Jobar

Heh. Talk about straddling the line between the two forums I mod...

My own opinion is that this forum has done its work if someone decides that theistic evolution is something they believe- that is, they reject literal creationism as requiring a god who lies to us via the fossil record. I will leave it to the other mods to do it- but I would say this should go to EoG, since it pretty much starts out with the acceptance of evolution.

emotional

So you're saying one can't do science unless one is committed to naturalism? That shows your arrogance.

I consider this discussion closed. You've already made up your mind that nature is all there is, matter is all there is, science requires naturalism, evolution disproves God and there is no life after death, so I can't see any productive results in this discussion. No point in further fruitless debate.

Jobar

After consulting with pz, I've decided that this is an EoG topic (by a hair!)

So, we'll see how this fits there. Jobar.

Asha'man

If we are to read any book as non-fiction, then that book will make statements about events that occur in the real world. If an event occurs in the real world, it will leave a mark, and that mark can be observed. Science is really nothing more than making observations and reasoning about the events that produced that observation.

The Bible makes plenty of statements about events that supposedly occurred in the real world. Simple observation tells us quite conclusively that many of those events did not, and in fact cannot, have occurred. The first two chapters of Genesis make very definite statements about the creation of the universe and mankind, and are entirely at odds with dozens of branches of science. The flood story is also utterly incompatible with many fields of science. Scattered throughout the rest of the book are various references to disease and insanity, and their cures are, again, utterly at odds with science.

If the Bible is provably incorrect on things that can be tested, how can it possibly be trusted as an accurate guide to things that must be taken entirely on faith?

To escape this problem, you must resort to a metaphorical and non-literal reading of the Bible. However, your interpretation then becomes entirely groundless. You read what you want to read, and ignore the rest. In effect, you have invented your own personal religion, using the Bible as nothing more than inspiration. This is not Christianity, it is CJDism, or whatever you want to name it.

If you are inventing your own religion, and defining your own god, then it is entirely possible, and probably required, that your new god is compatible with our understanding of the universe (as expressed by current scientific theory). This new god could possibly be faintly influencing life, perhaps participating with the direction of evolution even. But you are no longer talking about the Christian God, which was my original point.

Wounded King

Dear Emotional,

I think you will find I said no such thing. All I said was that the Sciences as we know them today developed out of the field of study called Natural Philosophy. I'm not sure what you thought I meant by Natural Philosophy, but as I said this can be verified by a brief study of the history and development of science.

I made no claims that one must be a hard line mechanist to study in science. I also strongly object to you telling me what I have made up my mind to believe, you know nothing about my beliefs. The fact that I feel that there should be substantiation for claims made is due to my being skeptical, not due to a vested interest in pushing some hard line Atheistic genetic reductionist dogma.

CJD

* Agreed, but let us not suffer under the delusion that in the process of observation we stand neutral. Expectations often produce our conclusions. I have yet to hear a sound epistemological argument to counter this notion. My expections regarding science and the bible has already been stated. They are complimentary, that is why when I take account of what science has to say, I try to determine whether its' a priori commitment is godless. I think I've written this before, but it is not, in my opinion, God vs. science. It is God vs. godless science. Science, Asha'man, is quite a bit more than "making observations and reasoning about the events, etc." It's not as if you are some blank slate coming into it (you're a self-avowed atheist!). At least let us first recognize that our starting points are altogether opposed. Now, this does not mean that good science is impossible for either one of us; rather, it should drive us to humility, recognizing that there is much scientifically that we do not know. Therefore, "simple observations" do not tell us conclusively that the bible is false on some points; simple observations plus godless assumptions, however, will likely lead to this conclusion.

This is just a "for example." For example, you assume the first two chapters of Genesis make very definite statements and so on. You must stand corrected. They make very definite statements that God, being the Creator, is Lord over all the created. They do not, however, make any definite statements as to how that was done. It is not a story of the very beginning so much as it is a story of God coming in media res to subdue the chaotic deep. This very God who controls chaos, is the very God who will lead the people into their land and hold fast to his covenant, etc. That is the point. It is not a scientific manual, nor does it ever claim to be. Its statements about the world are not scientific, they are theological. Once again, you are not dealing with the fundamentalist, creation-scientist hermeneutic here. You must deal with the actual text, if you want to say anything meaningful to me about interpretation. And that, my friend, requires real work, not petty antagonism.


* First, I am no scientist, but I must remind you of the 17th century church and Galileo. What I find looking at history is that people's interpretations have been found wrong--not the bible. If, for example, some scientific discoveries come along that are entirely incompatible with the Scriptures, should I completely tank my Xian faith? What if, upon perceiving tadpoles to spontaneously generate in a mud puddle, I apostasize because God obviously had nothing to do with such a thing. Then along comes Pasteur. "Oh, damn, spontaneous generation is wrong after all. I guess I'll be a Christian again." No, I think I'll wait it out until another Pasteur comes along. What I am trying to say is that I am not sure that the bible is "provably incorrect" on anything.

* Second, I cannot agree on your use of the word faith. Faith is belief conjoined with obedience. It is never blind. If you cannot agree with me here, I will have to substitute another word. What you mean is "wishful thinking." What I mean is supernatural fiducia. Xianity is not merely a robe I wear. It is who I am. In other words, I cannot help but to believe in the existence of the God portrayed in the Scriptures. Every time someone, with a mere slight of hand, dismisses one's Xianity, he or she commits murder. The same, of course, goes for those Xians who do the same to others.

*It is anything but groundless, that is, I am not pulling this stuff out of the air. While ignoring portions of the text is indeed a very real problem for me and countless other Xians, I must remind you that in the same way no scientist has the corner on truth, neither does any one biblical scholar, that is, we are all trying to make sense of the world. I cannot even imagine how much you ignore at the outset, given your naturalistic assumptions. As to the "methaphorical and non-literal" bit, well, that entirely depends on the orignial intent and message and genre. If I treat strict historical narrative as metaphorical, then I do violence. But if I treat, for example, the first few chapters of Genesis as a narrative that obviously makes use of various literary devices, and then proceed to read it theologically--as opposed to rigidly scientifically--it is anything but groundless. Put it another way, I am convinced, because of the surrounding historical context and the original language of the earliest copies that it is not a practice in scientific origins. No, it is about theology, about a God who subdues the reigning chaos present in 1:1 (a result of the Pleistocene?), about a God who wants his people to live "holily" in the land.


Much of Church history is laden with such sadness, I will admit. But with one fell swoop you have managed to relativize my years of studying this stuff by sweeping it into the corner of subjectivism. I, of course, cannot allow that. If you stop reading pop-theology, and dig-in to the real stuff, engaging the languages, the history, etc., I do think you will find that I, as a confessional Xian, am doing nothing more than applying Scripture and tradition to the current situation. Besides, you think too much of me by suggesting I have the intellectual wherewithal to construct my own "personal religion." I realize you, like Darwin's Terrier, probably believe that "anything can mean whatever you want it to mean," but I cannot countenance such idiocy. There is a way to check the interpretations of others, just as there is in science--test it.


* By the way, I am not a theistic evolutionist. I just think the earth is really, really, old (so the geological record). I think God, who stands outside of time, has moved in time, and fashioned the world the way it is now, just like he did when it all began, whenever that was. My God will never be compatible with your understanding of the universe, because your understanding of the universe is--a priori--godless.

Asha'man

Actually, Genesis makes very definite statements about the order things were done. For example, Gen 1:11-12 makes a statement about the creation of grass and fruit trees on day 3. Gen 1:16-18 makes a statement about the creation of the sun and moon on day 4. Now, even if you ignore the timeframe, you still have grass and fruit trees living before the very sunlight that sustains them. Science, on the other hand, places the origin of the Sun and Moon as being several Billion years before grass and fruit trees.

Faith is simply belief unsupported by evidence.

The Bible contains a great many statements about events that supposedly happened in the real world. These things are therefore verifiable, in some form or fashion. It also contains statements about non-tangible things, supernatural things, things that cannot be observed by man. It is impossible to us to verify what happens to us after death, for example, or the contents or existence of heaven. You must take these things entirely on faith, simply because verification is impossible. You believe these things because you have been told they are real, and for no other rational reason. Your belief must rely on the authority and trustworthiness of the source. How is this not Faith?

So the question remains: If the Bible is provably incorrect on things that can be tested, how can it possibly be trusted as an accurate guide to things that must be taken entirely on faith?

But how can you reliably tell the difference between theological language and history? Is the story of Noah supposed to be history? How about the Exodus? Both of those stories read very clearly as history, yet both fail to leave the physical marks that the events demand. If you are free to read those stories as theology, why not the Gospels as well? Do those discuss actual history? Or simply a theological metaphor?

You are making incorrect assumptions about me and my godless understanding of the universe. I learned about the universe while I was a Christian. (I've been interested in science and Astronomy since the 2nd grade.) I learned about it from other Christians. Christians, even as far back as Galileo, generated a great deal of the research that formed my understanding. My understanding of the universe hasn’t suddenly changed, it was my understanding of Christianity that changed.

fishbulb

Occam's razor says nothing of the sort. The razor is a principle of empirical enquiry that simply says this: if you can explain something adequately in terms of what you already know, then be satisfied with that explanation. Don't bother trying to devise an alternative explanation which requires that you invent or suppose the existence of new or unproven entities.

We know that life evolved and continues to evolve. This is an observed fact. No one knows for certain exactly how it happened or how it continues to happen, but we have devised a theory which, while perhaps not accounting for every small detail, does a good job of explaining the big picture, and does not directly contradict any of the evidence we have observed. We can use this theory not just to explain what we have already found, but to correctly predict what we will find in the future. Adding God to the mix does not provide any additional useful information; it does not allow us to make better predictions, so we don't do it.

It is impossible to prove that God can't be responsible for something. God is defined in mysterious terms, and it is always possible to say that God is responsible for whatever we don't understand. It is also possible to say that everything we think we understand is wrong and that everything we can "prove" is caused by natural forces is actually caused by an elaborate, but hidden, mechanism controlled by God. While some people derive some emotional satisfaction by believing this, it is of no practical value because it is just the same as saying that we don't understand how the universe works and we never will, so we ought not even try to figure it out. If Newton, Tesla, Pasteur, and others had all thought that way, we wouldn't have modern medicine, engineering, physics, chemistry, and so forth. So, from a practical standpoint, there is no scientific value in believing in God. But that's where it ends. It's not that God couldn't have possibly caused evolution; it's that God as a concept is useless to evolutionary theory and to science and empirical investigation in general.

CJD

* Asha'man, if you will forgive me, the most obvious features of the text in question have alluded you. I wonder if you have ever spent one day in serious study consulting the sources, languages, etc.? (we Xians, of course, are guilty of this all the time). But it's also exactly what I would expect from a fundamentalist-turned-atheist who has not even taken the time to really search the authoritative texts on the subject. I mean, do you go to a shoemaker to buy a fresh loaf of bread? Do you go to a French professor in order to learn about Dante? No, of course not. Please read the following carefully.

To assume a strict chronology in the text you cite, goes so far away from the plain meaning (even in the English!) that I wonder how it can be missed. There is a pattern here that you have overlooked:

Day 1 (1:3-5): "light"
Day 4 (1:14-19): "lights"


Day 2 (1:6-8): "Waters" and "Sky"
Day 5 (1:20-23): "living beings" (to the fill the waters) and "birds" (to fill the sky).


Day 3 (1:9-13) separation of the sea from dry land / fruit and grain to grow on land
Day 6 (1:24-31): land animals (to roam the dry land) / human beings (to till the fruit and grain)

Finally, Day 7 culminates in rest, being set apart as a day for rest. Remember, if the history at the time of the writing is true, then the writer is writing to a people who were commanded to mirror this day of rest in the land that they were about to enter. Therein lies the point of this framework account of creation.

An obvious pattern emerges, no? What interests me is that you presume to tell me the meaning of the text, and then you proceed--based on your faulty understanding--to argue that the creation account in Genesis is entirely implausible. That, Asha'man, is laughable.

* Um, no it's not.


* I believe these things because I cannot do otherwise. What is more, I have never heard or read anything that discounts the biblical witness. I have heard plenty, however, that discounts peoples' interpretations of the biblical witness. The point is that I strive to know, before I dismiss out of hand any other plausible alternative.


* Tell me one belief of yours that does not rely on the authority and trustworthiness of the source. How is that not faith? Once again, credo ut intelligam.


* Years and years of study, my friend. And I tend to avoid pop-theology or pop-atheism, which has the ill effect of giving many people the wrong ideas.


* First, I am not quite sure how a local flood some 4500 years ago has failed to leave any physical marks. What "marks" are you talking about? I guess I have the same question about the Exodus. What are you (or should I be) looking for? Remember, I am no scientist.


* Please, do not miss my point. If my choice of reading something one way and another thing another way seems willy-nilly to you, I assure you it is not. As any careful reader would, I attempt to take into account the grammatico-socio-historical context, including the literary genre at hand, and go from there. The Gospels read like historical narratives. The first few chapters of Genesis do not. The Exodus and the Flood, however, do. The Psalms, for obvious reasons, read like poetry. Kings, Chronicles, etc., read like historical narratives. But the one thing we must always keep in mind is that no matter what genre the text is in, the writers had theological intent when writing. This may seem ludicrously clear, but it is worth repeating. They were all pushing a theological point. And that must be taken into account. I, for one, trust their accounts, because I believe in their intent. We cannot look at the narratives of Scripture like we would a newspaper article. They are not full of pendantic precision. I mean, no one wrote like that in the Ancient Near East. What it seems to come down to is that you are demanding things from the text that it does not intend to give. As such, you are going to have to find a better reason for denying it.


* I think, as I do for any other historical record in the Scriptures, that they are theological history. In other words, the events actually happened, and were written to promulgate certain theological points. Metaphor has a place in Scripture, but not when, for example, some author named Luke claims to be writing eyewitness accounts of certain events. I dare say he did not mean for us to read his text as metaphor.


* Whatever it was, it was "not Christianity, it was Asha'manism, or whatever you want to name it."

* Come now, you should know this, since you were once around a bunch of Christians, that from my perspective, your leaving the faith makes quite apparent that you never had faith to begin with (in the way I described in the previous post). It makes no difference how hard you shut your eyes when you were a kid, in fact it's not even about you (or me!); faith is about what God does. If your understanding of the universe has not changed for quite some time, and then you come to the conclusion that this Xian-stuff is a load of garbage, then it seems evident to me that the only reason you were hanging on to God in the first place was the very same reason that the people in the market did when Nietzsche's Madman accused them of murdering him.

Regards,

hinduwoman

Evolution and God need not be mutually exclusive.
God could have just breathed in the first spark of life and then sat back and waited to see how we go on about it.
He also could have intervened in crucial stages of evolution to make sure that new mutations that he wants come into being and survive.