Hypocritical Leviticus

What are you referring to, in particular, as "your facts", and in what sense are they "factual"? For example, when you say: are you asserting these as "facts" in the sense that they have some sort of truth value in describing the actual physical history of the human race? Or are you instead making a purely linguistic assertion: that in a correct ("factual") English translation of the Bible, these stories in Genesis must be interpreted as saying that people lived 900 years, because to do otherwise entails an inconsistent translation (but the stories themselves are not intended as an accurate historical record of the human race).The same question applies to the initial topic of this thread: are you submitting as "historical fact" something like this?

Behavior currently (i.e. since Leviticus) held to be incestuous and bad (i.e. sexual relations among siblings), was initially not incestuous and was good, because there simply was no other way for the human race to propagate during the initial few generations.

Or are you putting actual physical history aside and simply asserting something like this?

A correct translation/interpretation of the text in Genesis involves accepting this logical necessity regarding the first-generation children of Eve (i.e. that they must have had sex with each other), and the details that have been left out of the text cannot include people coming from sources other than Eve, in view of what the text says explicitly about her.

Let's be clear: people who would assert a physical history based on one or another "literal" interpretation of Genesis, with the span of human existence numbering less that 8000 years, typically do mind "being corrected on their facts", in the sense that they simply refuse to accept or acknowledge the physical evidence that repeatedly and consistently shows a much longer span for homo sapiens (not to mention the spans of earlier hominid species from which homo sapiens evolved). To be "corrected on the facts" is to abandon any sort of "literal" belief in Genesis as an historical record of the human race in general.I put "literal" in quotes because, as you are well aware from other threads where I've replied to you, the issues of translation and interpretation applied to biblical text have been found (repeatedly and consistently) to be problematic, and to defy any sort of rational consensus among those who try to do it. The notion of a "literal" interpretation of any biblical text is virtually impossible to pin down, so that the meaning of "literal" is no less ambiguous, incomplete and inconsistent than the biblical text itself.BTW, as others in this forum can explain much better than I, the view of "incest" in the theory of evolution is consistent with what people can observe directly with regard to pets and livestock: some amount is tolerable and can even lead to certain "desirable" traits (favored by natural selection in the given context) being strengthened in the offspring, but too much inbreeding can create a serious threat to survival. (In the case of pets and livestock, of course, the selection tends to be deliberate -- directed by humans -- rather than natural, but the two kinds of selection are equivalent in relation to "incest".)While the actual biological risks posed by incest may be insufficient to explain the pervasive sense of disfavor or disgust toward it that we see in most cultures (with possible exceptions among some monarchist dynasties), in any event I think we can observe that damnation or other forms of supernatural punishment do not play a role in the process.(One last note, just for grins... we all make typographic mistakes in our posts -- I try to correct mine when I find them, and I notice that you revisit your posts often as well -- but this case of a missing comma in one of your sentences really had me going for a while: I know you didn't mean that the way it "sounded" (when read aloud with no comma, hence no pause, between "that" and "I"), but the first time I read it, I had to laugh. Nothing personal, believe me. Someday you'll catch me the same way, I don't doubt.)Edited by Otto Tellick, : added "incomplete" to the description of "literal"

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Thank you for your thoughtful replies, both here and on other threads. I think I understand your position much better now, and I appreciate your patience in explaining it to me, as well as your careful consideration of my position.I sense that your view of empirical research is somewhat dismissive, at least with regard to how it describes the mechanisms and history of life on our planet. When it's a matter of personal belief, I really don't have a problem with that. When dozens (hundreds, thousands ...) of distinct, independent and verifiable observations make it clear that stable, well-understood physical laws are incompatible with "the flood" as described in Genesis, you can decide that you don't care about that, and you don't need to care about it. (I suppose the flood is off-topic in this thread -- sorry -- but you brought it up )Likewise, when you say something like: You are saying that you are willing to dismiss the consistent behavior of several particular elements (carbon-14, etc) whose presence/absence in fossils has been shown, with high reliability, to correlate with age, so that you can assume I'm looking at stuff that is actually younger than known human fossils, when the evidence of these elements indicates the stuff is far older. That's fine -- my observations are probably irrelevant to you, and your dismissal is not a problem form me.Still, I hope you'll understand where it does become a problem for me, and why it becomes a problem. When someone says that public schools (which are attended and paid for by everyone, not just Christians) should present the flood story as an "alternative explanation" for the history and current state of earth's geology, flora and fauna, on a par with all those verifiable (and rigorously verified) observations, I must object.Because of the impossibility of supporting (let alone verifying) biblical accounts in the same way as empirical observations, because of the rampant disagreements and schisms about biblical interpretation, and because of the indeterminacy and incompleteness of the text itself, presenting these accounts in a science class would, in my view, be a disservice to education. And let's face it: when basic research is not filtered or bound by biblical compliance, it just works better. I'm sorry to seem so strident, but it matters as much to me as your faith does to you, and I want to be clear about it. Jesus used parables. I'm wondering what the strong case is that you speak of, and whether, on closer inspection, you might consider that His regard of Genesis as "including historical facts" might have been limited to certain parts, while other parts were taken seriously as valuable lessons conveyed by parables. How do you decide which is which? That's something that I can dismiss, because it doesn't matter to me.Please don't view this as ridicule -- consider: What if (next month, next year, tomorrow night) you were to have another experience with Jesus, and this time, He would actually take you on a tour to show you how the miracles of creation were wrought: you travel at incredible speed as He tells you, "These are the hundreds of millions of years that it actually took, these are the millions of forms of life that slowly built up and assembled all the pieces that ultimately became Adam, and Me, and you -- and the work is not done, there is more to do, and more to come! And the reason Moses described this the way he did was because..."What if, instead, someone else had that sort of vision of Jesus coming to them and explaining how it all really happened (by evolution), and why Genesis was written the way it was? You can't say that it will never happen, and if it does happen, what would it take for such a vision to gain common acceptance among Christians? (update -- fresh thought: what if they could be persuaded to look at and accept the physical evidence?)As for a sense of the meaning of life, I'm not just content but in awe that structure and beauty, awareness and understanding, control and compassion, can arise as the inexorable result of natural, self-organizing processes in physical nature -- no "guiding hand" is involved, it's all "bootstrapping" and "stuff working itself out as it goes along". And I am grateful that mankind, as one of the products of these processes, has attained the ability to study and comprehend them. (Grateful to whom? No one in particular -- nature in general. By "grateful", maybe I just mean "happy".)I have faith that there is more to come, that despite the apparent frailty and tenuousness of life, we can hope that the meaning we create on our own will endure and can bear fruits whose true wonders are far beyond what we can now imagine -- I'm not talking about technology, I'm talking about stuff beyond our current conception. If we fail, life will arise and try again somewhere else -- for me, based on my personal experience, that's just what physical nature will do, and that is reassuring.One last nit-pick. I expect you were aware of the following contrast in your statements: That is illuminating.Edited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.Edited by Otto Tellick, : (added "fresh thought" as indicated by "update")

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Excuse me, but I see three completely unfounded assertions there.

1. ToE predicts that there should be more than one species with the capacity for speech.
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   How do you derive that from the theory? Can you cite a serious source in ToE, or demonstrate a logical progression of accepted hypotheses to support it? (What sorts of "expected but missing" examples would you include in this alleged "prediction"? Not talking serpents, I hope. )
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2. We do not see other life forms with speech.
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   But how certain are we about the true nature of communication among, say, whales? We don't really have a physical or conceptual frame of reference for understanding what they might be doing (successes of human/whale communication at Sea World notwithstanding). We can observe animal behaviors relative to the "signals" they emit, and deduce relations between "signals" and events/behavior, but if there is communication that does not relate directly to events/behavior, we're sort of at a loss to figure that out, so far.
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3. Development of speech in other species/life forms is unlikely to occur.
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   Well, I suppose not in our life-times, though some of the experimentation that has been done with teaching communicative behaviors to other primate species seems to show that some amount of the required cognitive ability is present there, even though the appropriate physiology is lacking for speech. But over the next million years or so... who can say? I don't think we can rule it out. (*)
   

There are physiological as well as neurological prerequisites for speech as we know it: a vocal tract configuration that supports several dimensions of acoustic differentiation (at a bare minimum, ability to form at least 3 distinct vowels, and at least 3 points of consonant articulation with at least 3 distinct degrees of airflow obstruction for consonants - all languages exceed the minimum, but they all have at least these dimensions in common); a larynx suitable for phonation with a wide range of control for loudness and pitch; and plenty of brain cells to handle it all.I haven't kept up with the research on the hominid tree as represented in the fossil records, but I know researchers have been trying to establish the epoch during which the combined development of vocal tract physiology and brain capacity would have supported the onset of human language. We don't actually have a way to know whether it happened only once within hominid development, or, if it did happen more than once, whether the linguistic behaviors we know of happen to reflect more than one independent origin.Whatever the timing and conditions for the emergence of language, the impact of its onset would have been relatively explosive in comparison to other evolutionary processes. Language, like the domestication of animals, the development of agriculture, and the depth of awareness that all these skills entail, would obviously yield advantages for adaptability and species survival that far outweigh anything that mere physical mutation could achieve.If language (and/or agriculture, animal husbandry, etc) did occur only once, that one time alone would be plenty sufficient to account for where we find ourselves now: one single species of mammal able to inhabit virtually any environment on the planet surface (even floating for months on the oceans), with all other species trailing behind developmentally by a seemingly impassible distance.(*) Actually, if two different species had similar capacities for cognition and within-species communication, this could increase the likelihood that they would ultimately be competing for the same resources and environments. While the two groups would, by definition, be incompatible for reproduction, it's very likely that they would otherwise have many similarities -- i.e. land mammals with various advanced skills in addition to language. Unless the cognitive abilities of at least one species were sufficiently elaborate to understand and "allow for" the needs of the other, the possible outcomes would be either (a) they both manage to sustain themselves in separate, non-intersecting niches, or (b) one of them annihilates the other.The latter case, which might be the more likely one, could easily have been a scenario in the evolution of hominid branches to account for "just one human species today." It's also, I'd say, a recurring strategy when different groups within the human species come into contact/conflict with one another. If only religious belief could live up to its claims of exerting ethical and moral influence to the betterment of mankind, we might finally grow out of this sort of behavior. Alas, more often than not, religion is used as a means to exacerbate the conflict.Edited by Otto Tellick, : added lengthy (*) footnote for the discussion of point 3.Edited by Otto Tellick, : (grammar repairs in the footnote)

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Then why is Genesis not subject to critical investigation, and revision to accommodate new evidence, as is the case with all other scientific discourse? If you want the world to understand Genesis as an initial scientific document, why insist that none of its assertions can be disproved or amended by observable evidence? I can agree with the "written long ago" part, but "correct for all generations"? I'm sorry, but being "framed in biblical speech" does pose some problems. The vocabulary is simply not sufficient, and there is rather a staggering amount of relevant detail that is lacking.Just making stuff up to fill in the details so as to preserve the appearance of veracity for all the explicit assertions in Genesis is not going to work. You can't properly find the truth among discrepant made-up stories until you start looking for evidence. Once start to do that, then you have to be ready to question the original assertions, just as any evidence-based scientific inquiry must do.But we seem to have strayed off-topic for this thread, which has to do with an apparent discrepancy between the moral status of incest, as expressed in Leviticus, and the biological necessities of reproduction for the first generations after Adam and Eve, (and for that matter, after the great flood -- I suppose mating with first cousins, as presumably happened among Noah's grandchildren, might not have been incestuous according to Leviticus, though it is frowned upon today). In any case, who knows what really happened? Virtually nothing is said of any daughters, or of who married whom.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Oops, here we go, straying off topic again. I'm not directly familiar with any evidence about the timing of the onset of speech, but the figure you give represents the currently known maximum time-depth for extant physical records of language (i.e. speech being transmuted into visual symbols that could be preserved as durable objects).There are much older human artifacts attesting to image-based symbolism, as opposed to linguistic symbolism: cave paintings and carved figures that have been carefully measured to be considerably older than 6000 years -- cf. the Lascaux drawings, dated at about 31,000 years before the present. (This of course depends on your willingness to accept the preponderance of evidence for dating techniques, even though they contradict certain interpretations of Genesis.) I think it's reasonable to posit that human language is a prerequisite for accomplishing this sort of artwork.As for the rest of your points, I find them puzzling. What is the "scientific" (as opposed to feminist) impact of the uncle-niece vs. aunt-nephew asymmetry in biblical law? If it's 400 years from Jacob to Moses, how many years was it from Noah to Jacob, and how is it that the Egyptians became so well established (and so alien and hostile) in that time, having presumably descended directly from Noah's children? (I suspect there will be some discrepancies in the timelines of Egyptian and Hebrew records, particularly with regard to the timing of the flood.) Doesn't it warp the definition of "religion" to say that Genesis is not a religious text? What is the point of referring to Genesis as scientific, and also as "the most mysterious document in existence"? (Okay, there's mystery in science, but scientific discourse needs to be rigorously clear -- at least for the folks who actively pursue it and keep up with the vocabulary. It's only mysterious to people (the majority) who don't keep up, and that's different from the kind of mystery as is admittedly rampant in Genesis.)Nevermind -- don't feel obliged to answer any of those questions -- it's all too far afield, I'm just pointing out the difficulty I have in following your reasoning.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.