Posted on 02/05/2014 9:40:42 AM PST by EveningStar
Streamed live on Feb 4, 2014
Is creation a viable model of origins in today's modern, scientific era? Leading creation apologist and bestselling Christian author Ken Ham is joined at the Creation Museum by Emmy Award-winning science educator and CEO of the Planetary Society Bill Nye.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Deception implies intent. There is no deception if they described it the best they could with the words they had to work with. Even today we struggle with accurately conveying ideas with written and spoken word, even when we're honestly trying to convey it the best we can.
Agreed. But I don't see us making any progress in that direction bickering among ourselves over exactly what God did, in what order, and how long it took.
Arguing for the validity of creation and the fallacy of Darwinism is important and should be made until schools start teaching what’s verifiable, not myth. I think your emphasis on a minor issue of slight variances within an animal group is irrelevant, confuses things, and doesn’t help with the big, important issue here.
Well stated, except that there is circumstantial evidence SUGGESTING ID, and it is abundant and compelling.
ID isn’t fact either. We haven’t proven it. We can say that for the Earth and all of its species to develop as they have through some sort of randomized series of events is so statistically unlikely that it is virtually impossible.
That’s the problem with modern science is that we extrapolate observations into facts, and we skip the experimentation, evaluation, and peer review.
When Einstein proved to himself that photons behaved like waves when you weren’t observing them to particles when you were. He never offered any explanation about why that was, but he proved it was happening.
He also proved entanglement was real. ‘Spooky action at a distance’ was real. Again, he never talked about how or why it was happening, just that it was.
I will say that trying to believe in evolution is tougher than believing in intelligent design, for me at least.
The math against this all being an accident is so compelling it is tough to get your mind around the degree to which it is impossible.
I also tend to think anything that breaks down and crashes in Roswell, NM and doesn’t provide for ‘rapid deceleration syndrome’ probably wasn’t responsible for setting the Earth and its various species in motion either.
Knowing two Deans of engineering in the Big Ten universities (and many researchers therein), listening to all their comments on funding for what is politically correct (e.g. global warming), I beg to differ.
Science is overwhelmingly beset with a socio/political set of biases today, among which is a mindset towards atheistic dogma.
“Deception implies intent. There is no deception if they described it the best they could with the words they had to work with.”
As I said in the last post, this idea doesn’t make sense. There are no shortcomings in the Hebrew that would force one to diverge so radically from the evolutionary account, if that is what you were trying to describe in more “primitive” language. Some ideas might be described euphemistically, or only partially, or even left out entirely, but you wouldn’t have descriptions which were plainly contradicting the evolutionists’ account.
If you want to keep up on this line of argument, then explain how the language was unable to make a simple description which didn’t have contadictions. How is it impossible, in Hebrew, to say “God created life, and that life begat other kinds of life”, rather than “God created one kind of life. Then he rested. Then God created another kind of life. The he rested, etc”.
If we can’t convince each other of the truth of our positions, when we already agree on a great many things, how can we convince others, who we have more fundamental disagreements with? I think we need to have these “internal debates”, until we achieve some consensus. The libs have already done that, so they can present a coherent position to the public in the cultural war. We must do the same, or we are handicapping ourselves.
“Genesis 6 makes the creation story of the first 3 chapters come alive for me. It depicts outright interference by rogue “spiritual” elements which caused great violence and destruction upon the Earth. It really is a depiction of genomic interference from outside entities...the war of Satan’s seed against the seed of Eve. The first 3 chapters begin making a lot of sense when viewed thru the lens of Genesis 6.”
I don’t have much problem with this line of thinking. It is really the plainest reading of the text, especially once you take into account related passages from other books of the Bible. The problem I have, though, with your previous post, is that you are going down the materialist rabbit hole, trying to “explain away” things that are described as miraculous by attributing them to natural causes.
So, instead of God opening the firmament and fountains of the deep to cause a flood, you posit that a comet could have caused something that appeared to mortal men how it was described in Genesis. This casts doubt on two different aspects of the Bible.
First, it contradicts the divine authorship of the book. After all, God, if He was the author, would not be constrained by a human perspective, and would know the difference between a comet impact and a supernaturally caused deluge. So, if the author made a mistake and attributed the wrong cause, the author could not be God.
Second, by seeking to explain the miraculous events with naturalist causes, you cast doubt on every miraculous event in the Bible. Why, if the flood is “too miraculous” to believe, as written, is the incarnation of Christ not “too miraculous”, or Christ’s resurrection “too miraculous”? There’s no way to close that door behind just Genesis, once you have opened it.
” . . .starting with simple single celled organisms . . ..”
There is nothing “simple” about the protoplasmic substance of an amoeba. It is biochemically complex well nigh beyond human comprehension.
Which leads to the question, from whence the phenomenon we call “life?” Creationists say God created, and proceed to study what He created, trying to explain and understand whatever can be known about them, classify living entities, etc., etc.. Evolutionists likewise, but for their lack of an answer to the initial question.
You're not going to validate creation and disprove the theory of evolution using claims of "hydrologic sorting" to explain the layering of the fossil record, or claiming that all the uranium samples are contaminated with exactly the right ratios of daughter elements to make the falsely appear to be billions of years old.
Okay. You're no more complex than an amoeba. Happy?
From the facts of the intricate and functional make up of the thing, one can deduce the thing was not an accident but made with purpose by an Intelligent Designer, just like after inspecting a car. This is an unavoidable conclusion based on factual evidence.
You can parse out "fact" in different ways I suppose, but I think the point is something with evidence way beyond a reasonable doubt is considered proof at least in a court of law. I know that science is based on theory, but theory borne out by solid scientific method is generally considered proof, I think. So maybe there's a fine line between proof and fact, but I think the point is made.
What's the ancient Hebrew word for "billion"?
Describe what you'd consider an acceptable consensus.
Well, I’m not sure about that. If I knew the answer, I could publish an essay arguing for it in some conservative mag, wait for the inevitable acceptance, and claim my kudos :)
Whatever it is, it has to be a position that:
a) doesn’t offend any significant element of the conservative movement
b) effectively rebuts the relevant points of the liberal position that they use to support their agenda
c) is easily to articulate to the public in a way they can digest
and
d) is not easy for the liberals to deceptively twist in order to make us look foolish or hypocritical
What that would be exactly, I don’t know. Please note, I may think my interpretation of Genesis is theologically correct, but I am not arguing that we should present a theological argument as our political position. Those are two separate things entirely, even if they may be related because of the liberal attacks on traditional religious ideas.
Do you need to use that word in order to describe the general idea of evolution without contradicting it? I didn’t use it in my “primitive” English description that I gave as an example.
I don't either, so that's going to paint us into a corner. We can't go forward until we reach a consensus, and we don't know what it would look like if we got it.
The point is made to you. I would also allow that, for me, it is evidence enough of an intelligent designer, and more to the point, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
However, a FACT stands on its own.
This is the issue. Were I Nye I never would have taken the invitation, because in BOTH cases faith is required. Once you arrive at this, you look at the evidence on both sides, and there is so little supporting evolution that it isn’t worth exposing yourself.
If you don't like that explanation, you don't have to accept it. It makes more sense to me than the explanations of the fossil record and geology the flood theorists come up with.
Well, we won’t know until we reach it, and we won’t reach it if we don’t try.
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