Posted on 10/31/2003 4:23:35 AM PST by Dales
Edited on 04/13/2004 1:56:09 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Editor's note: Ted Dickason, a candidate for Modesto City Schools board of trustees, has stated that he believes evolution and creationism should be taught side by side in high school science classes. This position has generated substantial debate in the community, including this article opposing the teaching of creationism in schools and the two letters to the editor to the right supporting creationism and/or Dickason.
(Excerpt) Read more at modbee.com ...
I wasn't aware of that. Gosh, the fidelity of the transmission has to be a worry, then. Oral history tends to accumulate embroidery. The Iliad and Odyssey started as historical record, and ended up with Cyclops and people turned into animals.
My Spidey sense tells me something is wrong here.
That's where Divine Revelation comes in. The theory is that God wants man to know what's what, so He inspires His scribes so that they get it right.
This is the source of the joke about the lady who insisted that she relied on the King James Version, "just as Jesus wrote it Himself!" Of course, there are still variorum editions, which gives Biblical scholars something to do for a living, and keeps a lot of them employed.
It probably won't surprise you that the Catholic version and the Protestant versions differ quite a bit.
No, indeed. I was brought up on the Revised Standard Version. I wasn't aware until a few years ago that the Catholic and Protestant numberings of the Commandments were different. When people were accusing Clinton of violating the seventh commandment, I wondered what they thought he'd stolen!
(They also never told us, at least not in grade school, what adultery was, no doubt so we wouldn't get ideas. It was clear it was a bad thing, though.)
It is my understanding that the oldest fragment of the Old Testament is a fragment of Deuteronomy in Greek from the 2nd century BC. The oldest Hebrew fragment is from the Dead Sea Scrolls, as I stated. The oldest complete Hebrew version is the Leningrad Codex, circa 1008.
Turtles. It's turtles all the way down.
I think most people will eventually come to see that the 20th century was the time when the illusion that science was catching up cornering mystery was strongest. It's distinctily fading these days, what with string theory and all those sub atomic particles.
On another thread someone posted that the favorite symbol of atheists was one symbolizing the atom. That, of course was chosen before the quark showed up.
Well, I addressed that at some level in the rest of post #41, but I can expand upon that a bit.
My personal opinion, as a Deist, is that there is design, but it occurs at the level of the structure of mathematics. Physics, of course, is bound to adhere to mathematics.
In physics, phenomena are either accidental or consequential. (N.B.: save your objections about "intentional"; I'll get to that later.) The evaporation of a water droplet, with which I was challenging HankReardon, is consequential: under the conditions I described, it has to evaporate. It could not have been otherwise. The decay of a subatomic particle, by contrast, is accidental. All possible locally causal mechanisms have been disproven.
Now, which fundamental phenomena are consequential and which are accidental? As it turns out, that question occupies much of the theoretical side of high energy physics. In most cases, we don't know, but in many, we do. The mass of the proton, for example, is a consequence of quantum chromodynamics. You can program a computer to calculate it. By contrast, the difference between the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces is--we are pretty sure--an accident. (Once we find the Higgs boson, we'll nail down the last details.) This is what determines the masses of the elementary fermions, such as the electron.
[Geek alert: The term for such accidents is "Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking". It's easy to come up with real-world examples of this. Take a knitting needle and stand it on its point. Then let it go, and it will fall. The fallen needle will end up pointing in some specific direction. This "breaks" or "hides" the symmetry of rotational invariance that the needle enjoyed when it was standing on end. It used to appear the same from any direction; now it points one way but not another. (The symmetry is still implicit in the fact that the needle could have fallen in any direction.) The fall of the needle was consequential, but the final direction of the needle was accidental.]
So what parameters are calculable, like the proton mass, and what parameters are accidental, like the electron mass? We're working on that. Sometimes parameters that look accidental turn out to be forced by the physics at a deeper level. Some physicists believe that everything will be forced: you start with a single mathematical idea, and it just unfolds into a universe like ours, ineluctably. (That's why I expect the design to come in at an even deeper level, before even physics.) At this point, however, it really looks as if there are some accidents along the way.
And finally, what of intention? How do we can we know whether some of the falling knitting needles weren't shoved in particular directions? In fact, we can't. All we see are the fallen needles; no direction is less likely than another. The intentional acts, if there were any, will look to science exactly the same as accidents. And that's really the ultimate compatibility between logic and faith, between science and religion.
Every winning lottery ticket is somebody's miracle...but not every mist rising from the ground is anybody's science.
Proof isn't possible, but if one had argued in 1900(without evidence in hand) that early versions of the Bible were written down, then that speculation would have received confirming evidence with the Scrolls. The existence of the Scrolls convinces me that people were writing down what "is written".
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