Booky

:redface: Well surely the morality came before the written text, but the written text is what set it in stone and gave us social codes, rules, laws and expectations, etc.

My point was that the ancient text came before the secular humanism.

Much like the Creator comes before the creation.

If the Neanderthal had written anything down then we would know if they were ignorant or not.

:devil1: That will probably forever be a problem for myself in that I am a "Christian" without being a Christian because I am so extremely unOrthodox.

So I do know the 4004 BCE is just silly stupid nonsense, and I myself do not know what to do with the bone headed Creationist.

:redface: No, I would never say some extreme thing like that because it does not have all.

The Bible has plenty of nonsense in it, like the childish "Jonah in the fish" story and worse. But the Bible does have very interesting and useful information in it that can not be obtained from anywhere else. Info about God and about man.

I have a particular theory of my own concerning science in that I very much believe that Albert Einstein got some of his big science insights from the Bible. Like for us realist as myself that study the scriptures then "time" is a very important and very interesting topic for any Bible realist, and Einstein turned that "space-time" into our fourth dimention.

Science without religion is blind.

So the answer is that - science is proving the existance of God.

Like said before - the "big bang" = the creation day = let there be light.

:boohoo:

bacht

Okay. I have a little trouble following your points, but I understand that you are not a fundamentalist or identifiable by conventional labels.

I used to play with the idea that the 4004 B.C. date is kind of correct in the sense that it's around this time that the first cities got going. Thus "In the beginning" can refer to the beginning of urban culture as we know it, a celebration of civilization's triumph over barbarism.

I agree that creativity and inspiration are somewhat mysterious. I'm a musician, and the process of writing something original isn't easy to define (and maybe shouldn't be, don't want to spoil the magic do we?)

Booky

I re-read my post and I did word that very poorly.

What I was trying to say is that the Bible was created thousands of years ago and it claims the earth was created and the "big bang" proved that to be correct.

I do not see it as a matter of credibility, but I do see why other see it that way.

In my perspective I see it as a brave and bold thing for a God to do, and whatever that God actually is must be a very hard creature indeed.

:wide: That is so very true.

Booky

:notworthy: That was my best point of them all.

:wide: I like that perspective that 4004 is around the first city, because events do mark time and calculations.

Also 4004 BCE was the first cities in various places like Babbylon and Egypt.

I still have leanings to the "Sabbath Day" being the seventh (7th) day and when we calculate seven thousand years (7,000) as each day equals 1,000 years each link HERE, then that means 4,000 years BCE and the 2,000 year CE and so this is the 1,000 year millenium Sabbath = the seventh millenium.

Plus for me as a realist then I say the last Sabbath was 6,000 years ago and that was not the beginning of time but just the last Sabbath. So time goes back millions then billions of years with sabbath resting along the way.

:blush: I like that.

The Bible is seen as poetic, and it must have took a lot of gull to write down such words by their standards and by ours.

:bulb:

elevator

I am a little uncomfortable with the word "created". In my mind "creation" involves an intelligent agent or a designer. Is that what you're getting at too, or do you simply use "creation" here to describe an entirely natural process? There was no purpose in the big bang. The earth just happened to form inside the accretion cloud from which the sun formed 4.5 billion years ago - much like stars and planets inside some 100 billion other galaxies each home to about 1 billion stars. As far as "creation"; Earth is nothing special. I therefore fail to see to which part of the biblical story of creation is compatible with the scientific understanding of the evolution of the universe and the objects within it. If you want to argue that the Universe (not the Earth) was created, sure, I'll concede that we don't know what happened before the "big bang", but I am certainly not going to pretend to know that a God did it.

It is a brave and bold thing for God to allow the bible to interpreted in support of bad morality? In that case it doesn't look good for God's benevolence don't you agree? Or did I perhaps miss what you were trying to convey?

Booky

:wide: I am one on those Theist on the Board, so I did say "created and creation" very much on purpose to imply God.

Plus I can not figure out a replacement term to call the time of creation.

And yes, I do mean an intelligent designer.

Your term there of "natural" as in "nature" is just a fancy name for a God.

Like mother-nature or father-nature are God names.

The "no purpose" just does not add up for me.

If we take one seedling then that seed knows its own purpose of becoming a plant. It is not an accident.

And a "big bang" without a purpose is far more illogical then seeing a Creator.

The fact that the "big bang" blossomed out into a creation is the evidence in itself. Just like the seed's invisible intelligence is visible in the plant's growth.

:frown: You are the first that I ever heard of that claims the earth is not special - since it is so vastly and obviously super special in the extreme.

The other created planets are kind of baren, empty and lacking in so many ways while the special earth is not.

And surely we know the first lines of the Bible;

"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." Genesis 1:2, KJV

I understand.

I had to find out it was true myself before I was able to preach it.

:frown: Yes, you missed it, because I meant some thing very different.

I object to people claiming that the God has got to be things like "benevolent" because that claim is taken from an incorrect interpretation of the scriptures.

It is that lingering Orthodoxy that really messed up religion and any correct perception of the Creator.

The God I found out is both blessing and cursing, and I would not call that benevolent.

I am not one of the Christian fools.

:bulb:

elevator

No, I am not using “natural” as a fancy name for a God. I am using “natural” in opposition to that which is “supernatural”. I realize you see evidence of design in nature, and that you see this as evidence of God. In fact the design argument have been argued at lengths in this forum, so I see no reason to bring it up again as it has nothing to do with biblical criticism which was the original topic of your post, but a search on this forum for the design argument will yield many results. Similarly, the same search will yield many examples of bad design.

Seeing that the only planets (or other celestial objects) we have explored thus far are all located in our own tiny little solar system, I think it is premature to assume that the Earth is the only planet which have developed life (at any evolutionary stage). And if you see life as the property that makes Earth special, and thus indicating creation by an intelligent designer (read: God), then, yes, I firmly disagree. That is why, in my last post, I made some effort to illustrate that we live in but a tiny corner of this universe, surrounded by some 100 billion galaxies, each home to about a billion stars, around the vast majority of which we could expect to find bodies similar to those in our own solar system (a number of Jupiter-size bodies have already been found orbiting nearby stars). So, no, I am sorry, I just can’t agree that our Earth has some special purpose or is in some way tantamount to the existence of the universe as a whole.

You must surely see that this truth you speak of is in the eye of the beholder. To me, religious diversity alone is enough to discredit the truth-value of any creation story – not to mention the fantastic scientific discoveries that have progressively and effectively shriveled the domain of the supernatural down to what little about our origins that still remain unknown. As an agnostic, I am not saying that I am mentally closed to any explanation which invokes the supernatural, however, in the words of the late Carl Sagan: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.

I have never called any Christian a fool; if I gave you that impression I apologize. I am married to a Christian and might spend nights on the couch if I did Whatever properties you want to assign to God, it doesn’t matter. You conceded in an earlier post that “large parts of the Bible is fake and fraud”, and so my point all along has been that whatever truth exists within this text is indistinguishable from the “fake and fraud” and therefore destroying the overall credibility of the bible. And the fact that the bible, as a text claiming a divine connection, is nothing special (the Quran claims the same, for example) makes it impossible to rationally and logically determine which (if any) of it is true. Since, as of yet, there is no evidence that anyone ever walked on water, rose from the dead, performed miracles of the kind that Jesus allegedly did, or lived past 150 years of age, I see no reason to accept those stories as truth.

Booky

Well then what about my example of a seed blossoming into a plant? it is a "natural" process and that "natural" is thereby used to describe the intelligent design of a seed turning into a plant. And the "big bang" blossomed into the universe with the characteristics of planets and stars? "Naturally", and that is giving the power and the intelligence to the God called nature.

You may not mean to use "nature" as a God but there it is. In all human civilizations their Gods meant "nature" too, as in the rain-god, thunder-god, earth-god, sun-god, etc.

Supernatural means miracles but the "big bang" was not so much of a miracle as just being a natural design = intelligent design.

If the tiny seed or the big universe had not blossomed into a functioning and well defined product then we would have evidence of no intelligent design.

The fact that both the seed and the "big bang" did in fact blossom is proof of design.

And if we must go back to the original post in this thread - then the afterlife of the person is what dictates the origin of that same person.

:wide: Well I certainly do not want to go over to some other people's beaten down arguments.

If you see the argument as over and finished then it is you that are closed.

:devil1: I understand - I do not agree - but I see that point.

My belief is that the Creator called God does come from those outter spaces, so when we do find life out there then it too proves an intelligent design.

If we took a trash can and dumped it upside down and see garbage everywhere then there is nothing intelligent to be seen there, but when we see diamonds scattered inside the garbage then we know some thing is not being explained correctly because the scattered trash is not true garbage.

The whole point of any mystery is in finding correct conclutions. So claiming the diamonds (the earth) is a happen-chance is not realistic to me.

I said it, and I was not trying to put my feelings onto you.

I mean that I am a Christian but I do not believe that I am as foolish as so very many of the other Christians appear to be. And I only meant that some Christians are - IMO - lacking sense.

So God might be called "benevolent" but I find that to be not quite true. I guess God can be benevolent at times, but even Adolf Hitler was benevolent to his buddies.

I find it getting easier and easier to find out the truth from the false stuff.

Yes we can distinguish the fake from the authentic.

A little effort and a little work and it is well worth it, and the professional scholars and archeologist do the hardest work for us in that we only need to scrutinize their findings and there books.

Can not get much easier then that.

:jump: Well I like all the religious books so the Quran is great and so is the Bible and many other scriptures too, IMO.

In the Scholar Biblical Criticism the scholars routinely declare the "miracles" as being false or fake or dramatized and that works fine with me.

My perception of the God is not based on the bulk of the miracles. Jesus and Muhammed and others have a more powerful message then the miracles.

Their messages tell us how to live and how to excel and how to access power that greatly affect this world.

Such people like Jesus and Muhammed and even Mahatma Gandhi - all changed the entire world civilizations by their lives.

:bulb:

aa5874

There is a serious problem here. Only Muhammed and Gandhi are considered real people that changed the the entire world civilisation by their lives.

You probably mean Eusebius and/or Constantine instead of Jesus. Jesus as described in the NT is implausible or some-kind of supernatural unknown entity that the Christian Marcion claimed only looked real.

Constatine and Eusebius are the real people behind Christianity and changed the entire world.

They turned it upside down.

elevator

The way a seed blossoms into a plant has nothing to do with intelligent design, but is rather a well-researched, well-documented area of science called biology and includes evolution and molecular biology. Abiogenesis is, in my opinion, the only part of biology that still leaves room for speculation into the supernatural, and even then only by a longshot, because we don’t even know that any supernatural entities exist! I find it absolutely amazing that we are trying to explain an unknown with another unknown… that said though; there is nothing about a plant that is intelligently designed. I suggest the Evolution 101 podcast by Dr. Zachary Moore (www.drzach.net) for a very introductory course on the evidence for evolution.

As for the big bang. Yes, that is another unknown, much like that of the origin of life. Does that mean that we should automatically introduce God into the equation? In my opinion, no. Science has a number of theories including an eternal universe (with “big bangs” eventually collapsing into “big crunches” in a repeating cycle), and multiverses (as set forth in string theory). Incidentally, Hinduism teaches the doctrine of rebirth; an eternal universe subject to birth, life and death in an endless repeating cycle. Why do you not accept this doctrine? Afterall, the Vedas predate any existing Christian writings.

No, you misunderstand. The argument isn’t over… as long as there are groups of people who believe there is evidence of intelligent design in nature as well as people who believe there is not; there will always be an argument. What I am saying is that there is no point in us entering into a lengthy discussion about it here, when there are other posts on this forum (that can be found through a simple search) that do just that.

Only if you don’t know how a “diamond” could occur naturally. If you discovered a natural mechanism that explained the origins of such “garbage”, then you would immediately dismiss the supernatural explanation. Afterall, isn’t that exactly what has happened? Dr. Behe introduced the concept of irreducible complexity (at least into the popular culture) and presented examples such as the bacterial flagellum, the eye, blood clotting cascade, mousetrap(!), etc. as examples of intelligent design; much like your “diamond” example. Why were these evidence of intelligent design? Because Dr. Behe could not imagine any way that these designs could occur in nature without the aid of an intelligent designer. Of course, now we know that there are several intermediates in the evolution of the bacterial flagellum including a syringe-like structure used for injection into cells. The eye have numerous evolutionary stages including light sensitivity, directional sensitivity, and various stages of resolution and sensitivity to color. There are even eyes in the animal kingdom that are better than human eyes in that they are more adept to seeing in the dark and able to see in spectrums unavailable to the human eye. I think the conclusion from design is ultimately entirely a result of lack of knowledge about the subject at hand.

I certainly reserve the right to disagree with what I consider truth and false though.

The last poster said it right. And you know, at least Muhammad and Gandhi died! There is far less of a supernatural aura surrounding these characters. Does that help their credibility? Sure it does. That said though; I believe that the Quran is even worse than the bible in some senses, but that can be the topic of another discussion. I end again with a quote; this time from the Buddha (from memory): “believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who said it, even if I said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense”.