyssal pressures are going to be killed by that increase in pressure. This is going to be a "double whammy" to the corals, which not only require stable salinities, but also only exist in shallow depths (reef building corals are not found below around 100 metres, and many are confined to less than 50 metres depth). Worse still, many of those reef building corals rely upon an obligate mutualist relationship with zooxanthellae - single-celled marine algae - and if the zooxanthellae die, so do the corals. The zooxanthellae need intense lighting during daylight hours to continue functioning, which is why marine aquarists spend large sums of money on metal halide lighting to keep corals growing in the marine aquarium. Submerge those corals under 9,000 metres of water, and ALL light will be cut off from the zooxanthellae - in fact, you don't have to go as far as 9,000 metres to the bottom of Challenger Deep to reach ocean realms where all light is attenuated and total darkness ensues, 1,000 metres is more than sufficient for this. So, the zooxanthellae will be killed off by absence of light (they will be unable to photosynthesise) even if the pressure doesn't kill them first. There are quite a few other sessile invertebrate taxa that will be wiped out by this process, both freshwater and marine, along with all the aquatic plants, several happily growing examples of which are at this moment providing a playground for the catfish in my aquarium.

Consequently, the rampant absurdity of a global flood is of such a nature, even if one doesn't factor in the truly absurd physical conditions resulting from assorted creationist "flood models", that only those who are obsessively desperate to uphold a literal Genesis to the point of blanking out reality on a pathological scale can give credence to such ideas. Which is why such ideas tend to emerge from people whose adherence to genuine scientific thinking and practice is manifestly a pretence. Which brings us back to the assorted incompetents, charlatans and fraudsters of the creationist monkey house.

Even if one discounts the rampant absurdities, and engages in divorcing oneself from reality sufficiently to admit such ideas as being in any way valid, one is led to ponder another question. If Biblical inerrancy needs the likes of Russell Humphreys to champion it, it says a lot about its robustness, doesn't it?

Steviepinhead

As always, Cali, well done and well said!

deadman_932

I'm beginning to really, really like this forum. People like Dave are dead ducks in a well-moderated environment.

Calilasseia is OBVIOUSLY forgetting the angelfish that protected all the fishy, slimy, watery things.

Oh, you evos...will you never learn to see the light?

mung bean

Billions of dead ducks
buried in fora by
rules laid down by mods
all over IIDB.

SpaghettiSawUs

In the fundy Xtian world Christians are "true" Jews (by "circumcision of the heart" by the "holey spook"), the New Israel represented among other things by the 144,000 of John's Revelation.

It reallycomes down to the "logic" I described earlier, seeing the bible as one, supernatural, book with a story in form "beginning middle and end" of Genesis to Revelation.

Think about this: if the history of the beginning (Genesis) is literally true then get your head around what a literal rendering of Revelation would be like.

But then, even fundies are careful not to interpret all of Revelation literally. Obvious double-think. They will use the rationalisation "You only take it metaphorically when it makes sense to do so, when the passage is obviously metaphor". At this point a million people will ask in unison "how do you know which is metaphorical? What is more metaphorical: A talking snake or a seven headed beast? For that matter what would be the more supernatural of the two?"

Basically it comes down to what you want to be literal and what you don't.
A literal genesis makes evolution impossible and also makes "sense" of the lineage to Christ, from Adam via Noah, Abraham, Jacob (Israel), David etc.

A literal revelation has seas turning to blood, skies rolling up, armies of locusts, horsemen bringing war, famine, plague and death, dragon-riding sluts, babylon going tits up, etc.... But you can have some literal stuff: barcodes and the number 666 (microchip implants), a big final war in Israel (Oh yeah, that's the one they want most)...

Be afraid of minds that can believe this: they look forward to your extermination.

Regards
Spags