Posted on 02/05/2014 7:12:10 AM PST by edcoil
From Mr. Ham.
"Here is a report by Dr. Al Mohler that really nails what the debate was all about. A very insightful article. I urge you all to read it and spread it around:"
(Excerpt) Read more at albertmohler.com ...
I saw about 40 minutes of it, entertaining.
Ham (Creationist rep) was a young Earther and mainly just lectured on Bible verses while Nye (Science Guy rep) seemed very prepared for this show (which is all it was) and he lectured the Creationists on rather basic facts like the speed of light and how far Australia is from Mount Ararat, and that the creationists have not come up with a single Kangaroo bone between the two places many thousands of miles separated.(none of that is new BTW)
That forced Ham (Creationist rep) to argue that there is not a single law of science observed today that we can assume applied even a few hundred years ago.
Excellent ... thanx for posting
The whole idea is rubbish.
Excellent article - thank you.
Great piece. Thanks for the link.
The key is to focus on the lack of scientific evidence for evolution, as we have no fossil evidence for transition from one species to another, and forget arguing about the time table.
That's a desperate stretch.
I think the key is balance between the two. We need science and, we need faith.
Science created Lance Armstrongs drugs, apparently there were no men of faith there to advise him not to use them, hence his downfall from grace.
Science creates lots of things and we need people of faith to decided which we actually need.
It’s all about “how” versus “why”.
6,000 years vs. 4.5 billion years isn't really within the margin of error. Someone is very, very, very wrong.
I also detected an implicit threat from Nye: that if we and our posterity will not accept his religious dogma, we will be somehow be constrained from technology and our nation will fall to nations that do accept his religious dogma.
For me it comes down to the notion of humility. The problem I see with anti-creationists is that they seem to be overly impressed with scientific discovery, forgetting that it is a field of thought where man is continually proving himself wrong. Further, they seem to have two stumbling blocks; (a) a lack of confidence that God is powerful enough to be capable of a six-day creation, and (b) that man’s reverse engineering of creation (whether God-driven or not) is competent to reach such far-reaching conclusions without missing some unknown factor that would send their conclusions in a far different direction. The latter seems especially problematic in that the very length of time required to accommodate the macro-evolutionary model makes it exponentially more likely that man doesn’t have sufficient information to accurately extrapolate a scientifically defensible conclusion.
Creationists, on the other hand, should exhibit humility as well, similarly allowing for things that God hasn’t spelled out so as to prevent them from dogmatically staking out a position on the mechanics of His creation. Everyone seems to agree that the Bible was not intended to be a service manual for the planet, so while it’s legitimate to defend the creation story in general, debating the mechanics in a venue where the “other side” has home court advantage, by virtue of having built the arena, is of limited value and is engaged in with some risk to credibility in other, more spiritually significant areas.
The threat was more than that - it was that if we did not accept his worldview, our children would be taken from us.
The paragraph that jumped out at me most was the author’s recognition that the conclusions that both reached were based on foundational assumptions that both agreed they were not willing to compromise on.
According to general relativity both could be right. Time is relative.
That is what the Islamic fundamentalists argued to shut down scientific progress in the Arab-Islamic world back in the Medieval period. They claimed those who thought nature is governed by natural law limited Allah's freedom of action. Trying to find natural laws was a waste because Allah at any moment can change them and further such laws were blasphemous. Shows how Ham and his ilk go against millenia of Christian philosophy and theology that has supported scientific research.
The problem with that is you assume that it's a zero-sum game, and if you could somehow prove evolution wrong then that automatically means Biblical creation is right. That ignores the fact that there are as many stories of creation as there are religions and cultures.
I would say that Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation or his Laws of Motion applied a few hundred years ago, or a few thousand. I'd go further and add millions and billions of years but according to Ham the Earth is nowhere near that old.
I believe God created us through a process. I don’t think Darwinian evolution explains that process accurately at all. Neither does Creationism.
Our misunderstanding and lack of knowledge about that process has been exploited to undermine faith in God in general and Christianity specifically.
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