"You HAVE to believe in God" - My mum.

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Why? I don't think that you realise that classifying animals "properly" is a very modern idea. Cultures all over the world have what are called "folk taxonomies". An obvious example of a folk category is "small creatures with wings". Do you really think that it would matter to the Jews that bats are not closely related to birds? They didn't even have the idea that animals are related to each other in the first place!

There are many examples of folk taxonomy still existing in modern English. An average person's definition of "bug" is not a nice scientific category. It includes spiders, but does not include butterflies.

Our modern zoological taxonomy is based on the degree of relation between different species. This can be verified by DNA analysis. There are fundamental genetic differences between birds and mammals (for example, birds have entirely different sex chromosomes that have been dubbed ZW in contrast to the mammalian XY sex determination system. In birds, males are homogametic and females are heterogametic, in mammals it is exactly the other way around).

What I'm trying to say is that our modern system is not arbitrary. Everyone who compares animal species on the DNA level will arrive at the conclusion that what we call mammals and birds are fundamentally different groups of animals. This is an empirical fact and not just a nomenclature that biologists happen to agree upon.

No one should know these genetic differences better than a hypothetical creator deity who allegedly designed all life on Earth. Since it is this hypothetical deity that supposedly dictated the Bible to its writers, the Bible should only contain accurate information that is as true in this day and age as it was back in the bronze age. If that is not the case, we must conclude that the Bible was written by uneducated humans without divine guidance who weren't any more enlightened than other people of their time period.

Whoa there! I don't think that there are many people, even Christians, who would claim that the entirety of the Bible is supposed to be stuff dictated from God. The Bible has lots of different stuff in it: eyewitness accounts, history, visions....

The book in question, Leviticus, is simply a book of laws. Maybe the laws are supposed to have been given by God, but the claim is not that God dictated all of Leviticus word-for-word to some guy one day. That's the sort of thing that is said about the Koran, not the Bible.

Why would a book of laws not use the language of the culture that it is a book of laws for? It would, of course! So it would use the word meaning "small creatures with wings", because that is the appropriate word to use in ancient Hebrew. Even if someone were to claim that God dictated the thing, word-for-word, why on earth would God get all worked up about genetic classification? If you were God, wouldn't you speak to the people in their own language?

Classification systems are all arbitrary anyway.

So many errors in the Bible, and yet all we can think about is "Pi is not 3" or "bats are not birds".

What mammals? We're talking about the ancient Hebrews' classification system here. There are no mammals in that system.

The basis for such classification system is still arbitrary. Scientists today have agreed to classify animals based on DNA comparisons.

Hebrews, in the past, agreed to classify bats as fowls because they had wings like other fowls.

Most people stop using outdated textbooks, but Christians will defend or attempt to rationalize/reinterpret every anachronism from theirs...

Ad infinitum et nauseum ...

I have a list of over 200 errors and contradictions from the Bible. These three will do well for starters.

Are you sure it is your mum? Cause if she is your mum I am sure she has witness evidence about how you really came here.

The main thing that bats have in common with birds is flight.

* Tons of things that are not able to fly are birds. Are you going to tell me that penguins are fish and ostriches are mammals?
* There are a lot of things that we know fly and we do not count as birds: Insects, squirrels, planes.
* Bats possess a lot of differences from birds. No bill, no feathers, hands, ears. They don't reproduce by eggs. Etc.


Whoever classified bats as birds was just utterly wrong.

Last edited by Vexcalibur on 17 Feb 2012, 7:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Unless it was a virgin birth. After all, that does happen right

Midichlorians?

(Not at all a dated reference, because it is in theaters)

Shambles... your midichlorians are off the scale!

The two I'm disputing are not objective errors. They're only errors in your perception.

Who are you to say which classification system is wrong or not? They're all arbitrary.

Major theory of mind issues going on in here.

Well, now you come to mention it ... I can perform this cheap party trick where I kind of walk on water. I just don't know how I do it