#2392: — 05/11  at  09:37 AM
<i>It's not just the US that is infested with creationists; take a look at Canadian Christianity. Like their southern brethren, they seem to be greatly concerned about homosexuals and evolution; I'm always astounded at how much conservative Christian identity is tied to the denial of civil rights and opposition to science.</i>

I'm not astounded at all. The purpose of pointing at those who aren't like us or who profess contrary beliefs is to heighten the difference between Us and Them. Conservatives of all stripes who might be divided on other matters at least all share a common disdain of homosexuals as well as atheists. This gives those leaders who engage in such rhetoric support from their followers. In other words, they're playing to their base. The reason why Papal infallibility was devised in the 19th century wasn't because the Catholic Church really believed in it, but because it allowed the Church as an institution to better wall off their flock from the growing influence of modernity by using the tool of "If the Pope says it, it must be true" to protect the Church's power.

I don't think all Christians are like this, of course. But I do think liberal and even moderate Christians are eventually going to have to grasp the nettle of the supernatural assumptions that their faith incorporates and pull them out. To some this may only leave what amounts to humanism, but given that Jesus was human I think you can still have Christianity, albeit a Christianity where the fictional part is acknowledged as such but is still used as the basis for moral instruction. Sort of like Aesop's Fables, only with Jesus instead of Aesop.

Believers here, if any, feel free to flame away, er, respond...

#2393: Courtney — 05/11  at  11:47 AM
Heh. My dad (a seventh grade public school science teacher) used to get death threats whenever he taught evolution. Or geologic history. Nowadays, if they can spout some biblical nonsense semi-relevant, he lets 'em have credit. (and you'd be surprised how many of them can quote chapter and verse) He's not allowed to flunk more than a certain percentage anyway.

#2394: — 05/11  at  04:27 PM
Jacob simply outwitted Laban, that's all. His herds and Laban's herds were separated by three days of walking, but they shared the same watering hole, and that's where the breeding took place. Jacob set up the rods based on ancient superstitions to give the appearance of some kind of hocus-pocus in the breeding that was going on. It was a brilliant ruse. He tied his better, stronger female animals up near the watering hole when they were in heat, where they'd be conspicuous for Laban's males. He tied up his male animals far away. Naturally, there were far more offspring with streaks, speckles and spots than purely white, as we all know from genetics now -- and which Jacob knew then. He quietly separated those animals from Laban's flocks since they were his under the deal, and added them to his own. His flocks thus grew larger and larger and stronger and stronger, while Laban's stayed about the same size and were weaker. He didn't cheat Laban -- he just outsmarted him. Maybe you should STUDY the Bible instead of bashing it, Sir. You'd be amazed how many dumb mistakes you are making out of sheer ignorance. Hate to break the news to you, but. . . .

#2395: — 05/11  at  04:39 PM
Jane,

While that might be a reasonable explanation of the events described in that bible chapter, that is stated nowhere in the text. You can interpret the text all you like, but as it's written, this holy and inerrant text describes unspeckled goats having speckled offspring because of the coloration of some twigs near where they mated.

I'll be nice and assume your assertion that Jacob knew about genetics (did he "believe" in evolution?) is just a twist in the sentence structure.

Maybe you should READ the Bible instead of wishfully reinterpreting what it says, Madame. You'd be amazed... etc.

#2396: PZ Myers — 05/11  at  04:46 PM
"the goats mated by the rods, and so they brought forth streaked, speckled and spotted kids" seems to me to be a plain statement of causality. There is no way you can stretch this account to meet your interpretation.

And ancient superstitions they may be, but they are canonized by the Bible. Doesn't that make it a work of superstition?

I'm afraid he did cheat Laban. Taking advantage of someone's ignorance to rob him of a large part of his flock, while also making sure his remaining flock was "weaker", doesn't sound to me like the kind of thing I'd do to my father-in-law. Or anyone, for that matter.

#2397: — 05/11  at  05:10 PM
To Andrew: Laban was duped and now you are duped. Read it again. Maybe it would help if you moved your lips. :>) JK :>) As for how to properly read and understand the Bible, there's a cool skill you could look up in the dictionary: "hermeneutics." You ain't got it, Bro. But you could, if you'd lose the attitude and get into the spirit of the scholarship that it takes to understand the Bible properly. OK? No hard feelings: just honest advice.

To PZ: Well, why do people buy one brand of cookies and not another? Packaging? Price? Sprinkles? A "plain statement of causality" is that they liked 'em and thought they were "best" so they bought 'em. Doesn't mean those cookies are what they THINK they are. Laban liked the deal Jacob offered and thought it was "best." So he . . . bought it. :>) Jacob's maneuver with the fancy rods was just for show, to cement his success. Get it? As for "superstitions" in the Bible, it's chock full of 'em: weird pagan worship rituals, child sacrifice, incest, astrology -- all kinds of weird things are used in the Bible as examples of how dumb people can be and how NOT to be deceived. Again, I say Jacob just outsmarted Laban and didn't cheat him: he didn't rob him, he just was a better businessman. It's like this: if we both take a test, and I score higher on the curve than you do and get a better grade, did I rob you and cheat you? THINK ABOUT IT, BUCKO. God wants all of us to succeed, like Jacob. But to know how, you've got to read God's Word, and do the thinking work that it takes to understand and apply it. Thanks for the opportunity to give you guys a glimpse of what you're missing. :>)

#2398: PZ Myers — 05/11  at  05:26 PM
Unreal.

If Jacob was planning to connive to take over a bunch of Laban's flock, why put up "fancy rods"? Your interpretation simply makes no sense at all. Actually, your use of the word "hermeneutics" suggests that you think it means "invent whatever interpretation you want, then rationalize it".

If that kind of twisted justification for greed is what I'm missing, boy, am I glad to be an atheist. And somebody remind me to never trust a Christian in any kind of deal.

#2399: PZ Myers — 05/11  at  05:28 PM
(Yes, I know most Christians aren't like Susan.)

#2400: — 05/11  at  05:49 PM
Susan,

I'd begun typing out a response to your post that addressed the points, but it was really boring. I'm just going to skip ahead to the personal attacks and point out that your smiley is even more annoying than the normal annoying smiley (is the '>' supposed to be a nose? jesus with a small 'j'), as well as your elementary school/mom use of slang is just embarassing. You sound like Ned Flanders channeling Dennis Miller, uh, Sis/BUCKO.

Needless to say, your argument is full of shit. If I wanted to spend time interpreting the Word of God, I'd believe in him. Just don't assume your references to the bible logically lead to your hackneyed interpretations and please, please don't believe that they are science.

Oh, and no hard feelings, of course.

#2401: — 05/11  at  05:54 PM
ok, fine.

If you really believe in this god, why would you even need to question his ability to affect the pheotypes of a herd of goats through this sort of magical incantation. Considering you believe this guy designed the freaking things, why in the world would you need to invoke evolution to explain this?

#2402: John Wilkins — 05/11  at  08:23 PM
If white ceilings cause white births (as is biblically warranted) what would mirrored ceilings cause? Is this the explanation of heredity - each partners conceives as they see the other, and that is why children resemble both their parents? Children conceived in tawdry motels must resemble the partner on the bottom, therefore.

Hey, a scientific program worth pursuing. Can anyone lend me $100 for the next few nights?

#2403: PZ Myers — 05/11  at  08:38 PM
You know you're going to need at least 9 months to carry out this study.

I think mirrored ceilings might explain where buttheads come from.

#2404: John Wilkins — 05/11  at  09:37 PM
I'll continue as long as it takes, and as long as the funding holds out. I'm dedicated like that.

#2405: PZ Myers — 05/11  at  11:42 PM
You are a true scientist and scholar.

#2406: — 05/12  at  07:26 AM

Someone's got to be the control here. A less glamorous role I realize, but one I'm willing to fill.

#2407: — 05/12  at  05:47 PM
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/false.html#genetics

#2408: — 05/12  at  10:35 PM
Gee, you must have been faking-sick that day and missed Sunday School, when most of us little kiddies learned this story. :>) FYI: Jacob's father-in-law and uncle, Laban, was a pagan. He had "household gods" that he consulted, among other superstitions. Jacob was well aware of the phony superstition of the pagan herdsmen of the time, that experiences or sights seen by mothers in pregnancy could decisively affect their unborn offspring ("mark the baby"). Jacob didn't buy in to that stuff, but he used the superstition of the local yokels as a "cover" for the intelligent selective breeding program that he was undertaking. He basically put the food plants in the troughs when the stronger males were around and made sure his best females were there for that boy-meets-girl thing. Meanwhile, the stupid pagans were distracted by the ruse of the striped and polka-dotted branches. It was actually very humorous on several levels. Note that groves of poplar trees were where pagans worshiped their phony baloney nature gods that got them in so much trouble with the one true God (Hosea 4:13). Sheep loved to eat the poplar tree, too, but I bet Jacob chose that kind of tree as a secret "tweak" of the pagans who'd made him work for them for next to nothing for so long. Also note that the almond symbolized the dependability of God and is probably why Jacob chose that for the troughs, again as a quiet "in your face" to his tormentors. I think the plane tree is really the chestnut tree, a common tree of the locale and I don't know any particular spiritual significance other than the moo-moo's thought it was tasty. Anyway, he kept mating his best with Laban's best, knowing that the vast majority of the offspring would be dark and spotted and thus would end up in his herd, not Laban's. Laban thought Jacob was a sucker for wanting the spotted animals. But the fur color didn't matter at all for meat and milk products. Laban should have known better than to think Jacob was stupid, for before Jacob went to work for him, Laban had very little property (Genesis 30:30), but Jacob increased his wealth a whole bunch by being smart while working for him for 14 years, suffering Laban's deceit and all kinds of pay cuts and other fandango. Laban admits that in Gen. 30:27, and admits that Jacob's success is because of the Lord's favor on Jacob. The last six years Jacob worked there, building his own flocks, he didn't actually take anything from Laban -- he just outfumbled him, business-wise, and still left him far richer than before he came. OK? Now you can have a gold star on your paper because you've learned the lesson that, I hope, will make you have a newfound or renewed appreciation of the Bible and its -- yessirree Bob -- inerrancy. If you'd like to avoid this kind of embarrassing misunderstanding of the Bible in the future, and I certainly hope you do, I'd recommend "Introduction to Biblical Interpretation" by Dr. William W. Klein, Dr. Craig L. Blomberg and Dr. Robert L. Hubbard Jr. (W Publishing Group, 1993, 518 pp). Great poolside reading this summer! Share with all your fun, fun, fun atheist friends! :>)

#2409: — 05/13  at  07:10 AM
And here I thought "mating by the rods" meant artificial insemination!

#2410: — 05/13  at  11:05 AM
What you folks have to learn is that the Bible doesn�t say what it says. It says what Susan says it says.

Verses 39-42 sure don�t leave much wiggle room.

From page 4 of Susan�s book at Amazon: �As we will see, the role of the Spirit in understanding God�s Word is indispensable. The Spirit convinces God�s people of the truth of the biblical message and convicts and enables them to live consistently with that truth.� Basically, they concede that the Bible could never stand on its own merit.

i.e. If you�re not gullible, you�re not going to �get it�.

The url posted above defends the passage differently. The result was not due to the specifics just mentioned but rather a miracle, which is �plainly� described in the verses following. Rather different than Susan�s take.

Believers agree that the Bible requires interpretation. But they disagree about that interpretation. Doesn�t give you the warm fuzzies, does it?

#2411: — 05/13  at  12:52 PM
Gong, Duane. You left out the next sentence from that Bible interpretation book. The quote you gave people here is by consequence 'way out of context, and deceptive. But you KNEW that. :>)

Yes, it's true that people who don't have the Holy Spirit illuminating the meaning of the Bible because they reject Jesus Christ can't possibly understand the Bible. They block themselves from that ability. But understanding the Bible is not some kind of a magic trick. It takes WORK and EFFORT to understand the Bible correctly. As the passage you so conveniently quit quoting goes on to say next, "But the Spirit's help does not replace the need to interpret biblical passages according to the principles of language communication."

There's hope for you yet, though, Duane! Get the book and you can get off the Gong Show of atheism once and for all, and understand what God is trying to tell you, through His wonderful, inerrant holy Word. :>)

If others are thinking hermeneutics is some kind of hocus-pocus based on Duane's post, here are the subheads from the 518-pg. "Introduction to Biblical Interpretation" to give you an idea of the literary, historical and analytical scholarship entailed:

Chapter 1: The Need for Hermeneutics

Why Hermeneutics?
Hermeneutics Defined
The Art and Science of Interpretation
The Role of the Interpreter
The Meaning of the Message
Some Challenges of Bible Interpretation
Distance of Time
Cultural Distance
Geographical Distance
Distance of Language
Eternal Relevance -- The Divine Factor
The Goal of Hermeneutics
Conclusion

Chapter 2: The History of Interpretation

Jewish Interpretation
Rabbinic Judaism
Hellenistic Judaism
The Qumran Community
The Apostolic Period (ca. A.D. 30-100)
The Patristic Period (ca. A.D. 100-590)
The Apostolic Fathers (ca. A.D. 100-150)
Alexandria versus Antioch (ca. A.D. 150-400)
Church Councils (ca. A.D. 400-590)
The Middle Ages (ca. A.D. 590-1500)
The Reformation (ca. A.D. 1500-1650)
The Post-Reformation Period (ca. A.D. 1650-1800)
The Modern Period (ca. A.D. 1800-Present)
The Nineteenth Century
The Twentieth Century
Post-World War I
Post World War II

Chapter 3: The Canon and Translations

I'm getting tired of typing :>) and hope you can see that we ain't just whistlin' Dixie when it comes to the knowledge and effort required to do this properly. So I'll switch to key points from the remaining nine chapters to show the broad sweep of skills required:

Qualifications of the Interpreter
Presuppositions for Correct Interpretation
Levels of Meaning
Textual Meaning
Literary Context
Historical-Cultural Background
Word Meanings
Grammatical-Structural Relationships
Old Testament Poetry
Narratives
Law
Prophecy
Wisdom
Avoiding Mistakes in Application (DING DONG, DUANE!!! THAT ONE'S FOR YOU!!! :>) )

Here's a great subsection you really need, too, me boyo:

A Four-Step Methodology for Legitimate Application
Determine the Original Application(s)
Evaluate the Level of Specificity of the Original Applications
Identify the Cross-Cultural Principles
Find Appropriate Applications that Embody the Broader Principles

Since this is stuff that Bible students like me know, and you big palooka Bible-haters don't, then every time you propound and pontificate what you think the Bible means -- with your barn doors wide open exposing your own ignorance -- it just makes us "good guys" sigh, smile and wish you'd "zip it."

Just get the book, Duane. :>)

#2412: — 05/13  at  01:40 PM
Looks to me like that point is made and conceded. �Proper� interpretation presupposes belief.

We are left with verses 32-42 plainly saying the rods affected offspring. Apparently, only a believer�s mind can wiggle out of it.

And we are left with varying interpretations from �scholars� who are absolutely persuaded their view is correct. Inerrancy ain�t much good if nobody can prove which view is correct.

#2413: — 05/13  at  03:37 PM
'Nother gong, me boyo. To properly interpret any set of symbols, one doesn't need to BELIEVE the message is correct, nor to revere it as holy, does one? Such as . . . code-breakers? an astrophysics text? musical notation?

It's the same thing with the Bible or anything else that communicates abstractions. Takes mental muscle power, Duane. No magic, no mumbo-jumbo. That's why you don't love the Bible . . . yet. :>) You just ain't learned how to read it yet. You just ain't applied yo'se'f to the task. Gotta do some "reps" so you're not such a 90-pound weakling on the beach getting intellectual sand kicked in your face like this. :>)

Takes context, a knowledge of history, an understanding of etymology, familiarity with Biblical symbols, genres, storylines and archetypes, and most of all experience with the wondrous literary polyvalence of the Bible.

Look at it this way: if you found a piece of paper with this number:

398-6252

. . . you'd be hard-pressed to interpret what that number means. Is it a bank account? A password? A school identification number?

But if that piece of paper were inside someone's telephone book, in the "T" section, and it matched the phone number recorded for a certain "Duane Tiemann," and the phone book belonged to the keeper of the MONKEY CAGE at the local zoo, also listed as the address of the "Duane Tiemann" in question, then you'd be able to interpret what that number means with a high rate of accuracy: your phone number, Ape Boy.

OOOH -- OOOH -- OOOH -- AAAAH AAAAH AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!! :>)

Face it, Duane. You guys are blaspheming God by willfully misleading people about what the Bible says. You think you're making a monkey out of Him. Ohhhhhh, Duane:

Psalm 2:4

But do you know what? God never laughs at anybody without being full of love for them, and He listens to His children who pray diligently, on their faces, claiming these nonbelievers for the Kingdom, as I do for you, even though you look like a monkey, and you act like one, too. :>)

#2414: PZ Myers — 05/13  at  04:30 PM
Jebus. The raving fundie nutcases have discovered Pharyngula.

Seriously, Ms. Susan, your excuses for the Bible are a colossal load of BS.

#2415: Rory Parle — 05/13  at  04:52 PM
Okay Susan I thik this is a reasonable summary of what you've written so far:

"The Bible doesn't mean what it says, it means what it means. Since I have faith I can determine this meaning even though none of what I say is actually written anywhere."

Now I think the rest of us can reasonably react by saying that no-one cares what you think it means because, by the simple act of reading it, we can determine what it does mean. Since it says "the goats mated by the rods, and so they brought forth streaked, speckled and spotted kids" we can - like I said, using reason - determine that it means "the goats mated by the rods, and so they brought forth streaked, speckled and spotted kids". That's a clear statement of causality.

You seem to gain great pleasure from your understanding of the Bible. I can only imagine what joy you would gain from an actual understanding of the world, from (genuine) cosmology to evolution. The reality of our universe is so much more wonderous than any bronze-age fiction.

#2416: John Wilkins — 05/13  at  04:59 PM
I'm prepared to do a Bible study after testing creationist genetics, with any willing creationist subjects of the female variety...

#2417: PZ Myers — 05/13  at  05:06 PM
Whoa, John, you must really be desperate if you're hitting on <i>creationists</i> at a website half a world away from you...

Hey, do you think that's where creationists come from: people who have sex, and then do penance by reading their bibles assiduously afterwards?

#2418: — 05/13  at  05:38 PM
Hi, Rory: Well, I'm glad to be the one to open your eyes to the wonderful world of Bible scholarship.

If you know how these ancient people lived and worked, how the nomadic life went, how herding and breeding were done, and how intertwined God's people were with the pagan people, then this passage would be a lot easier to understand.

If you knew anything about the nature religions of the day, and how they contrasted with what Abraham's tribe was in to, you would understand the significance better, too.

If you have read and studied the entire Bible, you would see the connections between this story and many others in the Bible.

Last, but not least, if you could take off your 21st Century hat and put on a 2000 B.C. hat, you might see what a cool maneuver this was by Jacob, to hoist those pagan creeps by their own petards and using their own pagan superstitions to beat them at their own game. :>) His biologic knowledge was impeccable, you have to admit.

Bottom line: you atheists DIDN'T KNOW ENOUGH TO GET THE JOKE!!! :>)

Perhaps a quote from another scholarly book would help. This one is "Systematic Theology" by Dr. Norman Geisler (Bethany House, Minneapolis, 2002, 627 pp). The section is entitled "The Principles of Objective Hermeneutics."

The Principles of Understanding God's Special Revelation Objectively

Since God has given revelation, and since it is possible for us to understand its meaning, we need to understand what guidelines to use in the process of interpreting it. The following are the principles we must bring wtih us as we approach God's special revelation, Scripture.

Look for the Author's Meaning, Not the Reader's

The objective meaning of a text is the one given to it by the author, not the one attributed to it by the reader. Readers should ask what was meant by the author, not what it means to the reader. Once a reader discovers what the author meant by the text, he has obtained its objective meaning. Thus, asking, "What does it mean to me?" is the wrong question, and it will almost certainly lead to a subjective interpretation. Asking of the author, "What did he mean?" will almost certainly lead the reader in the right direction, that is, toward the objective meaning.

Look for the Author's Meaning (What), Not His Purpose (Why)

Another road to hermeneutical subjectivity leads to the author's purpose rather than to his meaning. Meaning is found in what the author has affirmed, not in why he affirmed it. Purpose does not determine meaning. One can know what the author said without knowing why he said it. Two examples will suffice to elucidate this point.

First, if one says, "Come over to my house tonight," there is no difficulty in understanding what is meant, even though the purpose for the invitation is not known. What is understood apart from why. The meaning is apprehended, even though the purpose is not known.

Of course, if the purpose is known, then the statement may take on a whole new significance. But meaning and significance are not the same. Meaning deals with what? and significance deals with so what? For example, if the purpose of the invitation is to inform you that you lost a loved one, as opposed to that you won ten million dollars, then the significance is quite variant. However, the meaning of the statement, "Come over to my house," is identical in either case.

Second, to offer a biblical illustration, Exodus 23:19 commanded the Israelites: "Do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk." The meaning of this sentence is very clear, and every Israelite knew exactly what they were not supposed to do. However, the purpose of this command is not clear at all. A survey of a few commentators yields a variety of different hypotheses as to the purpose of this command:

(1) It profaned the Feast of Ingathering.
(2) It would cause indigestion.
(3) It was cruel to cook a goat in the milk that nourished it.
(4) It was a form of idolatry.
(5) It violated the parent/child relationship.

In other words, nobody seems to know for sure what the purpose was. Yet everyone knows for sure what the meaning is. If purpose determined meaning, then no one would know what the meaning is. Thankfully, it doesn't. What is said is clear apart from why it was said.

Look for Meaning in the Text, Not Beyond It

The meaning is not found beyond the text (in God's mind), beneath the text (in the mystic's mind), or behind the text (in the author's unexpressed intention); it is found in the text (in the author's expressed meaning). For instance, the beauty of a sculpture is not found behind, beneath, or beyond the sculpture. Rather, it is expressed in the sculpture.

All textual meaning is in the text. The sentences (in the context of their paragraphs in the context of the whole piece of literature) are the formal cause of meaning. They are the form that gives meaning to all the parts (words, punctuation, etc.).

Applying the six causes to meaning will help explain the point. Following Aristotle, scholastic philosophers distinguished six different causes:

(1) efficient cause -- that by which something comes to be;
(2) final cause -- that for which something comes to be;
(3) formal cause -- that of which something comes to be;
(4) material cause -- that out of which something comes to be;
(5) exemplar cause -- that after which something comes to be;
(6) instrumental cause -- that through which something comes to be.

. . .

Look for Meaning in Affirmation, Not Implication

Another guideline in discovering the objective meaning of a text is to look for its affirmation, not its implication. Ask what the test affirms (or denies), not what it implies. This is not to say that implications are not possible or important, but only that the basic meaning is not found there. Meaning is in what the text affirms, not in how it can be applied.

There is only one meaning in a text, but there are many implications and applications. In terms of meaning, the sensus unum (one sense) view is correct; however, there is a sensus plenum (full sense) in terms of implication.

-------------

There are huge libraries full of books about how to do this, Rory, and I highly recommend that you get a study Bible, preferably a King James or New King James one. It will have great study notes, cross references, timelines, maps, etc. Maybe it will help you to stop ridiculing the Bible . . . and start loving it as much as I do.

Good luck to you, Sir.

#2419: — 05/13  at  05:38 PM

So now we have:

�Yes, it�s true that people who don�t have the Holy Spirit illuminating the meaning of the Bible because they reject Jesus Christ can�t possibly understand the Bible. �

AND:

�It�s the same thing with the Bible or anything else that communicates abstractions. Takes mental muscle power, Duane. No magic, no mumbo-jumbo. That�s why you don�t love the Bible . . . yet.�

You guys impressed? Ever wonder why believers �most never make it in big time science?

And, of course, still lying on the table:

We are left with verses 32-42 plainly saying the rods affected offspring. Apparently, only a believer�s mind can wiggle out of it. I see Rory has trouble with that, too. If it meant what Susan says, why would it plainly say something else?

And we are left with varying interpretations from �scholars� who are absolutely persuaded their view is correct. Inerrancy ain�t much good if nobody can prove which view is correct.

#2420: John Wilkins — 05/13  at  05:46 PM
Paul, if I read it from half a world away, maybe cute creationist babes in Australia do too. Besides, at my age I can't afford to be choosy.

#2421: — 05/13  at  05:53 PM
"Look for Meaning in the Text, Not Beyond It"

I looked. Didn't look like a joke to me. Just looked dumb. You must surely have some magic Spirit to make it not look dumb.

But, I guess, if you introduce enough obfuscation, you might forget what you read plainly said.

#2422: Robert Lindauer — 05/14  at  05:52 PM
You wrote:

"the the fossil record is one big catalog of macroevolutionary events"

Thats called a misleading interpretation. You can't go on lying to yourself while claiming the primacy of science.

#2423: PZ Myers — 05/15  at  06:05 AM
No, that's a pretty solid interpretation. Macroevolution happens. The challenge is to explain all the processes that drive it.

#2424: — 05/15  at  06:53 AM
You poor Americans have to put up with so much. In Australia the arugument never gets beyond a loony-toons press release or two.

Not that we don't have loony Christians, but they seriously have very very little political power. Interestingly, they love to bring in guest preachers (and basketballers) from the USA. Not making it in the land of opportunity.

Sort of like KISS doing a world tour while people still remember them.

#2425: isabel — 05/15  at  09:35 AM
You know, I've often wondered something along these lines: If God exists and exists in the generally conceived manner (i.e., omnipotent, omniscient, etc.), why does he (I'll use "he" here for ease) not just:

a) say what he means?
and/or
b) drop by sometime?

I'm interested in answers that do not rely on "making a leap of faith," humans still "paying for original sin," etc. How hard could it be for God to be a straightforward kind of guy? The guy created the universe. I would think that, if people knew for certain that God existed and if he were a loving god as many say, people would act more like God wants and be able to love God better (because they know who, what and why they're loving).

Why would such a powerful being go through all the motions of appearing mysterious when he knows that people are only so smart (after all, he created our intelligence) and that we cannot prove that he exists based on this intelligence and the facts we have at our disposal?

#2426: — 05/15  at  10:26 AM
But Isabel, we can prove it. If you call out to Him to come and live in your heart, and be your Lord and Savior, and submit your will, your soul, your mind and your emotions to His reign, then He will show you Who He is. It's a relationship. It's interactive. He communicates through His Word, through providence, through people, through nature and in so many other ways. He has spoken words into my heart -- not audible ones, and there were no thunderclaps, no choir singing -- just total assurance that He is real, He knows me through and through, and He loves me just as I am. It doesn't happen in church, though you can build your knowledge of Him by going to church. It doesn't even happen by reading the Bible, though that's His chief way of teaching us Who He is and what life's all about. No, it only happens in those quiet moments, one-on-One, when the "still, small voice" of the Holy Spirit is able to commune with you.

If God wanted to just make us robots and "download" everything we need to know into us -- program us, if you will -- then what would be the fun of that, for Him? What kind of a love relationship is that? It's why He gave us such great minds, and free will -- because it's like any other love relationship, He wants us to come to know Him and love Him.

That's why the Bible is written in so many genres, including poetry and metaphor. It's like a love letter. It's not marching orders or a laundry list. It's the bridge between us and Him. He wants us to depend on Him, and you learn to live that way by studying His Word, praying and, as we say, "walking" with Him. That's why prophecy and parables are "veiled" to the nonbeliever; it's sort of like a kids' club with its secret codes. It's why unbelievers misunderstand the Bible: they honestly can't understand it, because they're blocking themselves from being part of the group.

As I read this guy's blog, I'm struck by what a smart fellow he really is, but how desperately confused he is. For instance, he wrote a very nice piece about breastfeeding on about the same day as he wrote that irreducible complexity can't possibly prove that we were specially designed. You know, I've breastfed four babies, and I know, for a FACT, that there is no way, Jose, that all the immensely complicated interweavings of the biological features that make breastfeeding possible, can't have evolved little step by little step.

Perhaps this blogger's problem is that he's a guy. He never felt those early-pregnancy explosions in your breasts that signify they're getting read to start making milk. He never felt a little one's powerful (and thank God, toothless) jaws "stripping" the milk out of the ducts. He doesn't know what it feels like to be depleted and exhausted the way breastfeeding makes you feel, and yet at the same time, the very action of being emptied is the biological trigger to give you good-feeling endorphins so that your body can regain the strength to make more milk.

This may be trite, but in many ways, I feel like I am spiritually "nursing" onto Father God day by day -- totally dependent on Him, totally in awe of His love, grace and power.

I can only wish the same beautiful, blessed assurance of His reality and the truth of the Bible, for you and the ones who read this blog.

#2427: isabel — 05/15  at  12:15 PM
Susan, that was certainly a heartfelt response, but I'm afraid it did not answer my question, and it certainly was not an objective attempt. I'm looking for an answer that makes more objective sense than the usual "if you'd only open your heart..." type of response.

If God wanted to just make us robots and �download� everything we need to know into us�program us, if you will�then what would be the fun of that, for Him? What kind of a love relationship is that? It�s why He gave us such great minds, and free will�because it�s like any other love relationship, He wants us to come to know Him and love Him.

I don't see one should attribute wanting/needing fun to God. I thought God was supposed to be perfect, neither in want nor need of anything. It seems odd to think God looks to humans for diversion. Also, God needn't program everything; he could just allow himself to be known concretely. We would still be able to use our minds and free will as we wish. Furthermore, a lot of people have suffered, are presently suffering and I'm sure will suffer in their attempt to have a relationship with God. I don't see how that could be fun for God, much less anyone else.

You know, I�ve breastfed four babies, and I know, for a FACT, that there is no way, Jose, that all the immensely complicated interweavings of the biological features that make breastfeeding possible, can�t have evolved little step by little step.

I'm afraid you do not know this for a fact based on your breastfeeding experience. I'm sure your breastfeeding experience was a wonderful bonding experience with your children, but it did not give you direct knowledge about the origin of breastfeeding, as if by osmosis. It may leave you wondering at the breastfeeding mechanism; many natural mechanismsm, occurrences, etc. are fascinating. That doesn't prove divine origin. If we could gain knowledge of things in that way, we'd know a lot more about a lot more things than we do now.

Perhaps this blogger�s problem is that he�s a guy.

I don't see how that has any relevance to an existence of God discussion beyond the very limited sphere of trying to explain breastfeeding; and even there, explaining X can be done by someone who has not experienced X, so a blogger's gender is irrelevant. Plus, we don't always know the genders of those with whom we communicate.

Basically, I am looking for the most reasonable yet objective response to my questions. At this point, we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, we can only make arguments for one or the other and judge for ourselves which argument is most plausible. Personally, I'm on our blog host's side on this one, however, I'm curious as to whether there exists any rational argument for belief in such a deity. It needn't be a scientific rational (in fact, the proponents are probably better off not trying to be scientific in this case); a philosophical argument may be reasonable enough.

#2428: — 05/15  at  04:34 PM
But Isabel, He does say what He means (in the Bible) and He DOES drop by -- each and every second of each and every day, for those of us who love Him and welcome Him. The Holy Spirit "indwells" the believer, and Jesus Christ came to Earth the first time, to do exactly what you ask.

There are so many funny things in the Bible -- of COURSE God loves fun.

He doesn't look to us for diversion, but for love.

If we knew everything concretely, our necks couldn't hold our heads up, our brains would have to be so big :>) and anyway, if God told us everything that has happened and is going to happen, our heads would explode. For example, if you knew for a fact that the Second Coming was not going to be 'til the year 3004, you'd live a far different life than the one you're living now, would you not? Now imagine that you knew for a FACT that it's going to be TOMORROW. Think how "holy" you'd get, in a big, honkin' hurry, too. What kind of a deal would that be, on God's end, to "force" us to know Him and to love Him just because of "what's in it for us?"

People who suffer trying to have a relationship with God are probably too self-centered in their approach. Try being God-centered. That means watch your input -- control your thought life -- and have a conversation with Him as you would with anybody else you'd like to befriend. If you ridicule the Bible and spend all your time on websites like this, how can you possibly have friendly feelings toward God? Instead, study the Bible, hang out with believers, attend church, read scholarly Christian books or devotionals . . . really try in a productive way. It's OK to be skeptical, but remember, He's not a magic trick, nor is He a slot machine or short-order cook that you can manipulate or demand things from. You can't "order" Him to materialize or show you that He's real. But if you sincerely ask Him to show you that, in a reverent way, whatever your style of reverence is, then believe me, He will . . . and you'll be amazed.

A lot of people get up in the middle of the night, go outside and sit in a lawn chair just looking at the stars and talking to God. I think it helps a lot to get rid of distractions, like that. Model: first praise God, then confess anything you need to confess, then ask for what you need or want to know for yourself or others, and then thank Him for all the things He's already done.

As for your request, there are four arguments for God's existence:

The cosmological argument (the law of causality; every finite thing is caused by something other than itself)

The teleological argument (all designs imply a designer; there is great design in the universe; therefore, there must be a Great Designer of the universe)

The argument from moral law (we all are without excuse for doing things that are wrong since there is a "law written upon our hearts" that we call "moral law" -- moral laws imply a Moral Law Giver; there is an objective moral law; therefore, there is a Moral Law Giver)

The ontological argument (God is by definition an absolutely perfect being; but existence is a perfection; therefore, God must exist . . . if God exists, we must conceive of Him as a Necessary Being; but by definition, a Necessary Being cannot NOT exist; therefore, if a Necessary Being can, then it must, exist)

There are many others: the axiological argument, the anthropological argument, and the argument from religious experience (the latter is what I was using with my analogy about how breastfeeding disproves evolution). The best is C.S. Lewis' "Argument From Joy." That'n can't be beat. :>)

I'd recommend the "Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics" by Norman L. Geisler (1999, 841 pp.), a trip to the theology department of a university library, browsing through a Christian bookstore or, best of all, call a minister and make an appointment to talk about this over coffee.

You are welcome to visit my blog, too: http://www.DailySusan.blogspot.com

Good luck to you.

#2429: PZ Myers — 05/15  at  05:16 PM

You know, I�ve breastfed four babies, and I know, for a FACT, that there is no way, Jose, that all the immensely complicated interweavings of the biological features that make breastfeeding possible, can�t have evolved little step by little step.

Perhaps this blogger�s problem is that he�s a guy.

You know, I've knocked up a woman three times, and if you weren't a woman maybe you'd be able to appreciate the deep spiritual power...nah, I'd be lyin'. This whole awestruck wonder at the intensity and complexity of natural processes is routine. The difference between you and me is that I don't leap to the assumption that magical superbeings are responsible; I'm much more impressed by the reality than a fantasy spawned by ignorance.

And that whole ontological/cosmological/teleological/moral law argument and apologetics mish-mash? Phbtbtbt. Been there, laughed at it. Anyone who thinks it is worth considering is certainly welcome to visit your blog, but here, I'm just going to consider it the flibbertigibbet joke-of-the-day.

#2430: isabel — 05/15  at  06:03 PM
Susan, perhaps I'm not making it clear enough that, to repeat from a prior post, I am uninterested in responses along the lines of "if you'd only open your heart," etc.

But Isabel, He does say what He means (in the Bible) and He DOES drop by�each and every second of each and every day, for those of us who love Him and welcome Him. The Holy Spirit �indwells� the believer, and Jesus Christ came to Earth the first time, to do exactly what you ask.

That does not answer the question I asked re: why God doesn't just stop by so we can see him for ourselves.

If we knew everything concretely, our necks couldn�t hold our heads up, our brains would have to be so big :>) and anyway, if God told us everything that has happened and is going to happen, our heads would explode.

God could create a manageable size brain that held more information than our present brains. Also, I did not ask why God doesn't tell us everything concretely; I asked re: why God doesn't let us know of his existence concretely. He need not tell us anything about the second coming, or anything else, for that matter. One wouldn't need to know when the second coming would be, if one knew concretely that God exists. If I die tomorrow, and God, heaven and hell exist, I'll go one way or another, even though a second coming hasn't occurred.

People who suffer trying to have a relationship with God are probably too self-centered in their approach.

I was referring to people who, for example, have died for their faith.

...the anthropological argument, and the argument from religious experience (the latter is what I was using with my analogy about how breastfeeding disproves evolution).

Again, I'm afraid that is an insufficient disproof re: evolution.

I'm aware of the arguments you presented. I'm looking for an argument wherein one can rationally and intelligently evaluate both sides and, while recognizing and accepting the evolution argument, still decide to believe in some form of a deity. There are many intelligent, accomplished people who somehow come to this conclusion and I am very curious as to how they get there.

You know, I�ve knocked up a woman three times, and if you weren�t a woman maybe you�d be able to appreciate the deep spiritual power...nah, I�d be lyin�. This whole awestruck wonder at the intensity and complexity of natural processes is routine.

PZ, funny...naughty, but funny. I must disagree with you, however, regarding the routine nature of, well, nature. I think it's fascinating! I don't know anything about that critter in one of your prior posts, the one who was prserved molting, but I think that stuff is so neat. I really enjoy reading about the cool and often weird (to me) things that organisms do. Thanks for a great website.

#2431: — 05/15  at  08:57 PM
Isabel, that same "Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics" I referred to before has a good explanation of why any form of evolutionary theory, including "theistic evolution," such as you mentioned, is irrational on its face.

#2432: — 05/16  at  05:59 AM
First, you gotta believe. There�s just no getting around it. You have to take that leap of faith. And, of course, once that is done, you see that it is true. That one lapse surely opens the door to all of our religions.

None of them can stand without that lapse. But once that is done, all sorts of things become believable. You just have to relax your standards of what qualifies as evidence. Everything can become interaction with God if you just look at it that way. Ask Susan about messages from God on vanity license plates. With enough practice, you can believe some pretty wild stuff. They ought to have a contest. Who can truly believe the most unbelievable things.... Put it on TV alongside the weightlifters.

Susan�s �proofs�, of course, have never survived serious scrutiny.

We may never understand the base origin and mechanics of our existence, but just asserting that it is all God magic is just a cop out.

If complexity implies design and design implies a designer, then you are left with a funny feeling when you assert that the ultimate designer wasn�t complex enough to require a designer. i.e. the conclusion involves an exception to the rule that was assumed in the argument. Same deal for the first cause argument.

Absolutely perfect being by definition is just plain silly. If you can conceive it, it will exist...

We have a moral sense so moral absolutes must exist and God must be their source? Never mind that these senses vary by culture, not to mention species.

#2433: PZ Myers — 05/16  at  06:47 AM
If this �Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics� is actually arguing for creationism, then it is yet another eructation of stupid, pathological religion that ignores reality to favor distortions and lies.

#2434: isabel — 05/16  at  07:28 PM

First, you gotta believe. There�s just no getting around it. You have to take that leap of faith. And, of course, once that is done, you see that it is true. That one lapse surely opens the door to all of our religions.

See, that's just it...how do otherwise intelligent, admirable folks make that leap, folks who acknowledge that their belief lacks proof?

#2435: Rory Parle — 05/17  at  07:02 AM
Isabelle, most people make that 'leap' when they are children. Children are naturally gullible; they have to be. As a child you need to listen to and believe everything a parent says so that you accept "putting your hand in the fire will hurt" and "don't annoy the big dog". That this is abused by parents to make their children believe "magic man in the sky did it" is an unfortunate side-effect.

As for people who convert later in life, there are a few explanations. One is trauma bringing about a feeling of lonliness or helplessness which will lead people to accept religion. They often feel much more need for comfort than truth, so reason is abandoned in favour of comfort. There are surely others.

Basically it all seems to come about from a desire for some feeling of comfort, or companionship without regard for truth. When I ask people why they continue to believe I often hear in response "I don't want to live in a world without God". That makes it pretty clear doesn't it? These people don't hold truth to be the most important attribute of their beliefs. It all boils down to "I believe these things are true because I want them to be true."

#2436: — 05/17  at  07:51 AM
One of the smartest people who ever lived, author and professor C.S. Lewis, was an atheist for half his life and converted to Christianity when his own great mind finally gave him no other choice. He wrote an incredible number of incredibly powerful Christian books in the last half of his life. I'd recommend a biography of C.S. Lewis, Isabel, for a great example of high-octane intelligence making that leap of faith to a relationship with God.

Another smart person who was a longtime avowed atheist is Lee Strobel, a graduate of Yale Law School and an award-winning journalist at the Chicago Tribune. He's now a pastor and has written some great blockbuster books, including the excellent "The Case for Christ." As a lawyer and a journalist, he set out to DISPROVE Christ's existence . . . and wound up, like so many others, being transformed into a Christian.

Isabel, I wonder if this quote from our church program Sunday might enlighten you:

"There is a God we want, and there is a God who is. They are not the same God. . . . The turning point of our lives is when we stop seeking the God we want and start seeking the God who is." -- Patrick Morley

Blessings on your week.

#2437: Rory Parle — 05/17  at  09:25 AM
"C.S. Lewis was an atheist for half his life and converted to Christianity when his own great mind finally gave him no other choice."

That's not much of a leap of faith is it? You're contradicting yourself. If a great mind could be left with no choice but Christianity then why can I name a hundred great atheist minds for every one great Christian mind you come up with?

If CS Lewis was one of the smartest men who ever lived and that led him to have no option but Christianity then why didn't Albert Einstein believe in God? Surely he had a far greater understanding of the world than anyone before him, yet he felt no need to rely on a magic man to explain the world to him.

#2438: — 05/17  at  10:42 AM
Haven�t seen the Lewis books, but I can tell you the Strobel book is a loser. The �search� it describes is basically going round to a bunch of Christian professionals asking if this or that in the Bible could be true. Want to guess what they said? I can�t imagine it impressing any non-Christian.

It is instructive to compare Strobel with �Losing Faith in Faith� by Dan Barker.

#2439: — 05/17  at  10:48 AM
I wouldn�t think it a very good strategy for Christian evangelists to dwell on the great minds category. By now, folks pretty much know that the great minds in science are mostly atheists.

#2440: — 05/17  at  01:24 PM
Rory, you're dead wrong about Einstein:

http://www.ctinquiry.org/publications/torrance.htm

#2441: — 05/18  at  03:38 AM
http://www.skeptic.com/archives50.html

#2442: Rory Parle — 05/18  at  05:28 AM
Susan, in case you don't want to read the whole page linked to by Duane, here's enough to start:

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

- Einstein, 1954 letter to an atheist. (Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press, 1981.)

#2443: — 05/18  at  08:52 AM
Susan,

Still missing from all your verbose responses is an explanation of why the author of Genesis is not making a false causal claim about how goats come to have their spots (or how a particular herd of goats came to have their spots) when he or she writes:

the goats mated by the rods, and so they brought forth streaked, speckled and spotted kids.

The author is plainly claiming that the goats brought forth spotted offspring because they mated by the rods. Is is true that mating by particular rods can produce spotted offspring or did the author of Genesis say something false?

#2444: — 05/18  at  10:23 PM
Well, Rory, there are a number of quotes that shed more light on Einstein's beliefs in the aforementioned "Baker's Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics," by Norman Geisler, pp. 213-215.

Sounds as though he was bitter toward God in the face of the European holocaust.

In The Private Albert Einstein by P.A. Bucky, quoted in the Geisler book, Einstein says: "In essence, my religion consists of a humble admiration for this illimitable superior spirit that reveals itself in the slight details that we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds."

Quoting the Geisler book on p. 215:

"Einstein first opposed the mounting evidence for a big bang origin, perhaps realizing its theistic implications. In order to avoid this conclusion, Einstein added a 'fudge factor' in his equations, only to be embarrassed later when his maneuver was noticed. To his credit, he eventually admitted his error and concluded that the universe was created. Thus, he wrote of his desire to know how God created this world. He said, 'I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thought; the rest are details.''' (N. Herbert, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics)

That's a far cry from the conclusion you're apparently drawing from what you cited.

There's a lot more to this, in other words, than reading one quote from a private letter. Best to get a sense of Einstein's whole body of thought on this, and review it in the context of history and so forth.

You might like the article, "Faith and Reason," in the same book, pp. 239-243. Aquinas points out that we need reason before, during and after beliefs are acquired, and that even the mysteries of faith are not irrational. However, reason alone cannot bring anyone to faith. That's done only by the grace of God. Faith can at best only be supported by reason, but not totally objectively based on it. Why? Because God has given each of us free choice. God won't "win" anybody by force, by coercing faith . . . not even yours. :>)

Why not? Because He loves you, Baby . . . and He wants it to be reciprocal. :>)

Good luck to you.

#2445: — 05/18  at  11:23 PM
To "Girl With Curious" -- First, better get a King James Version. It's the most precise one. There's no "so" in it in the verse you quote. Here's the proper passage:

And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted. -- Genesis 30:39

It's dripping with irony, but if you don't use the tools of literary analysis -- including a knowledge of the customs and contrasting belief systems of the day -- you won't "get it."

Again, this was a smart trick by Jacob; he did not buy into the pagan superstition about the spotted branches producing spotted animal offspring, but his inlaw tormentors did. So he "hoisted 'em by their own petard" and parodied their superstition, making fools out of them -- a perfectly legitimate and humorous shell game. :>)

Here are two excellent Bible commentaries that may explain this burlesque by Jacob more clearly for you. I highly recommend 'em to help understand and appreciate the Bible:

". . . (Laban) forgot his bargaining instincts and agreed right away. We can almost hear the contempt in his voice as he said, 'Good! Let it be as you have said.' So contemptuous indeed was he of this 'sucker' of a son-in-law that he removed the mottled animals and black lambs from his present flocks. Jacob would only get those that came along in the future.
"But Jacob was ready even for this ploy. The audience by now would be smiling broadly. The crooked Laban was about to get his come-uppance. And when they heard how he got it, there would be many audible titters and not a few loud guffaws."

-- The Daily Study Bible Series: Genesis, Vol. 2, John C.L. Gibson, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1982, p. 185.

"The results of his (Jacob's) method, however, were not unscientific. Tinkle writes that Laban 'had indeed taken the ones which were visibly spotted but the rest were heterozygous for spotting -- there were latent genes for that pattern -- and spotted kids were the logical result. Breeding tests have shown that spotting is recessive to solid color in goats. Modern genetic studies on dominance and latency have cleared this incident, which at one time seemed to link the Bible with groundless supposition" (Davis, p. 250). Jacob's success was also attributed to selective breeding (vss. 40-42) in addition to divine help (31:10-12).

-- King James Bible Commentary, Edward G. Dobson, Charles L. Feinberg, Edward E. Hindson et. al., Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1999, p. 59.

Hope this answers your question.

Blessings!

#2446: Rory Parle — 05/19  at  05:36 AM
Einstein used God as an illustration. He didn't believe - at least after his childhood - in a personal God. He stated this outright on several occasions. The quote I gave was only the beginning. Like I said if you want more check out Duane's link.

#2447: Chuck — 05/19  at  01:41 PM
Jacob is a complex, pivotal character in Jewish and Christian tradition. Genesis 30 and surrounding chapters have stimulated lots of scholarly articles by both Jewish and Christian theologians. This literature doesn't focus on the "genetics" question. Genesis 30 (in King James or any other version) clearly implies that Jacob (and the narrator) thought characteristics of offspring could both be inherited, and affected by the setting in which conception occurs. Saying that Jacob only pretended to accept the latter is an ad hoc attempt to save the Bible's or Jacob's assumed scientific inerrancy. Susan is correct that there is lots of humor and intrigue going on between Jacob and Laban, and she's right about the need to understand the Bible in the context in which it was written. But the goal of understanding what is of value in the text is compromised, not advanced, but suggesting that Jacob somehow already knew about modern genetics. http://nrcse.creighton.edu has more information supporting the view that the Bible (and God) can be taken seriously without insisting that the Bible is a completely inerrant science or history textbook. And here's a list of books that I think might be worth considering: http://www.scienceandreligionbooks.org/BOD

Best wishes.

#2448: — 05/19  at  03:06 PM
Yet another scholarly "take" on Genesis 30 that sides with moi:

http://cgca.net/ucg/brp/brp0203.pdf

These dudes were a lot smarter than many of you dudes think. :>) And the Bible is, too, absolutely inerrant when it comes to science. AND THAT'S A FACK, JACK.

Best wishes to you, too, Chuck -- methinks the Creighton U. Chuck, eh? :>)

#2449: Rory Parle — 05/19  at  04:48 PM

And the Bible is, too, absolutely inerrant when it comes to science.

Does anyone else think that Susan should be denied the benefits - immediate or indirect - of any science that's directly contradicted by the Bible? It would be an interesting experiment but for two reasons. One, it would obviously be impossible to orchestrate as the entire world is hugely dependent on the science of the last several hundred years. Two, it would certainly result in fatality.

#2450: — 05/19  at  05:04 PM
:>) OK, Rory, let's see what you've got, Big Boy. Throw me your best fastball -- one specific Bible verse which you think is scientifically in error, and why you think so.

#2451: — 05/19  at  05:53 PM
The omission of �so� does little to alter the meaning of this story. A fair reading clearly has it saying the rods had an effect. Susan belatedly notes that God helped. She might have had a better chance if she characterized the rods as some sort of incantation to facilitate a miracle. Like Moses striking a rock to part the waters. Too late now.

It�s a safe bet that the person that made up this story bought into the rods and miracles myths.

This thread is illustrative of how hermeneutics works in practice. Once you have faith, knowing the Bible can�t be false, but faced with text that sure looks false, you then scramble in the weeds for a different take on it. If it doesn�t make sense, you try to throw some extra context at it. If that doesn't work, maybe it�s a miracle. If the miracle creates other problems then it was poetic, an analogy, or metaphor. i.e. The sun SEEMED to stop, etc.

I wonder if believers� brains are curlier than ours to facilitate such twisted thinking.

#2452: — 05/19  at  07:02 PM

OK, Rory, let�s see what you�ve got, Big Boy. Throw me your best fastball�one specific Bible verse which you think is scientifically in error, and why you think so.

I wasn't aware the Bible made any scientific claims. Can you describe some?

#2453: Chuck — 05/20  at  06:45 AM
Susan, I read the Bible study re. Genesis 30 at the link you posted. The author of the Bible study says nothing about your idea that Jacob, in order to outwit Laban, pretended to accept the prevailing superstitious belief (that environment experienced by parents at conception affects traits of offspring). Nor does the author of the Bible study think that Jacob had superior awareness of genetic recessiveness. On the contrary, the Bible study author emphatically argues that God miraculously caused the coloration of the goats, in response to Jacob's growth in moral character.

I didn't see the Bible study author's name listed, but I think his or her view is not one shared by most Bible scholars.

Yes, I am the Creighton Chuck.

Take care.

#2454: — 05/20  at  08:22 AM
I think we need to back up here for a second. I'm not entirely sure what you guys are talking about in the first place. And it is quite possible you're all talking past each other. So, here is a question for anyone, but preferably for those who assert its existence:

What is God?

#2455: — 05/20  at  09:38 AM
Hi, Chuck: Well, you have to remember that the key goal of the ancient Bible writers was for their audiences to understand them. Somebody in 2004 who doesn't know the Bible, doesn't know history, etc. etc., may not "get it" with this passage, but don't blame me. :>) Of course I could be wrong, but I really don't think I am. It's as funny as the idol Dagon falling in the night and breaking (1 Samuel 5:3,4) -- but in the Bible, it doesn't say "that was funny" -- you have to "get it" on your own.

To understand the Biblie, you have to be familiar with the various forms of context -- literary context, symbolism, metaphors, relationship to the whole Bible, historical-cultural background, word meanings, grammatical relationships. Many passages have multi-layered, polyvalent nuances that I really don't think you can understand unless you're really tight with the Holy Spirit :>) and have studied pretty hard over a period of years. But the people of that day would have "gotten it" right away on this story.

It's the same thing with Elijah challenging Jezebel's 850 pagan prophets in 1 Kings 18. It's one of the most hilarious moments in the Bible, in the same spirit as Jacob mocking the pagan superstition about breeding patterns. Elijah told them to meet him on Mount Carmel to prove which side really had God on their side. Remember? They shouted out to Baal from dawn 'til dusk, cut themselves, danced around and woo-woo'ed, etc. etc. Nothing happened. Elijah made fun of them: "What? You guys getting a busy signal? Maybe your god is asleep?" etc. etc. and then when it was his turn, he set things up as God had explicitly directed, prayed, God sent fire, and in verse 39 you see the result: "And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The Lord, he is the God; the Lord, he is the God."

What that story doesn't say explicitly, but if you knew the historical background, you would "get," is that the pagan prophets of the time would have all these elaborate rituals inside their temples where their idols appeared to move and shake -- (I guess that's where we get our expression "movers and shakers" :>) ) and the people would all get thrilled and trembly and give them all their dough, etc. . . . but the thing is, they had RIGGED it with ropes and levers! Kind of a "Wizard of Oz" type deal. So when Elijah challenged them to meet him on the mountain, they couldn't cheat . . . and God kicked their b____ts and exposed their deceit.

You wouldn't have grasped the irony and humor of that if you didn't know that they regularly cheated in the temple. See?

It's the same thing with Jacob's ruse of putting the trickily-cut branches in the troughs -- to make the dumb pagans think it was "magic" -- a little misdirection, like a good old-fashioned Husker football running play -- so he could get away with it. But all it was, was God and His wonderful invention of genetics, which Jacob had had PLENTY of time to observe in his many years of herdsmanship, along with his observations about the benefits of selective breeding. Yes, God did it, but Jacob benefitted from God's provision by observing reality and using it to his best advantage.

So many years out there with the sheep and the goats . . . I guess you could say that made Jacob learn how to KID!!!! :>)

#2456: — 05/20  at  10:15 AM
Susan,

Some quotes from Genesis 5

Thus all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died.
Thus all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years; and he died.
Thus all the days of Enosh were nine hundred and five years; and he died.
Thus all the days of Kenan were nine hundred and ten years; and he died.
Thus all the days of Ma-hal'alel were eight hundred and ninety-five years; and he died. Thus all the days of Jared were nine hundred and sixty-two years; and he died.
Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years.
Thus all the days of Methu'selah were nine hundred and sixty-nine years; and he died.
Thus all the days of Lamech were seven hundred and seventy-seven years; and he died.

Is your interpretation of these Bible verses that humans can live for nine hundred and sixty years?

Is this a scientific fact?

#2457: — 05/20  at  11:20 AM
Hi, Jonathan: There's an excellent synopsis in Chapter 11, "The Cumulative Case for a Creator," in the book, "The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God," by Lee Strobel (Zondervan, 2004, 340 pp.).

It's all in the Bible, as the author points out on pp. 284-285:

God is Creator (Psalm 102:25)

God is unique (Deuteronomy 4:35)

God is uncaused and timeless (Psalm 90:2)

God is immaterial, meaning "spirit" (John 4:24)

God is personal (Genesis 17:1)

God gives freedom of will (Genesis 1:3)

God is intelligent and rational (Psalm 104:24)

God is enormously powerful (Nahum 1:3)

God is creative (Psalm 139:13,14)

God is caring (Psalm 33:5)

God is omnipresent (1 Kings 8:27)

God has given humankind purpose (Colossians 1:16)

God provides for life after death (Isaiah 25:8)

A note to atheists, agnostics and skeptics in Romans 1:20-22 :

"For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: because that, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools."

If you want to know Who God is, Jonathan, just ask Him to show you, and read your Bible, particularly the book of John.

Good luck to you.

#2458: — 05/20  at  11:59 AM
To Andy:

Well, since I recently had a "whoopsie daisy," late in life baby, I guess I can identify with Noah, who became a father at age 500! :>)

It is thought that either these lengths of years reflect longlasting family dynasties, rather than ages of individual men . . . OR that they really did live that long. Those who believe the latter say the human race was more genetically pure in this early time period, so there was less disease to shorten life span; that no rain had yet fallen on earth so the firmament kept out harmful cosmic rays and shielded people from environmental factors has hasten aging while at the same time there was more oxygen because there were so few people, or that God gave people longer lives so that they would have time to fill the earth (Genesis 1:28).

Here's another illustration of the usefulness of hermeneutics -- to understand the Bible, you have to follow certain disciplines of interpretation. One of those disciplines involves the principles of genealogy, one of the key genres of the Scriptures. Here's how the reference book, "Hard Sayings of the Bible" by Walter C. Kaiser Jr. et. al. (InterVarsity Press, 1996, 808 pp.) approaches this problem. A long quote from pp. 102-103:

1. Abridgment is the general rule because the sacred writers did not want to encumber their pages with more names than necessary.

2. Omission in genealogies are fairly routine. For example, Matthew 1:8 omits three names between Joram and Ozias (Uzziah); namely, Ahaziah (2 Kings 8:25), Joash (2 Kings 12:1) and Amaziah (2 Kings 14:1). In verse 11, Matthew omits Jehoiakim (2 Kings 23:34). In fact, in Matthew 1:1 the whole of two millenia are summed up in two giant steps: "Jesus Christ, the son of David (about 1,000 B.C.), the son of Abraham (about 2,000 B.C.)."

3. The span of a biblical "generation" is more than our twenty to thirty years. In Syriac it equals eighty years. Often in the Exodus account a generation is 100 to 120 years.

4. The meanings of "begat," "son of," "father of" and even "bore a son" often have special nuances, as the context often indicates. To "beget" often means no more than "to become the ancestor of." To be "the father of" often means being a grandfather or great-grandfather. The point is that the next key person was descended from that male named "father" in the text.

The most instructive lesson of all can be gleaned from Kohath's descent into Egypt (Genesis 46:-11) some 430 years (Exodus 12:40) before the exodus. Now if Moses (one in the Kohath line) was 80 years odl at the time of the exodus (Exodus 7:7), and no gaps (such as are suggested by the above-mentioned principles) are understood (as we believe the evidence above now forces us to concede), then the "grandfather" of Moses had in Moses' lifetime 8,600 descendants. Amazing as that might seem, here is the real shocker: 2,750 of those 8,600 descendants were males between the ages of 30 and 50 (Numbers 3:19, 27-28, 34; 4:36)! It is difficult to believe that the writers of Scripture were that naive.

The form that Genesis 5 and 11 use, with few exceptions, is a stereotypic formula giving the age of the patriarch at the birth of his son, the number of years that he lived after the birth of that son, and then the total number of years that he lived until he died. It is the question of the function of these numbers that attracts our attention here.

Since Zilpah is credited with "bearing" her grandchildren (Genesis 46:18) and Bilhah is said to "bear" her grandchildren as well (Genesis 46:25), it is clear that a legitimate usage of these numbers in the genealogies might well mean that B was a distant relative of A. In this case, the age of A is the age at the birth of that (unnamed) child from whom B (eventually) descended.

The ages given for the "father" when the "son" was born must be actual years, as we shall presently see. The conflation takes place not at the point of supplying the actual years at which the father had a child; it is instead at the point where the name of the next noteworthy descendant is given instead of the immediate son. The ages given function as an indicator of the fact that the effects of the Fall into sin had not yet affected human generative powers as seriously as they have more recently. The same point, of course, is to be made with regard to human longevity. The fact that the record wishes to stress is the sad mortality of men and women as a result of the sin in the Garden of Eden. The repeated litany "and he died" echoes from the pages like the solemn toll of a funeral bell.

Attempts to make the numbers more palatable have been crushed by the internal weight of their own argumentation or from a failure to care for all the data in a single theory. One abortive attempt was to treat the names as names of tribes rather than as names of individuals. This would seem to work until we meet up with Enoch, who was taken to heaven. It hardly seems fair to imply that the whole Enoch tribe was taken to heaven, so we are left with the idea that these really are meant to represent individuals.

Another, equally unsuccessful, rationalization was that the "years" here represented a system of counting months, or something of that sort. In this view, the years would be reduced by a factor of 10 or 12. Accordingly, Adam's total of 930 years could be reduced to the more manageable and believable 93 or 77 years. This thoery runs into trouble when Najor becomes the father of Terah at 29 years of age in Genesis 11:24. This would mean that he actually had a child when he was 2.9 or 2.4 years old! In that case we jump from the pan into the fire. Unfortunately for this theory, there are no known biblical examples of the word "year" meaning anything less than the solar year we are accustmed to in general speech.

One final warning might be in order: do not add up the years of these patriarchs in Genesis 5 and 11 and expect to come up with the Bible's date for the birth of the human race. The reason for this warning is clear: the Bible never adds up these numbers. It is not as though the Bible never gives us sums of years -- there are the 430 years of Egyptian bondage in Exodus 12:40 and the 480 years of 1 Kings 6:1. But in Genesis 5 and 11 the writer does not employ his numbers for this purpose; neither should we. . . .

(end of quote)

I hope this shows you the depth and breadth of scholarship that has been employed on this question and many, many others.

Bottom line: yes, I do think those long lifespans were possible in those ancient times, but not, of course, today, despite all the Botox and plastic surgery! :>)

Hope this is helpful.

#2459: — 05/20  at  12:41 PM
Ok, you have given me an interesting picture of what God might look like. But I am curious about your source. The bible. What gives the Bible credibility to name the qualities of God over any other book which may profess different qualities to God?

#2460: — 05/20  at  12:45 PM

Bottom line: yes, I do think those long lifespans were possible in those ancient times, but not, of course, today, despite all the Botox and plastic surgery!

Those who believe the latter say the human race was more genetically pure in this early time period, so there was less disease to shorten life span; that no rain had yet fallen on earth so the firmament kept out harmful cosmic rays and shielded people from environmental factors has hasten aging while at the same time there was more oxygen because there were so few people, or that God gave people longer lives so that they would have time to fill the earth (Genesis 1:28).

The problem with these explanations is:

1. Genetic purity (whatever that means) will not affect lifespan, although it may affect life expectancy.
2. No rain had fallen on Earth for several thousand years? Please...
3. Environmental factors affect life expectancy, but not lifespan.

So we're down to God making people live longer. How did he do that?

#2461: — 05/20  at  01:27 PM
Well, Jonathan, there are many reasons: the Bible's perfection and the superhuman beauty of the writing . . . its astounding fulfilled prophecies even to naming exact names and forecasting exact numbers of years hundreds of years beforehand . . . the way symbols and references to the Messiah begin 'way back in the Old Testament as God's way of preparing all of us for understanding Him and knowing Him . . . the fabulous "numerical interweaving" that can't have been manipulated by so many authors over so many years . . . and most of all, for me, the archaeological corroboration that is overwhelmingly confirmational of the Bible's veracity.

There has never been a single word of the Bible disproved in any way, shape or form.

Take the question about longevity among the first people mentioned in the Bible. That's corroborated by the "Sumerian King List" from southern Mesopotamia, tablets found by archaeologists that were thought to have been written very early in the second millenium B.C. or before. They measured the reigns of various kings of the Babylonians. Some of those monarchs ruled for a long, long, LONG time -- even longer than how long the Clinton years seemed. :>) In fact, some of them were said to have reigned for longer than Methusaleh lived, and other long-lived early people from the Bible. The Sumerian documentation suggests, as does the Bible, that things were different before The Flood and that lifespans fell drastically after it.

So you can't say the ancient Jews "fixed" the Bible to make themselves look good. They were just reporters, after all. :>)

The other clincher for me is how the Bible works on the believer supernaturally. I've never heard this kind of stuff happening with any other faith. There have been many, many times in my life when the Bible has opened to a passage that is exactly on point of whatever I was dealing with in my life at that particular time. There are many, many ways in which the Bible acts as a supernatural "bridge" in the relationship between me and God. This is true of every other believer I know. You can't get that kind of connection to the Bible unless you submit your heart to the rule of the Holy Spirit. For other folks, I suppose, it's just a book. For me, it's . . . life. For more about how this works, please visit the past Sunday stories on my blog, http://www.DailySusan.blogspot.com

I'd also recommend a handy-dandy paperback, "Know What You Believe: A Practical Discussion of the Fundamentals of the Christian Faith," by Paul E. Little (Victor Books, 1987, 139 pp.).

#2462: — 05/20  at  01:50 PM

There has never been a single word of the Bible disproved in any way, shape or form.

. . . and most of all, for me, the archaeological corroboration that is overwhelmingly confirmational of the Bible�s veracity.

Recommend "The Bible Unearthed" by Finkelstein and Silberman.

Amazon.com's Best of 2001
The Bible Unearthed is a balanced, thoughtful, bold reconsideration of the historical period that produced the Hebrew Bible. The headline news in this book is easy to pick out: there is no evidence for the existence of Abraham, or any of the Patriarchs; ditto for Moses and the Exodus; and the same goes for the whole period of Judges and the united monarchy of David and Solomon. In fact, the authors argue that it is impossible to say much of anything about ancient Israel until the seventh century B.C., around the time of the reign of King Josiah. In that period, "the narrative of the Bible was uniquely suited to further the religious reform and territorial ambitions of Judah." Yet the authors deny that their arguments should be construed as compromising the Bible's power. Only in the 18th century--"when the Hebrew Bible began to be dissected and studied in isolation from its powerful function in community life"--did readers begin to view the Bible as a source of empirically verifiable history. For most of its life, the Bible has been what Finkelstein and Silberman reveal it once more to be: an eloquent expression of "the deeply rooted sense of shared origins, experiences, and destiny that every human community needs in order to survive," written in such a way as to encompass "the men, women, and children, the rich, the poor, and the destitute of an entire community." --Michael Joseph Gross --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The other clincher for me is how the Bible works on the believer supernaturally. I�ve never heard this kind of stuff happening with any other faith. There have been many, many times in my life when the Bible has opened to a passage that is exactly on point of whatever I was dealing with in my life at that particular time.

Wow! Just like the I Ching!

#2463: — 05/20  at  02:59 PM
Susan,

Ok, so according to the Bible, God is all these things:

God is Creator (Psalm 102:25)

God is unique (Deuteronomy 4:35)

God is uncaused and timeless (Psalm 90:2)

God is immaterial, meaning �spirit� (John 4:24)

God is personal (Genesis 17:1)

God gives freedom of will (Genesis 1:3)

God is intelligent and rational (Psalm 104:24)

God is enormously powerful (Nahum 1:3)

God is creative (Psalm 139:13,14)

God is caring (Psalm 33:5)

God is omnipresent (1 Kings 8:27)

God has given humankind purpose (Colossians 1:16)

God provides for life after death (Isaiah 25:8)

and then, the Bible is a credible source to describe God because of:

its

perfection and the superhuman beauty of the writing

, its accuracy (to paraphrase much of your most recent comment), and it

acts as a supernatural �bridge� in the relationship between [you] and God

If God is responsible for the Bible's perfection then it looks like you have a circular argument: we should believe God is perfect because the bible says so --> the bible should be believed because God (a perfect being) created/inspired it --> which in turn says that God is perfect.

That's a little hard to swallow, logically speaking (but maybe logic does not apply to Christianity). But I'll tell you what. You say that one must truly believe, one must have a leap of faith, and go to God with all your heart; in order for him to accept you. Since my skepticism merely springs from ignorance instead of atheism, I shall pick up a copy of the Bible this evening and then sit out and watch the stars and read from the Bible and contemplate on how profound the universe is. If I try hard enough, God should show himself to me and then I will be relieved of my ignorance about Him. Sound like a plan?

#2464: — 05/20  at  03:10 PM

Since my skepticism merely springs from ignorance instead of atheism, I shall pick up a copy of the Bible this evening and then sit out and watch the stars and read from the Bible and contemplate on how profound the universe is.� If I try hard enough, God should show himself to me and then I will be relieved of my ignorance about Him.� Sound like a plan?

You might want to try smoking a little weed while you're at it......

#2465: — 05/20  at  03:35 PM
Andy, we can't answer how God did it because we can't set up an experiment with all the variables. I mean, what do we do? Put a great, great, great big pair of sunglasses over the sun? How do you test the impact on longevity of a different intensity of sunshine, a different atmosphere, only one human per ka-zillion photosynthesizing plants instead of what we have now, etc. etc.? Can't be done, me boyo. If it could, I'm sure it would prove the Bible correct. I can tell you that doctors are more baffled by aging and death than they are by longevity. If you can 'xplain aging and death to me, I can 'xplain how God set the world up to allow for lifespans of hundreds of years "in the beginning." All I know is, I just picked up my Wall Street Journal after it laid outside all day, and the part that was to the sun is now practically sepia in tone, while the part that was to the driveway is still pretty white. Seems like the Bible's account of the firmament and The Flood changing things here on Earth is pretty plausible after all. But no can tell for sure. There's a maneuver we have in hermeneutics that we share with scientists. It goes like this: you study and study and study, and if you can't come to a firm conclusion, at some point, you go stand in front of a mirror, and you shrug your best shrug: "I don't know!" :>)

Duane: I wish you'd get an archaeology book some time, and then you'd see what a "load" that book you keep touting really is. :>) I have recommended the Alfred Hoerth and John McRay books to you in the past. Just one example: the walls of Jericho were said to have fallen down after seven trips around it by the ancient Jews over seven days blowing trumpets, and then "the walls came a'tumblin' down." You skeptics all go, "Tee hee, hardy har har, as if. . . ." But archaeology has determined that the walls around the ancient city of Jericho are inexplicably blown OUTWARD. If they were blown INWARD, it would have been consistent with an attacking army. But how could walls around a city be falling down AWAY from the city? Of course -- a perfectly-timed EARTHQUAKE, sent by a perfectly-planning Jehovah. That makes the story of Jericho far more than a fable, Pardner. Put THAT in your trumpet and blow it you-know-wh . . . I mean . . . and blow it! :>)

Jonathan: Everybody's faith journey is so different. I would greatly hesitate to tell you to expect a conversion by self-effort or manipulation. Very few people get "bonked" like that. Most are like my 95-year-old grandma, who, late in life, said that she never really paid attention to what God was doing in her life and wasn't aware of His work in her behalf, but when she looked back over those 95 years, she could see that He was with her every darn step of the way. That might be your path, too. But you can have what I have. You don't have to "try" other than calling out to God with a sincere heart. Not very many people have an "Aha!" moment. I can assure you that mine was totally, totally sincere and I was truly, honestly, with all my heart, calling out for God. You might have what I like to call, from my childbirthing experiences, a "lip of cervix" that persists in blocking you from allowing full-blown faith to be born in your heart. Whatever that blockage is, it'll best go away by dogged persistence, reading the Bible, talking to believers, listening to Christian radio, going to church, etc. I'd also recommend these two short paperbacks: "More Than a Carpenter" by Josh McDowell, and "How to Make an Atheist Backslide" by Ray Comfort. Good luck.

#2466: — 05/20  at  04:28 PM

I can tell you that doctors are more baffled by aging and death than they are by longevity. If you can �xplain aging and death to me, I can �xplain how God set the world up to allow for lifespans of hundreds of years �in the beginning.

That's the problem. If your position is that God can intervene to do anything he wants to the natural world, how can the Bible ever be scientifically in error? If something happened in the Bible that is not reflected by what science tells us, you can simply say "Well, God set it up that way at that time". It's indefeasible.

Now, to my next point:

The waters prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed so mightily upon the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; the waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man; everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died.

Is it your position that at some point in human history, a flood came that covered the entire Earth and killed every living thing on Earth that was not in the Ark? Or is there another meaning to the above passage?

#2467: — 05/20  at  04:43 PM
No, Andy, I'm saying that we can't understand how even the simplest parts of life came together, much less the earth or the cosmos, but we sure can observe what we can observe and make reasonable inferences from the facts. I'm saying that the Big Bang, DNA, the stupendous order and beauty of mathematics, and even human consciousness, all are strong enough scientific evidence for me to accept that all that we can observe didn't happen by blind accident.

As for The Flood, yes, I believe in it. Don't you? :>) I can predict a . . . FLOOD of words coming my way! :>)

#2468: — 05/20  at  05:30 PM
I wasn't talking about observing things and making reasonable inferences from facts (at least not in the post above..... I'll get to inferences in a minute.....). I was commenting on your position:

And the Bible is, too, absolutely inerrant when it comes to science.

My point was that you are in a no-lose situation. At any point that the Bible reports something that is incongruent with science (like humans living 900+ years), you can explain it away by saying that, well, God just set things up that way at the time. Doesn't this make your statement about scientific inerrancy a little..... well.... meaningless?

Now, back to your statement

.......but we sure can observe what we can observe and make reasonable inferences from the facts.

You claim to believe in a global flood that occurred sometime in the last 6,000 years which wiped out every living thing on earth except those in the Ark. I'm not going to unleash a Flood of words on you. I'm simply going to say that your point of view (from the Bible) is not supported by the evidence.....or as you put it "what we observe". There is no evidence that the Earth was covered in water some time in the last 6,000 years, and there is no evidence for a massive flood-induced extinction. This isn't exactly news, as geologists had given up on the idea of a Biblical Flood in the early to mid 19th century. So how do you reconcile your opinion that not a single word of the Bible has been

....disproved in any way, shape or form.

and

And the Bible is, too, absolutely inerrant when it comes to science.

.....with the 150 year old observation that the Biblical account of the Flood is almost certainly wrong? Did God make the flood happen, and then re-arranged the Earth's geological history to make it look as though it didn't happen? Or what?

I am genuinely interested in how you reconcile these views.

#2469: — 05/20  at  05:58 PM
I don�t recall mention of Hoerth or McRay, but my memory is not the best. A comparison of Finkelstein to McDowell certainly leaves McDowell in the dust, though. It is instructive to compare the work of real scientists head to head with the Bob Jonesish types. I did �The Bible Unearthed� in tandem with �The Evidence that Demands a Verdict�. Basically reading pro and con together is a good idea.

e.g. Read Strobel�s �The Case for Christ� and then Barker�s �Losing Faith in Faith�. The contrast is startling.

or �The Jesus Puzzle� vs any apologetic work.

From the Back Cover
Why are the events of the Gospel story, and its central character Jesus of Nazareth, not found in the New Testament epistles? Why does Paul's divine Christ seem to have no connection to the Gospel Jesus, but closely resembles the many pagan savior gods of the time who lived only in myth? Why, given the spread of Christianity across the Roman Empire in the first century, did only one Christian community compose a story of Jesus' life and death-the Gospel of Mark-while every other Gospel simply copied and reworked the first one? Why is every detail in the Gospel story of Jesus' trial and crucifixion drawn from passages in the Old Testament? The answer to these and other questions surrounding the New Testament will come as a shock to those who imagine that the origins of Christianity and the figure of Jesus are securely represented by Christian tradition and the Gospels. With the arrival of the third millennium, the time has come to face the stunning realization that for the last 1900 years, Christianity has revered a founder and icon of the faith who probably never existed.

I hope Jonathan reads critically tonight. No weed! In the beginning, as I recall, we get daylight separated from darkness on the first day, then vegetation on the third day, and the Sun and Moon and stars on the fourth day. Odd order don�t you think? If you don�t like it, you can turn the page and get a different order. The apologists can get right to work right away. It all makes sense if you interpret it to mean things it doesn�t say, but you can see those guys sweat, making even more magic up.

The simplest explanation makes sense to me: It was written by someone that didn�t know any better.

What good is a supposedly inerrant Bible, if most folks interpret it incorrectly? (which, given the diversity of interpretation, must be the case)

#2470: — 05/20  at  11:09 PM
Duane, I've told you before: "The Jesus Puzzle" guy is named "Earl" and he's a CANADIAN. He probably wears those furry ear-flap hats. Come on, now.

Anyway, long since debunked, fricasseed, asked and answered:

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/incarnation.html

http://www.tektonics.org/tekton_01_01_01.html

Also believe in other arenas we've gone over your other question, how in Genesis 1 God could make light (v. 3) before He made the sun, moon and stars (v. 16). OK, now scrunch up your face . . . tight as it'll go . . . shut your eyes and THINK, Duane . . . think of that last scene in "Gone With the Wind," where Rhett tells Scarlett he doesn't give a d___ and stalks off into the mist . . . here's a hanky, Duane, I know you're soft-hearted . . . anyway, what can you remember about that scene, Duane? You could see light . . . but no sun, moon or stars. HOW COULD THAT BE, DUANE?!?!? :>) You . . . MIST . . . another one, me boyo. :>) Once again, you've got to understand the Bible from God's point of view, not so self-centeredly our own. I guess, just think of it this way: first, God made the electricity, and THEN He made the lightbulbs that wouldn't work without it. It'd be pretty lame to do it the other way, eh? :>)

#2471: — 05/20  at  11:44 PM
I feel your pain, Andy. Science is great, but it ain't God. It ain't perfect. As with everything else in life, with science, you still have to have faith that you'll wind up able to come to a conclusion while you're in the process of proving something is right or wrong.

I'd recommend the book "Boy's Handbook of Practical Apologetics: Scientific Facts, Fulfilled Prophecies, and Archaeological Discoveries That Confirm the Bible" by Robert T. Boyd (Kregel Publications, 1997, 251). It would really help you see the inerrancy of the Bible as borne out by observable, verifiable facts.

Science is ever-changing, just like the discipline of hermeneutics, or Bible interpretation. We have the "hermeneutic spiral," where the Bible student reads a passage and understands it pretty well, but then after some time, reads it again, and comes across more illuminating background that suddenly brings a fresh, new realization about the meaning. This is called the "hermeneutical spiral," and it's progressive. My hope for you is that you will have that kind of a "spiral" of understanding about the supernatural inerrancy of the Bible and the expression of its asserted truths in our scientific repertoire.

There are all kinds of things we have now that people used to think would be impossible and couldn't grasp how they could possibly be true: heart transplants, space travel, a passing game for the Huskers . . . :>) . . . similarly, what we cannot understand today in the Bible will be proven out in the future, because the Bible's science and mathematics are perfect. In the meantime, it's not very scientific to ridicule it, if you can't disprove it. The correct answer is, "We just don't know yet." Maybe someday in our old age when we're tapping out our comments to each other on this blog with our crutch tips, we'll know so much more that we'll come to a meeting of the minds. And I predict YOURS will be the one meeting MINE. :>)

As for The Flood, I'll strap on my rubber-ducky boots to inform you that there is, too, an ocean of evidence that the whole Earth was once covered in water and that the science of geology points to a great worldwide catastrophe. That's why two-thirds to three-fourths of the earth's crust is covered with sedimentary rock, deposited quickly, not gradually over Sagan's "beellions and beellions" of years. :>) That's how come we have fossils -- it happened quick-like, so that Nature could "take a picture" of what was trapped there. Note that the arrangement in which fossils are usually found in rocks goes this way: fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, plant life, trees, fowls, and people. Isn't that an odd order, if those fossils were deposited over "beellions and beellions" of years? Note that Charles Lyell, who came up with the "geologic column" on which much of Darwinism is based, was a cousin of Darwin's, and draw up his column as a total hypothesis. It exists NOWHERE in Nature. It was "spin" to help Darwin construct his goofy, long-since-discredited Tree of Life with those long eras of gradualism -- that ALSO never existed in Nature. Nanny, nanny boo boo! :>)

As for corroboration, there are the cuneiform tablets found on the sites of ancient Babylonia's Nineveh and Nimrud in the mid-1800s with detailed accounts of a worldwide Flood recorded by non-Jews. And there's the three-meter thick layer of clean clay and silt separating the ancient Sumerian remains at Ur from artifacts of a more mixed culture, with similar alluvial strata found at Kish and Fara (site of the ancient Shuruppak -- whose high school football cheer HAD to be "yickety yack Shuruppak go fight win!" (sorry -- getting a tad punchy at this late hour :>) ).

Annnnnyway . . . there's a very good textbook with scientific evidence aplenty -- I mean, chockablock and extremely convincing -- called "In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood," by Walt Brown, Ph.D. (mechanical eng., MIT, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow, was a tenured associate professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy, and has taught college courses in physics, mathematics, and computer science). You might be able to access the textbook on http://www.creationscience.com

The Flood happened! These books I've recommended can be your waterwings, if you're willing to do a little snorkeling into this subject. Come on in . . . the water's fine. :>)

#2472: — 05/21  at  04:56 AM
So is Susan saying that the flood account in Genesis is literally literal as opposed to the story of Jacob and the goats which is sorta literal and you have to understand the culture and mindset of the people of the time to get it?

I guess it's obvious, Jacob believed in God, (the same sky spirit that "we" do today) therefore he must have been intellectually superior to his pagan father in law (who worshiped different non-existent entities than "we" do), so he had a knowledge that those primitive pagans couldn't grasp. Of course nowhere does it say this in the bible, but it doesn't NOT say it either, and we know that Jacob couldn't have believed anything stupid because he's on the right side. So basically we have the Jews of the time being not only morally better and smarter but they possessed a riotous sense of humour and knew how to have fun! Wow, they really did one over on those pagan buffoons.

Well sorry but it seems like they did one over on millions of Christians thousands of years later, because until about 500 years ago, when learning was able to break out of domination by the churches, culture and science was held back by people believing what is <i>actually written</i> in the bible as opposed to modern interpretations.

#2473: — 05/21  at  10:59 AM

As for The Flood, I�ll strap on my rubber-ducky boots to inform you that there is, too, an ocean of evidence that the whole Earth was once covered in water and that the science of geology points to a great worldwide catastrophe. That�s why two-thirds to three-fourths of the earth�s crust is covered with sedimentary rock, deposited quickly, not gradually over Sagan�s �beellions and beellions� of years.

Could you provide a reference from the scientific literature to substantiate this figure? What fraction of this "three-fourths" of sedimentary rock was formed by marine versus non-marine sedimentation?

That�s how come we have fossils�it happened quick-like, so that Nature could �take a picture� of what was trapped there.

Not so. The fossil record covers a period of several hundred million years.

Note that the arrangement in which fossils are usually found in rocks goes this way: fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, plant life, trees, fowls, and people. Isn�t that an odd order, if those fossils were deposited over �beellions and beellions� of years?

No, it's entirely consistent with the emergence of later forms from earlier ancestors over a period of millions of years. How do you explain the order using the Flood?

Note that Charles Lyell, who came up with the �geologic column� on which much of Darwinism is based, was a cousin of Darwin�s, and draw up his column as a total hypothesis. It exists NOWHERE in Nature. It was �spin� to help Darwin construct his goofy, long-since-discredited Tree of Life with those long eras of gradualism�that ALSO never existed in Nature.

False. The geologic column has been observed in a single location, for example this account of the column in North Dakota

Geologic Column

As for corroboration, there are the cuneiform tablets found on the sites of ancient Babylonia�s Nineveh and Nimrud in the mid-1800s with detailed accounts of a worldwide Flood recorded by non-Jews. And there�s the three-meter thick layer of clean clay and silt separating the ancient Sumerian remains at Ur from artifacts of a more mixed culture, with similar alluvial strata found at Kish and Fara (site of the ancient Shuruppak�whose high school football cheer HAD to be �yickety yack Shuruppak go fight win!� (sorry�getting a tad punchy at this late hour :>) ).

Ahem.... how would the Babylonians know that any flood they experienced was world wide? Unless they had either telecommunications or satellite photography back in Babylonian times, I'm not sure how they could make this claim. Of course, it's perfectly possible that a local flood occurred at that point - but that's not what we're talking about. As another example, I grew up in the East Anglia region in Great Britain. East Anglia is a low-lying region prone to flooding. How would my ancestors know whether a flood they were experiencing was local or global?

Do you have any more half-baked Flood gibberish for us to shoot down, or is that it? Would you like me to ask some questions of you - such as why there is no record of a worldwide flood in the last 40,000 years of ice core samples, or 10,000 years of tree ring dating - or why there is no evidence of terrestrial flooding on the sea floors by a number of different measures, or.... or......

#2474: — 05/21  at  11:21 AM
Oldies, but goodies.

Unh huh. He made some light off to one side, that wouldn't leak off to the other and put the earth on the line between and spun it around. Then wadded up a bunch of light into the sun and whipped the earth into orbit round it... Let me guess. This hasn't overwhelmed the scientific establishment, right?

A worldwide flood is certainly a minority view in science. In that sense, science does contradict those who buy a literal flood. If you take the view that it just SEEMED like the whole world was flooded to some guys in a boat, maybe you have a shot.

In the meantime, it�s not very scientific to ridicule it, if you can�t disprove it. The correct answer is, �We just don�t know yet.�

Say what? You make up any old unfalsifiable claim and are entitled to respect? Maybe there was a committee of Ubergods that created your god without letting Him know. � 40 seconds ago. Creating all the supposed historical evidence, etc. Prove it ain�t so. Can�t be done. Proving that it is ridiculous is not that tough, though.

All the biblical gotchas have responses by now. The fun thing is how convoluted they have to get and how different they are from each other. There are answers, but they�re pretty lame. I particularly like McDowell�s assertion that apologetics is not responsible for providing the right answer, merely one that can�t be refuted.

�The Jesus Puzzle� is worth a read, despite some reluctance on the part of Christian �analysts�. It is generally accepted that the most compelling corroborating evidence for Jesus came from later Christian insertions in historical documents, Josephus, etc. His (and others�) observations about the gap between the gospels and the epistles is very interesting. He goes to great pains to track down places where it might seem that there is some connection, Paul meeting Peter, etc. These are shown to be dubious, at best, fraudulent at worst.

#2475: — 05/21  at  02:53 PM

There are all kinds of things we have now that people used to think would be impossible and couldn�t grasp how they could possibly be true: heart transplants, space travel, a passing game for the Huskers . . . :>) . . . similarly, what we cannot understand today in the Bible will be proven out in the future, because the Bible�s science and mathematics are perfect.

Circular reasoning. The Bible's science and mathematics are perfect. If we find something in the Bible that contradicts this, it's because our understanding of that phenomenon is wrong. We know it's wrong because the Bible's science and mathematics are perfect.

I find it amazing that you can write this stuff without a hint of irony.

In the meantime, it�s not very scientific to ridicule it, if you can�t disprove it.

If I had a cent for every creationist who yacked on about science proving things, I'd have at least enough for a Happy Meal. Science doesn't prove or disprove things. That's not how it works. Fact is, the Bible says that humans can live for over 900 years. All the available evidence suggests that the human lifespan is somewhere between 125 and 130 years. If you say that the Bible's science is perfect, you must therefore delve into Bible and give me a scientific explanation about how humans can live for 900 years, when all the available data says this is not possible. There are two alternatives. Either the Bible is correct on this point, or it is incorrect.

#2476: — 05/21  at  03:39 PM
Well, Andy, it comes down to this: is something possible and plausible, or impossible and implausible? How do you decide? You look at the facts. From there, you draw inferences. What I'm saying is that you guys have looked at the facts and drawn a lot of biased inferences from them. It's OK; I forgive you. I once spelled "canoe" with two "n's." I! Even I! :>) I'm saying that the evidence makes evolutionary theory neither possible nor plausible. You have http://www.trueorigins.org and all kinds of other resources to 'xplain why, and if you still don't "get it," don't look at me, Buster. AT LEAST I TRIED!

It's as if you found a fragment of a letter from me and all that was legible was the word "like." Oh, your heart would go pitter-patter: she LIKES me!!!! You'd get a haircut, discover deodorant and put on your best polyester leisure suit with shined shoes. But guess what? The letter ACTUALLY said that being with you was LIKE having my upper lip stretched up and out, over my head. THAT painful, Andy. :>)

Anyway, that's how you guys have tried to cobble together your phony-baloney evolution arguments -- from false inferences you've drawn from the facts. From a filed-down tooth here to a little section of a skull here, to an extinct pig's tooth here -- you select what "fits" for you to be able to assert, straight-faced, that there has been evolution from one-cell life to man. In so doing, you ignore and avoid 99.99 percent of the contradictory evidence. It's kind of like what you have to do post-partum for a while when looking in the mirror. All that's safe to look at it your eyes; the rest is just too upsetting. :>)

You do the same thing, though, with geology and paleontology. Based on a few pocketed areas where the rocks line up at least partly in the way Charles Lyell's hypothetical geologic column should look, you lead people to believe that that's how the rocks stack up all over the bloomin' world. WELL, THEY DON'T!!! And you know it. You rascals! :>) The rocks stack up as you point out in the Williston, N.D., basin and, according to your guy, 25 other places. BUT . . . if you count the ocean floors, those "bingos" make up less than .4 of 1 percent of the earth's surface. That means based on that amount of evidence, you're claiming to be totally right . . . and attempting to NEGATE the other 99.6 percent of the evidence, that shows what a CROCK your theory is. Plus, the few spots that you say "prove" uniformitarianism are nowhere near as deep as they should be for the number of years you're claiming. A chart on http://www.trueorigins.org/geocolumn.asp illustrates it as being like one thin piece of paper (YOUR side of the story) stacked up against a skyscraper (OUR side). Plus PLUS, there are many fossils in categorized strata that are 'way out of sequence . . . etc. etc.

Found out you can, indeed, access Walt Brown's textbook on http://www.creationscience.com and I would urge you to study his references and notes for answers to your other questions. His hydroplate theory is right on the money. It's a GUSHER of good science and common sense. Hope you'll read it. Someday, I expect there'll be another worldwide flood -- from the tears of people who finally realize they've been fed a line of baloney allllllllll these years. :>)

Don't forget your waterwings.

#2673: PZ Myers — 05/21  at  07:14 PM
Where "good science" in Susan's world is defined as "anything that gives me the desired result."

#2675: — 05/21  at  09:14 PM

Anyway, that’s how you guys have tried to cobble together your phony-baloney evolution arguments—from false inferences you’ve drawn from the facts. From a filed-down tooth here to a little section of a skull here, to an extinct pig’s tooth here—you select what “fits” for you to be able to assert, straight-faced, that there has been evolution from one-cell life to man. In so doing, you ignore and avoid 99.99 percent of the contradictory evidence.

Susan, Susan, Susan..... we were discussing the flood, not evolution. Do try and stay focused.

You do the same thing, though, with geology and paleontology. Based on a few pocketed areas where the rocks line up at least partly in the way Charles Lyell’s hypothetical geologic column should look, you lead people to believe that that’s how the rocks stack up all over the bloomin’ world. WELL, THEY DON’T!!! And you know it. You rascals! :>) The rocks stack up as you point out in the Williston, N.D., basin and, according to your guy, 25 other places. BUT . . . if you count the ocean floors, those “bingos” make up less than .4 of 1 percent of the earth’s surface. That means based on that amount of evidence, you’re claiming to be totally right . . . and attempting to NEGATE the other 99.6 percent of the evidence, that shows what a CROCK your theory is

Why would you expect the geologic column to be preserved intact in every location in the world? Given the effects of geological activity and erosion, it's not surprising that the column is incomplete in most areas....however where we find parts of the column in different places, the strata miraculously occur in the same order as the complete column, not just mixed up at random. Interesting, eh? By the way, you still haven't answered my question:

Could you provide a reference from the scientific literature to substantiate this figure? (...that 75% of the Earth is covered with sedimentary rock depositied quickly) What fraction of this “three-fourths” of sedimentary rock was formed by marine versus non-marine sedimentation?

You then write

Plus, the few spots that you say “prove” uniformitarianism are nowhere near as deep as they should be for the number of years you’re claiming. A chart on http://www.trueorigins.org/geocolumn.asp illustrates it as being like one thin piece of paper (YOUR side of the story) stacked up against a skyscraper (OUR side).

Woodmorappe's estimate of 100 miles is not shared by any sane geologist. What he did was to make some crude calculations from different basins around the world (just what you criticized geologists for with the geologic column!!!) on what the thickest sediments were in that region. In other words, he took the most rapid sedimentation rates he could find, assumed they applied everywhere on Earth (they clearly don't), added them up, ignored erosion, and got 100 miles. It's complete nonsense. He even admits it where he writes:

What they are saying, as is seen in the part usually not quoted by anti-creationists, is that nowhere on earth is the geologic column complete in the sense of having the maximum thickness of sedimentary rock attributed to each geologic period.

....the maximum thickness of sedimentary rock attributed to each geologic period..... It's just so....so....amateurish.....

You then trot out another old creationist canard:

Plus PLUS, there are many fossils in categorized strata that are ‘way out of sequence . . . etc. etc.

OK Suzy-Q, it's put up or shut up time. Provide me one peer-reviewed reference - not pap from Kent Hovind or his buddies, and not the Paluxy tracks - that show fossils in categorized strata that are way out of sequence. Go on. The best you can find (and which has been well characterized) is inverted fossil layers due to geological activity. And here, the pattern of inverted fossils match the inverted strata and the sequence is indicative of inversion - for example, if fossils occur in the sequence ABCDE, you tend to see ABCDDCBA. You do not see ACEDBACEEBD or some other random sequence.

And finally, the piece de resistance:

Found out you can, indeed, access Walt Brown’s textbook on http://www.creationscience.com and I would urge you to study his references and notes for answers to your other questions. His hydroplate theory is right on the money.

No it isn't - it's complete garbage. A large number of people have pointed out that the amount of water concerned could not lie under the earth with rock floating on it, that the release of superheated water from underground reserves would cook Noah and his Ark, and that such a release would leave geological evidence which we do not see any traces of.

Now let's get back to you and the questions I posed that you still have not addressed. How do you explain the fossil record in Flood terms? Why do you assume that Babylonian flood myths refer to a global flood? How would they know?

Susan, it's OK if you just come out and say "OK, I admit there is no geological evidence for a flood - but it happened, and God got rid of all the evidence, and made it look like life evolved over billions of years". That's fine. In fact, that's just the explanation you gave for 900 year old humans. Just don't try and pretend that there's any scientific evidence for a global flood 6-10,000 years ago, that's all.

#2676: — 05/21  at  11:39 PM
Why do you guys bother? Susan clearly doesn't know squat about real science, and you aren't going to convince her that she's wrong. On the other hand, you guys aren't going to be swayed by emotional arguments. You're talking past each other.

Faith is faith, not knowledge. If your religious faith requires validation by fake science, then it isn't really faith, is it? If you require a single book (or even worse, a single translation of a single book, such as the King James Bible) to be factually inerrant, your faith isn't in your God so much as all those people who mucked with that book over 2000 or so years. Isn't that misplaced?

I may not have faith in a deity, but I _certainly_ don't have faith in a rabble of human translators and copiers. Yes, I know, they were all "inspired by God". They were still human. They still make mistakes. They still imposed their own unknown (to themselves) biases on their work.

#2682: isabel — 05/22  at  10:30 AM
<blockquote>Why do you guys bother? Susan clearly doesn’t know squat about real science, and you aren’t going to convince her that she’s wrong. On the other hand, you guys aren’t going to be swayed by emotional arguments. You’re talking past each other.<blockquote>

That sounds right, but I admit to regularly coming back to this thread just to see if maybe, just maybe, Susan's come up with an example as per Andy's request. Not that I expect the example will hold any weight. And reading about the alleged Bible evidence makes my head ache. I guess I just have a morbid fascination with such blind faith.

#2683: — 05/22  at  11:32 AM

Why do you guys bother? Susan clearly doesn’t know squat about real science, and you aren’t going to convince her that she’s wrong. On the other hand, you guys aren’t going to be swayed by emotional arguments. You’re talking past each other.

This is a question that comes up periodically in talk.origins, where Dr. Maierz and myself have hung out for many years. There are a number of answers to this:

1. The replies are meant to be informative, not just to the person you're responding to, but to other readers. For example, if just one person comes away with the idea that the fancy-sounding "Hydroplate Theory" has been shown by scientists to be just a load of silly nonsense, or that the full geologic column has been observed at multiple locations on Earth, that's great.

2. In a similar vein, it is important to counter creationist claims point by point. Professional creationist debaters such as Kent Hovind or Duane Gish never agree to written debates - only to public debates where they can use their well-honed schtick and spout a multitude of falsehoods and misrepresentations without the other side having the opportunity to rebut every single idiocy. See the recent account of the Hovind-Shermer debate in this blog. This sort of forum gives us an opportunity to forensically dissect every single stupid claim in public.

3. I have no illusions that Susan will come around to abandoning her young-earth Biblical literalism. However, there is a small chance that she will think about it a little bit.

4. It's good mental exercise, and informative for me to research all these creationist claims. It actually also sets up a nice challenge (Susan - are you reading this?) - Susan has said that

In so doing, you ignore and avoid 99.99 percent of the contradictory evidence.

Taken at face value, this means that if I provide one piece of evidence for, say, an ancient Earth, or biological evolution, Susan will have to provide 9999 pieces of evidence in return.....

5. It's fun, and it keeps me off the streets

Are those good enough reasons? For the record, I predict that Susan will quietly drop out of this discussion in the next few days, possible with a patronizing reference to concern for my mortal soul. But if she decides to venture back, we'll still be here.

#2685: PZ Myers — 05/22  at  12:37 PM
I also think it is useful propaganda for the evilutionist side to have creationists like Susan, who are willing and even enthusiastic about the most godawfully stupid claims, to stand up for their foolishness where we can laugh at them. Like Andy says, most creationists are a bit more cunning than that, and do their damnedest to hide their beliefs from critical examination.

And really, you don't want Andy on the streets. He's a terror.

#2687: Rory Parle — 05/22  at  01:11 PM
Thank you Andy. That first point went a good way to dissolving my frustration with this thread. It seems this isn't as pointless as I thought.

#2690: — 05/22  at  03:42 PM
You losers have been busy since I've been having a life! :>) You know what Henny Youngman said: he tried being an atheist but hated it because they don't have any holidays! :>)

OK, Andy, I'll have my way with you briefly:

1. Here's what I was referring to: "Two-thirds to three-fourths of the earth's crust is covered with sedimentary rock. Evidence shows that thick layers of sediment were deposited in a short period of time -- not gradually over millions of years. For anything to become fossilized, it must be quickly buried in sediment, otherwise it would decay or be devoured by scavengers. The sudden death of the frozen mammoths, the wiping out of dinosaurs, and the many fossilized shoals of fish all point to a terrible catastrophe like a flood." This is p. 70, Boy's Handbook of Practical Apologetics, Robert T. Boyd (Kregel Publications, 1997). Think "limestone," Bro. Think "coal." There's this "thing" called basalt. There's the coal seams under Antarctica. There's the Grand Canyon, the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, continental shelves and slopes, ocean trenches, seamounts and tablemounts, marine fossils on mountaintops, the fact that 95% of the fossils are of marine life, etc. etc. etc. No, I don't have a juried, pureed academic journal cite that acknowledges the high amount of sedimentary crust on Earth, including, you'll note, under the oceans. But you probably can't show me a research cite that says "farts smell." BUT IT'S STILL TRUE!!! :>) And bet YOURS do a LOT. :>)

2. Fossils in categorized strata out of sequence: yeah, that's ALL that the fossil record shows, because THERE AIN'T NO SEQUENCE!!! :>) The fossil record is strong evidence against macroevolution, especially the Cambrian Explosion. And you KNOW that. So did Darwin: "Geological research, though it has added numerous species to existing and extinct genera, and has made the intervals between some few groups less wide than they otherwise would have been, yet has done scarcely anything in breaking the distinction between species, by connecting them together by numerous, fine, intermediate varieties; and this not having been affected, is probably the gravest and most obvious of all the many objections which can be raised against my views." (The Origin of Species, 6th ed., 1962, Collier Books, NY, p. 462). ANDY, YOU GUYS ARE LOOKING AT PILES OF DEAD THINGS KILLED IN THE FLOOD . . . for the most part. If there were intermediate fossils all over the place, especially bewteen Thing 1 and Thing 2, those relatively simple early critters, I'd be more amenable to your claims. Since there ain't, I ain't. YYOU GUYS NEED TO GET YO' GLASSES CLEANED!!! :>)

3. Hydroplate theory would have poached Noah & Co. -- gotta read Walt Brown's book, "In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood." I think it's on http://www.creationscience.com He carefully explains the lubrication and lapse rates and so forth that show how it might have been mega-mega hot right where the "fountains of the great deep" broke up (Genesis 7:11), but note that where Noah was was about as far as possible from the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, where the superheated water fountains were spurting. Not sure the satellite photo is available on the online version, but in the book on p. 89 there's a terrific color picture of the ocean floor taken by the U.S. Navy's SEASAT satellite, and you can see the 46,000-mile Mid-Oceanic Ridge of mountains that wrap around the continents kind of like the lacings on a baseball, and all of basalt. That's one of many, many geologic conditions on the Earth that are totally consistent with Brown's hydroplate theory. Not very SPORTING of you to comment on it unless you've read this book, me boyo. :>)

4. Babylonian flood myths don't prove The Flood was global -- nooooooo, but similar documentation from Greek historians, in Australia, in Indian, in China, in Scandinavia and across America sure do. Chinese pictographs dating 4,000 to 5,000 years back are really interesting: the Chinese word for "boat" has the strokes that mean "vessel," "eight" and "mouth" or "person." Why would the ancient Chinese describe a boat as an "eight-person vessel"? Might could have something to do with the fact that on the Ark were Noah, his three sons, and their wives = eight people? :>) THINK ABOUDDDIT!!! :>)

5. If evolutionists were honest, they'd welcome written debates. You guys are the ones who duck the good guys. Walt Brown (creationscience.com) has had a standing offer to do just what you propose, for years. In fact, he says he would pay a student $200 who could get it set up for him. So don't look at me -- why don't YOU take Walt Brown up on his offer? :>) No? BAWK BAWK BAWK BAWK ba-KAWWWWWW!!!!! :>)

6. I stand by my statement that nowhere on Earth is there an example of the geologic column in precise order and proportion such as you Nimrods show in your evolutionahoonieology textbooks, though in .4 of 1 percent of the world at least the order is close enough to the way you describe it to allow me, The Lady Bountiful, to concede that in .4 of 1 percent of the places, it's close enough. But O . . . K. Now let's pretend that I just said that in .4 of 1 percent of the places on earth, gravity doesn't work. Using YOUR logic and twisty-changy-spin-bias inferences, then GRAVITY DOESN'T WORK AT ALL!!! See? You're the one ignoring more than 99 percent of the evidence. OK? You're the one with . . . issues. :>)

For your reading pleasure:

ocean cooling supports The Flood:
http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-277.htm

ice core assumptions:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2001/0704icecores.asp

lots of good flood articles:
http://www.trueorigin.org
http://www.trueorigin.org/camplist.asp

TATA for now, and God bless, you knucklehead. :>)

#2691: — 05/22  at  04:50 PM
>pointless

Right on. The damage done by acceptance of magical thinking is huge, especially in the US. It is a good societal contribution to fight it. Stem cell research; The right to die; Family planning; War for the rapture; Hounding gays; Retarded development of science talent; and on and on.

#2692: Rory Parle — 05/22  at  05:28 PM
I went through three Catholic schools during the course of my education and I always lamented religious views being presented as fact, moral results derived from bronze-age myths and the fact that I was forced to sit through a few hours a week of indoctrination under the title of "religious education". This is in Ireland. I thought at the time that I'd be better off in the US. I'd heard of seperation of church and state; I thought it would be wonderful. But now I see education and national policies being influenced heavily by religous crackpots and I'm glad I live Ireland. Catholicism is harmless even if its supposed adherants followed it, which most don't around here. Now I lament the power and influence the US has over the rest of the world, including Ireland, and I just hope that sensible people aren't drowned in the rising sea of superstition.

#2696: — 05/22  at  08:25 PM
Wow! That was quite a groovy experience. Thanks for pointing so vigorously to the Bible, Susan. It very difficult to explain because the Holy Spirit is such a powerful and awesome entity that it desn't speak in language. The best way to put it is that He speaks in love. It was truly amazing. I recommend everyone try it.
I tried what Susan said she did. I opened the Bible to a random passage and let God direct my soul to just the right place. Where did He direct me? He directed me to Psalm 90. Below is a recreation of the most influential part of the Psalm, the part that He wanted me to pay particular attention to.

Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on thy servants!
Satisfy us in the morning with thy steadfast love,
that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Make us glad as many days as thou hast afflicted us,
and as many years as we have seen evil.
Let thy work be manifest to thy servants,
and thy glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

And it seem quite clear to me what it was God was trying to tell me. He was trying to reveal to me His true nature. And judging by the language God was telling me that He is a powerful, loving, creator of glorious works, arrogant, insecure, needy, dependent, self-worshipping, perfect, omnibenevolent force.

Thank you very much Susan for showing to the light and now that I have taken it up I can live forevermore satisfied that I am following the one true God, who may very well need some therapy as I imagine that it is dysfunctional, distressing, deviant, and dangerous to for the all powerful to need others to worship Him and go on and on and on ad nauseum about what a great thing He is. Why on Earth would I want to follow a diety like that? I'd much rather disbelieve him. No, take your wares elsewhere, I'll not buy them, this god is defective, come back when you have one that is really perfect.

#2697: isabel — 05/22  at  08:27 PM

...I just hope that sensible people aren’t drowned in the rising sea of superstition.

Rory, that's my worry, too. I live in the U.S. For a number of years now, it's seemed to me that people are increasingly believing in allegedly divine (Christian) interventions, e.g., miracles, angels, etc. People actually talk about everyday things as if they were divinely influenced, common coincidences are now "miracles" and good fortune is due to "an angel on one's shoulder." It's like watching a whole nation become more gullible and stupid right in front of your eyes. I don't go along with the divine intervention stuff, but I sure wish folks would at least save that designation for really unusual things and use common sense first.

No, I don’t have a juried, pureed academic journal cite that acknowledges the high amount of sedimentary crust on Earth, including, you’ll note, under the oceans.

Susan, if you don't have a cite regarding this crust in a respected (as in respected by the scientific community at large), peer-reviewed scientifc journal, your claim won't - and should not - be accepted by the scientific community.

But you probably can’t show me a research cite that says “farts smell.” BUT IT’S STILL TRUE!!! :>) And bet YOURS do a LOT. :>)

This is unnecessary and, may I add, most un-Christian like.

#2700: — 05/22  at  09:03 PM
In the spirit of Andy's reply to my earlier post, I'll dip my toe into the water.

Susan,
I suggest you read an introductory geology book before you make grandiose claims about how the current state of the planet supports the flood. Geologists have a saying: the present is the key to the past. To understand what might have happened in the past, it is necessary to understand how basic geological processes work today.

A well-written, well-illustrated text is Earth: An Introduction to Physical Geology by Tarbuck and Lutgens, available from Amazon (but you're likely to find it used at a college bookstore).

You can't determine whether your Flood-supporting references are talking through their hats until you have an inkling of how geological processes affect the modern earth.

(And as a bonus, the book will give you an idea of what to worry about when you check out the location of your next home. Hills do slide, floods and sinkholes happen, etc., and the land often gives little clues about whether a disast er might happen in a particular place.)

Oh, and by the way: I spent my spring break looking at fossil beds in the California desert that have very nicely sequenced fossils, as did hundreds of other geology students in many other places around the U.S. and elsewhere. We don't just make this stuff up.

#2703: — 05/23  at  05:17 AM

Catholicism is harmless even if its supposed adherants followed it

I’ve been struck recently by how aggressive the Catholic church is. There is a movement to deny communion to pro-choice politicians. These are guys that may very well buy the church line, but are unwilling to impose their views on others. The church’s position is that is not enough to believe, you have to force others to your point of view as well. They really aren’t on board with the freedom thing.

Now, they’re taking the same line on voting. Voting for a pro-choice pol is a sin and you shouldn’t take communion until you repent it.

They’re against condoms. Not just for their own, but for everyone. Just think of the tremendous amount of suffering that condoms have prevented in society, and they’re blocking them.

Harmless?!

#2704: — 05/23  at  05:26 AM
http://users.utu.fi/snapir/fart/pro.html

#2705: Rory Parle — 05/23  at  06:27 AM
Well I don't follow the ramblings of the Catholic church too closely Duane, but I suspect that some of the things you mention are coming from Catholic bishops in the US rather than from the Pope. I take your point on birth-control. There's also the "evil homosexuals" thing. So it's not as harmless as I suggested, but like I said most people around here don't adhere to it too closely anyway. I think people do and think and vote how they like and just feel a little uncomfortable when they know it contradicts their faith.

#2706: Ben — 05/23  at  06:36 AM
Interesting that Susan recognises "household god/s" as superstition, yet seems to draw the line at universe god/s.

#2707: — 05/23  at  08:12 AM
I seem to recall some bit of religion involved Catholic/Protestant strife goin' on even in peaceful Ireland.

It was nice of them to rename the Office of the Holy Inquisition, though.

#2708: Rory Parle — 05/23  at  11:05 AM
That's the UK you're thinking of, ever since the right-thinking Irish electorate decided to remove all claim to the six counties of Northern Ireland from the constitution.

Besides that has nothing to do with religion. This is one case where the religions are used as a label and nothing else. I mean they couldn't really have much influence if they agree about just about everything. I'm not aware of any religious leaders in the area supporting either side.

The conflict in the north is partly political (republican vs loyalist/unionist) but mostly criminal. If every person in NI suddenly lost all faith in God they would continue to kill and maim for the fun of it. It's not a religious issue.

#2709: isabel — 05/23  at  12:07 PM
I know the chaplain at a nearby Catholic nursing home. She's a wonderful person and a delight to know. She's kind, humble and ecumenical. I've often thought that these are the kinds of qualities for which Christians are supposed to strive. And yet the behavior of some so-called Christians illustrates doctrinal aggression (as pointed out by Duane), arrogance and narrow-mindedness. I like to think that these folks' behavior is such that it can't help but draw attention to them, and that the majority of Christians are tolerant people whose normalcy keeps them off the radar. I hope that's the case.

Duane, thanks for that link. There simply has to be cites to flatulence, since it is a biological process, but I was too lazy to look for any myself.

#2710: — 05/23  at  01:33 PM
I find myself getting lazy, too. It’s such a joy to sit back and watch these guys work. I get lazy and then get tangled up by Rory.

I don’t know why the science is important to the true believers. They claim a miracle to start off the flood. Why not just throw one in to clean it up? They’re cheap. Heck, these guys see miracles when they find their car keys.

#2712: isabel — 05/23  at  05:46 PM

Susan, it's OK if you just come out and say "OK, I admit there is no geological evidence for a flood - but it happened, and God got rid of all the evidence, and made it look like life evolved over billions of years". That's fine. In fact, that's just the explanation you gave for 900 year old humans. Just don't try and pretend that there's any scientific evidence for a global flood 6-10,000 years ago, that's all.

This sounds reasonable; keep your faith while acknowledging the data. I also don't know why creationists get all het up trying to provide scientific evidence for creationism. I wonder if they'd be better off and more successful in the long run if they gave up that project and divert their energies to other, more promising projects.

I find myself getting lazy, too. It’s such a joy to sit back and watch these guys work. I get lazy and then get tangled up by Rory.

Regarding being lazy, this is the first presidential election where I feel like I should do something other than vote, e.g., get off my butt and help with the Kerry campaign. It seems completely unimaginable that Bush could get re-elected and yet I'm concerned that there's a good chance that that's exactly what will happen. PZ's post about the censored high school students is a horrendous scenario that should not be happening in the U.S.

#2713: — 05/23  at  06:13 PM
Susan wrote:

But you probably can't show me a research cite that says "farts smell." BUT IT'S STILL TRUE!!! :>) And bet YOURS do a LOT.

and

YYOU GUYS NEED TO GET YO' GLASSES CLEANED!!! :>)

and

BAWK BAWK BAWK BAWK ba-KAWWWWWW!!!!! :>)

and

TATA for now, and God bless, you knucklehead. :>)

I am prepared to continue to discuss issues with you, but your tone is not very respectful, and not (as others have pointed out) very Christian. And most of all, they don't make your arguments very convincing. Now, to your message itself:

No, I don't have a juried, pureed academic journal cite that acknowledges the high amount of sedimentary crust on Earth, including, you'll note, under the oceans. But you probably can't show me a research cite that says "farts smell." BUT IT'S STILL TRUE!!!

Don't bring a knife to a gunfight. If you don't have data to back up such a specific claim, don't make the claim. I also asked you how much of that sedimentary rock was due to marine versus non-marine deposition. I suppose you can't tell me that either. Oh well. Next:

Fossils in categorized strata out of sequence: yeah, that's ALL that the fossil record shows, because THERE AIN'T NO SEQUENCE!!! :>)

However, on 5/21, you wrote:

That's how come we have fossils -- it happened quick-like, so that Nature could "take a picture" of what was trapped there. Note that the arrangement in which fossils are usually found in rocks goes this way: fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, plant life, trees, fowls, and people. Isn't that an odd order, if those fossils were deposited over "beellions and beellions" of years?

Now, I realize that (foolish) consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and all that, but this does seem to me to be a tad contradictory. Either there's a sequence, Susan, or there isn't. If you claim there isn’t a sequence, you are arguing against overwhelming evidence. At least one other person here has recently seen some of that evidence with her own eyes. Perhaps you should do so too. If, on the other hand, you are sticking with your earlier claim that there is indeed a fossil sequence, please explain how Flood theory can account for it.

You citation from Darwin is accurate, but not up to date. In the 150 years since Darwin's time, we have uncovered many excellent examples of fossil sequences of many different organisms. It is true that certain organisms don't leave good fossils - for example, the conditions in rainforests are very unlikely to give you fossils, so we don't have very many bat fossils. That's a problem with taphonomy, not the extant fossil record.

Let's get back to the hydroplate theory. Let's ignore the amount of energy released by the superheated water mysteriously lying underneath all that rock. Let's just imagine that we needed to rain down enough water to cover the earth to a height of Mount Ararat (5165m above sea level today). I'm not very good at maths, so work through this with me:

The surface area of the earth is 5x10E14 square metres, so we're talking a volume of 5x10E14 x 5165 = 2.5825X10E18 cubic metres of water. 1 cubic metre of water weighs 1000kg, which is 2.5825x10E21 kilograms of water.

Let's say that all that water fell from a distance of about 36,000 feet, which is roughly 12,000 metres. The energy released by that water falling to Earth is roughly 3X10E26 joules.

The mass of the Earth's atmosphere is roughly 2x10E19 kg. To raise 1kg air by 1°C takes about 1000 joules. If we released 3X10E26 joules of energy all at once, it would raise the Earth's atmospheric temperature by 15,000 degrees. Spread that out over 40 days and 40 nights, and we have the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere rising by 375 degrees a day.

This assumes little loss of heat from the Earth (which is a reasonable assumption). It also ignores the pressure of that amount of water above the Earth. It also assumes the water doesn't soak into the Earth at all, and thus that every drop of rain increases sea level. This is not a good assumption at all. For example, an 18 hole golf course in Las Vegas consumes one million gallons of water every day without any waterlogging at all. In other words, the amount of water needed to flood the Earth to a height of 5165 metres is likely to be much higher than my estimate.

Now, I did this very quickly and sloppily. I may have been out by a few orders of magnitude. So go and do the maths yourself and present your calculation here. Other people should check my math too.

Note that if you envisgae this amount of water below the Earth's crust, the problems with heat become even worse!

Babylonian flood myths don't prove The Flood was global -- nooooooo, but similar documentation from Greek historians, in Australia, in Indian, in China, in Scandinavia and across America sure do.

No they don't. They show that flooding occurs in Greece, Australia, India, China, Scandinavia and America. They don't show the flooding occurred at the same time. For an isolated culture, it is likely that a large flood would seem to them to be their "world" flooding. That doesn’t mean the entire Earth was flooded at once. Your list of these countries does raise an interesting point, however. Noah's family of 8 people were meant to populate all the different ethnic groups of the Earth in 5,000 years, correct? Genetic and archaeological evidence suggests that's nonsense.

You guys are the ones who duck the good guys. Walt Brown (creationscience.com) has had a standing offer to do just what you propose, for years.

I do indeed stand (partially) corrected that Brown will engage in a written debate. However - his "rules" stipulate that:

However, the debate must be restricted to science and avoid religion, a broader, more complex, and less-structured subject.

How is one meant to debate the merits of evolution and creationism without discussing religion? Brown's whole thesis is designed to explain a Biblical flood.

Brown also cites one part of "the evolution position" as

Over billions of years, the universe, the solar system, the earth, and finally life developed from disordered matter through natural processes.

This has nothing to do with evolution. Brown also stipulates that:

One side, selected at random, will nominate three willing editors, each associated with a large, but different, publisher. (A large publisher is defined as one with annual sales of more than 10 million U.S. dollars.) The other side, after considering each nominee’s qualifications and fees, and the royalties the publisher would provide the debaters, will select the editor.

What if the royalties were unappealing to the other side? What happens then?

I have a suggestion, Susan. I'll debate Walt Brown in the Talk.origins forum, which is free and available to anyone with an Internet connection. We'll have an open-ended debate in which he makes a statement of 10kb total text, and I respond. I then make a similar statement and he responds. We keep going until one person drops out. You set it up.

I stand by my statement that nowhere on Earth is there an example of the geologic column in precise order and proportion such as you Nimrods show in your evolutionahoonieology textbooks, though in .4 of 1 percent of the world at least the order is close enough to the way you describe it to allow me, The Lady Bountiful, to concede that in .4 of 1 percent of the places, it's close enough. But O . . . K. Now let's pretend that I just said that in .4 of 1 percent of the places on earth, gravity doesn't work. Using YOUR logic and twisty-changy-spin-bias inferences, then GRAVITY DOESN'T WORK AT ALL!!! See? You're the one ignoring more than 99 percent of the evidence.

As I said previously, we would not expect the complete column to be present in many places on Earth. Your comparison with gravity is fatuous. You're comparing a force with a geological artifact. A better comparison, and one which is nearer to your heart would be the following (and I stress that I am not subscribing to the opinion which follows):

"The Bible is a forgery. Nowhere on Earth does there exist an original, intact copy of the Bible. Instead, it's simply been cobbled together by Biblutionists from scraps all over the world".

I doubt you would agree with this. Why not?

Lastly, you make your 99 percent claim again. I see you've come down by two orders of magnitude from your 99.99 percent statement a day or two ago, but regardless - this still means that for every piece of evidence I can give you against the flood, you will give me 99 pieces of evidence for it. Deal?

ocean cooling supports The Flood:
http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-277.htm

.

The problem with this, Susan, is that the sediments we find in the earth's crust are over 6,000 years old. In fact, they are millions of years old.

ice core assumptions:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2001/0704icecores.asp

William Hyde demolishes this article nicely here

http://tinyurl.com/397qm

Any more?

#2722: — 05/23  at  11:12 PM
Urgh, reading through this debate is painful. I'm a practicing Catholic, and I believe in every word of the Nicene creed. But no, I'm not a creationist or a fundamentalist. I think the Bible is a fallible work written by human hands, which may have been divinely inspired but certainly not divinely dictated. I'm fascinated by evolutionary theory and hope to spend my life researching the mechanisms of natural selection. You can be a rational Christian. (I may add that none of the above opinions contradict the current dogma of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church.) In fact, Susan, you'd probably do a better job of converting people by showing them exemplary Christian behavior instead of resorting to petty ad hominem attacks. Honestly, go reread the Gospels instead of spending so much time trying to validate your pseudoscience.

As for the atheists on the other side of the debate--I understand that people like Susan make believers look bad, but I would just like to assert that I do believe in a God, and while my interpretation of Him may not be entirely traditional or orthodox, I don't think my beliefs necessarily have to contradict with my scientific knowledge. I think that religion and science both begin with a sense of wonder, and I want to become a scientist partly because I am religious and find something deeply spiritual and moving about the order of the universe. I don't allow religion to dictate scientific facts or theory for me, but I do allow it to provide me a perspective where I can see the beauty in these disparate facts. Religion isn't just a useless psychological crutch but a source of inspiration.

#2723: — 05/23  at  11:15 PM
Karen, thanks for the textbook reference, and Duane, your flatulence cite is hilarious. However, I can one-up you both: we have a series of little science books for our kids, “A GOLDEN GUIDE” (Racine, Wis.: Western Publishing Co.), written on about the sixth-grade level by two Ph.D.’s.

This evening, beginning to look up stuff to reply to you guys, I happened to open up the one on “Rocks and Minerals” to p. 121 – lo and behold! – entitled “Sedimentary Rocks.” It contains the following assertion: “In total these rocks cover about three-quarters of the earth’s surface.” That’s exactly the factoid that you requested.

This kind of stuff happens to me alllllll the time. Jehovah-jireh! The Lord will provide! (Genesis 22:14) :>) So even if you guys didn’t know this fact about sedimentary rock covering most of the Earth, little kiddies know. Get a clue from them, I guess. And a little child shall lead them. . . .(Isaiah 11:6) :>)

I’m sorry if my jokes rub you the wrong way. I’m just a joyful person, since of course, I have the joy of the Lord. Maybe you’re just not used to happy people. Sorry about that. Keep in mind that blaspheming God and denying Christ, as you do, is a lot, lot more “un-Christian” than a few fart and chicken jokes. THINKABOUDIT! :>) Anyway, though, I’ll try to be more circumspect.

Isabel: Among the overwhelming evidence FOR a worldwide flood in the past are:

-- Signs of dramatic changes in the position of the earth’s land masses.

-- Evidence that the mountains could be much, much higher now than before, because of the unparalleled forces at work during the Flood.

-- Nobel Prize nominee Dr. Melvin Cook, a Yale Ph.D., has stated that his life’s work studying oil and gas deposits and well pressures have led him to conclude that oil and gas deposits probably came from the sudden deep burial of organic material a relatively short time ago – from 5,000 to 100,000 years ago. The incredibly high pressures in deep oil wells of up to 8,000 psi and rock permeabiity values suggest the oil hasn’t been there very long at all – certainly not Sagan’s “beellions and beellions of years.” :>) Similarly, Dr. Edward F. Blick, professor of aerodynamics, nuclear engineering, geological engineering and other subjects for more than 30 years at Oklahoma University, made similar calculations for deep gas geo-pressured reservoirs and found that the high gas pressures could not last at 10,000 to 20,000 years. (Duane, I guess that’s where your fart website comes in :>) ) Other factors, such as active seepage at the surface of wells, are irreconcilable with a uniformitarianistic model of millions of years. Only sudden deep burial of a few thousand years ago can explain it, which means a worldwide flood is nicely consistent with the facts. (Source: Book, “A Scientific Analysis of Genesis” by the aforementioned Dr. Blick, Hearthstone Publishing, 1991.).
-- Same book quotes another book, “Marine Geology” by P.H. Juenen (Wiley Press, 1950) as saying that coral reefs have been measured as growing as much as 5 centimeters per year, which would account for most of the coral reef depths found around the world since The Flood.

-- Same book asserts that “there is enough water in the oceans of the world to cover the entire Earth to a depth of about two miles, if the Earth’s topography smoothed out.” (p. 11) The hydroplate theory holds that topography used to be a lot smoother, even to subtropical conditions by the North Pole. That, and a sudden worldwide flood, would explain why there were millions of frozen-drowned mammoths found in Siberia, with congested blood that suggested death by drowning, and subtropical vegetation in their digestive tracts. Duane will like this: one mammoth was even found with an erection – suggesting sudden death by flooding. Awww . . . didn’t even have time for that giant cigarette. :>)

-- Partial skeletons of animals have been found in deep fissures in several parts of the world, and the Flood seems to be the best explanation for these skeletons. They occur even in hills of considerable height, extending from 140 feet to 300 feet (see Rehwinkel’s “The Flood”). There are mammoths, bears, wolves, oxen, hyenas, rhinoceros, deer and many smaller mammals. No skeleton is complete, which means they couldn’t have fallen into these fissures alive or been rolled there by streams. Because of the calcite cementing of these bones, they had to have been deposited underwater. Such fissures have been found in Odessa by the Black Sea, in the island of Kythera off the Peloponnesus, in the island of Malta, in the Rock of Gibraltar and even in . . . be still, my beating heart . . . good old Agate Springs, Nebraska! That’s my home state. Y’all come on down for a visit and see for yourself. I’ll even spring for corn liquor and a buffalo burger as I lead you to the Lord after you admit the evidence points to the truth of Genesis 6-9 and the faithfulness and holiness of Jehovah-jireh, Adonai, the Lord God Almighty.

Moving right along . . . Andy was pouting about my pooh-poohing of the “sequences” in the fossil record. I’m sorry to hurt his feelings, but what you guys see there is a mega example of a bad inference – kind of like Darwin looking at farmers breeding animals to get a better version and inferring that if you breed horses to be smaller and smaller, eventually you can wind up with a Pomeranian. :>) Remember, Darwin also wrote that bears could evolve into whales. Riiiiiiiight.

Let’s quote a better writer than I, even I, on the fossil record and what it means:

“The present-day whale, which is the largest animal in the world, has no clear-cut fossil predecessors. These monstrous 60-ton mammals seem to have merely appeared. One would think that a huge, fossilized pre-whale skull or vertebra might be found somewhere.

“Flies found in amber that is estimated to be 225 million years old are the same as today’s flies. The giraffe, with its incredibly long neck, has not changed in two million years, and it has no shorter-neck predecessors among the fossils. Rodents also appeared suddenly in the fossil record. Fish arrived without preceding fish-like fossils. Insects showed up without any precedents. Thousands of new species, discovered at the Burgess Shale in Canada and at a counterpart in China, exploded on the scene during the Cambrian period (sometimes called the biological big bang) 540 million years ago. No predecessor fossils have ever been found for 99 percent of some quite large and weird-looking animals. The opabinia had five eyes; there were worms with thorny noses to snag prey; and we’ve even found evidence of crawling creatures with eyes on the ends of stalks. There are no new phyla since the Cambrian period.

“Most species, according to the fossil record, evolved very little, if at all, before becoming extinct; the life expectancy of a species of animal might have extended a hundred thousand generations or a few million years, yet each generation continued to look much like, if not identical to, the previous generations Take the beetle. It has not changed in two million years. Or the bowfin fish, which has not changed in 100 million years. The lungfish has not changed in 350 million years.

“Herbert Nilsson of Lund University, Sweden, stated, “It is not even possible to make a caricature of evolution (Darwin’s gradualism) out of paleobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that the lack of transitional series cannot be explained by the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.” Or consider the words of paleontologist Steven Stanley: “The known fossil record is not, and never has been in accord with gradualism.” Or those of paleontologist David Raup: “Different species usually appear and disappear from the fossil record without showing the transitions that Darwin postulated.” Or those of biologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural History, Ernst Mayr: “With curious frequency it is even stated today that Darwin’s method was largely one of speculation and deduction.” Or those of Francis Hitching in “The Neck of the Giraffe,” who states that most scientists now discount the idea of the lungfish having evolved into an amphibian, based on its head structure and lack of true legs.”

(Book, “What Darwin Didn’t Know: A Doctor Dissects the Theory of Evolution,” Geoffrey Simmons, M.D., Harvest House Publishers, 2004, pp. 303-305).

I’m getting to a conclusion on this. Stay tuned:

On Andy’s question about how much of the sedimentary rock is marine, reference pp. 40-41 of Walt Brown’s book on http://www.creationscience.com:

“Is there enough water to cover all the earth’s preflood mountains in a global flood? Most people do not realize that the volume of water on earth is ten times greater than the volume of land above sea level.

“Most of the earth’s mountains consist of tipped and buckled sedimentary layers. Because these sediments were initially laid down through water as nearly horizontal layers, those mountains must have been pushed up after the sediments were deposited. (See pages 886-119 for the hydroplate theory explained.)

“If these mountains were again flattened out while the ocean basins rose in compensation for this downward flow of mass, the oceans would again flood the entire earth. Therefore, the earth has enough water to cover the smaller mountains that existed before the flood. (If the solid earth were perfectly smooth, water depth would be 9,000 feet everywhere.)

“Every major mountain range on earth contains fossilized sea life – far above sea level. I have found fossils of sea life a few miles from Mount Ararat, more than a mile above sea level.”

Again, Andy, I urge you to read Walt Brown’s book (and by the way, I encourage you to set up that debate on your own; as I said before, I ain’t yo’ mama :>) ) and then you’ll understand that undue heat wouldn’t have been a problem for Noah & Co., that the fossils we see are much, much younger than the assumptions and inferences lead many people to believe, that they illustrate creation rather than evolution, and also that fossils are consistent with a worldwide flood and actually work to DISPROVE the theory of evolutionaholicbooboohooliganism. :>)

There. Was I nice enough this time?

Had a very lovely morning in church. Great songs. Took communion and learned about Ephesians 1:15-19. Our pastor made a reference to John 17, where Jesus prayed to the Father for the ones predestined to be His (Romans 8:29,30) and I bowed my head and prayed to the point of tears for you and the other people on this site.

Further, affiant sayeth naught.

FOR THE FIRM . . .

#2734: isabel — 05/24  at  09:07 AM

In fact, Susan, you'd probably do a better job of converting people by showing them exemplary Christian behavior instead of resorting to petty ad hominem attacks.

Hana, well said.

As for the atheists on the other side of the debate--I understand that people like Susan make believers look bad,

Indeed.

but I would just like to assert that I do believe in a God, and while my interpretation of Him may not be entirely traditional or orthodox, I don't think my beliefs necessarily have to contradict with my scientific knowledge.

This seems like a perfectly acceptable point of view. One can certainly believe in a god and still accept the modern scientific view of the world. My gripe is with creationists trying to distort science to fit their creationist agenda; that is unacceptable.

I’m sorry if my jokes rub you the wrong way. I’m just a joyful person, since of course, I have the joy of the Lord. Maybe you’re just not used to happy people. Sorry about that.

Non-believers can be exceedingly happy. Personally, I'm a very happy person, as is my husband, and together we have a lot of happiness. In fact, I've occasionally considered joining the Society of Happy People. I am familiar with many happy, kind and loving atheists and agnostics.

Keep in mind that blaspheming God and denying Christ, as you do, is a lot, lot more “un-Christian” than a few fart and chicken jokes. THINKABOUDIT! :>)

Now, I'm afraid this won't further your case because it's advice based on circular reasoning, i.e., one must believe in the Christian God to consider keeping your comments regarding blashpemy and denial in mind.

Anyway, though, I’ll try to be more circumspect.

That would be most appreciated. For the creationist who wishes to debate science with non-creationists, many of whom are scientists, it might help him/her to debate in a manner commensurate with scientific debate. It does not help the case of any debater - whatever their position on whatever topic - to appear otherwise. And I may be very wrong about this, but I must say that your apology regarding your so-called jokes does not ring true. It appears to be a perfunctory apology since it is immediately followed by more of the usual.

I find many Christian folks and ideas to be admirable and inspiring. There is much good in these people and their ideas. Christian charity, in thought and deed, is particularly admirable and can be emulated by the non-believer to good effect, although, of course, not for religious reasons. In fact, I utilize a Christian-based behavioral guideline, drawn in part from a Catholic upbringing.

Forgive me if I already mentioned this, but my mother and father are both Catholic, from Ireland and Poland, respectively. I consider my mom in particular to be an excellent Christian role model for her tolerance, humility and charity, though, she is not perfect and will be the first person to point this out. These are all positive qualities whether or not inspired by religion. E.g., although my mom disapprovies of abortion, she neither expects nor desires to legislate her disapproval over others. She may feel sympathy for anyone who chooses to have or even considers an abortion, but she does not condemn them. That is not her responsibility. She will share her opinion and beliefs, but will not do so inappropriately or unasked. In fact, she recently opined that politics, religion and family planning are three topics which must be discussed with much care and circumspection.

The point of this profile: This is my idea of Christian behavior: tolerant, humble, charitable, forgiving, respectful, non-judgemental. Hana's post suggests such an attitude. But has this gone out of fashion in Christian circles at large? I often wonder if one would be a more effective Christian if one were to focus more on one's behavior compared to the ideal rather than other people's behavior.

#2738: — 05/24  at  11:04 AM
I count Susan a friend. Anybody surprised?

I find her remarks generally a mixture of faith based science and impishness. I know her asides do put a lot of people off and diminish the impact of her comments, yet I am somehow reluctant to discourage an opponent’s ineffective tactics. --- but that’s just me.

What the heck. I do a bit of that, myself. It’s just that I’m more graceful and elegant about it.

She is right in that denying Christ is decidedly un-Christian. Kind of by definition wouldn’t you think? But, I’m not so sure that the other, positive behaviors mentioned deserve to be characterized as Christian. There is scant evidence that Christians have a corner on that market.

It may be true that people are persuaded more by exemplary behavior than evidence, but I think that’s unfortunate. However, a lot of us must realistically concede that we can not always confidently assess thermal implications, ice core movements, etc. One is more or less forced to rely on the efforts of others. In such cases, I tend to at least require some sense that those I decide to trust go at it within the disciplined rules of science as I would were I of adequate background, intelligence and energy. I haven't been through ice cores, but I have been through peppered moths. That is an instructive controversy and the tactics of the creationists there are on clear display, accessible to anyone who looks.

#2739: — 05/24  at  11:45 AM
Oh... And good point about organizing for Kerry. Faith based policy is about as far off the mark as faith based science.

#2740: — 05/24  at  11:49 AM

Isabel: Among the overwhelming evidence FOR a worldwide flood in the past are:

-- Signs of dramatic changes in the position of the earth’s land masses.

-- Evidence that the mountains could be much, much higher now than before, because of the unparalleled forces at work during the Flood.

Dramatic changes in the position of the Earth's land masses are due to plate techtonics. Read a geology textbook for more information.

The reason mountains are raised up and beaten down is due to geological forces and erosion. That's why the relatively young Himalayas are so tall, whereas the old and venerable Appalachians are much lower than they used to be. Again, a geology textbook will tell you this.

-- Nobel Prize nominee Dr. Melvin Cook, a Yale Ph.D., has stated that his life’s work studying oil and gas deposits and well pressures have led him to conclude that oil and gas deposits probably came from the sudden deep burial of organic material a relatively short time ago – from 5,000 to 100,000 years ago.

.

I hate to break this to you, Susan, but the Nobel Committee never, ever provides the names of people being considered for a Nobel science prize. (This is not apparently the case for Peace prizes; I don't know about economics or literature). You either have a Nobel prize in science or you don't. I fall into the second category. I challenge you to prove that Dr. Cook has been nominated for a Nobel Prize. I suggest you contact the Nobel Foundation:

In any case, if Melvin Cook was correct, we would find evidence of a sudden burial of organic material in ice cores (to name but one example). We don't. I notice, by the way, you haven't commented on the rebuttal of your ice core reference. Did you read it?

-- Same book quotes another book, "Marine Geology" by P.H. Juenen (Wiley Press, 1950) as saying that coral reefs have been measured as growing as much as 5 centimeters per year, which would account for most of the coral reef depths found around the world since The Flood.

Two points. First, Juenen states that the maximum observed rate of coral growth rate is 5 centimetres/year. That doesn't mean coral always grows that fast. In fact, this came up in the 1981 Arkansas trail (McClean vs Arkansas) when a Dr. Roth (a coral expert) was questioned on the stand:

Q: "What is the last sentence of your article on the growth of coral reefs?" A: "...this does not establish rapid growth of coral development."
Q: "Is there any evidence that coral reefs were created in recent times?"
A: "No."
Q: "No further questions."

-- Same book asserts that "there is enough water in the oceans of the world to cover the entire Earth to a depth of about two miles, if the Earth’s topography smoothed out."

That's very nice, except for the evidence that the Earth's topography has not been smoothed out. If you want to present peer-reviewed evidence to the contrary, go ahead. If you want to suggest that God did the smoothing during the Flood, and then re-arranged everything afetrwards and erased the evidence, that's fine too.

Partial skeletons of animals have been found in deep fissures in several parts of the world, and the Flood seems to be the best explanation for these skeletons. They occur even in hills of considerable height, extending from 140 feet to 300 feet (see Rehwinkel’s "The Flood"). There are mammoths, bears, wolves, oxen, hyenas, rhinoceros, deer and many smaller mammals. No skeleton is complete, which means they couldn’t have fallen into these fissures alive or been rolled there by streams. Because of the calcite cementing of these bones, they had to have been deposited underwater.

1. Explain how deep the fissures were, and what geological strata the fossils were found in.
2. Explain why finding a fossil in a 300 foot hill is significant.
3. Describe what you mean by "calcite cementing" and why this means the skeletons were deposited during a Flood.

Moving right along . . . Andy was pouting about my pooh-poohing of the "sequences" in the fossil record. I’m sorry to hurt his feelings, but what you guys see there is a mega example of a bad inference – kind of like Darwin looking at farmers breeding animals to get a better version and inferring that if you breed horses to be smaller and smaller, eventually you can wind up with a Pomeranian

I wasn't pouting. Iwas demonstrating how you directly contradicted yourself, saying on 5/21 that there was a fossil sequence explicable by invoking the Flood, and on 5/22 shouting that "THERE AIN'T NO SEQUENCE". Your failure to comment on this inconsistency is noted.

The present-day whale, which is the largest animal in the world, has no clear-cut fossil predecessors.

Absolutely wrong. For example, check out these whale ancestors at Hans Thewissen's web page:

http://darla.neoucom.edu/DEPTS/ANAT/Thewissen.html

Now, don't just take my word for it. If you don't believe me, contact Dr. Thewissen and ask him what he thinks about this.


That's all I have time for now. If I have more time in the next few days, I'll get back to your post. However, the burden is on you to discuss the points I have already raised - not to just ignore them and cite another bunch of stuff. I have been answering you point by point. You should do the same

#2744: isabel — 05/24  at  02:12 PM

But, I’m not so sure that the other, positive behaviors mentioned deserve to be characterized as Christian. There is scant evidence that Christians have a corner on that market.

You are absolutely correct, Duane. My post incorrectly implied that these traits are products of Christianity when they may in fact also result from other religions, beliefs, convictions, etc.I count Susan a friend.

Anybody surprised? I find her remarks generally a mixture of faith based science and impishness. I know her asides do put a lot of people off and diminish the impact of her comments,

If I were Christian, I would say God bless you, Duane, because you obviously have more tolerance than I, and your choice of the word "impishness" is more charitable than any word I might choose.

Re: Kerry: Yes, I need to find out how to get involved in my area.

Andy, you are also to be admired for the tolerance and patience in your methodical, point-by-point posts.

#2748: — 05/24  at  04:50 PM
OK….. here is my response to the rest of Susan's points:

"Flies found in amber that is estimated to be 225 million years old are the same as today’s flies.

No they aren't. Show me a picture of an amber-embedded insect and give its species. Then show me the same species is alive today. If by "the same" you mean they have wings, legs, compound eyes, antennae and mechanosensory bristles, then yes, you are correct. But so what?

The giraffe, with its incredibly long neck, has not changed in two million years, and it has no shorter-neck predecessors among the fossils.

I don't know how long the modern giraffe has been around, but two million years does not seem unreasonable. As for predecessors, you're wrong. Giraffe predecessors (from early to late) include Climacoceras, Canthumeryx, Paleomeryx, Palaeotragus , Samotherium and finally Giraffa. You can look these fossils up on the Web. The nearest living relative of the giraffe is the Okapi, which is essentially a short-necked, short-legged. giraffe.

Rodents also appeared suddenly in the fossil record.

Until the last two decades you were correct, so your book is now out of date. Early rodent ancestors include Barunlestes,Heomys, Tribosphenomys minutus and Acritoparamys atavus

Fish arrived without preceding fish-like fossils.

How about Cladoselache, Tristychius, Ctenacanthus, Paleospinax, Spathobatis, Protospinax, Canobius, Aeduella, Parasemionotus, Oreochima, and Leptolepis ??

Note that I don't want you to reply "Aha!" They are already (fish/rodents/giraffes/ whatever). This is a favourite creationist argument - that if a fossil has some features of e.g. a rodent, then it IS a rodent, rather than a rodent ancestor. It's also bogus.

Insects showed up without any precedents.

At present, this is a reasonable statement.

Thousands of new species, discovered at the Burgess Shale in Canada and at a counterpart in China, exploded on the scene during the Cambrian period (sometimes called the biological big bang) 540 million years ago. No predecessor fossils have ever been found for 99 percent of some quite large and weird-looking animals. The opabinia had five eyes; there were worms with thorny noses to snag prey; and we’ve even found evidence of crawling creatures with eyes on the ends of stalks. There are no new phyla since the Cambrian period.

You make it sound as though the fossils appeared exactly 540 million years ago (at 9am….). Actually, the fossils appear over tens of millions of years. Mind you, biologists are actively studying the Cambrian period, and there is a great deal of controversy over these fossils. To my knowledge there have been no papers published suggesting that these forms were created. And anyway….. isn't the earth meant to be 10,000 years old?

Your point about no new phyla is as unremarkable as me saying that the hundred year old oak tree in my father's garden has only one trunk and has not developed a new trunk at any point since the original trunk appeared.

"Most species, according to the fossil record, evolved very little, if at all, before becoming extinct; the life expectancy of a species of animal might have extended a hundred thousand generations or a few million years, yet each generation continued to look much like, if not identical to, the previous generations Take the beetle. It has not changed in two million years. Or the bowfin fish, which has not changed in 100 million years. The lungfish has not changed in 350 million years.

Two words. So what?

"Herbert Nilsson of Lund University, Sweden, stated, "It is not even possible to make a caricature of evolution (Darwin’s gradualism) out of paleobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that the lack of transitional series cannot be explained by the scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled."

Aha! Here we see evolution in action, but not of the sort you might think. Nils Heribert-Nilsson published a book ", Synthetische Artbildung " in 1953. It was published by Verlag CWK Gleerup of Lund, Sweden. Over time, creationists have copied and pasted his name so many times that now poor Nils has ended up as "Herbert Nilsson of Lund University". In any case, he wrote in book in 1953. Things have moved on since then. The fossil record is far more "complete" than he claimed in was fifty years ago.

Or consider the words of paleontologist Steven Stanley: "The known fossil record is not, and never has been in accord with gradualism."

Correct. So what? The idea that species evolve at a constant gradual rate is a straw man.

Or those of paleontologist David Raup: "Different species usually appear and disappear from the fossil record without showing the transitions that Darwin postulated."

Raup is being taken out of context. He was arguing against the gradualist straw man described above.

Or those of biologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural History, Ernst Mayr: "With curious frequency it is even stated today that Darwin’s method was largely one of speculation and deduction."

Mayr is saying this is not true. I agree with him.

Or those of Francis Hitching in "The Neck of the Giraffe," who states that most scientists now discount the idea of the lungfish having evolved into an amphibian, based on its head structure and lack of true legs."

No one thinks the modern lungfish evolved into amphibians. There are plenty of lobe-finned fish fossils that people believe were the first amphibian ancestors, such as Osteolepis,Eusthenopteron, Sterropterygion,Panderichthys, and Elpistostege

I'm not going to comment on any more of your points. What I want you to do, Susan, is to rebut the series of posts I've made. I don't want you to dive back into your creationist bookshelf and copy out a bunch more pap for me to wade through. I want us to have a debate. So tell me why my counter-points to yours are wrong. If you post any more stuff unrelated to what we have discussed already, you are notice that I will ignore it. Argument does not proceed by sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting.

#2754: — 05/25  at  08:32 AM
Straight Scoop for Andy

Wah. It’s going to be hard to answer your questions without cracking any jokes. But I’ll try, just to please you mirthless atheists who are obviously cranky because you aren’t getting any . . . dang! This WILL be hard. But I promise, I’ll try:

61. Science in the Bible? Well, these people thought so:

“I find more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history whatsoever.” – Sir Isaac Newton

“With regard to the origin of life, science . . . positively affirms creative power.” – Lord Kelvin

“(It is) as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence (of God) . . . as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science.” – Wernher von Braun

Try the handy-dandy booklet, “Science: Was the Bible Ahead of Its Time?” by Ralph O. Muncaster. Chock full of Biblical insights into medicine, biology, chemistry, engineering, agriculture, physics, astronomy, geology, etc. I highly recommend it to you.

75. How can the Bible ever be scientifically in error, if God can intervene to do anything He wants to in the natural world?

Well, I think your real problem is that you are determined to nail down natural causes and origins of things when the truth is, they were supernaturally caused, although the effects are of course natural and scientifically-discoverable. You don’t believe in miracles, and that’s your choice, but that’s what’s getting you stuck. The only way to disprove the possibility of miracles is to disprove the possibility of God’s existence. But you can’t do that. So you’re stuck. This might help: What is scientifically unexplained is not necessarily scientifically unexplainable. And I guarantee you, God WANTS to be discovered and understood. He uses the big questions -- how did life begin? why does the Earth look the way it does? -- to draw us to Him into a love relationship. The more we know, the more loveable God is. So it pleases Him when people like you delve into His creation. Just hang in there and keep studying and going down all these rabbit trails, and eventually you’ll lead yourself to the Truth. I do believe in miracles – beaucoup do I believe. But here’s the deal: I have supernatural contact with the Person of Jesus Christ, but I have only the memory of it – I can’t prove it. But it’s real. It’s not a replicable experiment and I have no lab results – but if science is the study of reality, this is as real as things get. Truth goes beyond the science lab, Andy. It’s transcendent. Science is great for understanding the realm of regular events. But it doesn’t have the wattage to handle ALL events – just as science can’t make two people fall in love, or explain the kinds of things I write about in my “Radiant Beams” Sunday series on my blog, DailySusan.blogspot.com – shamless plug – see the May 16 effort, “Returning the Call.” That’s a good example of an everyday miracle that is 100% possible and plausible – no woo-woo about it, nothing implausible, just absolutely wonderful and utterly “unscientific.” I’m saying that someday, when the Lord returns, all of us who make it to The Big Square Dance are going to understand how He did all that He did. And I’m ready for that day. Are you?

77. How do I reconcile the views of many geologists, that the Flood didn’t happen, with the Biblical account?

I’m a reporter. I’m trained to look at all sides of a story with a lot of evidence, weigh the plausibility and credibility of different points, and then make judgment calls of what to accept, and what needs checking. Yes, I make mistakes. But they’re without exception careless ones – in #114 about Melvin Cook, for example, you're right, I erred – his real award was called the “Nitro-Nobel Gold Medallion,” presented in Stockholm in 1968, but it’s not The Big Show -- it’s given in the area of his life’s work, explosives. He really was a worldwide expert and so forth, but I humbly apologize for misunderstanding the award’s significance. And yes, apparently I passed on the misspelling of that other scientist’s name. Thanks for correcting me. No, I’m far from perfect. But you make mistakes, too, Andy: you spelled “tectonics” as “techtonics” in that same item, and you’ve misspelled a number of other words as we’ve gone along. Do I think you’re stupid because you made that mistake? Of course not. It’s all about balance, experience, and judgment. So, bottom line: I’ve read all sides of this question and have come down on the side of the Flood geologists. It doesn’t bother me that others disagree; I can certainly live with differences of opinion. I’ve seen an awful lot of well-educated people make an awful lot of judgment calls, inferences and assumptions that don’t match my own. It’s a free country, after all. Anyway, that’s the stand I’ve taken, and continue to take.

82. (A) What fraction of sedimentary rock was formed by marine vs. non-marine sedimentation?

I do not have a research cite on that, but I do have my common sense: 95 percent of the fossil record is of marine life, found in sedimentary rock. Is that solid enough (excuse the pun) to drawn an inference? It is for me.

(B) How do the fossils point to The Flood?

You say the fossil record was laid down over several hundred million years. I say fossils were made a lot more recently than that, and for the most part, at the same time.

I saw it in the Grand Canyon: smooth, continuous deposition with no time break, shown by horizontal contact between the layers unmarred by erosion, plus a lot of missing “time” on the evolutionary clock. Faults in the Canyon go all the way through the layers, which wouldn’t happen unless the cracks happened at the same time, not millions of years apart. If you can’t infer from the looks of the Grand Canyon that it was caused by a spectacular flood, then explain how come scientists infer that the canyons on Mars, that are much larger, were caused by torrential floods – that, on a planet with little or no surface water today. That’s evidence of lots of water, moving fast, as opposed to the very few fossils left in the lumpy sediment layers of relatively slow-moving, gradually-deposited sediments of our great rivers.

I’m also convinced by the sea creatures fossilized in the high Himalayas and other mountains. Then there are the many polystratic fossils, like trees buried upright, and the obvious action of flowing water that formed coal. The gigantic coal seams are another indicator for The Flood.

Also consider the incredible results of the Mt. St. Helens volcano, which was a teeny tiny lava-less volcano compared to the Big Kahunas thought to have participated in The Flood. Remember, 2/3 of what comes out of a volcano is water vapor – the source of most of the water for The Flood.

What else? The fact that fossil relatives of existing creatures were no more or less “fit” to survive than today’s versions is another indicator – that the creatures killed in The Flood were just unlucky, not inferior . . . but luckily, two of their “kind” survived on the Ark to keep their gene pool going.

There’s also the massing of similar life forms. Consider the millions of Precambrian jellyfish and other forms in Ediacara, which stretches over 300 miles in South Australia. They have incredible markings and detail. The wet sand they landed on turned to sandstone, nature’s cement, probably within 24 hours. The Karroo Beds in Africa have as many as 800 billion vertebrates. These areas are vast and show consistent sedimentary and paleontological features. There’s a tendency for lots and lots of fossils of the same approximate species to be found together in certain groups, but it’s not because of some really, really long, slow process – they all died at the same time. Think of “Where’s Waldo?” – all buried at one time – not one Waldo a day for 550 million years. :>) (Sorry – that was a joke, but at least it was sort of respectful. OK?) That’s why we don’t find a fossilized mouse and a fossilized moose in with the Cambrian trilobites – not because they evolved hundreds of millions of years apart, but because they – the trilobites -- were all together near the sea floor when the whole world suddenly belched upward.

If there’s a “sequence” to the strata, it’s because of that. Fossils show the buried remains of plants and animals that once lived together in the same ecological zone. That’s why we don’t find trilobites with dinosaurs – they didn’t live in the same neighborhoods! But on the other hand, the flood did move certain lightweight creatures so that they were entombed with specimens they normally wouldn’t be with, such as the land plants (that aren’t supposed to have existed in the Cambrian) found with trilobites.

Of course, the biggie is that not a single missing link has ever been found, while with all those marine creatures in the fossil record that are relatively simple, there should be ample evidence of transitions. Instead, the “ancestor” species you say the fossil record shows are either variations of the same species that are alive today, or extinctions. The theory of evolution is absurd on its face and preposterous when you look at the amazing complexity of even sea algae.

The fossil record shows sudden appearance of complete forms, minor variation, and then, in most cases, just as sudden disappearance. Plant life shows much, much more diversity in the fossil record than in real life today, and that’s another nail in the coffin of evolution. If evolution were true, there should be much MORE variety today than in the past.

(C) You say there's no evidence of terrestrial flooding on the sea floor. I say there is, chockablock.

Maybe I don't understand you right, but there are, too, ample examples of flooding within the ocean. This is from the book "Creation: Facts of Life" by Gary Parker, who has a doctorate in biology with a cognate in geology (paleontology), Phi Beta Kappa, Science Faculty Fellow of the National Science Foundation (Master Books, 1994). On p. 195: "We do get some inkling of the kind of geological processes involved from the study of 'underwater landslides' called turbidity currents. In 1929, an earthquake loosened sediment lying on the ocean floor off Newfoundland near the continental slope. The loosened sediment roared down the slope at freeway speeds, up to 60 miles or 100 kilometers per hour! How do we know? The dense, muddy slurry flowing along the bottom severed transatlantic telephone cables one after the other, so the time of travel could be calculated from the time telephone service stopped on each line. The roaring sediment spread out over the deep ocean's abyssal plain, covering an area of hundreds of square miles (kilometers) in a matter of hours! Many boulder flows, megabreccias, and other deposits which once mystified geologists are now interpreted, even by evolutionists, as huge layers deposited rapidly by turbidity currents. Some evolutionists estimate that perhaps 40% of the geologic column was formed by these stupendous flows!

(D) Ice core interpretation: we have "dueling scientists" on what they show, an Earth that's at least 100,000 years old, or a much younger one.

Here's what I think: the cores do show many thousands of layers, and layers are distinct in the uppermost sections. But that makes sense: layering correlates with annual snow deposits since the end of the Ice Age. Lower down, the so-called "annual" layers become less distinct and can be understood as being caused by other mechanisms, such as storms coming from different directions depositing water evaporated from oceans differing in temperature. This is from the book "The Revised & Expanded Answers Book: The 20 Most-Asked Questions About Creation, Evolution, and the Book of Genesis" edited by Don Batten, Ph.D. (Master Books, 1990).

(E) Doesn't tree-ring dating disclose a really old earth, too?

Dendrochronology is in a hubbub. The "one year, one ring" rule is not so certain any more. Quoting R.W. Fairbridge, writing on dendrochronology in Encyclopedia Britannica's entry on the Holocene epoch: "As with Palynology, certain pitfalls have been discovered in tree-ring analysis. Sometimes, as in a very severe season, a growth ring may not form. In certain latitudes, the tree ring's growth correlates with moisture, but in others it may be correlated with temperature. From the climatic viewpoint these two parameters are often inversely related in different regions." Bottom line: two tree rings can grow in a single year, when there's an early spring followed by frost and then back to spring. There's a good section on dating discrepancies and so forth in the book "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism" by Richard Milton (Park Street Press, 1992).

There are quite a few more questions in your past posts. Want ‘em explicated, or do you say “Uncle”?

I remain, very truly yours,

FOR THE FIRM. . . .

p.s. How’d I do, joke-wise? :>)

#2757: Rory Parle — 05/25  at  09:00 AM

just to please you mirthless atheists who are obviously cranky because you aren’t getting any [...] p.s. How’d I do, joke-wise? :>)

Appallingly. You seem to lack the capacity to distinguish jokes from insults. It doesn't make me jovial if I call you a fuckwit an then append one of those ugly smilies. You should feel free to joke but not if the butt of the joke is anyone else in this thread. If you feel like trying to irritate people then be assured that your bronze-age mysticism is doing enough for me on its own.

#2758: — 05/25  at  12:38 PM
Susan,

Jokes are always appreciated.
My guess would be that you don't accept an ancient earth/universe? <EG>
What kind of evidence would it take to convince you otherwise?

#2759: — 05/25  at  12:57 PM
Susan,

Before I proceed any further, I have a question. In your messages you discuss the idea of a global flood, but you also talk about the Grand Canyon and Ediacaran fauna. Is it your contention that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, or about 4 billion years old. How long ago did the Flood occur?

One other point:

Yes, I make mistakes. But they’re without exception careless ones – in #114 about Melvin Cook, for example, you're right, I erred – his real award was called the “Nitro-Nobel Gold Medallion,” presented in Stockholm in 1968, but it’s not The Big Show -- it’s given in the area of his life’s work, explosives. He really was a worldwide expert and so forth, but I humbly apologize for misunderstanding the award’s significance. And yes, apparently I passed on the misspelling of that other scientist’s name. Thanks for correcting me. No, I’m far from perfect. But you make mistakes, too, Andy: you spelled “tectonics” as “techtonics” in that same item, and you’ve misspelled a number of other words as we’ve gone along. Do I think you’re stupid because you made that mistake?

There is a difference between poor scholarship and poor typing. In every one of your posts, you have made references to creationist texts to support your position, rather than science texts. The mangling of Heribert-Nilsson's name is just such an example of creationists copying each other's works and the name getting mangled in a creationist game of pass-the-whisper. It took me less than three minutes to find your error on the Internet. This, I'm afraid to say, is poor scholarship on your part. If I get sick, I go to an expert. I don't go and see a journalist or a concert pianist. The scientific literature is the largest collection experts you are likely to find. And - get this - many of them are Christians, or have some other religious faith. Your implication that I must be an atheist because I don't believe in the literal truth of the Bible is profoundly insulting to a large number of Christians.

There is also a difference between stupidity and ignorance. I have not called you stupid. I don't think you're stupid. I do think you are ignorant. I think that if you actually put down your creationist texts and looked at a variety of evidence - both in print and with your own eyes - you would see that the evidence does not point to a global flood.

Scientists have to do this all the time. We make hunches about the way the world works, and we have to test them. We know that most of the time, our hunches will turn out either wrong or incomplete. I make a point of telling people who work in my lab that I don't care what answers they get in their experiments. All I care about is that they design the experiments carefully and carry them out competently. Part of that bargain means that you have to abandon your hunch if the data tells you you're wrong.

#2761: isabel — 05/25  at  01:25 PM
Rory said:

You seem to lack the capacity to distinguish jokes from insults. It doesn't make me jovial if I call you a fuckwit an then append one of those ugly smilies.

and

If you feel like trying to irritate people then be assured that your bronze-age mysticism is doing enough for me on its own.

Well said; I could not agree more.
Susan said:

I’m a reporter. I’m trained to look at all sides of a story with a lot of evidence, weigh the plausibility and credibility of different points, and then make judgment calls of what to accept, and what needs checking.

Susan, I am most curious as to what kind of reporting you do? And for what outlet(s)?
Andy said:

I'm not going to comment on any more of your points. What I want you to do, Susan, is to rebut the series of posts I've made.

and

So tell me why my counter-points to yours are wrong. If you post any more stuff unrelated to what we have discussed already, you are notice that I will ignore it.

Susan, I would also be most interested in succint, direct rebuttals to Andy's counter-points in post #116. And I also

...don't want you to dive back into your creationist bookshelf and copy out a bunch more pap....

Thank you.

#2767: — 05/25  at  05:19 PM
Hi, DS: No, as a matter of fact, I do accept that the Earth and the universe must be ancient. There's a tremendous weight of evidence from all branches of science that this is so. I'm especially convinced by astronomy.

I think it comes down to our ability to correctly interpret the Holy Bible and correctly interpret the evidence from the physical sciences. We're still a ways from getting a bingo on that.

Our God is not a trickster, though, and I know He wanted to provide information that would make sense in all ages. If He would have given a description of The Big Bang in more precise terms, all past generations would have been left scratching their heads, because it has been only within the last lifetime that science has advanced enough for us to grasp what apparently happened "in the beginning."

I'm a softball mom, so I'm very used to sitting and waiting. :>) I know the answers will come someday. I can wait!

#2768: — 05/25  at  05:42 PM
TY for responding Susan.

I don't want to interrupt the flow of this thread, so I'd like to make a brief observation and leave you guys to continue.

If the Bible is correct in everyway including physical details of nature and history, then nothing we can discern about the past or present natural world can contradict it.
So if we observe or reasonably infer various facts about out universe which appear to be at odds with a particular intepretation of that text, such as the earth going around the sun, or the univesre being older than 10,000 years, or a recent global flood, then either our observation/inference is wrong, or the interp is inaccurate.

I suggest this is a strong possibility for your global flood intepretation.

#2775: — 05/25  at  10:43 PM
DS can come to my birthday party. Right on, and thanks.

116

Ah, long ago, in my salad days, before giving birth to 35 pounds of baby flesh in four at-bats, that was the weight on my driver’s license. Now, it’s a reference number with a dreary set of questions to answer for people whose chinstraps are on a LITTLE too tight. To the task, then:

116 (A) Flies in the buttermilk: what’ll I do? Flies in the amber: get a clue. Flies’ve been flies since their debut! Skip evolution, Darlin’.

DANG, I’M GOOD!!! :>) JK

No wonder there’s no evidence of evolution in flies. There’s no evidence of evolution, period! Even Stephen Gould said that about flies, and you KNOW not many landed on him, intellectually speaking! :>) Your pout point is no doubt that there have been cases where flies once interbred and then developed barriers to reproduction. That doesn’t mean they have become a different species; they just have become different varieties with different alleles of the same genes. They are not wasps, ladybugs, roly-poly's or skeeters. They’re still flies, and have been since God created the buzz. Moreover, each variety of fly resulting from reproductive isolation has a smaller gene pool and is less able to adjust to its environment. So that process in nature, shown in flies, argues convincingly AGAINST evolution and its “ever-upward” spiral of development. Which should be swatted :>) Flies are good examples of God’s creation and creativity, anyway. Flies are invertebrates with excellent flying skills. That’s a trick in itself. They do all kinds of flight maneuvers, all with incredibly rapid wingbeats per second. No mutations have ever been found that have converted the fly, or any other creature, into a markedly different species. Your . . . FLY is open on this bogus evolutionary claim. :>)

(B) Giraffe: another excellent example of special creation, with one cardiovascular system to serve the upper body and a second one for the lower parts. Giraffes are just about the coolest animal there is. The variation you see is a good example of trait plasticity. Organisms adapt to their environments. In the case of the giraffe, it’s thought that the climate and diet in which the variety of giraffe existed had an effect on its body – length of legs, shape of jaws and teeth, etc. These changes through the years don’t have beans to do with random mutations – they’re from environmental cues acting on the genetic program. When you see variety in giraffe fossils, you're seeing this. The idea that giraffes evolved from anything other than Grandma and Grandpa Giraffe is another . . . TALL tale from you pencil-necked geeks. :>)

(C) Rodents: Rats! I’m not supposed to make jokes about you guys. OK, I’ll try to play this one straight. Rodents are great little buffet enthusiasts. They’ll try any kind of food. A new kind of seed will become part of their diet and spread throughout the population quickly. We know nutrition affects teeth, bones and muscles. Food literally shifts the phenotypes, and quickly, too. This happens, and there’s no mutation involved – no selection – just the fossil record showing different jaw and tooth structures and other body form changes because that rat and pals started dining on tough nuts to crack. Nyuck nyuck. No evolution occured; just adaptation and variety created. Whether it’s of mice or men, evolution is . . . MICKEY MOUSE. :>)

(D) Fish: I’m not fishing for compliments, but this one shows how much evolution really is a . . . FISH story. :>) I think the problem is that for so many years, evolutionahoonieologists relied on anatomy to speculate and infer what was what. They saw various fish fossils and made various assumptions about what had evolved from what. Now we have the wonders of molecular biochemistry and so forth, which is making evolution more and more apparent as a big, big boo-boo. The problem was in the olden days that there wasn’t much other science besides anatomy to go on. Scientists didn’t see these widdle fishies in action, since they were STIFFS, so they couldn’t see how they really moved, navigated, ate, defended selves, etc. That’s how the fins of the coelacanth suddenly became interpreted as “legs” – as people trumpeted the mistaken idea that that supposedly extinct fish, that supposedly went down with the dinosaurs, was the “missing link,” with legs that walked on land. Everybody gave evolutionists a ticker-tape parade and ate fish sticks at the celebratory banquet . . . until 1938, when the first of many real, live coelacanths was CAUGHT from the sea. Imagine that! A “living fossil.” Hadn't changed a BIT since the days of T Rex, either. Imagine! But that’s not the funny part: those “legs” were really just plain-Jane old fins after all that wouldn't support weight other than while swimming in water -– better return the little socks and booties to Fish K-Mart -- and anyway, the coelacanth would be rather dicey as a “missing link” walking fish since it lives deep down in the drink, like 200 meters, and when it’s brought up into the air it EXPLODES!!! Kind of like evolutionary theory, when IT’S brought to light! Take THAT, Fish Lips! :>)

(E) Cambridge Explosion is said to have taken place about 540 million years ago, while young-earthers say the earth is only about 10,000 years old. How to square the two?

‘Snot my yob, mahn. I’m not a young-earther. I dig a lot in it and find a lot of young worms, but I’m not one of those who subscribes to the 10,000-year theory. When asked how old I think the Earth is, I have perfected an artful shrug, a perfectly arched brow, and an attractively resonant: “I don’t know.” At least I’m 100 percent accurate on THAT claim! :>)

(F) Ringo, Paul, George and other beetles have been the same all through the “march of evolutionary history,” with no changes over eons and eons. Refused to evolve, those rotters. How come? Party poopers, eh? And many others, including bowfin fish and lungfish, haven’t changed a whit. You ask: so what?

So . . . ask yourself: if evolution were true and at the mercy of all kinds of random, blind forces initiating species change, would it be possible for some species to resist those forces? Like . . . have some kind of a CONDOM over their genes? :>) Methinks nada.

And ask yourself this: are you guys REALLY “finding ancestral species in the evolutionary chain” . . . or mistaking them for extinct species and novel varieties of the same old, same old? Could you be . . . (organ music) . . . (crowd gasps) . . . (woman screams) . . . WRONG?!?!? :>)

Further, affiant sayeth naught, but I’ll take up #120 tomorrow if I can, if you still want me to.

I remain, yours truly, blah, blah, blah . . .

FOR THE FIRM

#2777: Rory Parle — 05/26  at  04:58 AM

[...]a dreary set of questions to answer for people whose chinstraps are on a LITTLE too tight. [...] you pencil-necked geeks. [...] Rodents: Rats! I’m not supposed to make jokes about you guys. [...] Take THAT, Fish Lips!

Repeat after me: "Ad hominem is not a valid method of debate".

“I don’t know.” At least I’m 100 percent accurate on THAT claim!

I agree. If this thread has thought us anything, it's that you don't know what you're talking about.

#2783: — 05/26  at  10:32 AM

Further, affiant sayeth naught, but I’ll take up #120 tomorrow if I can, if you still want me to.

Please do. At the moment, you're rolling snake eyes.

#2784: — 05/26  at  10:34 AM

The variation you see is a good example of trait plasticity. Organisms adapt to their environments. In the case of the giraffe, it’s thought that the climate and diet in which the variety of giraffe existed had an effect on its body – length of legs, shape of jaws and teeth, etc. These changes through the years don’t have beans to do with random mutations – they’re from environmental cues acting on the genetic program.

Er, forgive me if I'm wrong but...natural selection says that the mutations may be random, but the overall frequencies of those mutations in the gene pool are affected by environmental circumstances. So obviously changes in the giraffe's body structure, on the average population level, will be in response to environmental changes because only environmental changes will cause the frequencies of mutations in the gene pool to shift in any significant fashion. This means that either you're arguing a la Lamarck that acquired characteristics are inherited or you're arguing that natural selection does work.

Also, claiming that some species haven't evolved for thousands of years doesn't say much because the current model of evolutionary theory, as I understand it, incorporates the concept of punctuated equilibrium which allows for long static periods where organisms don't undergo change because their environment remains on the whole constant and we don't see any overall need for adaptation. Evolution isn't at the mercy of "random, blind forces"--its source material are random mutations in the genome, but external factors essentially determine which mutations are propagated in the population and which are not.

Your pout point is no doubt that there have been cases where flies once interbred and then developed barriers to reproduction. That doesn’t mean they have become a different species; they just have become different varieties with different alleles of the same genes.

I may just be confused but...if they've developed barriers to reproduction, aren't they essentially separate species? What on earth is your definition of species then?

Now we have the wonders of molecular biochemistry and so forth, which is making evolution more and more apparent as a big, big boo-boo.

I should think biochemistry only reaffirms evolution by showing that small mutations in genes can have remarkable effects on metabolism that are not observable morphologically.

And a final question for Susan...if you agree with the Big Bang theory, then how exactly do you imagine life starting on Earth? This isn't a challenge; I'm genuinely curious. Because I think that if you agree with the Big Bang, you have to accept all the cosmology that follows--the birth of stars and galaxies, the development of planets--in which case you're left with an early Earth that is rocky, full of volcanoes, surrounded by an atmosphere hostile to life, bombarded by asteroids and comets, without any biological macromolecules, etc., etc., etc. Is this where divine intervention steps in, disregarding all scientific laws, or do you actually have some sort of natural explanation for it? Because unless you have God snapping his fingers at that moment, I can't see how you can deny some need for change (i.e. evolution). Personally, I think that God created the universe through the laws of science, so I don't accept the idea that he would break his own laws to begin life on Earth. I have no idea whether that's bad theology or not, but that's how my mind works, I'm afraid.

#2786: isabel — 05/26  at  11:20 AM
Well, Susan, I give up. With your most recent post (#124) full of personal attacks, juvenile (alleged) humor, immature dialogue, arrogance, etc., I have given up any and all hope for reading a mature, intelligent response from you.
However, I'm still interested in this question...

Susan, I am most curious as to what kind of reporting you do? And for what outlet(s)?

...and would greatly appreciate an answer. Thank you.

#2794: — 05/26  at  11:54 PM
Once upon a midnight dreary
Evolutionists made their queries.
Wouldn't heed me! Such a bore.
Quoth the Susan: "Nevermore."

Honest -- I'm overbooked for the next week, so this is it, Pardners. See the next post for another reason I'm outa here -- I drew a bead on your erroneous interpretation of Genesis 30 and your ridicule of my beloved Adonai and His Word, blew the smoke away from my gun, and now I'm placing it back in the holster 'til we meet again. :>)

To the remaining questions:

Isabel: No. But good luck in your endeavors.

Hana: Microevolution, true. Macroevolution, false. Punk eek: silly. Mutations as a creative, constructive force: silly. Lowdown on how biochemistry negates evolutionary theory: "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution" by Michael J. Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University (Touchstone, 1996). How and when did life originate: good articles on that in "Mere Creation: Science, Faith & Intelligent Design" edited by William A. Dembski (math Ph.D. from U of Chicago, philosophy Ph.D. from U of Ill at Chicago and an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary) with articles by Behe, David Berlinski, Phillip Johnson, Hugh Ross and others. My personal opinion is that because of ice sheets and volcanoes and such, combined with the best Hebrew scholarship on the Bible's genealogies and the fact that there really aren't that many human bones being found AND the fact that linguistics is showing us that language can't have "evolved," but had to be built in us innately . . . I believe human life arose about 50,000 years ago and it was by God's Hand, not evolution. Last, but not least, theistic evolution is a crock. There's a good explanation of why in the "Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics" by Norman L. Geisler (Baker Books, 1999); you could visit a Christian bookstore to have a look-see. I highly recommend it for anyone who wishes to square scientific thinking with the Bible. It's a perfect fit, if you just take the time to find out how. Good luck to you, Ma'am.

To Andy: Looks like all that's left is when did the Flood occur? Going back to the Hebrew scholars, I'm afraid all I can pinpoint is that it was at least 4,000 years ago, but not earlier than 50,000 years ago. Not very precise, I realize. But there weren't any dated "clips" or "sound bites" in the fossil record. :>)

I'm sorry if I've left questions unanswered, but I believe I've cited beaucoup, beaucoup resources for your learning pleasure that could answer anything you could ask.

Good luck, all.

Sorry I got your pants in a bunch, if I did. Think of me as like the "ding-dong man" that used to go around the neighborhoods ringing a bell that signaled that there was ice cream for sale in the truck. Some people would flock to the sound of the bell; others, who didn't want ice cream, ignored it. If I've irritated you, ignore me. But if my passionate defense of the Bible and my love for Adonai, Science Guy, has rung your chimes, I encourage you to go to a Christian bookstore and get a couple of apologetics books to see how beautifully science and the Christian faith really do square. You might get a study Bible while you're at it -- a Bible with footnotes and references to 'xplain things that, at present, it appears that a lot of you are misinterpreting. No offense. SOMEBODY's got to tell you when your barn door is open, eh? :>)

Carry on! Be well!

I remain, very truly yours, etc., etc.,

FOR THE FIRM

#2795: — 05/27  at  12:30 AM
Sweet Vindication

One of the commenters on this thread was kind enough to do more research on the item that brought me here in the first place – correcting your misinterpretation of the dealings between Jacob and Laban in Genesis 30.

This individual sent me a copy of a 1997 article from The Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society, published by the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

The article is entitled "Sex, Sticks, and the Trickster in Gen. 30:31-43," by Scott B. Noegel of the University of Washington.

While this scholar did not agree that Jacob was using pagan fertility beliefs of his father-in-law against him, as I assert, he does agree with me that there were lots of puns and parallels in the story between how Laban treated Jacob, and Jacob treated Laban. The scholar agrees that Jacob didn’t believe that the rods in the troughs would help him, but used enigmatic, bawdy, tongue-in-cheek humor to beat Laban at his own game.

“The clever use of ambiguity forces us to rethink at every step both Jacob and Laban’s double-talk. We are tricked just as Laban is tricked, and thus, we participate in the story. This is humor at its best. . . . It permits the Israelites not only to laugh with the success of their hero, but to laugh at Laban.”

Here’s what our intrepid correspondent wrote to me, in acknowledging that I was correct, and you guys were wrong:

“Though you had different reasons than Noegel for doing so, Susan, you were probably correct in rejecting the face-value meaning implied by the English translations.”

Thanks to this gentle reader for helping us all out and closing this chapter. He can come to my birthday party. :>)

#2797: Ben — 05/27  at  01:06 AM
This is fantastic! Why can't all nutty Jesus freaks be this entertaining??

*grabs a box of popcorn*

#2798: PZ Myers — 05/27  at  05:31 AM
Hey, you know that story in Genesis about how God made the world in 7 days? You aren't supposed to take that literally. It's a joke. Had 'em rolling in the aisles in Jerusalem.

And that tall tale about the whole world getting flooded and everyone but 7 people drowning? Just a joke.

Those stories in Deuteronomy where the Israelites butcher various peoples, rape their women, and enslave their children? PSYCH! God was just joking.

Everyone -- open your Bibles to the Book of Revelation. It's INSANE! You'll be HOWLING!

And the best joke of all? Some people actually take the Bible SERIOUSLY!

#2799: — 05/27  at  07:33 AM
..wow.

No macro-evolution. Ice cores. Lack of sequence in fossils. Lungfish/coelocanth/fill in blank appears suddenly in fossil record. Mammoths frozen in flash. "Chinese symbol for flood is eight/peopleboat".

All these and more mean only one thing..

I think I just won Creationist Bingo.

#2800: isabel — 05/27  at  07:37 AM

Susan, I am most curious as to what kind of reporting you do? And for what outlet(s)?

Susan, perhaps you declined to answer this question due to privacy concerns, in which case I should have been clearer. I'm interested in what sort of reporting you do and for what sort of outlet(s), not the actual name of the organization. I think it would be useful background info to have in mind when trying to understand your posts. Thank you.

#2801: — 05/27  at  08:25 AM
Although Biblical prophesy is generally either (a) wrong or (b) nonspecific, I'd like to point out that Andy Groves' prophesy was fulfilled to the letter:

90. Are those good enough reasons? For the record, I predict that Susan will quietly drop out of this discussion in the next few days, possible with a patronizing reference to concern for my mortal soul. But if she decides to venture back, we'll still be here.

#2802: PZ Myers — 05/27  at  08:39 AM
That's our Andy, the Old Testament prophet. If you ever meet him in person, you'll recognize him by his ancient, wizened visage, his long white beard, and the fact that he smells like goat.

(Just kidding. He actually shaves.)

#2806: — 05/27  at  09:14 AM
I’ve spent a fair amount of time fighting Susan at nebraska.statepaper.com over the last few years. They accept a lot of her stories. The first one I came across claimed the Harry Potter movie was spawned by the devil. I’ve also seen her fight against whole language instruction in classrooms and against overfunding of education.

She does sometimes unconditionally exit, but reappears if adequately taunted.

She gets tons of messages from God, but they tend to be attagirls rather than informative. With all that conversation you’d think He could have mentioned the age of the earth. If He can tell people where their car keys are, or open books to the right page for them, why wouldn’t He tell her how old the earth is?

While you folks were having your way with her, I’m still left not knowing what good an inerrant bible is if it’s so badly done that even the people that think it’s correct disagree about what it says. Kind of flies in the face of the idea that God was trying to communicate something to us.

I’ll ask her again later. I think it’s a good strategy to keep reposting unopposed points. It not only pressures the target, but also reinforces them for the lurkers.

#2807: — 05/27  at  09:57 AM

Although Biblical prophesy is generally either (a) wrong or (b) nonspecific, I'd like to point out that Andy Groves' prophesy was fulfilled to the letter

Verily, for it is written. And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals........

That's our Andy, the Old Testament prophet. If you ever meet him in person, you'll recognize him by his ancient, wizened visage, his long white beard, and the fact that he smells like goat.

Paul's just envious. He knows I'm actually so young and pretty that I don't need to shave.......

#2809: — 05/27  at  10:26 AM

Honest -- I'm overbooked for the next week, so this is it, Pardners. See the next post for another reason I'm outa here -- I drew a bead on your erroneous interpretation of Genesis 30 and your ridicule of my beloved Adonai and His Word, blew the smoke away from my gun, and now I'm placing it back in the holster 'til we meet again. :>)

We'll be here, Susan. You have an awful lot of specific points to rebut, and when you re-emerge, we'll direct you to the questions you have left unanswered.

For the record, though, you have to be one of the most bizarrely inconsistent creationists I've ever encountered. You accept an Old Earth and what you refer to as "microevolution", but you say the fossil record and the geologic column are a crock and the Flood occurred. If the earth is 4.5 billion years old, but all the sediments occurred during the flood, what was happening geology-wise for the previous 4,499,990,000 years? If animals were alive before the flood, when did they appear? Did they fossilize? How can you accept the dates of the fossils in the Burgess Shale, and simultaneously say that the fossil record (of which, let us remember, you have said both that there is a sequence and "THERE AIN'T NO SEQUENCE!!!" on two consecutive days) is due to the Flood?

I've come across many inconsistent creationists in the past, but the sheer volume of cognitive dissonance going on in your head is almost awe-inspiring.

Anyway, good luck and have a nice day. It's been a blast.

#2815: — 05/27  at  01:57 PM
Nice thread, indeed.
By the way, someone early on commented on the annoying :>) smiley Susan likes to use. That's actually not any run-of-the-mill smiley, it's the international Pinocchio smiley, which more or less stands for:
"I know I'm lying through my ass here, but what else can I do, really?"

#2817: — 05/27  at  04:30 PM

"I know I'm lying through my ass here, but what else can I do, really?"

Letting off a litle steam....... to paraphrase the great David Rees (http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war.html)

"They talk out their asses so much, their cushions are probably deaf".......

#2822: Virge — 05/28  at  02:04 AM
In another reality, in another leg of the trousers of time, in a universe not completely unlike ours, Susan is actually an autonomous agent running on a modest home computer. She is a Debate-Bot designed to play a role in on-line entertainment. This is the future of on-line gaming.

Where most of the computer games to date have pitted a player's intelligence against that of other players (or computer simulated players), this paradigm shift sets up truly formidable opponents -- human ignorance and self-deceit. The Debate-Bot is incredibly frustrating. It is resistant to the most elegant of rational arguments, all of which it shrugs off with glib chestnuts, appeals to non-existent authority, accusations of conspiracies and ad hominem exaggerations. The game is addictive. The bot will never concede, so you can only ever experience limited victory when the bot stops responding, and even then you can never be sure if it has given up or is merely collecting more facts to distort.

In this parallel universe, "'bating the bot" is understood by all to be a game. Even the most naive child knows not to take a Debate-Bot seriously. Science fiction writers construct frightening dystopian worlds where complete subcultures are gulled by entertainment bots and driven by self-supporting fantasies. They imagine what atrocities could arise if those game arguments were allowed to influence education policy, or even worse, international politics.

#2840: Some ol' rat — 05/28  at  09:45 PM
Verily, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of reason, I shall fear no SCIENCE!

(Har, har, har! Seriously, I don't know whether to laugh or despair. Wow.)

#2920: — 06/01  at  07:21 PM
With reagrd to Susan's comment #23, is that an orgasm or a monkey she's trying to convey?

#2939: Chuck — 06/02  at  02:14 PM
I agree with her critics regarding Susan's handling of science. And I still think that the (English) translations of Genesis 30 portray both Jacob and the narrator as believing that maternal visual impressions can determine the characteristics of offspring.

However, I did send Susan an article (J. of the Ancient Near Eastern Society, Vol 25, pp. 7-17, 1997) in which Scott Noegel (Univ. of Washington) contends that translations of Gen. 30 were influenced by medieval fertility magic beliefs. Noegel does not support Susan's theory that Laban believed the magic while Jacob pretended to believe it, but neither does he support the view that Jacob and the narrator believed it.

Noegel says that the earliest sources for maternal impressions belief appear in the 5th century CE. Noegel writes: "Although we possess numerous Egyptian, Ugaritic, Mesopotamian, and Aramaic magical texts, nowhere, to my knowledge, do the ancient texts reflect this belief. For example, one might expect to find a reference to such a belief in the numerous Mesopotamian potency incantations and teratological omen texts, where anomalous births are mentioned frequently, but one does not." He notes that though Gen. 30:39 "is frequently translated 'at the sight of the rods,' this is not an accurate rendering and seems to have been influenced by the assumed notions of fertility magic . . ."

To me it's just a reminder that we who can't read the original Biblical languages are relying on fallible translations. Moreover, Noegel and other scholars who can read Hebrew agree that Gen. 30 is one of the most ambiguously worded passages in the Hebrew Bible, so it's not surprising if translations of that text have been especially vulnerable to being colored by the mindset of its translators.

I also have an article ("Jacob's Cattle and Modern Genetics: A Scientific Midrash," Tradition Vol 7, pp. 5-14, 1965) by William Etkin, who was Professor of Biology of City College, New York and Research Associate Professor of Anatomy at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. Etkin, unlike Noegel, probably was not a highly trained Hebrew scholar, though he was apparently a devout Jew. He interprets Gen. 30 (to my surprise!) much as Susan does: that Jacob pretended to believe in the efficacy of maternal impressions as a cover, while Laban really did believe. In my opinion Etkin doesn't support that interpretation much better than does Susan, and his motivation seems much the same, to defend the validity of the Bible. It's a fascinating article historically, however. Etkin contrasts the Communist commitment to Lamarkian theory with the Western neo-Darwinian understanding of genetics, and he feels that Judaism and the Hebrew Bible ally more with the latter.

Here's his concluding statement (circa 1965):

"Science is unravelling the secrets of heredity. Each day records new insight into the chemistry of the material basis of heredity (DNA). Will not man soon be able to control his own genetic mechanism? And will he not then have the awful power over his own nature as mentioned above? This may indeed be the case, although in my estimation we are only at the beginning of our penetration into the mysteries of genetic action and no such crisis is imminent. Yet, of course, this is part of the great adventure of our times, in which science emerges as the key to the religious experience of modern man."

Cheers.

Chuck

#3575: isabel — 06/18  at  11:05 AM
This is an fyi for Duane; it's from Susan's website, http://www.dailysusan.blogspot.com/, the entry for June 16, 2004.

Prayer request: I’ve been working on a fellow named Duane for some time now, to come to know Christ. He doesn’t believe in prayer and isn’t even sure there’s a God. Let’s train our spiritual sights on him today, and ask the Lord to reveal Himself to Duane in a wonderful, unmistakeable way. We seek Duane’s conversion, Father, for your greater glory. (Daniel 2:28)

#3584: — 06/18  at  01:01 PM
Thanks, Isabel.

I'll let everyone know if I see any result. I notice there was no timeframe requested so we may have to wait awhile.

Susan and I have been working on each other for years now. No progress either way that I can detect.

Les posted this on our home forum (http://www.reason.ws). Might be relevant. It's really long, but you probably can get it read while waiting for my conversion.

http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-05/new-age.html

#3590: isabel — 06/18  at  02:48 PM
Converted yet, Duane? Because I read that article (thanks for the pointer) and also checked out your home forum and some of the useful links there. Thanks again.