The 15 billion yrs of cosmos & 6 dys of creation r same.

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Ragtime, having a debate with you is pointless. You don't read what I actually write, only what you want to read into what I write. You have consistently created straw man arguments when debating this topic with me. I also get the impression that you think you know Truth. You don't seem to realize that you are seeing through a glass darkly like the rest of us.

It's not about having many followers. The Bible says few will enter Heaven, and that many will go to Hell. It says that plainly.

You're still missing it. Man didn't make God, God made man. Over man's heads -- not within or according to their knowledge. The people who wrote down the Scriptures did not understand the full implications of the truths they were recording, nor did they claim to; it was beyond them, as it is Christians today, in its fullness.


Yes. He did keep most of His thoughts to Himself. That's His prerogative. You're still viewing God and the Bible from an anthro-centric perspective.

First, show me some neanderthals. Complete skeletons.


I haven't been in the lab for the last sixty years, so you'd have to enlighten me.

Well, Adam's rib evolved, of course, and then Eve was "cloned-with-modifications" from that rib.

He did not "go in unto her". He jacked off.

Last edited by Ragtime on 30 Jul 2007, 8:32 am, edited 2 times in total.

im fine you're happy with your interpretation... but you're ignoring my point. there is no scientific basis for assuming that there was any scientific reasoning for wording the bible as it is...........................

you are choosing contexts as you wish... which is fine for you to do... i appreciate that you have incorporated some scientific logic into your beliefs but you have to realize that that is your own personal assessment because there is no basis for presuming scientific consideration to this degree... if there were... then evolution might have been more accurately described in the bible (for example)

edit: what im getting at is that i do APPRECIATE when christians can ammend science with their beliefs... i just dont think you can do this with a strict literal interpetation of the wording... which is what your original post seemed to say you can abstract from such a literal interpetation from "6 day".... there is no basis for literally interpretting this as anything else orther than 24 hours x 6... you have to take it less literally to do so... yet that's not what you say you are doing when you come to your conclusions about time duration and interpretation and applying science to your literal interpretation. my point is that there is no evidence of comprehension anywhere in the bible on the lvl of scientific knoweldge to presupose anything BUT a literal 6 days... but again, i dont think the bible should be taken literally

I couldn't agree more about having an argument with you.


Of course I see through a glass darkly, but not like ALL of "the rest of us". For, concerning Truth, "Thy Word is Truth." That's what Jesus prayed allowed to God the Father. I believe in adhering to Scripture, you believe in reading-into it. So yes, though I indeed see through a glass darkly, "Thy (God's) Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light to my path." So, those who forsake His Word have no light, and "walk in darkness".

Last edited by Ragtime on 29 Jul 2007, 10:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

given that my quoting skills are what they are (poor!)

i forgive you... just this once though!

dont let it happen again... or ill have to confiscate your blackberry

You made a mistake in editing. Sedaka is innocent, all the stuff you attributed to her is mine. I will fix the quotes so everyone knows who is to blame.

The best illustration I can think of is my second example, where I offer one interpretation from context, and a few that I would consider literal, depending on the exact wording. I have now looked that up:





I think the most obvious interpretation of the words marked in bold is coitus interruptus, not masturbation.

The Wikipedia entry for Onan includes the interpretations I suggested. It adds masturbation to the prohibitions derived from the verses about Onan, but that doesn't look like the most important conclusion. I don't know how a literal reading leads yoo to conclude that this is all about masturbation.



Are you telling me you refuse to believe Neanderthals ever existed until someone shows you a complete skeleton, without any bone missing? a nice way of dismissing almost all of the fossil record, but science often has to work with less, and does. Googling for "Neanderthal complete skeleton" gave me this link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2236585.stm

You may also be interested in an article about sequencing part of the Neanderthal genome: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/bei ... enced.html

You did not mention homo erectus. Do you accept that they existed? How about homo habilis or Australopithecus?



I discussed that point at some length in another of your threads, the one about "Do you believe in Alex?" I'll copy the post into this thread in a separate post.



Please go into a bit more detail. How can a rib evolve during the lifetime of the body in which it is? How does the cloning happen, what modifications are there? Do you get these details from a literal reading of Genesis?

Gromit

After re-reading this post of mine, I knew it would probably confuse. What I meant was that, as God grew Adam, perhaps through theistic evolution, so did the rib grow. And of course, the modications are from male to female.

But seriously, before I/we waste anymore time in this discussion, lets just all admit we're not going to change our views. That's the truth, and means we'll just be spinning our wheels -- which can be fun at times, but also annoying and pointless to continue at other times -- this being one of them.

So....bye!

Copied from the other thread:



That's why I asked Ragtime to be more specific. I don't know whether he means a young Earth creationist interpretation when he refers to biblical creation.

Spending about an hour on the site you referred to, I did find a reference to something I had heard before:


More sensible than Answers in Genesis, then. But in the same article (http://www.reasons.org/resources/apolog ... game.shtml) Ross also states:

A scientist should know to provide a reference to such a statement. I couldn't find it through google. I tried finding the authors, but was not willing to search through 250 publications of P Ehrlich or 182 of A Ehrlich. I would have liked to see the context and date of the quote, because to my knowledge, it does not correspond to reality.

Plants often enough produce polyploid (they have more than the normal two sets of chromosomes) hybrids which are fertile with themselves, but not their parent species. I read at least one new species of tree has been documented to have arisen in Mauritius around 1930 (I don't remember the source). More recently, two hybrid butterfly species have been observed:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns? ... 025564.200
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/lif ... w-one.html

One important point here is that the hybridization has been reproduced in the lab. I quickly scanned the original paper, but did not find any report that they tried crossbreeding with the naturally occurring hybrid. It would be nice if they had tried that as well, just to see whether they can reproduce in the lab a specific speciation event which has occurred naturally. But please be clear that this is speciation produced in the lab, something which creationists claim is impossible. It may be the first speciation in animals that was experimentally produced in the lab, but not the first obeserved in the lab.

Several subspecies of fruitfly were collected in the early 50s, and tested to see whether they could interbreed and really were only local variants of the same species. They were. Six years later, one of the populations no longer was able to interbreed with the others. There had been an infection in the lab. It is known that the evolutionary response to some infections can make insects infertile with those whose ancestors were not exposed to the infection. So here you have a spciation event which happened in a lab, at some time in the six years between the first and second tests. If you give me time enough, I should be able to track down the reference, if I can find the book again, and if that provided a reference.

Also in the news recently was a butterfly species in which most of the males were killed by a bacterial infection. The following link gives you enough of the article to understand the follow up:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns? ... 125664.800

The same species was in the news again a few weeks back in one of the science podcasts I listen to. Within 10 generations the butterflies had evolved enough resistance to the infection that they were nearly back to a normal sex ratio (sorry for not providing a reference, I listen to science podcasts from several sources, and I don't remember which one it was, but if you are really interested, I can try to find a reference). The fast response is relevant to the bit about the observed speciation in Drosophila. The evolutionary response can be very fast, about one year, rather than six years. Because of this and other findings, biologists generally treat speciation like Dr Ross treats the neutrino:


The patterns of data observed in nature make sense if neutrinos exist and speciation occurs, and no one has yet come up with an idea that makes more sense. But Ross has problems with speciation, without providing good arguments for his views. And biologists have the advantage of having observed speciation, and having reproduced it in the lab. So on the matter of speciation, I argue Dr Ross is plain wrong.

Gromit

P.S. I have looked up the original report of the Drosophila speciation. You want a paper by Dobzhansky and Pavlovsky in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA in 1966, volume 55, pages 727-733. The title is SPONTANEOUS ORIGIN OF AN INCIPIENT SPECIES IN THE DROSOPHILA PAULISTORUM COMPLEX. I quote the first paragraph of the paper below. Note that it mentions that natural speciation through hybridization had already been reproduced back in 1966.

Not a problem on my part. I don't insist that we must agree. I will be content just understanding your views better. Let's limit it to a question you could answer with yes or no. Would there be a contradiction between your literal reading of the bible and the origin of any species more recently than the origin of anatomically modern humans?

Gromit

evolution! (what a show!)

evolution! (here we go!)

evolution's here and it's here to stay! (evolve!)

history of the world: part 0.1

Yeah, yeah, yeah... Quit monkeying around, Sedaka. Or no banana for you!

Its one big game of chinese whispers. We are talking about an agglomeration of texts spanning generations and cultures, gleaned from a huge variety of different sources, written by people from all walks of life and several races, no doubt with wildly varying language and writing skills. These texts have been reproduced, edited, reproduced again, lost, found, hidden, ciphered, deciphered, manipulated, tweaked and generally faffed about with, then printed again in a multitude of different versions according to wildly diverse agendas. This has all happened using constantly evolving languages that haven't even had consistent rules of grammar and spelling most of the time, and all under the auspices of a race apparently operating within the boundless parameters (like final frontier maybe?) of sin, free will, and fallability. A race divided into groups by reading the same text, each group trying to sell its version as the definitive word of an omnipotent,omnicogniescent, onipresent, infallible and all-powerful deity that they couldn't possibly hope to comprehend, not being omni-anything.

On top of that comes the hundreds of other texts and deities, followed by many other groups that all say THEIR deity is the right one, all deftly excused from actually proving they exist by a bewildering array of theological arguments.

So, that said.. it still looks like a load of old b*llocks to me.

You err. The Scriptures were preserved with greatest care over time. But it wouldn't matter to you either way, anyway. You're clearly prepared to reject the truth of God wherever you encounter it.

Really? Like being kept in jars in a cave to be found by small children throwing rocks? Thats great care?
Do you have any grasp of the realities of history at all? You deny the confusing list of origin, despite the fact that its all based on empirical fact? Or are you denying that humanity is fallible, sinful etc? Exactly where have I erred in my brief summation of the publishing history of the bible, and why exactly wouldn't it matter to me either way exactly?