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To: Right Wing Professor
Among scientists, only 5 percent hold the literal Bible view, 40 percent believe in theistic evolution and a majority, 55 percent, believe in evolution without help from God.

Darwin may have been a theist at the time he write Origin of the Species, but that is highly suspect. He was a seminarian at one point, true, but his inclusion of new species being created at the hand of God in Origins was put in there under intense pressure by the publishers. Darwinian evolution as it is taught and believed today is godless and it was Darwinian evolution that I said 55% of scientists believed in in my post.

As I understand it, and I'm not a Hebrew scholar, but there are several here on FR, the passage in Isaiah that translates to 'the circle of the earth', uses a Hebrew word that means circle or disk. It does not mean sphere. Therefore, to claim the Bible says there is a spherical earth is fallacious.
It is not fallacious. There was no word for "sphere" in ancient Hebrew (and I have had Hebrew as well).

Some Christians, particularly in the early middle ages, did believe in a flat earth. For example, there is the famous sixth century map of Cosmas Indicopleutes which shows a flat earth with four corners.
The church fathers rejected the work of Cosmas Indicopleustes. A flat earth was never held by the church as a whole or even in majority. Washington Irving has been the one to popularize that slur and evolutionists love to harp on that falsehood to this day.

Your accusations of prejudice on my part are ad hominem and unjustified.
I disagree.

What in the sam-hill do you think panspermia is supposed to be saying

That life arrived on earth from elsewhere. it just avoids the question of the origin of life. It does not answer it.

No, teacher. Panspermia teaches that life on earth did not happen by chance but that it came here (in Crick's view) on rocket ships from some other highly intelligent society someplace else. Why would Crick come up with this wild theory? Because he can observe that evolution as taught is not possible on this planet, so he has to invent some other hypothesis whereby on some other planet in his fantasy world life could have evolved and be sent here. Not very scientific, if you ask me. The utter refusal to admit that the earth shows intelligent design and that this design could have even possibly come from God is the epitomy of prejudice and close-minded bigotry and is not worthy of a scientist.
174 posted on 08/15/2003 9:40:43 AM PDT by DittoJed2
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To: DittoJed2
It is not fallacious. There was no word for "sphere" in ancient Hebrew (and I have had Hebrew as well).

There was (and is) a Hebrew word for ball, kadur. Isaiah knew the word; he used it in another verse (22:18).

208 posted on 08/15/2003 1:29:37 PM PDT by Lurking Libertarian (Non sub homine, sed sub Deo et lege)
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To: DittoJed2
Darwin may have been a theist at the time he write Origin of the Species, but that is highly suspect.

Quoting from the last chapter of The Origin of Species

To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

Looks pretty theistic to me

Darwinian evolution as it is taught and believed today is godless and it was Darwinian evolution that I said 55% of scientists believed in in my post.

Darwinian evolution is no more godless than freshman chemistry. We don't invoke a creator to explain how iron rusts, or how airplanes fly. Why invoke God in biology?

It is not fallacious. There was no word for "sphere" in ancient Hebrew (and I have had Hebrew as well).

Just because there is no word for sphere (I understand there is a word for ball) does not mean that they used circle to mean sphere. In fact, the verse of Isaiah which refers to the circle of the earth, also describes the heavens as a curtain and as a tent. You don't have a currtain around a sphere; you don't pitch a tent on one.

Your accusations of prejudice on my part are ad hominem and unjustified.

I disagree.

Then, since you will neither justify them nor withdraw them, I'll write them off as juvenile name calling.

A flat earth was never held by the church as a whole or even in majority.

You initially wrote that Christians never believed in a flat earth. Some Christians clearly did. If you wish to change that statement to a claim that a majority of Christians never did, I think you're going to have a tough time proving it. Gallup wasn't around in the 6th century.

The utter refusal to admit that the earth shows intelligent design and that this design could have even possibly come from God is the epitomy of prejudice and close-minded bigotry and is not worthy of a scientist. On the contrary; if one compares the gene sequences of related animals, the evidence for random mutation followed by selection is clear; on the other hand, many aspects of the human genome are clearly not at all intelligently designed.

For example, unlike most mammals, we can't synthesize vitamin C. The gene that codes for one essential step in vitamin C synthesis is actually present in humans and the great apes, but it is defective. Now why, if you were to design a human intelligently, would you eliminate the ability to make an important nutrient that most other mammals can make; and yet still include a defective gene for that ability?

The human genome also includes retrotransposons. Retrotransposons are pieces of retrovirus DNA that got accidentally incorporated into the host DNA, and can be passed on to progeny. We share some retrotransposons with the great apes and monkeys; evolution says this is because one of our common ancestors got infected, and passed on the gene. Makes sense! But why would a designer put in a functionless fragment of a virus into a series of related species in such a way as to make it look like they had a common ancestor?

I'm a scientist. Looking at the genomes of humans and other animals, I can see no logical explanation for them except evolution. If there were a designer, he would have had to have been drunk.

214 posted on 08/15/2003 1:46:51 PM PDT by Right Wing Professor
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