Posted on 05/20/2009 8:56:16 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
So, since you decided to call me a liar, I decided to indulge you providing simple instruction for how you could confirm your intemperate claim. The method is simple and avoids disparaging individuals. Go to the group the world at large has accepted and confirmed as excellent scientists. You pick the sample, just go to top-rated institutions that compete for the best researchers and do not retain any that falter for long. The web gives you access to faculty listings of every department in almost every real university in America. Now, find the “creation scientists” that your perspective would say exist in the group actually practicing science before the world.
As I expected, you have chosen not to reply to this challenge. In all my years, I have never met a competent, working, productive, scientist that shares the creationist view. There probably are a couple someplace. But if I am a liar, you should be able to find a lot more than a couple.
I accept the absence of any reply to this challenge as confirmation of the truth of my statements. A person with integrity would apologize.
As I have stated elsewhere, I have no problem with you believing whatever you want to believe. I do, however, have a big problem with those that would characterize themselves as creationists passing off their clap trap as “science” worthy of any kind of co-equality in the classroom science curriculum. Butt out of science and the development of future scientists, and I will butt out of religion.
Darwin's Theory of Evolution may or may not in its several details stand the test of time. This is the core of the nature of science. If a theory is not at risk of fall or revision in the face of reliable contrary evidence, it does not represent a scientific theory. But a scientific theory is also more than an unsubstantiated idea or imagining. It offers coherent explanation to a substantial body of observation. And it generates nontrivial expectation (prediction) regarding observations and measurements and the outcome of experiments as yet undone. No ability to predict = no vulnerability = not a Theory.
As scientific theories go, there is not much that has stood up as well for 150 years as Darwin. And for 150 years, evidenciary support for it continuously grown with essentially nothing that withstands scrutiny in opposition.
The irony of course is that nothing in Darwin's theory (or science) denies or contravenes God. Not a few genuine scientists think of their mission as revealing those workings of God which Bronze Age man was not intellectually prepared to grasp, let alone set down in a story. But Gnostic or not, science knows its boundaries, leaving faith to take up those domains where science remains inadequate.
The core issue YOU face is the weakness of YOUR faith. My view is that if those that supported Creation Science did not suffer from a weak faith, they would feel no need to conjur up “creation science” in pseudo opposition to Darwin's Theory. They would simply have confidence that the good scientists doing their best to discover, describe, and understand would eventually work out what they knew in their hearts already. Science has no interest in proving a lie. But creation scientists seem to inordinately fear that their “truth” might become one.
The core reason your faith is challenged lies in your own words: “Those that do not believe detailed information in god's (sic) word fall short for me.”
Your reference, of course, is to a literal Bible. The pedant would ask which version translated from which sources traceable in original form to dating to when and from where in which original languages translated by whom when and including (and excluding) which books (and missing how many)? If there is a permanence and immutability to God's word, God knows that there is no shortage of disagreement by experts about it in just these domains and no shortage of battles about what is and is not included. I do not wish to challenge divinity surviving in its message. But the “modern” Bible in its present form is the product of man's hand and man's sometimes arbitrary decision.
But more importantly, if the Bible is literally God's Word, why does the Bible not tell us any “information” not otherwise known to contemporary (Bronze Age to Iron Age) man? It is all in the vernacular of the knowledge of the place and time. Little things like the existence of microbes, how diseases are spread, the earth being a ball that goes about the sun (not vice-versa), electricity, etc., are left totally to latter generations of scientists. Surely God understood this stuff he made! If the Bible (in one of its mainstream modern forms) was from the lips of God, there is no doubt that it was dumbed down to match the awareness and capacity of the original listener. This view suggests you ought to then rejoice at the role scientists play at revealing more about God's accomplishments and abilities and consider this work equivalently inspired. And isn't building a few “monkeys” to work the kinks out of the design a sign of divine genius?
If the Bible is not from the lips of God, but merely a human created story of the time reflecting the status of the then known world? That would be troubling to religion built on a foundation of literal paper, wouldn't it?
No one even claims that T-rex could run anymore. You’re way out on a rotten limb.
You’re trying to fabricate an issue that doesn’t exist. Grasping at straws is what its called.
....and the OTHER hundred man eaters you’ll conveniently ignore to hold onto this asinine notion that Man lived AND survived in the age of carniverous dinosaurs?
Yeah...über-intelligence has it’s limits.
It’s all nonsense. Man has been contemporary with every predator that has ever lived. Read job, where T-Rex is mentioned, as a large dangerous beast, with a tail as large as a cedar tree.
We live with them only in the sense that they are here on Earth, but not with them by vicinity.
Yes, it IS “all nonsense” that Man walked the Earth at the same time as hundreds of species of man eating dinosaurs.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.