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AngelRho
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02 Jul 2010, 1:24 am

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
AngelRho wrote:
A careful reading of Genesis 1 does NOT take into account or deny the possibility of intermediary days between the 6 days that are mentioned. One could simple read each day of Genesis 1 as a special day upon which God caused certain things to be or performed certain actions in creating life sustained by the universe.

You mean one where you can take things in as ad hoc of a manner as you please?

"And there was evening and there was morning, the Nth day." seems to strongly suggest a sequence without an intermediary period. So, talk of intermediary days does not make sense within the text. Even further, the text interprets itself, and likens creation to the days of the week. While perhaps there is something Hebrew I am not getting, I doubt you are basing your own claim on this great exegesis of Hebrew either.


It doesn't NECESSARILY suggest a sequence without an intermediary period. Ad hoc or not, it's at least referencing 6 days that happened in succession--as in THIS happened first, and then on another day at some point after that, THIS happened, and on another day later on after THAT, something else happened, and so on. The only thing really specific is the order in which those things appeared or were created. The writer of Genesis obviously did not think any greater detail was really that important. It certainly has nothing to do with the preeminence of the Creator. If you choose to interpret it that way, it does NOT contradict a literal reading of the text at all.

This occurs elsewhere in Genesis 1 as well, starting with the first verse: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." That statement is followed up with "Now the earth was void..." What is INTERESTING about this specific ordering of the opening of the creation account is it leaves open the possibility (even in a literal reading of it) that some time had passed between the creation of the heavens and the earth and the ensuing 6 days. There is SOME room to wonder, to contemplate what had happened before the earth had, through whatever reason, become void. The existence of dragons/dinosaurs perhaps? The rise and fall of Lucifer and the angels who followed after him? I choose not to make up my mind about it simply because there isn't a way to know, nor does it seem especially relevant. What I DO know is that there are those Christians who do point out this fact, the way the days of the week are presented along with the 1st two verses of Genesis 1, and believe in at least the possibility of some prior existence of the Earth. If that is TRUE, then it also leaves open the question of exactly how old the Earth, along with the rest of the universe, really is. I'm not saying I share that belief. I'm just saying that the clues presented in the text are certainly worthy of debate. I don't see Creationists as necessarily dishonest as you put it. But I have come to the conclusion that the YC view is terribly inflexible. It need not be so, even for a literalist interpretation.

As far as the original Hebrew goes, you aren't really going to do that much better since most (virtually all with few exceptions) translations are taken from the MT, which itself doesn't deviate from other manuscripts. So it would appear that the original Hebrew leaves the same possibilities open.

As far as biology or even bio-chemistry goes, there IS "Darwin's Black Box," particularly the idea of the eye being irreducibly complex. As to what any degree of competency even has to do with it, you also have to consider that MOST people in general lack sufficiency in the wide range of disciplines required to understand and participate in the debate of evolution and creationism. Even within the community of science it takes a rigorous dialogue among those within a variety of individual disciplines to sort out the bigger picture: The biologist concerned with an evolutionary mechanism, a chemist concerned with the actual origin of life, the astronomer/physicist/astro-physicist/other concerned with the origin of the universe, and so on. And those individuals have no immediate need or concern to study beyond their given field, simply because there aren't enough years in a lifetime for a single person. So I have my doubts as well that AG possesses the appropriate mastery of an array of disciplines to make sense of it all, either.

So if it doesn't make sense to us, there's no harm at all in saying so and pointing out exactly what doesn't make sense. It doesn't require any vast amount of knowledge or competency offer those kinds of critiques. I mean, after all, you do often make the opposite critiques regarding things you don't seem to fully accept or understand. I think it's only right and "honest" (and fair) to point out such inadequacies, wouldn't you agree?



Sand
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02 Jul 2010, 2:21 am

Amazing how a functional mind can knot itself up into almost humorous contortions to fit itself into such a tiny box.



Asmodeus
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02 Jul 2010, 5:36 am

greenblue wrote:
Asmodeus wrote:
I stopped at 00:16;
"What you're about to see... There are no cameras."

He was mocking the big-bang theory with that. Kirk has argued before on the lines on intelligent design, such as, someone designed a tv camera and it didn't evolve itself from "nothingness".

I did based on the fact it must automatically preculde a false premise, be it magically appearing tapes they found, or an analogy.

The argument you mention is a modern electronics variant of the Watchmaker analogy, and was already refuted and televised:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No7UCB2meF0[/youtube]



DeaconBlues
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02 Jul 2010, 11:50 am

AngelRho, if you can admit that parts of the Bible must be interpreted allegorically in order for them to make sense, can you not see that this leaves open the possibility that all of it is allegorical, a series of morality tales intended to inform choices, not replace them? That perhaps the tales of Daniel in the lion's den, or Noah in the Great Flood, might simply be intended to drive home the idea that faith in God can help you through the hardest of times, not to make you believe that there was an actual historical person who built a tiny craft out of wood and managed to cram breeding populations of every animal on Earth aboard?

In other words, maybe the Big Bang happened 14 billion years ago because a Being existing outside the concept of space/time willed it so (hey, it's as good an explanation as any other - ask any honest cosmologist), and the rest occurred because of the starting conditions set up in that Bang. Maybe the description given in Genesis 1 is as close as one can come to explaining cosmology to a group of itinerant shepherds with no concept of numbers higher than maybe a hundred, and Genesis 2 (which disagrees with it) is a "just-so" story to explain why men and women are so different. Maybe the Bible should be taken as a book of religious instruction, not a book of scientific or historical instruction. (I specify "Bible" because my understanding is that the source material, the Torah, is already treated that way by Judaism.)


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ruveyn
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02 Jul 2010, 2:23 pm

DeaconBlues wrote:
AngelRho, if you can admit that parts of the Bible must be interpreted allegorically in order for them to make sense, can you not see that this leaves open the possibility that all of it is allegorical, a series of morality tales intended to inform choices, not replace them? That perhaps the tales of Daniel in the lion's den, or Noah in the Great Flood, might simply be intended to drive home the idea that faith in God can help you through the hardest of times, not to make you believe that there was an actual historical person who built a tiny craft out of wood and managed to cram breeding populations of every animal on Earth aboard?

In other words, maybe the Big Bang happened 14 billion years ago because a Being existing outside the concept of space/time willed it so (hey, it's as good an explanation as any other - ask any honest cosmologist), and the rest occurred because of the starting conditions set up in that Bang. Maybe the description given in Genesis 1 is as close as one can come to explaining cosmology to a group of itinerant shepherds with no concept of numbers higher than maybe a hundred, and Genesis 2 (which disagrees with it) is a "just-so" story to explain why men and women are so different. Maybe the Bible should be taken as a book of religious instruction, not a book of scientific or historical instruction. (I specify "Bible" because my understanding is that the source material, the Torah, is already treated that way by Judaism.)


Galileo once said the Bible tells us how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go.

ruveyn



Awesomelyglorious
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02 Jul 2010, 3:53 pm

AngelRho wrote:
It doesn't NECESSARILY suggest a sequence without an intermediary period. Ad hoc or not, it's at least referencing 6 days that happened in succession--as in THIS happened first, and then on another day at some point after that, THIS happened, and on another day later on after THAT, something else happened, and so on. The only thing really specific is the order in which those things appeared or were created. The writer of Genesis obviously did not think any greater detail was really that important. It certainly has nothing to do with the preeminence of the Creator. If you choose to interpret it that way, it does NOT contradict a literal reading of the text at all.

It really does contradict a literal reading of the text, as the text suggests that each day is directly after the other. "There was evening and there was morning, the next day". If someone told me a story in that kind of framework, I would regard it as a misreading to regard the days as having significant separation between them. If it seems a misreading, then it does contradict the literal reading of the text. If one, in deciding a literal meaning of a text, does not use these kinds of clues, or uses them in an ad hoc manner, then one is not really going off of a literal reading so much as picking and choosing.

Quote:
This occurs elsewhere in Genesis 1 as well, starting with the first verse: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." That statement is followed up with "Now the earth was void..." What is INTERESTING about this specific ordering of the opening of the creation account is it leaves open the possibility (even in a literal reading of it) that some time had passed between the creation of the heavens and the earth and the ensuing 6 days.

Well, most Bibles say "The earth was without form and void", such as the KJV, the ESV, and the RV, and then say that God hovered above the waters. This does not really suggest anything of the sort that you are saying, as it moves from God creating both Heaven and Earth to God working with the Earth, as the Earth has to exist before it lacks form or has waters.

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There is SOME room to wonder, to contemplate what had happened before the earth had, through whatever reason, become void. The existence of dragons/dinosaurs perhaps?

Well, probably not. I mean, "let the dry land appear is in Gen 1:9". Now, I suppose one could take a hermeneutic that anything can happen in the gaps within the Bible so long as it is theologically convenient, but this hardly seems like a good work of hermeneutics, but rather about as postmodern as hermeneutics could come, as generally speaking holding to a text literally involves being parsimonious about it, otherwise why not hold to the text allegorically?

Quote:
The rise and fall of Lucifer and the angels who followed after him? I choose not to make up my mind about it simply because there isn't a way to know, nor does it seem especially relevant. What I DO know is that there are those Christians who do point out this fact, the way the days of the week are presented along with the 1st two verses of Genesis 1, and believe in at least the possibility of some prior existence of the Earth. If that is TRUE, then it also leaves open the question of exactly how old the Earth, along with the rest of the universe, really is. I'm not saying I share that belief. I'm just saying that the clues presented in the text are certainly worthy of debate.

What's really the debate? The exegetical foundations are so loose that we might as well assume that Jesus also had children with Mary Magdalene for that manner. The Bible doesn't say this isn't the case after all, and certainly there is some possible ambiguity that one could use.

Quote:
I don't see Creationists as necessarily dishonest as you put it. But I have come to the conclusion that the YC view is terribly inflexible. It need not be so, even for a literalist interpretation.

Right.....

Quote:
As far as the original Hebrew goes, you aren't really going to do that much better since most (virtually all with few exceptions) translations are taken from the MT, which itself doesn't deviate from other manuscripts. So it would appear that the original Hebrew leaves the same possibilities open.

The issue is words do not directly translate between languages. So, while different translators might make similar assumptions, this does not mean that people who don't know the language are getting everything that is said.

Quote:
As far as biology or even bio-chemistry goes, there IS "Darwin's Black Box," particularly the idea of the eye being irreducibly complex.

One, there are hypothetical answers given about the eye. Secondly, it has been shown even in a US court for goodness sake, that ID wasn't science. Thirdly, the human eye is horribly designed, giving us an unnecessary blindspot, this is not a sign of any God, so much as a god of the gaps.

Quote:
As to what any degree of competency even has to do with it, you also have to consider that MOST people in general lack sufficiency in the wide range of disciplines required to understand and participate in the debate of evolution and creationism. Even within the community of science it takes a rigorous dialogue among those within a variety of individual disciplines to sort out the bigger picture: The biologist concerned with an evolutionary mechanism, a chemist concerned with the actual origin of life, the astronomer/physicist/astro-physicist/other concerned with the origin of the universe, and so on. And those individuals have no immediate need or concern to study beyond their given field, simply because there aren't enough years in a lifetime for a single person. So I have my doubts as well that AG possesses the appropriate mastery of an array of disciplines to make sense of it all, either.

No, but I am willing to listen to the people who do study these matters, as opposed to listening to loonies. As such, I am not challenging these people on their fields of expertise like a moron. It is clear to anybody who has knowledge of science, the scientific community, or the general sociology of the matter that creationism is BS that is kept alive by theological interests, as such, I don't seem dismissal as requiring the same level of intellectual command as acceptance. Generally speaking, experts are given more epistemic authority than know-nothings.

Quote:
So if it doesn't make sense to us, there's no harm at all in saying so and pointing out exactly what doesn't make sense. It doesn't require any vast amount of knowledge or competency offer those kinds of critiques. I mean, after all, you do often make the opposite critiques regarding things you don't seem to fully accept or understand. I think it's only right and "honest" (and fair) to point out such inadequacies, wouldn't you agree?

Honestly, I probably have a much better grasp of young earth creationism than you have of evolutionary theory. Even further, if I say that the two aren't even close to epistemic equals then my acts as a critic are more justifiable than your acts as a critic, at least so long as my claim of epistemic inequality is justifiable. The fact of the matter is that you aren't informed to a sufficient degree to criticize people who have spent their lives studying something and who actually know what they are talking about. I have enough information, however, to criticize backwater crackpots on a nonsense idea. Let's even make a comparison: Can everybody meaningfully criticize germ theory? No. Can a lot of people meaningfully criticize homeopathic remedies though? Of course, because they're nonsense that can't pass the muster anywhere.