So human evolution has scientific consensus, as 98% of all scientists and 99% of all biologists agree that humans evolved from apes. How am I wrong?
Scientific consensus determines what is and is not good science. That is my position.
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Genesis & Science - Friend or Foe?
- Thread starter nPeace
- Start date
Scientific consensus determines what is and is not good science. That is my position.
nPeace
Veteran Member
Since when is Exodus Genesis? Also "can be" and "has been", are two different things.
It seems you would like to start a thread on the Exodus. Feel free.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
Yes, as I pointed out it left out communicating one's results. Also the one that I posted shows what one does when a hypothesis is not quite right. That happens almost all of the time. One does not hit on the right idea right off the bat. Perhaps the most important step in that series is forming a testable hypothesis. That means one must think of a reasonable test that would show one to be wrong. If one can't think of a reasonable test that could show one to be wrong then what one has is not science.
nPeace
Veteran Member
Maybe you should ask what the firs line means. Unless you prefer to form your own opinion about it, and then project that opinion against what science says.
If that's the case, I have no intention of trying to stop you.
The Bible simply says, in the beginning God created the heavens and earth.
nPeace
Veteran Member
Thank you teacher. How could I possibly have known that.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
I think the objection was that our Earth is 4.55 billion years old. Our system is a secondary system at best. That means that our Solar System was formed after an older star died through a super nova. That is shown by the heavier elements. That might take some time to explain if you have not studied this at all. Our Earth, is much younger than our universe.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
One has to be careful when reading articles. Creationist sources especially distort them, but even those without an agenda are not much better at times. People are quite often totally unaware that object can have water in them and still be "dry". One of my favorite examples is drywall. It is made up of gypsum. It has far more water than the water in the mantle that you hear of. The chemical formula for gypsum is CaSO4*2H2O. That means for every CaSO4 (calcium sulfate) molecule there are roughly two water molecules. It is mined, heated so that the water is driven off and crushed and then water is added back and it is shaped into panels for drywall. When it is dried a second time they do not drive off all of the water and it is once again CaSO4*2H2O.
nPeace
Veteran Member
The entire Bible reports it as history - from Moses to David; from Solomon to Ezekiel; from Jesus to the last living disciple of Jesus.
It is not written metaphysically, and God himself - in relating it - says that it is history.
If you want, I can make a list of all the scriptures that show this.
If Genesis is not history, then all the characters right down to the apostle John, are mythical, and all the books too.
What reason do you have for saying it's metaphorical?
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
There is no reason to take such an all or nothing attitude. In fact as someone else already pointed out the Exodus never happened either. In fact the Bible is not as old as many Christians believe. Most of it appeared to have been written after the Babylonian captivity. For Christians the most important part of the Bible is found in the New Testament. treating the Old Testament can only lead to a loss of faith if one reasons at all rationally.
nPeace
Veteran Member
From what I understand, the Genesis account does not say the sun and moon were created after the earth, but rather before the earth was formed.
nPeace
Veteran Member
No need to lie or falsely accuse others either, but perhaps you just made a mistake.
The first page contains my post on what is good science. Maybe you missed it, or decided it didn't fit with what you wanted to say, so you dismissed or overlooked it. I don't know.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
Genesis 1 11-13 on the third day God makes plants.
Genesis 1 14-18 God makes the Sun and the Moon on the fourth day, oh and the stars too.
Definitely out of order.
Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
No need to lie or falsely accuse others either, but perhaps you just made a mistake.
The first page contains my post on what is good science. Maybe you missed it, or decided it didn't fit with what you wanted to say, so you dismissed or overlooked it. I don't know.
He did not lie. Another poster was calling names, not you. Have you not been reading your own thread?
Yes, and science says that the earth began to exist a few billion years after the beginning of the Universe.
Ergo, when there were already zillions on galaxies, stars and other planets born a long time before the earth.
If that is not a contradiction with Genesis, then tell me please how you call it.
Ciao
- viole
No need to lie or falsely accuse others either, but perhaps you just made a mistake.
The first page contains my post on what is good science. Maybe you missed it, or decided it didn't fit with what you wanted to say, so you dismissed or overlooked it. I don't know.
Good science??? Still waiting. . . .
I do not know. your incomplete description is often associated with the Creationist claim of the origin of the waters of Noah's flood. Actually the existence of this water bound up in rocks of the interior is nothing new to science, but recently more is known concerning the amount and how the water is bound up in the rock.
An interesting subject worthy of a thread. Briefly, the deposition of the strata parallels the same deposition we see in the world today. It is cyclic and contains specific and discrete layers of limestone, shale, coal, and sandstone, with abundance of fossils that lived in place in the environment of they type of deposition. Individual layers contain drying crack, abundant tracks and evidence of animals. The limestone layers are vaste and hundreds of feet thick, contain vaste coral reefs and can only be deposited in shallow seas like the Bermuda regions. In the strata layers are vaste meandering river systems, windblown deposits, varved lake deposits, and erosional surfaces and soil formation just as we see in the world today repeated again and again throughout the thousands of feet of the strata. There are also many eroded volcanoes in the strata, flows of volcanic lava and ash within the layers.
The present evidence of living tree ring records, and over lapping dead tree ring records go back to before the Biblical record of Noah's flood. The living tree ring record is in trees more than 2.300 years. Varved lake deposits go back uninterrupted for more than 60,000 years as in Lake Suigetsu in Japan. Climate for over 60,000 years is recorded in these sediments, and the nuclear fall out for recent nuclear blasts is also recorded.
The nature of the deposition of thousands of feet of strata is simply physics of particle size, chemical reactions such as carbonate formation, living organisms like coral, and the physics of gravity and how particles behave in wind and water throughout the history of the earth as it happens today. If you take a course in sedimentology you would understand all the history of the strata of the earth.
This is not only 'good science, but excellent science!'
My professional degrees and work involve the geomorphology involved with this evidence. and I have been around the world intimately involved with the sites that demonstrate this objective verifiable evidence.
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There are parts which are history. There are parts which are poetry. There are parts which are mythological. There are parts which are allegorical. And so forth. As Subduction Zone pointed out already, why is it viewed with such an all-or-nothing approach? That wouldn't be wise. It's an easy way for one to lose faith when they set it up like that. All it takes is one error of fact and the whole thing collapses under such an artificial constraint.
If you look at any culture's origin myths, they read as history too. Mythologies do this. Gone with the Wind writes about America's Civil War, but the stories woven into that are fictional. Just because the Civil War happened, does not make the story actual history. And because it's not actual history, this does not therefore mean the story is crap, unless you need it to be factual first before it has meaning. That I consider to be a problem with the reader, not the literature. Same thing with the Bible.
Of course the Bible deals with metaphysics! Metaphysics deals with the origin of things, beyond physics in other words. In fact most of what it deals with are metaphysical questions in nature.
No need to. I've studied and read the Bible from cover to cover. Have you ever read the entire thing yourself?
I am honestly not sure how you can leap from Adam and Eve being mythological characters to John being mythological. One does not follow through to the other. Each has to be looked at on its own.
I am guessing that you are needing to think in these all-or-nothing terms is because of some artificial construct you have superimposed upon the whole thing. I believe that is probably the artificial construct of the "Biblical Inerrancy Doctrine". That is a very modern doctrine, and not one that Christianity as a whole believed in previously. Not all Christians need the Bible to be believed in that way in order for their faith to be real. I consider tying one's faith to the modernistic Inerrancy Doctrine to be at odds with actual Faith.
If one loses faith in God because they found out there are errors in scripture, then I would say that faith was one built on a bed of shifting sand. It is faith built as a house of cards where one little tremor can topple the whole thing. Denialism about things like science and history because it runs into one's beliefs about the Bible, is a trainwreck of faith just waiting to happen.
I could easily write a whole book on this. In brief however, a metaphor points to something beyond itself as the thing to be considered. For instance, when you look at the night sky it is strewn with countless stars in a jumble of dots littering your field of vision. But if you draw a line from one point of light to another, and to another, and another, you impose a pattern upon it which the mind can recognize and relate to it.
This is what the constellations are. Orion is not actually up there in the sky, right along with Leo, or Scorpio, or the Big and Little Dippers. Those are metaphorical figures we use to try to relate to the transcendent.
Many of the figures of the Bible, the characters of Adam and Eve for instance, are images of humanity as a whole dealing with things like our human natures, sin and temptation, guilts, shames, regrets, pain and suffering, etc. Everyone can relate to this on some level or another. This is what good mythologies do. This is what they are for. Relatability. They are usually timeless truths that transcend cultures.
The myth of the Garden and the Fall of man is a story about us. To reduce it down to "historical fact" guts it of that. If it can't be "true" in a timeless sense, beyond historical facts, then it is a worthless story. It doesn't capture the imagination. It gets rid of imagination reducing it to a simple fact-finding task. It is imagining that is the wings of faith. Without that there, faith is dead.
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BilliardsBall
Veteran Member
Or, you can just ignore the ones who tread on our pearls, which saves a LOT of time.
What other choice do you guys have?
Of course, what would save much more time is to not even start threads that declare that the Bible and Science are compatible. Since they are obviously not.
Ciao
- viole