rhutchin

I think you have put the cart before the horse. It is the consequence of having been saved that a person knows that they are a sinner. Prior to salvation, a person is described as being totally depraved (he does not seek God) and would never classify himself as a sinner (people have been known to claim such just to please someone they love, e.g., a child for his mother or a boy to satisfy the demands of his girlfriend). It is only after God saves a person that they see themselves as a sinner and this leads the person to cry out to God (on the basis of that which was done by Christ) to be cleansed.

You sound like many people who are attracted to “religion� because they want to be free from the guilt of that which they have done which they attribute to be the cause of bad things happening to them. They then call themselves a sinner and profess to “believe� in Christ, but when life does not get materially better (or they are faced with doing what the Bible says when they have no desire to do so), they give it up.

The faith you describe above seems to have been worthless in that you demanded that the Bible prove itself before you would really believe. I don’t see anything in what you write above that should lead anyone to conclude that God had saved you. You are basically a witness to what "you" did. That is not salvation.

rhutchin

If one person calculates the creation of the universe to have occurred in 4004 BC and another that in occurred in 13,000 BC, they both can’t be right. That's a good observation on your part.

Now, is it possible for a person to conclude that each used a different line of reasoning to get to the different dates?

John A. Broussard

Ah! So it is you, after all, who decides whether or not my neighbor is a Christian.

You investigate the bible to determine whether god has saved him. When you find out he has been saved, then he must be Christians.

Isn't that correct?

John A. Broussard

Yup!

Now what's the right answer--according to the book you claim is historically correct.

rhutchin

The right answer will be that which agrees with everything else in the Bible. Given that, I go with the earlier date and the reasoning that supports the calculation of that date.

rhutchin

Not exactly. It is God who decides to save your neighbor, and it is God who reveals to your neighbor that he has been saved. It is your neighbor that God prompts to investigate the Bible and find that he has been saved. My role, and that of other Christians, is to exhort people to investigate the Bible to determine whether God has saved them and then to provide encouragement and support to those whom God has saved that they may live a holy life pleasing to God.

John A. Broussard

So Bishop Ussher reading the same book came up with a completely wrong answer. Right? How could that be? Was he misled by Satan?

And, if the good Bishop could be that far off, might you not also be mistaken? Or are you claiming that the bible is an absolutely reliable source of astronomical and geological knowledge--that examined correctly it will reveal the answers to all these questions human scientists now look for answers to?

Wouldn't it just be a good idea to close those University departments and simply check the good book for answers to the age of the earth, the origin of living species, the structure of the universe?

Just look how far off scientists are just regarding the age of the universe, with 13,000 years by your estimate, and 4,000,000,000 by theirs.

Think of all the time, effort and money we would save by not dwelling on the germ theory of disease and simply using Christ's technique of healing lepers instead?

I realize I have a lot of questions above, but you have shown remarkable patience in answering my questions, so a few more shouldn't be too burdensome.

Thank you.

John A. Broussard

If they are saved, why do they need encouragement and support?

Wayne Delia

Sure, but what's the point? Which line of reasoning is correct? One or the other, or neither, but it can't be both. The scientific and cosmologic estimate of the age of the universe probably isn't exact, but it's much more accurate than either of the theological estimates. This is a common technique of yours: when your belief is challenged with a competing or conflicting belief, you retreat without supporting your position or refuting the competition, such as "People are entitled to their beliefs" without your explanation of why you would reject other people's non-Christian beliefs. It's a typical dodge. You aren't confident enough in your own position to answer the following question: is Bishop Ussher's method of calculating the age of the universe correct? If you say yes, then the alternate site you produced must be wrong; if you say no, then you're criticizing his method blindly, since you admitted you aren't really familiar with the method. Actual physical scientific evidence shows both figures to be off by several orders of magnitude (Ussher is off by three or four orders of magnitude). "All I know is what's in the Bible," you said, and Ussher carried out his calculation using nothing more than the dates and the ages of the lineages Bible. The alternate view on the website could have used exactly the same method, but may have made mistakes in arriving at a final figure - that could explain the difference in the results. I'm not interested enough in rebutting that website, though, since you're not interested enough in picking and retaining a specific position.

WMD

Wayne Delia

You are correct in that the Bible has no specific verse indicating the age of the universe since creation, or the time that man has spent on the earth. There is no verse which is in the form "And so the time from Adam to Jesus was four thousand years, or four 'days' of God's time, or whatever." What has been my experience with Christianity is that ministers, priests, pastors, etc. will play a little fast and loose with the facts during their sermons, sacrificing actual truth in order to get a point across, such as "The message of the Bible is to blah blah blah!" where "blah blah blah" isn't actually specified, but requires a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption of completely unrelated verses and passages, each comprising an incomplete fraction of the message, and they still don't add up to the actual claim. That credibility gap is usually made up with the congregation's collective "faith", or a willingness to believe whatever comes down the pike as long as it's not derogatory, offensive, or critical of God. For example, if a minister was giving a sermon and said "We read in the Bible that God helps those who help themselves!" as an excuse for why God doesn't seem to help anybody lately, few in the congregation would object that the maxim was originally written by Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanac. That appears to me to be the style of argumentation used lately by rhutchin, and to his dismay, the "pious lie" technique (as demonstrated in the "Atheists are thieves" fiasco) isn't working on atheists, skeptics, and cynics. It boils down to a technique which doesn't work, but the theist feels "wouldn't it be cool if it did work?" Of that I am certain; I've been there, and it flat-out didn't work.

WMD