Posted on 05/12/2006 12:13:47 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
In his op-ed "Evolution's bottom line," published in The New York Times (May 12, 2006), Holden Thorp emphasizes the practical applications of evolution, writing, "creationism has no commercial application. Evolution does," and citing several specific examples.
In places where evolution education is undermined, he argues, it isn't only students who will be the poorer for it: "Will Mom or Dad Scientist want to live somewhere where their children are less likely to learn evolution?" He concludes, "Where science gets done is where wealth gets created, so places that decide to put stickers on their textbooks or change the definition of science have decided, perhaps unknowingly, not to go to the innovation party of the future. Maybe that's fine for the grownups who'd rather stay home, but it seems like a raw deal for the 14-year-old girl in Topeka who might have gone on to find a cure for resistant infections if only she had been taught evolution in high school."
Thorp is chairman of the chemistry department at the University of North Carolina.
You are, of course, free to take Genesis however you like. But some people believe in the evidence that the earth is older than a few thousand years and that life as we see it today emerged not in a matter of days but over millions of years. Yet, they don't believe that makes God a liar. The Bible is full of parables and figurative language and some people simply don't believe in a literal interpretation.
Why can't God's evidence in the world we see simply be accepted at its face value?
Let me take a wild stab at this. Perhaps because christian apologists would rather fight on comfortable ground, by talking about Hitler's personal life, the arcanum of canon law and feeble-minded, short-lived naturalistic sects, than face up to why Hitler and the Nazi propaganda machine made successful religeously-couched appeals to the German people to win support for the final solution. Germany, by census, was overwhelmingly, and intensely christian before the war and after the war, so it's a pretty reasonable guess that they weren't Odin worshipping Fitche-ian public nudists, immune the the outpouring of religious defamation of jews during the war.
Yeah! And they were all waving copies of "Origin of Species" as they operated the gas chambers and murdered the entire population of random villages to set an example when Heydrich was assassinated. That's the kind of thing that evolution leads to.
What is the physical evidence you are referring to that falsifies Genesis?
Genesis does not necessarily indicate that the earth is only a few thousand years old. Gen 1:1 states that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. This could indeed hve been innumerable years ago. Gen 1:2 implies that something catastrophic had taken place, for the earth had become waste and void. Gen 1:3 starts yet another epoch, where God moves to refashion the earth. The verbs used in Gen 1:3 and following indicate working with previously existing materials (made, formed, set, etc.) as opposed to the verb "created" in Gen 1:1 which literally means to create ex nihilo - out of nothing.
Yes I have, many times. Inspired by God? Yes, but not any more than your post to me was inspired by God. Infallible? No. I've no reason to believe that anything involving fallible humans can be anything else. But I still don't understand why that's relevant.
Well, if you don't believe the Bible is the inspired word of God, I see no reason for you to believe God is the creator.
Thank you for confirming the ambiguity I was addressing in my post. I was not the one to submit the false choice that either the Bible happened according to my personal interpretation or else God is a liar.
How many examples do you want?
If you are now talking about Genesis as a whole. Creationists claim that the fossil record is thin, yet there are far too many fossils in the fossil record for them possibly to all have been alive at the time of the flood. The earth would have been many feet deep in writhing flesh and plantlife.
We know what cataclysmic floods look like. The geological column doesn't look like that. Angular unconformities and disconformities make no sense in flood geology, and perfect sense in conventional geology. Oil companies follow the money; curiously for those who support a young earth oil companies use conventional geology. You can be quite certain that if flood geologists could find minerals that oil companies wouldn't be hidebound by conventional science.
The Freeper Coyoteman points out that he has excavated sites that show continuous human occupation back to well before the date that the Bible would indicate for a global flood. He dates the sites using several cross-correlating techniques.
Radiometric evidence confirms the dates that biologists and geologists had suggested for the age of the earth are accurate, indeed Darwin first suggested that life on earth was at least 500 million years old by observing evolutionary rates and extrapolating backwards. Given the data he had this turned out to be a remarkably good estimate that squares well with modern beliefs. Physicists at the time poured scorn on suggestions of such age, but they turned out to be wrong because they didn't know about the heating effect of radioactivity in the earth's core.
The supernova SN1987A has been shown to be around 170,000 light years away using geometric techniques. That means that the light from it started its journey 170,000 years ago, or perhaps God created light depicting an incident that never occurred 6000 years ago. We can see in that event that lightspeed hasn't changed in the last 170,000 years, and that atomic decay rates (the foundation of radiometric dating) haven't changed in the last 170,000 years.
Modern genetic diversity of the human race is far to great for us all to descend from 3 women and 3 men around 4500 years ago. There are just too many alleles for that to be possible. The situation with many other species is even worse, particularly as they are supposed to stem from a single pair in most cases.
Do you want any more?
You seem to be stuck in that binary mode, that all things are "either/or". Have you considered that the world is a little more complicated than that? That things, such as the beliefs of other people, may exist in ways that haven't yet occured to you? You're also ignoring the answer I gave you. Here, let me quote me: "Inspired by God? Yes"
But since you see no reason for my belief, it must not exist. Sheesh.
And the foot fungus. Don't ever forget about the foot fungus.
Unfortunately, many of His self-appointed middle-men represent that gift as contingent, and demand a percentage.
LoL. Yeah, he abandoned the discussion for whatever reason. Not sure I fully understand it. He sent me a very kind email after doing so.
Pius had no trouble, and apparently felt the need, to explicitly ex-communicate every communist. Are you telling me the communists never beat up any nuns, or did anything else to warrant automatic ex-communication, and thereby save the Pope the trouble? Apparently Pius suffered the impression that ex-communication means something in the modern world--it's just that torturing 6000000 jews to death doesn't rise to that level of Godly concern, in the opinion of Jesus's voice on earth.
You are correct that the words "hump" and "sex" are related :-)
Cheers!
One of the things by which Hitler was recorded as being moved, was the spear reputed to have pierced the side of Christ. It was "miraculously found" during the first crusade, and brought back to Vienna.
Of course recent analysis shows that it was made in the 11th Century, and therefore a fraud. But it did inspire the Crusaders to great efforts.
S-gruber was a nutcase. He couldn't stand Jews because his natural father, Schicklegruber, was too close to his mother, and he had a vast unresolved jealousy. If only he could have had a bit of counseling and therapy!
Yes.
No.
I would ask you: "Is the Bible an infaillible doorstop?"
The point is, the Bible may be infaillible, or not infaillible depending on what use to which you put it.
The Bible is not a math textbook, not a history textbook, not a biology textbook. If you put it to that use, it is your error, not the Bible's error, and not G-d's error. To use the Bible incorrectly should be close to blasphemy, if you are a Christian. If the Bible is a product of the Holy Spirit, then misuse of the Bible would be perilously close to "Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit".
Right?
Sorry, I just can't resist the pun inspired by your post...
(Sing it with me, folks)--
"Darwin repented,
this I know...
for the Internet tells me so.
Crevo threads to him belong
Talk is cheap and flames are strong..."
Cheers!
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