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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Some water measurements for the Flood | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
The problem isn't your gathering skills, it's your lack of belief.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
True, prayer can be effective from across the world if necessary. But we're trying to change the climate of a particular location and I figure the people who are praying for it should have a stake in it if they are going to be effective at that.
As for the idea that miracles would convert people, I think what Jesus said to the rich man makes the point. If you don't believe Moses and the Prophets, meaning the scriptures, which report many miracles in both Old and New Testaments, all intended to lead you to belief, then you aren't going to believe a miracle you see with your own eyes either. How would you explain it away? Oh you'd just figure it was a temporary cyclical change in the weather or something like that. Something to marvel at but nothing excessively out of the normal range of things. It would be hard to prove otherwise after all. Just a temporary increase in the rain, a boon for the farmers etc. Or maybe it's a more lasting change, connected to global warming. ABE: As for the sad man in the cheap suit, oh poor old Holy Hubert. I never stopped to listen to him. But God doesn't make it easy for intellectuals and rich snobs or people who know how to spell either. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I was always a Good Girl who believed what my teachers taught me, and I guess the illustrations in the text books too -- my favorite kind of assignment was to draw the diagrams they presented. Why shouldn't I have believed them? What ARE you getting at?
ABE: And I guess it made sense too. You know, the sun heats up the ocean or the wet ground and turns it to vapor, like the heat on the stove gets the steam rising from the boiling water, and it goes on rising until the cooler higher air condenses it, which for some reason forms clouds that contain it instead of instant rain. The hardest part to explain may be why it stays in the clouds. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
We have a water cycle that you accept, so let's try and stick to things we have good evidence for, how's that sound? How's that sound? It sounds patronizing and totally ignorant of what a Christian believes. So you want to stick to things that don't involve faith or belief? But an account of a time in the past that may have been quite different from our own doesn't require any different kind of thinking, it's just different data to think about, and I believe the Bible writers perhaps pretty much the same way I believed my teachers. You are imposing some other way of thinking on the situation than I do. Although you claim there is some essential difference between believing the Bible and believing things I've actually witnessed, the fact is I've only witnessed the water cycle on the small scale, I can't say I've witnessed what happens in the clouds I can only infer it and believe what I'm told about it. And I believe a ton of stuff about history that I've never witnessed too. And I believe what I'm told about things like how the sun and soil and water create the chemistry that makes plants grow and so on and so forth. The point is that believing all that is really not essentially different from believing the Bible accounts of a time that was different from ours.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I am trying to get a handle on where your brain turns away from evidence the rest of us can test and into the bible where only you can see it. I mean no harm. See my post above. You are imagining some completely different kind of thinking when it comes to the Bible when in reality it is no different from believing what a teacher tells me about scientific matters, or a history book tells me about what happened centuries ago in a place I've never been. I believe the admittedly very scanty accounts in Genesis about conditions on earth before the Flood that sound quite a bit different from conditions as we experience them now, and I use my mind just the way I would use it on any piece of information about anything else I've never experienced, to picture how that world was different from what I'm familiar with. Again, no different kind of thinking, just different data to think about.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
it's just different data to think about
Where is the data, the hard data that doesn't require faith or belief, that says what you are saying and backs up your claim? The claim that the world was completely different pre-"flood"? Well, I'd offer the Geologic Column myself, buried in which is an immense abundance of all kinds of creatures, many we aren't familiar with today, which should say something about pre-Flood conditions, such as that it had to be immensely fertile to produce that teeming life. But of course anything you find in the Geologic Column you attribute to a time much older than the Biblical Creation and you invent an environment for it specific to accidental trinkets buried with it in its grave site, all of which destroys the Biblical account. But demanding that kind of data from a time before a huge destruction that wiped out everything is really unreasonable. The fact that we have a written mention of atmospheric water that sounds a lot fuller than what we have today, and a written mention that the Earth was watered by a mist, is really quite a bit of data under the circumstances.
and I believe the Bible writers perhaps pretty much the same way I believed my teachers.
Do you never check anything for yourself? Do you simply believe everything everyone tells you and take it at face value? You would suspect me of that based only on my saying I believed my teachers about what they taught? But that's true for everybody. Mostly up through high school you're trying to cram in enough information to get a good grade, and you get the science of the water cycle rather early on. Later if you study say literature or history your data is pretty exclusively information in books. Not all of us are geared for a career in science. I think I could say that I did acquire a fair amount of anthropological and sociological field experience among the strange forms of humanity that populated the US during the sixties though, if that kind of observational science counts.
You admitted to me earlier that you do not, in fact, do that and you have witnessed firsthand what water can do. What if I told you there are a great many other things you can do yourself to study the world around you and be able to understand it better? Golly gee, ya don't say.
the fact is I've only witnessed the water cycle on the small scale, I can't say I've witnessed what happens in the clouds I can only infer it and believe what I'm told about it.
Fair enough. But you don't have to just take peoples word for it: you can test their claims and see for yourself that the water cycle actually acts the way you were told it does. That is the beauty of science. Golly gee, ya don't say. You know, school up through high school for most of us is a matter of cramming in the information. We have our own pet interests and although I dissected a frog in some science lab or other, that is not where my interests lay. I remember having frog legs in a restaurant later though; I liked them. That was more interesting than dissecting the frog in the lab. Meanwhile, there is nothing wrong with learning basic science from textbooks and teacher explanations, unless of course you're going to go on to become a scientist, which was not my interest.
And that, dear Faith, is the stark difference between faith and science and is precisely the reason I am asking you to use data that we can both test equally. But dear Hooey, when one is talking about the only source of information one has, in this case a few lines from the Bible, where there simply is no hard data of the sort you wrongly think is the only source of knowledge, it would be foolish in the extreme to throw it out just because the kind of data you prefer isn't available. However, I would again point out the Geologic Column as that sort of hard data from the time in question, if only it hadn't been co-opted...
And I believe what I'm told about things like how the sun and soil and water create the chemistry that makes plants grow and so on and so forth.
Have you never planted a plant and watched it grow? I have difficulty thinking you have not. Of course, but that experience tells a person absolutely nothing about the chemistry of growing plants. That you only get from reading up on it. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : grammar correction Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Did you read what he actually said? Yes, very cute, but I translated it back into reality.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
If you want to do something even more unarguably miraculous, try making the Mojave bloom except for a perfect circle, ten miles in radius, centered on the Las Vegas Strip. That would actually be a lot easier than making it bloom within that circle, since it encompasses the area of most spiritual resistance.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Now I'm confused. You want us to pray for it to bloom inside that circle (which would be harder) or outside? Originally you said to make it bloom everywhere EXCEPT that circle didn't you?
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
We're trying to find a project within the realm of the doable with minimal resources. The one we've picked is already straining the seams of the doable.
What you are asking is beyond our meager resources. Not that we don't all pray to end local expressions of all those things you list, which is more or less in the realm of the doable though if we're making any headway it's hard to tell. Just as a side note, the cause of most of all that misery is most likely Islam but that isn't mentioned in the article. Wouldn't be politically correct to mention it I suppose. ABE: The article says "political solutions" are necessary. Fat chance when the perpetrator is Islam. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I've followed the only path there is and answered him quite aptly. Do you discern another route?
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
No I challenged his very concept of a dichotomy between faith and science in this case. He's wrong.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
My claim is that data in the Bible is as good as data in the field. You may want to call that faith, I call it simply trusting in the report the way I would trust in any other report I read about natural facts. I put the Bible's report above the current scientific explanations for things in the distant past that the Bible describes because I know the Bible is trustworthy. You put science above the Bible and call my trust in it "faith" which is really just a way of saying it's wrong. We have a basic disagreement here. There is no real dichotomy between science and faith in my mind but there is in yours because you trust science over God's word.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
What you're referring to in this part of your Message 102 isn't unambiguous. You could be referring to making it bloom within the circle. Or you could be referring to the belief that making it bloom outside the circle would be easier. So now it's clear you meant the latter, but not why you think it would be harder to offer a non-prayer explanation for blooming outside the radius rather than inside. Is it because of all the water supply infrastructure around Las Vegas? Aha, that may clear it up.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1474 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
You think I have a problem with the scientific method but that's because of a prejudice of your own against the Bible, not because I actually have such a problem. If we weren't talking about events described in the Bible but only about testable occurrences in the present there'd be no problem with the scientific method.
Now we are kinda getting somewhere. the geologic column DOES show that the planet was different in the past. However, you seem to be the only person in existence to claim it was different the way you claim. But that's not true. I share my basic view of the Geo Column with lots of creationists though we may differ on certain points with respect to it. Now you want to know why I put the Bible above what my teachers told me about the Geo Column and the answer is that I discovered that the Bible is a more trustworthy source being the word of God and all. It's really very simple and logical. The only problem is that you can't accept that it's a more trustworthy source being the word of God and all. But once you do then it becomes your source of information and the basis for rejecting other explanations of the same phenomena. It's really very elementary Hooah, you are struggling to pin me down to a contradiction that exists only in your mind. You call my acceptance of the Biblical report "faith" and pit it against the methods of science when in my mind it is simply another source of data. You want me to follow scientific method toward a conclusion that denies the trustworthiness of the Bible, because you don't believe in the trustworthiness of the Bible, but once one has accepted that it is trustworthy above anything that contradicts it there is simply no going in any direction that contradicts it. This isn't a failure to grasp the scientific method, it's the acceptance of a truth that in this case science keeps missing. Really, it's very simple and logical. Yes I do think the conclusions that follow on the Bible are obvious and I get very impatient with those who keep insisting on making this false dichotomy between faith and science. That's a character failure of mine, I need to learn patience. You conclude with the usual insistence that science trumps the Bible, and all I can do is answer with my usual insistence that the Bible trumps science where there is a contradiction. This has NOTHING to do with the scientific method or my ability to understand and apply it. (Understanding the way water behaves under different conditions, finding my lost dog, looking for my lost keys etc etc etc. the idea that believing the Bible makes such ordinary sleuthing impossible is wacky, Hooah). Really, it doesn't. It's all about the clash of ingrained worldviews. As for my reading of the Bible being unique to me, well it really isn't. I've acquired it all from years of reading various interpretations of the Bible. I have some small differences with creationists among others but all that comes from having done all that reading too. In other words there are a LOT of people I'm getting my views from despite differences here and there. It's basic Christian theology, not unique to me at all. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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