Posted on 03/18/2012 6:38:49 PM PDT by EnglishCon
Your's is a common experience.
I have done my part - informed the world at large there are many, MANY, Conservatives who understand science, know what a Scientific Theory is and understand and embrace the differing yet related and adjacent thought quadrants of science and faith.
Prepare for the standard bombardment, which I will ignore.
This is my last post on this thread — I hope you find the enlightenment you seek. It shall only come from the enlightened.
You know something?
As a bioscience nerd, grass is amazing to me. About 30,000 years ago, some breeds of grass started exhibiting a thing called polyploidy. A duplication of their complete genetic code, that made the grains bigger.
Think of the odds of a single plant with that mutation surviving. If you have difficulty, plant some corn and watch the racoons eat it the day before you intend to harvest.
That was somethint impossible. Yet it lead to modern culture.
A keeper!
Before one begins to make verse 3 the point a couple of things need be addressed. Genesis 1:1 is a declaration, without any time signature as to when the beginning began, or how long.
Verse 2 begins with that big word AND meaning a continuation and explanation of what happened to the 'state' of the perfect creation. Now other elected writers pen much about verse 2 such as Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Solomon, Moses in the book of Job, Peter, Paul and Christ made mention to verse 2 in referencing the 'foundation' as translated in the New Testament.
Verse two describes as Peter calls the heaven/earth that WAS being flooded in IIPeter 3, as does Moses. Genesis 1:2 describe the rebellion of Lucifer described in Isaiah 14:12..... and Ezekiel 28:12 .....
What Genesis 1:3 does is describe an 'environmental' clean up to make this earth once again inhabitable. Peter says in IIPeter 3 there are 3 different heaven/earth ages and we in the flesh are in the world that is now. And Peter also explains how God keeps time, that a day with the LORD is as a thousand years.... so that would mean the 8 days of creation took 8 thousand years.
So, you believe the earth sits atop some structure and that the sun moves around the earth. When literally interpreting scripture, you cannot pick and choose
Psa 104:5 He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
Let them bomb.
In all honesty, I don’t write for non paying sites unless I get a call to do so - and it is annoying as it disrupts my work.
This time I got one. Two words - write this.
Sometimes I wish he’d just leave me alone ....
Can you expand please, FRiend?
Partially it is 3 AM here, partially I have zero desire to misinterpret you.
Also consider early cooling with respect to waters covering the face of the earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Early_Earth Then consider late heavy bombardment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment
Ah - I have always considered the waters of heaven to be the gas tides, driven by the stars, that created the sun and the planets. In a metaphorical sense it is true - there is a flood of gass and heavier elements.
Sure, it ain’t orthodox, but what you expect from a three religion guy!
>>Put another way, I refuse to believe that such achievements as the Mozart Requiem, Handel’s Messiah and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony are nothing more than the residue of some cosmic hiccup.<<
So you admit to (and admire) stochastism in the world as we know it.
The “spark of genius” shall remain under the control of the Lord. But the general lengthy progression by generations is a clear spokesmodel for the observed effects of TToE.
You are clearly the latest data point on an accelerated line of smart people who sochastically continued thought evolution.
My brothers and sisters are pretty sharp so I like to think my ability to analyze has a bit of that same general theoretical impetus. Or, more accurately, is representative of it.
Either that or you have some ‘splainin to on how God chose you to be smart...
(btw: this is NOT a comment on the thread in general. After a 1st or 2nd comment my rule is to be mute.
"...let's turn to a passage in Heller's Creative Tension. He points out that recent developments in deterministic chaos theory have demonstrated that "there are strong reasons to believe that a certain amount of randomness is indispensable for the emergence and evolution of organized structures.... Randomness is no longer perceived as a competitor of God, but rather as a powerful tool in God's strategy of creating the world."
"He quotes the physicist Paul Davies, who wrote that,
"God is responsible for ordering the world, not through direct action, but by providing various potentialities which the physical universe is then free to actualize. In this way, God does not compromise the essential openness and indeterminism of the universe, but is nevertheless in a position to encourage a trend toward good. Traces of this subtle and indirect influence may be discerned in the progressive nature of biological evolution, for example, and the tendency for the universe to self-organize into a richer variety of ever more complex forms."
"In a similar vein, he quotes A. R. Peacocke: "On this view God acts to create the world through what we call 'chance' operating within the created order, each stage of which constitutes the launching pad for the next."
"So the bottom line is that if your life were totally planned, it couldn't be. In other words, the more you attempt to tamp down randomness and chance, the more you are likely to create disorder. To put it another way, there is a higher principle at work, which uses randomness and chaos to break up evolutionary impasses and "lure" the system toward its own destiny, so to speak. We must surrender to this destiny, as each of us, to paraphrase Sri Aurobindo, is a "unique problem of God."
"Or you could say that "the answer is the disease that kills curiosity," or that twoness resolves the problem of oneness through the discovery and synthesis of eternal threeness, in which Love abides. ....."
bttt
Your entire note makes Genesis verse 1 a lie.
If Genesis verse 1 is a lie, the account of creation is a lie.
If the account of creation is a lie (and if your theory were correct it would be) all of Genesis is a lie, and so also is the whole Bible. Be honest and say so.
One has two options:
(1) By man came death
or:
(2) By death came man.
I choose (1) and therefore I believe in The God and His progressively revealed Word.
Your scheme necessarily requires that you have chosen (2), and hence do not believe in God's Word; hence you do not believe in the God of the Bible.
I am a reasonably competent Ph. D. in the physical chemistry of inorganic oxides and semiconductor materials, and a successful scientist in both academics and the commercial world. I believe true science supports a six-day literal creation as exactly described in Genesis. I believe as well that the entrance of sin and death into a perfectly created world was due to deliberate disobedience of The God's single, non-negotiable command by our federal and genetic head, under the agitation of the Consummate Liar, who is also the source of the evolution falsehood.
I was not there at creation, therefore I believe.
Prove that I am wrong, if you can (and you can not).
I reject your "science" and repudiate your doctrine. Evolution and Genesis are not miscible and cannot be harmonized. Day-age theory is a farce.
Wishing a greater faith for you --
Genesis 1:2 describes the end of what Peter calls the heaven/earth world (age) that WAS... The rebellion of the devil wherein all life was destroyed as described by Jeremiah 4:22-27 no life survived that destruction. IIPeter 3:5-6-7-8 Peter is not the only writer that penned what is now a mystery to the majority.
Four questions:
1. Does God live in this Universe or outside of it?
2. What role does perspective play in understanding Genesis?
3. You have noted God’s signature in everything from the laws of physics to the microwave buzzes of the universe. How powerful is God?
4. What does Hebrews 11:1 mean?
"Without a doubt, the ultimate Black Swan is whatever it was that permitted merely genetic human beings to emerge into full humanness just yesterday (cosmically speaking), some 50,000 years ago. .....
"....once man consciously enters the sensorium of time and space, he is implicitly aware of both Absolute and Infinite, and therefore Love, Truth, Justice, Beauty, Virtue, and Eternity. These are the things that define man, not his genome. ....."
"It is terribly naive to say that science (especially modern science) deals with the "real world." It actually begins with the ponderable world -- the everyday world of the senses -- but eventually creates a wholly abstract world that is taken to be more "real" than the ponderable world. (Importantly, it also begins with certain implicit religious assumptions purloined from the Real, such as the idea of an intelligible cosmos that can be comprehended by rational observers,....)
... This process of abstraction leads to patent absurdities such as the belief that DNA explains life or that the brain creates consciousness, rather than vice versa. Both the brain and DNA are digital, while the human is analogue. ......Suffice it so say that revelation deals with the Real world, not the abstract world of science or the ponderable world of everyday existence. (To be perfectly accurate, it also has has to do with the dependence of the ponderable upon the Real, or their intersection;we are not dependent upon physics, but upon the Creator who created physics.)"
"....science is always provisional, whereas theology is always about the permanent and atemporal. What we call the "Big Bang" is merely the extrapolation of a certain model used by physicists to understand the physical world. In these models, at a certain point, the "history" of subatomic particles disappears into "nothing." Therefore, some people make the hasty conclusion that this must be the same "nothing" out of which God created the universe.
But this is not only wrong, but it demonstrates a peculiar lack of imagination. The "nothing" of the physicist is merely the area beyond the horizon of his model. There's still "something" there -- it's just that the physicist's model does not permit him to even hazard a guess as to what it might be.
But the Nothing of theology is a much vaster principle, having to do with the emanation of Being from Beyond-Being. This is what I meant the other day when I said that in my book I was not trying to equate the Big Bang with God's eternal creative act, but to use it as a "fable" to retell that timeless story. As I said on p. 2, "Borrowing freely from Christian, Greek, Jewish, Hindu, Taoist and other sources, the creation to which it refers did not happen just 'once upon a time,' but occurs continuously, in the timeless ground anterior to each moment."
"Put it this way: neither the cosmos nor this book have a proper 'beginning,' but both have a center, a center that starts where science ends and must therefore be described in mythological terms. The purpose of myth is to help us re-collect what we have forgotten about our timeless source, our eternal nature, and our ultimate destiny. ........"
Water is ubiquitous throughout the universe and I have read how a lot of water could have accounted for an early cooling and crustal formation at a time when classical models predicted a magma surface.
And now we have evidence that massive amounts of continental crust were produced almost immediately upon Earth formation.http://info.anu.edu.au/ovc/media/Media_Releases/2005/November/181105harrisoncontinents
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