Tower of Babble (a bunch of baseless babble)

I have heard Joseph F. Smith's commentary on evolution, and think it is the ideal prospective for the church to have (somehow I'll work that into my testimony). But it is the Twelve I am concerned about.
Even President Hinckley, while an apostle, wrote that he discounted evolution and geology. Whether he has learned otherwise as a prophet or if he has access to that information at all I do not know. But as I have implied, it is interesting that the First Presidency has been very careful about evolution, while the Apostles have not. As for whether the books are canonized or not the difference is vague. As my bishop said yesterday, the church pubs are the most important published material to read, second only to the Scriptures. What is in them concerns all of us.And the interpretation of Scripture is important as well. For example, Doctrine and Covenants 77:6 can be interpreted in different ways but certainly seems to imply a young Earth.

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Originally posted by William E. Harris:

Just a small aside, is not Occam spelled Ockham, from William Ockham, and English philosopher of the 1300s.
William

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There was no consistent spelling in the 1300's so any spelling will do.

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Originally posted by William E. Harris:
They were under the influence of a wicked king named Nimrod who was building the highest temple tower to house the "most high god" to protect his city. God did not want all the people to flock to him, so he inspired someone to develop phonetic writing to keep them within their own cities.
Just a small aside, is not Occam spelled Ockham, from William Ockham, and English philosopher of the 1300s.
William

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My dictionary allows both spellings. William OF Occam.Mark------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

gene 90
My reading of D&C 77:6 is a discription of the 7000 years of man on the earth, after it was created. If you were God, and wanted your children to learn the things you knew, when would you have taught them about creation--while it was going on with hands on experience or after it was done?
William

Could you expound on that more? I don't quite understand.By the way, since our last exchange I have actually found friendly comments on evolution from the Quorum.

I believe a good part of our education in pre-earth life was learning how to create by genetic engineering under supervision, of course. Most of the steps along the phylogenetic ladder were accomplished by adding clusters of genes to existing species to create a more advanced creature. This even included homonids. One reason that we do not seem to see new genes appearing (not mutations of existing genes) is that evolution was basically completed and we are involved in earth life experiences. Speciation by mutation would continue.
William

Fair enough, that version seems to float just fine with paleontological evidence. My only real difference is that we shouldn't necessarily see genes appearing in populations today under a completely naturalistic scenario because your original estimates didn't compensate for generation lengths. The hypothetical new genes were distributed equally between bacteria and people in that model. I also tend to believe in diffusion between most every human culture at some point or another. Finally, I don't think the rate of evolution is fixed, I think population change has spurts and long periods of stability. Other than that, I think the model is a creative one, I certainly would not have thought of it, and I encourage you to continue refining it.I also want to point out that genetic modifications would be toward the physical image/species of God, but not necessarily towards "complexity", a term that is relative and difficult to measure. Humans are great, we have opposable thumbs and free agency but most of our *biological* systems are really much like those of chimps. Is the difference in complexity (2% by DNA homology) between us and them the same as the difference of faculty? I don't think it is.

Anyway, to get back on topic-an article by David Rohl on the Tower of Babel-here talks about how there were two nun.ki cities-one translated into Babylon and the other to the first city in the world-Eridu, which is also known as nun-ki.

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Before we get to the heart of the puzzle surrounding the identity of Babel, we need to understand something about the relationship between the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. The classic tongue of ancient Mesopotamia was Sumerian. In later periods, when Akkadian dominated the region, some ancient names were still written in Sumerian, even though they had perfectly good Akkadian alternatives. Sumerian was the 'Medieval Latin of Mesopotamia'. In Akkadian literature numerous archaic names were written in what scholars call Sumerian logograms. Thus the city of Babylon in Moses' source tablet would have been written as Nun.ki ('Mighty Place'), the Sumerian name of the city. Moses would naturally have understood Nun.ki to represent Babylon and, in so doing, the city of Nun.ki became biblical Babel in the Genesis narrative.

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[This message has been edited by blitz77, 08-10-2002]

Very interesting article. I am debating with someone about the Tower of l, and was pleased to find some more viewpoints on the subject.
Thanks for posting and keep discussing this.

a human starts as a single cell

Hello, pit40. Welcome to EvCforum.You were responding to Message 10, which was on how multiple cells can evolve from a single cell. You are correct, that a human starts as a single cell, and grows into many. And I suppose that the word "evolution" could be used there. But it isn't biological evolution, as usually understood. Rather, it is biological development.In any case, I thought that some of the other responses to Message 10 did deal adequately with the question for biological evolution. Incidently, Message 10 was off-topic for this thread.

that's a heck of a bump, man.

The good news is: somebody's actually reading the "back issues".

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People who think they have all the answers usually don't understand the questions.

now if we can teach people to use the search button...

I'm basically replying to the 1st post by quicksink, so bear with me:"Why did they want to build a tower and waste a tremendous amount of resources to peek into the living room of a god they didn't even believe in?"This was soon after the flood. Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth were still alive. The Bible only mentions one of these that was considered righteous, so aside from Noah, we're unsure of the rest of the population's belief system. Nimrod (from the Hebrew verb, "nimrodh", which means, "let us revolt") had a few reasons for wanting to get the tower built:
a. unite the city-states (Babel, Erech, Accad, Calneh, [Shinar/Sumer] - Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, & Resen [Assyria]) against God, whom he detested in light of God's judgment at the flood.
b. provide a means of escape, paranoid that God would flood the earth again.
c. intentionally go against God's command to replenish the earth (Gen. 9:1)
d. simply power hungryGoing back to the belief system of the people, they probably were partly persuaded to believing in polytheism due to stories handed down of events before the flood, in relation to the Nephilim. So why did the people go through all that trouble?
a. Not all the people were followers of Nimrod. As believers of God, (pre-Jews aka pre-Abrahamites), they were most likely taken in as slaves as he united the city-states. If Nimrod is so bad, considering being known as the "mighty hunter before the lord", it would only be safe to assume that he was a mighty hunter in three aspects:
a1. hated God
b2. hated and hunted down those who followed God
c3. simply a hunter of animals (the Babylonian word for Nimrod is split up as thus: "leopard" = "nimr" / "rod" = "to subdue".
b. The others were merely brainwashed by Nimrod to follow him to their graves.Yet a part of the question assumes that the people were trying to reach the spirit realm of Heaven to which God resides. This is not the case. They followed the lead of Nimrod, uniting together under one banner, with the possible slogan of, "If we put our mind to it, we can accomplish anything". (Back to the Future, anyone?)...continued...