Is our education failing us?

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Knowing how old the earth is, or not, doesn't impact my ability to find meaningful work and feed my family. The world could have been literally created yesterday and it would make no difference as long as the world exists as it does. Are there really people in the world who wouldn't be able to function if it was KNOWN that the world was created only a few thousand years ago? And, I mean, nothing else was different? My biggest worry is the possibility my vehicle won't function well enough to get me to my job.

I've noticed in certain religions, often in new religious movements, that theology hinges on the wording of key scriptures that are minor to the level of even being obscure. For example, take the opening verses of the gospel of John. In the beginning, was the word. The Word was with God, and the Word was God.

JW bibles alter it to read: In the beginning, was the word. The Word was with God, and the word was a god.

The controversy is that the articles a/the don’t exactly appear in the original Greek, therefore Jesus (Logos) was never intended to be understood as being co-equal with God and thus part of the Trinity. Their argument is Unitarian rather than Trinitarian.

The problem with that argument is that those articles aren’t features of the Greek language as we understand them in our language. It comes down to a matter of context as to whether unitarian or trinitarian was intended, which the rest of the Bible seems to support. So what exactly is it about this one passage that proves so crucial to JW doctrine? If the articles were left in their translation, what impact would that have on their faith?

When the age of the earth is taken up in secular arguments, it often occurs as a means of undermining the credibility of the Biblical account of creation. I keep asking why it even matters. If YEC people are correct, what effect would that have on daily life for everyone else? Galileo was correct in describing a heliocentric universe, at least within the boundaries of the universe as people could have been aware at the time. How did that change the life of the local bread baker? Galileo was wrong about describing orbits as perfect circles. How did that affect Italian fishermen? What impact did that have on the invention of the automobile? How did this knowledge prevent the stock market crash of 1929 or stop the US nuclear attack on Japan in the 1940s?

Oh, wait…

I’m not anti-science. I’m sure the earth is a few billion years old. I have no problem with that. And this applies just as much to YEC people as it does atheists. If it turns out that secularists are correct that the earth is billions of years old, how will that prevent you from entering heaven?

By placing so much emphasis on inconsequential things and irrelevant things, you paint yourself into a corner. You create problems for yourself that prevent you from moving forward if you happen to be wrong about something. If you can’t afford to be wrong, you have a bigger problem than the one you are arguing about. If a JW asks questions about John 1:1, he likely will get ignored at best, but possibly disfellowshipped if he persists in asking questions and showing trinitarian leanings. There are some issues within the scientific community that are effectively the same thing by the way they are handled: unquestionable dogma. One thing I’ve noticed that hard empiricists despise more than anything is being accused of dogmatic thinking, yet this indeed happens.

^^ That's a really solid assessment of some of the issues with sects that are really strict about literalism, or at least how a literalist mindset can contribute to schisms over what are likely to be very trivial matters.

It's also fair to point out that once science is close to having an incorrect consensus on an issue that often it becomes an incredibly difficult uphill battle to convince one's field of their errors. It's not impossible but egos and other human factors contribute to it being much more difficult than it should be.

Indeed. And to be clear, I consider myself a Biblical literalist. But if you intend to take the Bible literally, it takes a bit more work than saying "The Bible says the earth doesn't move, therefore the earth literally does not move." Ok, in what context does the Bible say the earth doesn't move? Psalms? So you're interpreting an artistic, poetic statement referring to the unshakeable existence of reality and the firm reliability of God's creation to mean the earth in absolute terms DOES NOT MOVE? If you are a true literalist, you must take into account that the Bible sometimes interprets ITSELF to not be literal in certain contexts. Jesus mentioned the faith of the mustard seed and moving mountains. I think it's clear from the context that Jesus likely was referring to a literal, physical mountain, not some vague, general, life challenge. But what I think Jesus was talking about in referring to literally moving mountains was a mindset, an absolute commitment to faith. If you have the kind of faith that you believe could literally move mountains, and that faith is only the seed of something, the actions predicated on that naïve, immature faith can grow to do great things that are seemingly impossible. It is not a violation of literalism to understand that Jesus used Jewish idioms and exaggeration in His teachings. Moreover, the words of Jesus include humor and sarcasm. If you get too bound up in literal meanings of things, you lose the richness of the moment in which the words are said. You have to find that balance between literal meaning and intent. If someone claims to be a literalist and doesn't understand that words do have intended meanings, those claims are useless and unhelpful.

Example, and a relevant one: Take the entire first chapter of Genesis, which is where the OEC/YEC controversy comes from. Is God powerful enough to create the entire universe the way Genesis 1 describes? Of course. It's not wrong to say the universe COULD be only a few thousand years old. But it's also wrong to say Genesis 1 gives us any date for creation. Those dates are suggested from our best guesses based on timelines of genealogies and royal records. The problem is not that Genesis 1 is missing information. The problem is when literalists miss the whole point of Genesis 1: God created everything. He created the heavens, the earth, everything on the earth, and us. All of creation exists for God's pleasure and is His alone to dispose of as He wants. He possesses the sole right to destroy all of us and everything on a whim. The point of Genesis 1 is to establish God as creator and owner of everything and HIS will alone as the single determining factor of our destiny. There is never any indication that Genesis 1 was to be taken as a scientific text. That means YEC arguments are silly--as are OEC arguments. They're silly not because one is right or one is wrong, but because those arguments have no bearing on the most important messages of scripture as a whole.

It's probably fair to suggest that literalism exists on a spectrum and that even a lot of literalists are probably more attached to 'the spirit of the scriptures' or 'the overall message' than to following every word to the letter.

When I was at school I didn't have to know that fossils are made of stone. It wouldn't have given me more than maybe one mark in a geography exam, and as soon as I got the chance I dropped geography because whoever set the syllabus had put a huge amount of rote learning of facts in there, facts that just happened to be rather than facts that could be remembered by the use of reasoning. Geology was just one aspect of geography, and geography was the only subject that referred to fossils at all. Geology was also pretty much the only part of geography that interested me, probably because it had an element of reasoning in it, of forensically deducing what the past might have been like from an examination of what remains of it. That's probably why I retained the knowledge that fossils are made of stone. The rest of geography was, like I say, mostly just bald facts by the bucketful. So I specialised in subjects I was better at - physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

Before notions such as evolution and a billions-of-years-old Earth became mainstream, religious leaders and pundits were more free to come out with wild guesses about where humans came from and how old the Earth is, as there was no known evidence against their claims that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that humans were a qualitatively different life-form created by a deity with miraculous powers, etc. In the same way, older religions had their own explanations for such matters, e.g. the Sun was a god who travelled across the heavens every day in a fiery chariot. Clearly none of it was based on known facts and rigorous deduction, it was just their best guess (or deliberately-concocted myth). But just as the fiery chariot theory eventually bit the dust in the light of more detailed observation and thought, so the young-Earth and creation theories are now being replaced by rival theories with more substance to back them up.

Various brands of religion have reacted differently to these new theories. Darwin originally planned to have his theory published posthumously because he feared an angry backlash from the established Christian church of his day. And to this day there are still some old-fashioned religionists who rage against the new information and its exponents, and seek to turn the clock back. Meanwhile the Church of England has sidestepped the conflict by quietly dropping the original concretist thinking and offering neat explanations along the lines of "yes evolution happens, but we believe our deity created evolution."

So it doesn't matter if you favour evolution and the old-Earth theories if you're among some religious brands, but with other brands you could get trouble. And I'm not surprised that some scientists go on the offensive and try to defeat or disempower the reactionary types. In some ways I think they're doing us a favour if they do manage to disempower them. Reactionary groups can be very dangerous and I'd prefer it if the threat were neutralised, but those who try would do well to make sure they've got the fire-power to complete the job.

---

Hmm, Whether or Not Fossils Are Comprised
of Bone or Mineral Played A Direct And Valued

'ArtiFact of Knowledge' in my 'Tenure' As An

Archeology Associate in One Summer At University;

However, The Other Two Part Time Jobs i Had, While
Maintaining A Full School Course Load, Earning Three
Degrees At Once, Per Social Sciences Interdisciplinary,
Anthropology, And Health Science; Not So Much As Those

Other Two Part Time Jobs Were Janitor And University Book Store Clerk;

However, Part of the Research As A Budding Anthropologist Was Analyzing The
Garbage of the Bank Employees, Where i Was Employed As Janitor Late at Night.

And Additionally, Part of my Practice as An Anthropology Participant Observer Was
Massaging One of my Female Classmates at a Lamaze Class; And No, She Was Not
Pregnant; i Still Vividly Remember the Cigarette Smell on my Finger Tips as She Was
Addicted to That Cancer Causing Rolled Weed, With All The Additive Carcinogenic Chemicals; Yet i Digress

As i Have an Amazing Memory; Usually Whatever Anyone Writes Here That i am Part of, i Don't Forget Either;

Yep, Going All The Way Back to 2010; Like When i First Got Here on ThanksGiving Day, 2010, And Made A Small
List of the Technological Developments That Distracted me So Much And Helped Lead to my Demise Before then...

YeP, it Makes it Hard For Folks to Get Away With A Lie with me; Probably Would Have made A Great Lawyer; Yet
i Intuited Then That Any Systemizing Field At University Would Suck my Soul Away into Oblivion As Science

Suggests That is What

Happens today When

Folks Ignore Their Potential
Human Intelligences Associated
With Real Social-Empathic-Emotional-
Physical-Artistic-Intuitive-Spiritual Real
Feeling And Sensing Ways of Doing the World Now.

For Instance, Let's Take A Modern Human Deficit, Where
Science Shows the Average Human Being Has An Attention
Span of Less than 3 Seconds; Yes, Less Than That of A Frigging Goldfish....

It's Safe to Sing, The
Average Human Being

Is Very Distracted; And Has
Great Difficulty in Cognitive Executive
Functioning in Mastering The Regulation
of Emotions and Senses From Head to Toe that
Is Integral With Physical Intelligence too of Actually

Moving More
Than Adhering
to A Computer
Screens Most Hours
of the Day; However, At
Least Some Folks Are Interacting
And Creating Online As Opposed to

Passive Couch Potato Life as Spectators
of Someone Else's Plays of Life on TV; And
Net Flix on Computer Screens now too; And of
Course, Mainly Just Sharing What Someone Else Already

Did, Or Repeating Facts Already Downloaded in Rote Memory
For Retrieval, if Long Term Memory is Working Well Enough That
Way to Retain What Was Learned Long Ago; Some Folks Remember

Facts for Multiple Choice Tests; and Poof After That the Information is gone; Just gone...

It's Really Not A Good Measure of Whether Education is Failing Us As to Whether or Not
Someone Remembers the Data Download of one Isolated Fact in School, Per the Mineralization
of Bone That Makes The End Results of Fossils For those Associated With Fields of Work in How

Limited They
Are Where that
Information Matters
at All in Day to Day Life...

We Tend to Forget Things We
Don't Need to Know in Everyday

Life; Not so Much With me and Others;

And too Much Information Without the Ability
to Focus on the Task at Hand; May Come to Be A Handicap For
Real Where A Person May Be Able to Remember All the Facts; yet in

'Real Life 'As 'They' Say for Metaphor,
Not Be Able to 'Find Their Way Out
of A Paper Bag' Or Develop The Kind

Of Intelligence, Required in Interpretive
Skills of Figurative Language to Understand
That Doesn't Literally Mean, Find Your Way Out of a Paper Bag;

Or in the Case of Literal Religious Folks; Coming to Understand that
A 'Risen Christ'; Is Just Another Archetypal Hero Story; Where the Hero Comes
through A Dark Journey Out of the 'Proverbial Plato Cave'; Finds Wisdom From Within;

And Attempts to Go Back to the Cave to Enlighten Others, to Help Those Folks Get Out of the Cave too...

Yawn, Some Folks

Literally Still Believe

A Dude they've Changed
to an Idol God, Actually Was
Raised From the Dead Like Real

Life Zombies AS Such; And then
Make it All About Him and He, Instead of Them; Reaching Their Human Potentials...

And Yes, MiSSinG Out on Doing 'John 14:12,' Just Naked, Enough, Whole, Complete
Doing the Luke 17:21 Dance And Song of LiFE iN Heaven Within too; Oh Lord,

So Many Intelligences;

So Many Potentials Fulfilling

in This Life Now, With So Many Avenues

to Master the Tools; Instead of Becoming

The Tools; And Mastered By Others As Slaves...

Meanwhile, Some Folks Give, Share, Care, Heal;

In Terms of Social-Empathic-Emotional-Physical-
Artistic-Intuitive-Spiritual Real Feeling
And Sensing Intelligences And Become

More Than The Facts They Download

In Life; And More Than Machines that
Specialize in Only One Set of Facts too...

This is A Fascinating Day to Be Alive, Where We have
The World's Arts and Sciences At Our Finger Tips online,
Practically For Free; Yet It's True, A Budding New Real 'Jesus',
'Buddha', 'Lao Tzu', Mozart, Beethoven, Einstein, And Da Vinci,

Michelangelo, And the List Goes On For Fictional And Real Folks
Who Didn't Get Trapped at the 'Bus-Stop' Playing a Game, Totally
Distracted With Candy Crush or the Latest Net-Flix Flick; Other Video Games,

Or Whatever Distracts them From Reaching Even a Small Percentage of Human

Potential, They Might Have Otherwise Developed, if Not So Restricted to A Small Area

of Human
Potential;

As My Philosophy
Teacher in College Noted;

Specialization in a Technological

Society in Systemizing Ways of Cognition,

May Yet Be A Large Part of Human-Kind's Fall; And

As Far as Customer Service Associates Absorbed
in their Facebook New-Feed or Whatever; It's True,

One May Be Lucky, if someone even Looks Up to Acknowledge

Another Human Exists; And Even if They Do, if the Question is Longer

Than 3 Seconds, It May Be A 'Mute Question', All Together;

We Have Got Bigger (Smaller) Problems With Human Education
Now Than Whether or Not Someone Understands For Real, Whether

Or Not A Fossil Is Bone or Mineral Indeed; Like Being Able to Even Pay Attention

to One Task in Autotelic Flow And Truly Find A Kingdom of Heaven Within to Enjoy, Truly Happy/Content
Eternally Now And Also Reaching Human Potentials that Most Humans Have Never Even Imagined in Life;

As Basically

They've Lost

Their ability to
Move, Connect, And
Co-Create In Life; Usually

What Animals Do in A Freer

Naked Kingdom That Way

With Intuitive Intelligence That
Conserves Every Calorie For Life;
FRiEnDS with Gravity, Moving Gracefully,
Regulating Emotions, Integrating Senses;

Fully Able to Capture Prey in Focus With Enough
Larger View, Bigger Picture Mindful Awareness to Escape Predators too..

And Nope, Not Living A Life Almost Every Minute Lost in Anxiety;

And Distracted

Every Which
Way Yet Laser Focus

In Improving Human Animal
Potentials too, Both in Balance And
Complexity in Effortless 'Wu-Wei' Ease...

Anyway, Modern Society Has Many Moving
Parts and Requires Many Humans With Specialities;

And Crystalized And Fluid Intelligence to Keep the Whole
Machine Building New And Still Well Oiled For Parts Already Made...

It's True, With Ants,They Don't Understand in Big Picture View, How the Mound
Comes to Be; It's True too, With Humans They Are Often Lost in the Trees and Miss

A Forest Too...

Yet It's Also
True, It's Possible
to Improve As Use it or
Lose it Makes Life What We Co-Create it to Be And Do Now...

There Are so Many Variables, Like Personality Traits too, Where the
More Conservative, Closed Minded Person May Wish to Stay in the Cave
And Keep Traditional Concrete Ideas About Religion, Where Myth Becomes

The Truth Alone...

And On the Other
Hand, THere is Always
A Potential too; For the
More Liberal And Open Minded

Folks Finding A New Way to Sail to Heaven
on Earth Within; And Give and Share And
Care Fearlessly Now to

Heal Others

With that More
'Progressive Wisdom' True...

Yet Again; Some Folks Are More Like
Anchors on Boats That Keep Us in Safe
Harbors Through Raging Storms of Change;

Others, Find New Ways For Heaven on Earth Within, With Sails in Fair
Winds And Following Seas And Share That Wisdom And 'Just Do it' too

Without Even Worrying

About "Shoes Sells"

As They Have Mastered
The Tool And Now Just Use it;
No Longer Servant to Someone Else's Traditional Story/Tool...

Listen, It's Difficult For Almost Every Ant to Figure Out How the
Mound is Made Whole;

Yet Every Once

in A While,

A Different

Kind of Ant Comes to Play For Free...

Meh, Same Old 'Matrix' Story; Characters

Remain; Actors And Story Continues to Change...

-Part 6

~WHere the
Architect/Oracle
Become One With tHE ALL...

Yawn, Marry Easter; Merry Spring to All

Eternally

Now within

At Least FoR Me...

WHeRE IT's Always
A Good Day New Now..

---

If religious institutions want to keep the government out of their businesses, then religious institutions should stay out of government businesses, of which public schools are just one aspect.

Christian churches have been experiencing an exodus of their congregations since the 1950s, when science education in public schools really started taking hold.  Their response has not been to update their religious teachings, but to try to dilute the influence of science in public schools through challenges to "Separation of Church and State".

You can surive without curiousity but I wouldn't call it living. I want to provide more for my family than food. I want to show them the wonder of the world.I'd be able to function just fine if that was known. I get a little annoyed when a different figure is known and people just lie about it.

The world is billions of years old.

Man is at least 2 million years old.

Some guy named Ussher came up with the 4004 BC figure out of the clear blue sky.

It depends if Homo Habilis counts as a man or as another species. He was certainly a tool user.

A tool MAKER. Chimps are actually tool-users.

There were Homo erectus-type men about 2 million years ago.

Ok, that's actually a significant upgrade.

I still think he was a man of a different species. If he could be transported to our time he would look noticeably different while a man from 100,000 ago would blend right in if you gave him modern clothes and a haircut.

1) Bishop Ussher did NOT "come up with the figure out of thin air". Nor did he invent the idea that the world was less than ten thousand years old. Common misconception. It had long been the cosmology of the entire western world centuries before he came along.

Ironically Bishop Ussher was one of the first modern historians, and came up with the figure precisely because he pioneered the use of modern evidence based scholarship. He pegged the chronology of the Bible to the dates of events attested to in the Old Testament in non Bible sources.

The entire Jewish and Christian worlds had assumed for centuries that the world began with Genisis in the Bible. What Ussher did was not to invent the idea that the earth was less than ten thousand years old, but to fine tune the date of Genisis by pegging the Bible to sources out side of the Bible (ie finding say Egyptian or Babylonian records of events also described in the Bible - using the dates from those sources to keep the Biblical chronology teethered to reality).

The Jews ALWAYS "knew" that Genisis happened in 3760 BC (only a couple of centuries different from Ussher's figure of 4004 BC). Oddly- the Eastern Orthodox always calculated that the cosmos began in 5600 BC (they somehow count all of those 'begats' in Genisis differently than do Jews and Catholics), but thats still only a few thousand years ago.

But Ussher still assumed that the Bible had to be right in its internal chronology. And he was a historian, and not a geologist. Had to rely on written sources, and couldnt read the evidence in rocks about the age of the earth.

In the 1700s Geologists began to notice layers in rocks, and to notice the fossils of extinct critters in those layers of rocks, and began to realize that the earth had to be older-many times older- than the Bible says.

2) Man (the Genus Homo) is about two million years old. But "anatomically modern humans" are only about 200 thousand years old. Archaic humans (homo hablis, homo erectus, Heidleburg Man, Neanderthal Man, Denisovans, etc ) were around before, or were contemporary with anatomical moderns -before going extince leaving us as the sole heirs. Whether these archaic humans were seperate species, or just seperate subspecies, from us, is open to debate.

I guess kraftie attributes to figure to him because he came up with a figure. I realise the Ussher chronology isn't the only young earth chronology so I try not to peg all creationists as following his chronology exclusively.

I'm sure Ussher used the evidence he had at the time and tried to come up with a result that fit the evidence. Modern creationists try to fit the evidence to the result.

The creationist I was arguing with brought up fossil dug up by Dr. Mary Schweitzer which contained bone marrow that was only partially lithified. He tried to make it sound like all soft tissue fossils are like that. Fossils like the Schweitzer fossil are extremely rare. This kind of exaggeration is commonplace.

He said that the tissue in the Schweitzer fossil (and all other soft tissue fossils even though most are preserved in stone) can last for thousands of years but not millions of years.

Why thousands but not millions? I told him that he was basing his assertion that bone marrow can last for thousands of years but not millions of years on his requirement that the dinosaur died a few thousand years ago (he claimed that it was drowned by the flood).

So he thinks he knows bone marrow can last for thousands of years but not millions of years because the fossil is a few thousand years old. He thinks the fossil is a few thousand years old because bone marrow can last for thousands of years but not millions of years. Do you see the circular reasoning there?



He was actually using this "bone marrow can only last for a few thousand years old as a major piece of evidence that the fossils can not be millions of years old but his assertion that bone marrow can last for thousands of years but not millions was based on the fact that he thought the fossil was a few thousand years old.

I don't think he realised that the bone marrow in the Schweitzer isn't much like the bone marrow in a freshly killed animal.
Like I said, Ussher used the evidence had available to him and he created a date that fit the evidence. The creationist has come up with a figure for how long bone marrow lasts to fit the date he wants.

I've seen that happen. Personally I have no problem if Christians or people from other religions want to believe God created the earth billions of years ago. I expect they have some explanation for why the Bible's primeval history shouldn't be taken literally.

I've also seen some people try to offer "evolution is false" as a proof for God's existence. Now IMO there's nothing wrong with trying to prove that God exists but they are going about it in by far the most difficult way possible. I find their focus on "the earth is young, therefore god exists to be strangely materialist. The good thing about an invisible god is that he's unfalsifiable and most scientists won't even try to disprove his existence. A wiser man trying to prove god's existence would focus on god's intangibility.

Evolution could be disproven tomorrow and that wouldn't prove the earth is young. Earth could be proven to be young next week and that wouldn't prove God exists or prove a literal reading of Genesis 1 to 11. Those things would still need proof positive if they are to be believed, especially if they are to be believed on physical evidence as the creationist wants.

The creationist sets himself a very difficult task by trying to prove god's existence by way of a young earth. I think there must be easier methods he could use.He would survive but do you want him to live in a world of mere survival? A world without wonder? Animals survive. Do you want to reduce us to the status of animals, just survive, feed and breed?

I know a very devout Christian who is a hobbyist astronomer. His life would be so much poorer if astronomy had ended with Ptolemy. He doesn't say "I have bread to eat so who cares how the planets move".Quite a substantial one. The 1850s was the beginning of the so-called second industrial revolution, in which machines and engines were made to operate on the principles of Newtonian physics. Newton worked out his laws by studying the movements of the planets. He already started his observations with the premise that the solar system is centred around the sun, a piece of knowledge he inherited from earlier astronomers.

Without the second industrial revolution we probably wouldn't have gotten past the steam engine. An internal combustion engine relies on much more rapid motion. Newtonian physics has not only impacted on the initial invention of the automobile by the continued development of it right up until the present day. Ask yourself if you can become a mechanical engineer without understanding Newton's laws of motions, for which he used heliocentrism as a premise.

You may not be a mechanical engineer. Neither am I. Neither is the local fisherman or the local baker. But does the fisherman's boat use an internal combustion engine? Then the heliocentric model has impacted on him. Does the baker in your town use a truck? Does his bakery use electricity from a powerplant that uses an engine? Does the grain he uses come from a farm that uses modern machinery? Has the farmer also increased his yield using other fields of science?

We already have those things. We already have internal combustion engines and powerplants but not everything has been invented yet. The individual who eschews learning because he already has bread to eat will be poorer than one who finds employment in a lucrative technical field. The man who says "I have bread to eat, my learning stops here" may starve in the next crisis. The man of science may help to prevent the next crisis.

If the country says, we already know enough about the universe, we don't need further science. If the creationists get their way and science becomes based on lies and assertions, the country will fall behind technologically. Look at how your country has benefited from using (at the time) advanced technology in the past. If America had focused only on baking and fishing, it would be an impoverished and undeveloped country. If America forgets about science other countries will overtake it in technology. They will be more economically competitive. If America forgets about science, other countries will overtake it in military technology.It sure helped to develop the nuclear bomb. You can't win World War 2 using muskets. Without trucks and planes and rifles even Little Boy and Fat Man, all of which can trace their heritage back to Galileo, you'd be speaking Japanese or German now.