From your
Message 11:
Faith writes:
Sorry, I'm worn out from answering Percy's post so just wanted to answer this much of yours for now.
Well, of course you're going to exhaust yourself if you insist on responding to everything people say. Pick the key points you want to make and respond to those parts of people's posts that help you make those points. On to your
Message 10:
What I meant was that the Bible appears to be treated as fiction, not even as a historical record here, same as it is among most academics and scientists and even, sad to say, some people who consider themselves Christians.
The guidelines make very clear that you're expected to support your positions with evidence and reasoned argument. Nothing at EvC Forum from either side is a given. If you can't support your position that the Bible is an accurate historical record with evidence and reasoned argument then you must drop it. Nothing obligates anyone here to accept anything as axiomatic. There are many religions in the world, and your wish that people defer to the specifics of your interpretation of your religion's holy book will not be granted.
Faith writes:
Percy writes:
One of the key requirements of science is replicability. A single observation by an expert scientist means little by itself. It is only after the observation has been repeated by many other scientists that it becomes accepted. And a single observation by a layperson with no scientific training a couple thousand years ago in a religious book carries no weight as scientific evidence at all.
You describe it as if Moses had picked up a stone and declared it Kryptonite.
I think you may be glossing over a key component of science: replicability. Please don't ignore the definition of science. This is a science site intended to debate Creationism's claim to be science. The definition of science is important here, and replicability is part of science.
I'm not precisely sure how to interpret the part about Moses and Kryptonite, but I think you're saying your religious myths should be given the same weight as the observations of trained scientists. Why? Do you think knowledge, training and experience make no difference?
Scientific replicability can't possibly apply to ancient historical events...Do you really mean that they tried to REPLICATE the Flood? Don't you mean they looked for EVIDENCE of the Flood?
I was speaking of observations. Each observation is unique. Some come during an event, some after. Noah observed the flood first hand, but as you correctly note, modern geologists can only observe the evidence left behind by the flood. Still, modern geologists have a huge advantage over Noah. Noah's small group was confined to the ark and could only observe the flood in a tiny part of the world. But modern geologists can go everywhere, and so they are able to find the erosive and sedimentation events that marked the floods progress over the land, and they can find the massive scars in the earth where torrents of water escaped from the depths and where it descended after the flood.
Biologists also have an advantage over Noah. Even Noah couldn't observe the migration paths of all the animals to and from their home regions, but biologists can make observations of the existing evidence to find and track these migration routes and tell us how long it took after the flood for marsupials to find their way back to Australia and what routes they took, even dating the flood by analyzing Australia to detect the period before the return of its native species when there was no animal life in Australia at all. They can determine which species returned first and which returned last. They can also detect and track the return of plant life to the denuded landscape.
And while we may reenact this or that historical event, say a war, we try to be true to the historical accounts, and consider it wrong to deviate from them. Except when it comes to the Bible, of course, which is apparently fair game for all manner of revisionist rewriting these days.
Historical accounts are not treated as you describe here. We do not try to be "true to the historical accounts" or "consider it wrong to deviate from them" if by this you mean take them at face value. The task of historian goes far beyond what you imply here. Some historical accounts are true, some are false, some are both. Oftentimes the actual events must be teased out from multiple conflicting accounts. Even more often the mix of truth and fiction, bias and propaganda is never unraveled. A source earns the privilege of being considered reliable to the extent that it is in concordance with other sources and with such physical evidence as still exists, and historians are still able to find much to argue and disagree about. If you want the Bible considered as a historical source then you must allow it to be assessed and evaluated in the same manner as other historical sources.
Faith writes:
and they quickly came to the conclusion, even by the paltry evidence available at that time, that there had never been any global flood. And all evidence gathered since that time has reinforced that view a million million times over.
Well, that sure does open and shut the case with a bang, doesn't it? I guess the only way I can hope to refute this claim is by thoroughly studying just what "paltry evidence" they drew their conclusions from.
Your thinking makes no sense to me. How do you hope to discuss this topic intelligently if you don't inform yourself about it? I think this has been a primary concern about your debating style - you don't seem to see lack of knowledge as an obstacle to participation. Since the evidence is paltry, "thoroughly studying" it won't take much time. Some of the people you want to study are Georges Buffon, James Hutton, William Buckland and Charles Lyell. If you want specific references to some rather brief material on the web that can fill you in then just say so.
I believe that there are many supporting facts but evolutionists dismiss them on the basis of apparent contradictory facts and scenarios of their own imagination.
This is a simple dismissal with no engagement of the issues whatsoever. You must engage the discussion on the evidence. I encourage you to stay focused on the facts supporting your case.
It is not the case that there are NO supporting facts for creationist views.
If we're talking about a young earth and a global flood, then it would be incorrect to state that the evidence supports such views.
Faith writes:
If you want to believe that the flood of Noah was a true event that is your right. But there is no scientific evidence for Noah's flood, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant or fooling himself or lying.
There's a ton of such evidence but that evidence is currently appropriated to evolutionism.
If this is your belief then you're going to have to make this case in your messages. The pattern of Creationist effort on the flood is to raise a panoply of red herrings in objection to modern geological views without ever explaining how the evidence can be reasonably fit into a severely truncated time frame. Their goal isn't to present a coherent theory of their own, but to simply cast doubt about the views of modern geology within the minds of the faithful. You are a prime example of the success of this effort.
Observations and experiments are solid science and I don't see Creationists disputing actual facts, except maybe dating methods, which MAY not be as trustworthy as they are claimed anyway. It is the extrapolations and interpretations of the observations that are not necessarily trustworthy.
This is mere dismissal, and I again caution you to address yourself to the evidence and arguments so as to assess their merits. Certainly we know some things more directly than others, but you can't just dismiss well-established principles of geology by calling them "extrapolations and interpretations" as if there were somehow some shame or weakness in this. If you accept the established principles of how the universe behaves, then the deductions from those principles are valid conclusions, not ephemeral imaginings. We know the limestone layers of the Grand Canyon were laid down over millions of years because it takes a long time for that many tiny ocean-dwelling creatures to die and sink to the bottom. Radiometric dating confirms the timescale. We observe the same thing happening in shallow seas today. A legitimate objection to these conclusions does not consist of labeling them mere "extrapolations and interpretations...that are not necessarily trustworthy." This is an argument from personal skepticism and is worthless.
A valid approach would be to propose alternative scenarios that are also consistent with, rather than ignorant of, well-established principles of geology. If it is the well-established principles of geology that you feel are wrong then you can attempt to make that case while at the same time requiring your opponents to justify those principles. But just dismissing the arguments of your opponents with handwaves about "extrapolations and interpretations" instead of directly addressing the scientific merits is quite legimately causing consternation and frustration among those discussing with you.
You cannot cherry pick which parts of science you accept and which you reject. The findings of geology that you reject were established using the same principles of science as things that you undoubtedly accept, such as Newtonian mechanics. While to your limited knowledge geology may appear on much less solid ground that Newton's laws of motion, the fact is that it is established with just as much rigor. The various fields of science that you accept or reject according to whether they contradict your Biblical interpretations are interdependent and interrelated, and you don't seem to realize that rejecting one field causes ripples all up and down the line of other scientific fields. And Creationists don't reject just one field - they reject the significant findings of many fields, as I enumerated earlier.
I know you'd like to accept the obvious successes of efforts like finding oil in the ground and using genetic engineering to develop new medicines, and at the same time reject other very closely related efforts that don't have so direct an impact on our lives like dating geological layers and tracing evolutionary descent through DNA analysis, but you can't do that. If geologists aren't really able to date geological layers then they can't really find oil. And if biologists can't derive evolutionary histories then they don't really know enough to discover new medicines through genetic engineering. But geologists do find oil, and biologists do perform genetic engineering of DNA. The knowledge is very real, and it is very interrelated.
This is in stark contrast to Creationism. There is no Creation Science working on many fields within science and producing its own scientific contributions in these fields. There are no Creationist medicines, no Creationist satellites, no Creationist crops, no Creationist fuel cells, no Creation Science oil search companies, no Creation Science genetic engineering companies. In contrast to conventional science, of which geology and biology are a part, Creation Science has made no tangible contributions. Creationism exists only to promote as science the religious beliefs of the evangelical Christian community in order to counter what they perceive as the evolutionistic threat to faith.
What is a "religious argument?" This notion all hinges on whether or not the events recorded in the Bible are historically true, and that's not a "religious" argument, it's an argument about FACT.
True, debating the validity of some Biblical accounts is not religious. But if you want the Bible
a priori accepted as reliable, then that is a religious position. I know you understand the difference and are attempting to keep the latter opinion, which you obviously firmly hold, out of your arguments, but you're not succeeding very well in this effort. This very message that I'm replying to is ample evidence of you confounding the two viewpoints. If you were truly keeping your acceptance of Biblical inerrancy aside then you wouldn't be raising it with such consistent frequency. I'll believe you've finally left this argument aside only after a couple months go by during which you never raise it in any science thread.
You simply deny that the report is true. You really HAVEN'T proven that it isn't true, though you believe you have.
If we're talking about a young earth and a global flood, then the account in the Bible is very strongly contradicted by the physical evidence. This is true whether you as an individual ever accept it. Your views on the age of the earth and the flood stem from your religious views, not from scientific evidence. You would find it as difficult to convince a Hindu of your views of creation as of your views of Jesus Christ. I wonder if you grant the Koran and the Bhagavad-gita the same stipulations about historical accuracy that you demand for the Bible.
Faith writes:
If you really believe the Bible contains scientific evidence that trumps observation of the natural world (which is supposedly as much the creation of God as the Bible),
You can't have contradictions between the revealed word of God and the creation of God. The Bible is unique in that it is known by believers throughout time as the revelation of the nature of God by His own direct intervention and inspiration, which we have no other means of knowing because of the spiritual death we inherit from the Fall. There is an immense testimony of withnesses to its supernatural origin back to Moses and up through the greats of Western history including scientists.
This is your problem in a nutshell. I raise the issue of whether you believe the Bible contains scientific evidence, and you reply that the Bile is "known by believers throughout time as the revelation of the nature of God by His own direct intervention and inspiration, which we have no other means of knowing because of the spiritual death we inherit from the Fall." I'm talking science, and you're answering with Christian apologetics. If the world is young and there was a recent global flood then the evidence for it will be apparent to everyone, Christian and Moslem, Buddhist and Hindu, agnostic and atheist. You seem to think the views of conservative Christianity are entitled to special treatment and consideration from everyone else, and you seem supremely unaware of the colossal conceit that this appears to be to others.
You qualify this somewhat by going on to say:
BUT fear not. I have not claimed that the Bible contains "scientific evidence" only historical fact, AND I am careful to avoid arguing from it even about historical fact. I may argue FOR it from time to time but I know better than to argue FROM it in such a hostile environment.
I'm quite sure the Bible contains historical fact. It also contains historical fiction and much else. It is reasonable to request that the Bible be given the same consideration as other historical sources, but it is a religious position that the Bible be granted some special dispensation from such requirements, and you consistently confound the two.
--Percy
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