Anyone Interested in a Serious Religious Debate?

[Sloth]

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Sloth wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]Sloth wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]CappedAndPlanIt wrote:

[quote]Sloth wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:
And when it comes to theology you can’t even answer a basic question about the origin of sin and death. It’s not complicated like you made it out to be unless you have to figure out a way to mix and match the distinctly different world views of uniformitarianism/evolutionism and creationism. Good luck with your struggle, friend.[/quote]

I do want to address this, since it’s rather uncharitable. When it comes to theology? I’m not using theology to deal with CALism. So, why allow myself to be detoured into a theological debate? As for my theology, if you wish, you might visit a number of sites dealing with Catholic theology/apologetics. But, I’m not here for that.

As of now, I’m dealing with observations the vast majority of CALs wouldn’t dispute. We do not live on land rising from the middle of a giant basin, set into what might be an infinite amount of water. There is not a dome with lights set in it, above our heads. There is not a body of water above, and kept at bay, by this dome.

And since the vast majority (barring some niche sects) wouldn’t dispute these things, they in fact are not literalists. Theology here would be a distraction when simple observation does the trick.[/quote]

Exactly. The people who wrote the bible were explaining the world around them to the best of their ability, but once humans were able to gather more data, it was disproven.[/quote]

No, Sloth is hung up on one word that I think must come from a Catholic translation that more accurately should be translated as “expanse.”[/quote]

Catholic? Try ancient hebrew. That’s an illustration of what their view of the earth and the universe was. This is completely indisputable. Even the hebrews understood it to be a solid dome. A firmament. In fact, that word is used in the illustration. With windows to let in the rain, even! That’s the literalist view.[/quote]

Dome is not a Hebrew word.[/quote]

Edited:

I know. It’s an accurate english description of a general shape. You may substitue firmament, if you wish. As I said, I used the word myself. This firmament kept the waters above and below seperated. The waters above, being outside of the firmament. The lights (stars, moon, sun) and the terrestial water being inside the firmament. None of this even touches upon the basin.[/quote]

The fact of the matter is the atmosphere does separate liquid water with gaseous water.

I cannot believe how people get tripped up by stuff like this. This truly is Jehovah’s Witness type tried and true tactics. It’s amazing.[/quote]

Gaseous water? Do you see what you’re doing? You’re no longer taking it literally at all. You’re talking about seperating fog, water vapor, mist, whatever, from liquid water. This ISN’T the account any longer. Nor does it coincide with the Hebrews understanding.

And your claim that firmament meant the atmosphere is very, very, problematic for a literalist, anyways. After all, the lights (sun, moon, stars) are said to be set IN the firmament. So, taking your word on it, you can now observe that the neither sun, the moon, nor the stars are in the atmosphere.

[Sloth]

[quote]pushharder wrote:

Holy cow, I cannot believe how you insist on needlessly complicating this. You must be posting from a Watchtower certified computer chair.[/quote]

Nope. I’m not a genuine literalist.

Not in the way it’s commonly meant (by evangelicals and athiests, I guess), at least. Look, Push, there’s no explaining it away. The atmosphere explanation is immediately tossed by the account of the lights being set in the firmament. Thus, according to your argument, in the atmosphere…

And, of course, we haven’t even touched the basin problem.

Take a look at some Hebrew/Jewish cosmogony. They understood it just as I’ve related here. And, I think they had a pretty good idea about interpreting the language.

[Sloth]

Push, would you do me the honor of sharing, say, Job 37:18? Here the heavens (the Hebrew believed in layers, see the illustration) are described as having the strength of perhaps molten brass. In the account of the flood we see the floodgates of heaven opened up (thus allowing the celestial water, which we discussed earlier, in). This account also makes mention of the fountains of the Great Deep (see illustration).

But getting back to firmament as atmosphere, or now just meaning “above us,” I’d draw your attention to the placement of fowl in the creation story. They are not placed in the firmament, as the lights are. Indeed, they are placed under the firmament. That is a clear distinction. Of course, this still doesn’t deal with our world being a basin in the terrestial water.

[Sloth]

[quote]pushharder wrote:
Don’t let me catch you defending 'original intent" about the Constitution on some other PWI thread. I will so, so, so ambush and scalp you in a heartbeat.

[/quote]

You might. Then again, one is not the other, you Apache savage.

[mse2us]

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]kaaleppi wrote:

[quote]BBriere wrote:

Ok, then let’s start there. We see flaws in the evolutionary chain. We find little or no evidence in a common ancestor. We also see during the Cambrian explosion that changes occur too rapidly to support the evolutionary thought of slow changes over time. So this is a step in the right direction. Now, how do we go about proving what we believe is true?[/quote]

It is nowadays quite commonly accepted among biologists that evolution is a fast process. A proof for this is seen in the domestication of dogs. Wolves that scavenged the waste our ancestors created, were more daring than the wilder wolves, that ran away at the mere sight of a human. This 10 min. snippet is about an russian experiment with foxes.

If you consider evolution to be a self-evident fact, as I do, this is a strong indication for fast evolution. But even if you don’t believe in it, this short film is interesting nevertheless, if you like dogs and it makes you think about us, too.

[/quote]

Are you even remotely implying that creationists don’t believe adaptation occurs? Microevolution?

Dogs beget dogs. Simple. In fact one type of dog can, with enough time beget all different types of dogs. That is something that can be experimented within the hallowed scientific method. It works.

What doesn’t work, and I’ll be a little facetious here and stray slightly outside of conventional evolutionary thinking in order to make a point, is dogs don’t beget giraffes…or anything between dogs and giraffes. It’s ALWAYS dogs. Always has been. Always will be.

A dog has always been in the dog family whether he be a wolf, fox, chihuahua or St. Bernard. You will never be able to breed the dog out of the dog. You will never get any type of dog whatsoever to successfully breed with any type of aardvark. You never have nor ever will see a dogvark.[/quote]
Excellent point and well said!

[Sloth]

[quote]pushharder wrote:
If this is “state of the art” Catholic thinking then no wonder it is a dying church. [/quote]

Just caught this, and not sure how I skipped past it, now that I’ve noticed. Remember what I said about the pointlessnes of starting up what would devolve (sin and death) into a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong (all those o’s are for dramatic effect!) sectarian conflict, with no resolution? It would appear as if I called it right on the money.

Instead, I chose to stick with simple observations, while leaving the theology on the back burner for the sake of the forum and the thread. I contrasted a literal reading of the creation account with what we know about our world. There isn’t a firmament (with lights and floodgates set into it) dividing one massive body of water into celestial and terrestial bodies of water. Neither is our world no more than a land mass potruding from within a basin (filled with water to create the sea(s)). With the basin in turn set upon and under the before-mentioned bodies of water.

These are not theological arguments. They’re simple facts that ARE testable today. If one agrees with even on of those facts, one doesn’t take the creation account literally. Period. Therefore, one has lost all ability to charge an Evolutionist Christian with rejecting the bible. No, we reject your treatment of the bible. Let’s be clear on that.

Now, directly to the “dying Church” comment. My faith in my religion, my Church, is not predicated upon it’s popularity. Nor, upon the outsider’s approval. It is not shaken by insult, by myself being sneered at, or even physical threat. Lob away, if you choose to go that route. However, you’re not going to get much satisfaction from me, I’m afraid.

[anonym]

[quote]mse2us wrote:
Excellent point and well said![/quote]

It’s only an excellent point if you believe that evolution actually suggests that one can “out-breed” their genetics.

Animalia → Chordata → Mammalia → Carnivora → Canidae-> Canis → Canis lupus Familiaris

This is what the taxonomic breakdown for dogs looks like. The arrows tell you how the classification ‘flows’ from the most general to the most specific.

What push is asking you to do is assume that evolution states that an animal can mutate against the directional flow. That it can, under some circumstance(s), swim back up the classification river and then take a different stream back down to a species classification (maybe becoming the ‘crocoduck’ Mak and I laughed about earlier). That an animal can “out-breed” its heredity is not something “evolutionists” suggest happens… so arguing that its never been seen is besides the point. Unless, of course, you pretend that that is what evolutionary theory hinges on and then it’s a real zinger.

But, the big thing about Linnaean taxonomy is that, while it is a convenient way to classify animals, it is ultimately an arbitrary system that just so happens to work well for its purpose. The only “TRUE” distinction that is of any real importance is speciation, which is ultimately a matter of inherited genetic changes that progress to the point of any particular animal being no longer able to mate with the group which it, at one time, belonged to. At this point, the daughter species is no longer constrained by the parent and can multiply without the possibility of its changes being diluted by the parental gene pool.

This, an example of MACROevolution (to everyone but Creationists) is, as anyone would admit (even Creationists), observable. It’s happened so many times that we even have different labels to classify the ways in which we DO observe it.

Evolutionary theory “suggests” that all these higher-level classifications we observe in the Linnaean ranking system are simply the result of speciation occurring over millions and millions and millions of years. Now, while this is not directly observable (of course), there is enough fossil evidence available (yes, it IS out there, despite what some say) that we can, with the inclusion of other information we have at our disposal, tentatively say that this is most likely how it all went down.

A “cog” (or even a “dogvark”) will never happen - and indeed, if it ever DID - it would be a MUCH more convincing case for Creationism than evolution. Why? Because current evolutionary theory doesn’t suggest that that is how it works!

[ephrem]

…interesting animation on the trek out of Africa and how humankind populated the planet over the course of 150.000 years. It may take a while to load: Professor Stephen Oppenheimer Books