fatpie42

Because we have a whole fossil record of different forms of snake-like animals and none of them developed the necessary means for making the right sounds (never mind the level of intelligence to form grammatical sentence structure).

Your solution to this issue seems to be "because it's magic".

No, the main wonder is that Egyptians couldn't tell the difference between dirty water and blood.

1. It's never been fully demonstrated how they know.
2. It's never been fully demonstrated that they know.

There was a claim once that the Chinese government had predicted an earthquake using dogs. It turns out that actually a series of small pre-earthquake tremors had allowed them to predict it, not dogs at all.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...keanimals.html

I'm not sure I understand what your point here is. It's almost as if you are trying to say that Genesis was the first story in Bible to be written. Also, I don't see why the mention of the Tigris earns the story any more credence than the mention of men, women or fruit. Yes, we know people at the time it was written would have known about the Tigris river. That doesn't mean that this area was the location of a scientifically-impossible 'first human'.

It has already been pointed out that your reference to 'alphabetical books' is daft. We know full well that there were alphabets before the Hebrew alphabet and the fact that the Hebrew is recorded in a 'book' (if the old papyrus scroll counts as a 'book') makes very little difference to this.

Christianity was strongly tied with Neo-Platonist philosophy and the New Testament, might I remind you, was in Greek. The greeks no more abandoned Greek for the Tanakh than the arabs abandoned Muhammed for Aristotle. This is nonsense.

Special pleading! *yawn*

This is only a problem if you have your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears, saying "lalalalalala!" The difference between the Israelites and other ancient cultures is that a large number of historians in the west have had a religious attachment to scriptures based around the Israelites and not around, say, ancient Egyptian gods.

Er... nope. Adherents of the NT and Qu'ran accepted the Tanakh uncritically as history.

Because obviously they've been the ones most interested in Biblical scholarship... :Cheeky:

fatpie42

Your first comment was as follows:
That statement is not saying that there needs to have been a first living thing. It claims that there must have been a first 'human' and that this 'human' must have had both sexes.

I am perfectly happy to say that there must be a first life. There would have been a kind of bacteria, then this would have developed into more complicated forms of life, then eventually life with two separate sexes would have developed, then eventually one species of mammals would develop as a group into something resembling human.
- Nowhere in that would there have been a 'first human'. Yes, there are some humans with both male and female genitals, even today, but the idea of a 'first human' is a nonsense. 'First humans' (plural), however, is possible, though even that would involve more than just two.

Oh ffs. No there wasn't. That was the whole bleeding point. Bulldogs were gaining breathing problems all over the place because the bulldogs which were being bred were those with that particular shape of face.

Imagine we are talking about polar bears. They developed that way because the bears in the area which survived best were the ones with thicker fur coats. Those without such thick fur coats died. Thus all over the place the surviving polar bears were the ones with thick fur coats. There therefore wasn't a first thickly fur-coated polar bear from which all the other thickly fur-coated polar bears came. There were many different polar bears of which the surviving (and therefore breeding) ones were those with thick fur-coats.

Adaptation means that there was not a 'first human'. If there was a first human we would have to suppose that humans appeared by magic and not only is that contrary to all our scientific knowledge, but it is a ridiculous fairy story.

If you could show how this was a relevant analogy that would be helpful. I know what you are trying to say, but this analogy completely misses the point.

Yes life might well have begun with only one life form, however one human cannot produce more humans. However, I am saying more than this. I am saying that the human race could not have begun with two humans either. The human race began through the adaptation of a whole group of mammals. It did not begin by two mammals of alternate sexes magically turning out to be human, and certainly not by one mammal turning out to have both sexual organs and then splitting into two people like an amoeba.

Let's presume we can fire lasers from our eyes too. Make believe is fun.

We have scientific evidence against it. It is simply not the way that the human race developed.

fatpie42

I actually wasn't talking about the first bulldog. I was talking about the recent issue of bulldogs with breathing difficulties.

There was a trend in breeding bulldogs to have a kind of 'Churchill' face.



Here's a before and after look at what happened in bulldog breeding as a result:


Naturally this wasn't a case of one bulldog giving birth to all other weird-looking bulldogs. Rather it's a change which occurred across the entire group.

Pragmatista

Understood. However it seemed convenient to morph the bulldog analogy into a counter-argument to the notion of a first human. And here, I have to admit that this is shamelessly off topic, as it hardly relates to Biblical criticism.

show_no_mercy

There was no "first human".

But if we go with the Genesis account - did Adam have a navel? How about nipples? Do you realize that every single person that is born starts off as a female, and that male sexual organs are just an enlarged, "zipped up" version of the female's, and that's the only reason why men have nipples?

So it seems as though even if there was a "first human", going by biology this human would look like a woman. Because men are simply modified women, not the other way around.

IamJoseph

The math vindicates a purposeful man breeding dogs, and also its subsequent populations. One cannot produce two million popcorns from a popcorn machine without first producing one popcorn - and that first one requires a duality factor. Its like a mother bearing twins - each one of them is derived from an underlying duality. There is no absolute ONE anywhere in the universe - that one requires an independent external factor to exist. This is also why we will never find an irreducable and indivisable entity - because everything is based on a minimum of TWO. A lone particle needs a triggering wind or heat particle to conduct an action - and both those entities need a core program to interact and be receptive to each other - again another external factor applies.

IamJoseph

More relevent is that the parents were also products of a duality - able to pass on this faculty - else no repro.
[quote]

The time factor does not apply - each step of multiplication is based on a duality factor.

IamJoseph

That is a duality, and that is what Genesis is saying. I see it as absolute and a great insight - it impacts all of science in a different direction it does not like to go.

GLITCH! How could that first lone bacteria 'develop' [change/action/etc] by itself? To become a more complicated form means there is another factor interacting with it - be this an entity from the solar winds, the environment, heat, gravity or another similar particle.

Nothing happens unless something happens - and something needs more than one [some] thing to happen. So the universe could NOT have been kick started with ONE entity - a duality had to be the primal action - two entities/forces would have had to be in the very first occurence. And this cannot occur without an external, transcendent, independent and precedent impacting factor. Denying this negates all of science and math.

Imagine a bulldog is one popcorn. Can you make a popcorn with ONE entity - before any popcorns existed?

the survival factor is post-existence. First the bears have to be existent - and this requires a duality factor in its primal occurence.

Adaptaion proves duality best. Adaptation = change/multiply/elevate. What triggers the adaptee adapating to another? Can it adapt in a vacuum?

No we do not have scientific evidence - this points only to Genesis with no alternatives. Terms such as adapted, expanded, multiplied, changed can only apply where a duality applies.

IamJoseph

The organs do not impact - they are as processors performing the directives in the seed's core program, transfered by a host duality. One cannot have a male or female unless both faculties are contained within. Its alternative says there is an outside, independent factor which applies - and the duality factor again kicks in.

Look at it that both the male and female are dependent on their own duality precedence.

spamandham

2000+ years ago, it certainly would have been.

Any reasonable person knows snakes don't talk. Any reasonable person also knows of the existence of legends. To explain the existence of a story of a talking snake, we can either speculate the preposterous idea that it really happened (i.e., reject all evidence that disproves your inerrency position), or we can recognize a legend when we see it.

If it walks like a snake, and it talks like a human, it's a legend.

The outrageous is nomologically impossible, even if not logically impossible. It is possible to twist any outrageous tale into a logical possibility, but that doesn't make it reasonable to do so.

Why do start by assuming these things might really have happened? We both know the answer. You started with your conclusion first.

You ask for disproof. When given, you reject it and say "oh yeah, but how do you *know*!!!!???" You are not a reasonable person in position to demand a serious discussion.

Perhaps not all, but there are examples of others. Have you read the Vedas? They seem to have twisted occasional real history into their tales of magic and fantasy as well.

The scientific approach is "it's false until proven otherwise". Therefor, the scientific approach rejects all theologies a priori, just as it rejects all other hypotheses a priori. The scientific approach requires that a hypothesis withstand serious attempts to discredit it, and even then, it is accepted only contingently.

"Yeah but maybe there really was a talking snake!" does not comply with this approach, so you're in no position to lecture others here about being unscientific.