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Suspicion Against Scientists?


thomas t

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5 hours ago, thomas t said:

... because man is responsible for that for the most part, I think. We shouldn't be shifting the blame and expect God to provide answers for that, I think.

You argued that if an theory wasn't clear to (You and modern readers) that there could be interpreted a period between days (Yoms) that we didn't have an option to suggest this interpretation. So fine. You have given us a premise that states God must be clear in how he communicates in order to accept that communication. 

I gave a counter-example of the problem of evil which is the single largest unknown that theists have had to defend for 2300 years. 

If God being clear to both ancient and modern readers alike, without the type of deep contextual and language and Hebrew Grammar, figurative structure, etc. then we would certainly expect a clear concise answer to the problem of evil. Not chopped up over a half-dozen texts, not spanning texts compiled over 1000s of years, not deduced after 2000 years of doctrinal discussions. Show me that text. 

Job gives no explanation of the problem of evil.

Jesus when ask about the tower of Siloam dodges the question completely.

I'm not asking you to give me it, I know it. 

I'm asking you to answer my knockdown objection to your GOD ALWAYS PRESENTS CLEAR ANSWERS understandable to both ancients and modern alike.

If as I contend, the most important objection to non-believers is the problem of evil then it follows that it would be important to God to give us the clarity you suggest. Please provide a reference where he CLEARLY does that.

Or upon further reflection you might reconsider your clarity standard as arbitrary and subjective and approach the text of Genesis abductively. That is to say see which of seven present Bible-believing, conservative theories about the text of Genesis gives the most reasonable account of the data of scripture found in Gen 1-2.4 in terms of depth, breadth, consistency based on exegesis of the text(s). Remember that the sacred space requirements of the Levitical laws are completely opaque as to why we need to do these things. 

 

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23 minutes ago, Uber Genius said:

Yes most would agree, we have some truculent responses missing the point of the context of the original distinction which was essential DOCTRINE, to which I made an obviously unsuccessful attempt to correct the equivocation but alas querulous and truculent are often attended by stubbornness.  At this point, why bother? It may be time to abandon hope of a rational discussion about Essential Doctrine having nothing to do with CANON, or view of sanctification, or view of end times. Your patience outshines my own. 

Hey, speaking of my band, I just remembered this: One of the fairly judgmental members of my band said, in his between song banter at one of our church gigs, how he would see people on Sunday morning taking a load of hay or tobacco into the barn and he'd say to himself, "why are you not going to church?"

To which I said into my own hot mic, "Maybe they're Seventh Day Adventist." Nobody laughed. And yeah, that was fairly close to the end of my time with that band. 

BTW, when I commented to the band leader one day about the terrible "seat of the pants" preaching I was hearing at those small churches, and they needed to prepare a solid message, she literally argued that a "prepared sermon" was of man and a "spirit led" unprepared sermon was from God. I asked if the same was true of the quality of our musicianship. :)

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29 minutes ago, Still Alive said:

To which I said into my own hot mic, "Maybe they're Seventh Day Adventist." Nobody laughed. And yeah, that was fairly close to the end of my time with that band. 

Hilarious. 

I was raised in the Episcopal Church (a dead country club) then after becoming Christian started attending a charismatic church. The people were lovely, but the preaching was ...of the spirit-led variety. I held the same view as your band leader qua preaching until the age of 20 when I started to examine the rationality of Jesus. His enormous intellect, and his arguments were amazing. He prepared and memorized material. Further, so did Paul and the author of Hebrews. Once I started doing inductive Bible studies in the early 1080s I was hooked. One quick aside. I had a great lay Bible teacher at my Charismatic church. He exposed me to Hebrew and Greek. Our class surveyed church history, and systematic theology. 

I have been fortunate to be exposed to a wide variety of Christian practice and beliefs. This is why I eschew the boundary-keeping in favor of letting the HS develop people intellectually over time as they mature.  

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58 minutes ago, Still Alive said:

BTW, what I said was, "Folks, eternity is not about where you are going, heaven or hell. It's about whether or not you are saved from death. (I then quoted John 3:16 and Romans 6:23). Eternity is not about geography. It is about condition."

Strangely uncontroversial. Perhaps the education level of the group didn't afford them the opportunity to parse your statement properly. 

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On 10/29/2018 at 6:43 AM, thomas t said:
using data and sources.
Please use one example and be specific. Explain which exact data you think was manipulated. Please indicate your source and explain why you deem your sources to be more trustworthy
than the scientists accused.
"google this and that" is not enough to back up a claim, I think.

:sherlock:

The

"Our Lord and God! You are worthy to receive glory, honor, and power. For you created all things, and by your will they were given existence and life." Revelation 4:11 (Good News Translation)

Darwinists Are Not Impressed

Whether or not you believe that what has happened on Earth violates the second law, I can’t imagine anything in all of science that is more clear and more obvious than that unintelligent forces alone cannot produce such things as Apple iPhones. But Darwinists are not impressed. They believe that natural selection, alone among all natural causes, can create spectacular order out of disorder, and even produce beings that can write science texts and design computers.

That it seems even superficially plausible (until we think about the details) that selection could create such order out of disorder relies completely on the fact that living things are able to reproduce, that they are able to preserve their complex structures and pass them on to their descendants without significant degradation, generation after generation. Without reproduction, there are no variants to select from. Reproduction is the most fundamental characteristic of life. We see it happen everywhere, so we may feel there is nothing “unnatural” about reproduction. 

Imagine Self-Reproducing Cars

But to appreciate how unnatural the astonishing reproductive abilities of living things really are, imagine trying to design cars that are able to give birth to other cars. Although it is far beyond our current technology, imagine that it were possible to construct a fleet of cars that contained completely automated car-building factories inside, with the ability to construct new cars — and not just normal new cars, but new cars containing automated car-building factories inside them. If we left these cars alone and let them reproduce themselves for many generations, is there any chance we would eventually see major advances arise through natural selection of the resulting duplication errors? 

Of course not. Without intelligent humans there to fix the mechanical problems that would inevitably arise, the whole process would grind to a halt after a few generations. We are so accustomed to seeing animals make copies of themselves without significant degradation that we dismiss this as just another “natural” process. But if we actually saw cars with fully automated car factories inside, making new cars with car factories inside them, maybe we would realize what an astonishing process reproduction really is. “How do these instruction sets not make mistakes as they build what is us?” asks mathematician Alexander Tsiaras in the wonderful TED Talk: https://evolutionnews.org/2018/11/why-evolution-and-reproduction-are-unnatural/

Trouble

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes on him may not perish, but have life eternal. John 3:16 (Darby Bible Translation)

I’m a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, and I believe that Jesus was raised from the dead.  So do dozens of my colleagues. How can this be?

Hypothesis one: We’re not talking about a literal resurrection. Perhaps it is just an inspiring myth that served to justify the propagation of Jesus’ exalted ethical teachings. A literal resurrection contradicts the known laws of nature. Maybe scientists can celebrate the idea of Jesus’s spirit living on, while his body remained in the grave.

But the first disciples attested to a physical resurrection. How could an untruth logically support high moral character? How could it have sustained the apostles through the extremes of persecution they experienced founding Christianity? And is celebrating a myth consistent with scientific integrity?

Hypothesis two: We really believe in the bodily resurrection of the first century Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth. My Christian colleagues at MIT – and millions of other scientists worldwide – somehow think that a literal miracle like the resurrection of Jesus is possible. And we are following a long tradition. The founders of the scientific revolution and many of the greatest scientists of the intervening centuries were serious Christian believers. For Robert Boyle (of the ideal gas law, co-founder in 1660 of the Royal Society) the resurrection was a fact. For James Clerk Maxwell (whose Maxwell equations of 1862 govern electromagnetism) a deep philosophical analysis undergirded his belief in the resurrection. And for William Phillips (Nobel prize-winner in 1997 for methods to trap atoms with laser light) the resurrection is not discredited by science.

To explain how a scientist can be a Christian is actually quite simple. Science cannot and does not disprove the resurrection. Natural science describes the normal reproducible working of the world of nature. Indeed, the key meaning of “nature”, as Boyle emphasized, is “the normal course of events.” Miracles like the resurrection are inherently abnormal. It does not take modern science to tell us that humans don’t rise from the dead. People knew that perfectly well in the first century; just as they knew that the blind from birth don’t as adults regain their sight, or water doesn’t instantly turn into wine. http://www.veritas.org/can-scientist-believe-resurrection-three-hypotheses/         

With Men

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness, because what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, because they are understood through what has been made. So people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give him thanks, but they became futile in their thoughts and their senseless hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for an image resembling mortal human beings or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Romans 1:18-23 (NET Bible)

Thus, as we see, scientism seeks to elevate the methods of natural science to a level where it is the bar by which every other intellectual discipline is held. Scientism ridicules faith and religion and tells us that “God is dead.” Scientism tells us that the “debate is over,” so shut up and get in line.

And, of course, scientism leads us to technocracy. “I dread government in the name of science,” said Lewis. “That is how tyrannies come in.” What a profound conclusion! How many of us have been duped in the name of “science”?

We can see the results. Generations are taught that life began without God; that the use of fossil fuels is warming the earth; that homosexuality is genetic; that abortion is not really the taking of a life; that confiscating the wealth of some to give to others is “fair;” that guns are evil; and so on. Of course, we then get laws and official government policy based on such conclusions.

Sadly, too many of us then grow accustomed to our chains. We become children, or pupils of the state (like the Obama campaign video featuring “Julia”). We continue to elect leaders who perpetuate the cycle of the “welfare state” based significantly on the lies of scientism.

It’s time for Americans to wake up to this perversion of science and return science, faith, philosophy and, by all means, common sense, to their proper place. https://www.gainesvilletimes.com/columnists/opinion-community-columnists/thomas-technocracy-is-the-allure-of-scientism/

Is Most Lie And Pontificate

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. But about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, ‘You must not eat it or touch it, or you will die.’  “No! You will not die,” the serpent said to the woman. Genesis 3:2-4 (Christian Standard Bible)

Note: This is Part 7 in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, and Part 6 here. Coyne writes that Darwin “had little direct evidence for selection acting in natural populations.” Actually, Darwin had no direct evidence for natural selection; the best he could do in The Origin of Species was “give one or two imaginary illustrations.” It wasn’t until a century later that Bernard Kettlewell provided what he called “Darwin’s missing evidence” for natural selection — a shift in the proportion of light- and dark-colored peppered moths that Kettlewell attributed to camouflage and bird predation.

Since then, biologists have found lots of direct evidence for natural selection. Coyne describes some of it, including an increase in average beak depth of finches on the Galápagos Islands and a change in flowering time in wild mustard plants in Southern California — both due to drought. Like Darwin, Coyne also compares natural selection to the artificial selection used in plant and animal breeding.

But these examples of selection — natural as well as artificial — involve only minor changes within existing species. Breeders were familiar with such changes before 1859, which is why Darwin did not write a book titled How Existing Species Change Over Time; he wrote a book titled The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. “Darwin called his great work On the Origin of Species,” wrote Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr in 1982, “for he was fully conscious of the fact that the change from one species into another was the most fundamental problem of evolution.” Yet, Mayr had written earlier, “Darwin failed to solve the problem indicated by the title of his work.” In 1997, evolutionary biologist Keith Stewart Thomson wrote: “A matter of unfinished business for biologists is the identification of evolution’s smoking gun,” and “the smoking gun of evolution is speciation, not local adaptation and differentiation of populations.” Before Darwin, the consensus was that species can vary only within certain limits; indeed, centuries of artificial selection had seemingly demonstrated such limits experimentally. “Darwin had to show that the limits could be broken,” wrote Thomson, “so do we.” https://evolutionnews.org/2009/05/selection_and_speciation_why_d/

While Putting  Man's Religion Of Scientism

Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee. Psalms 119:11 (King James Bible)

Worldview 1: Biblical

One of the most debated questions in history is answered firmly within the first five words of the Bible. “In the Beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.” Genesis 1:1 The Bible gives a full account of how
God purposefully created the universe as well as our planet, wildlife, and especially us.

Worldview 2: Naturalistic

In brief, Naturalism teaches that the world came about by chance. By accident and the perfect conditions, life slowly evolved from a simple organism to human life today.  This is a brief account of Darwinian Evolution. How life came about is a
theory; the theory is presented as fact.
https://www.fbalions.org/editoruploads/files/Middle School/Copy of BH-Topic 5- Priya Hansen.pdf

Before Creation

Thy word is true from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever. Psalms 119:165 (Kings James Bible)

There is a very sinister idea making the rounds these days, an idea even taught in the schools as the truth. That idea is that science is grounded only in facts and religion is grounded solely in faith in the Bible. Therefore, the theory goes, when it comes to the origin of life, evolution may be taught in the schools, but not creation. The truth is that both of these views are grounded in a huge leap of faith and both claim to be reasonable. The creationist indeed places her faith in intelligent design, and finds in this faith a reasonable explanation of life and its origin. However, the evolutionist also operates by faith: faith in the inexplicable and wholly random origin of something out of nothing! Make no mistake, this is a leap of faith, an astounding assumption not based on any observable facts. For Christians, faith in intelligent design as explanation for the origin of life is far more reasonable than faith in randomness and blind chance.

When it comes to miracles, it is fair to conclude that they lie outside of science, but are not opposed to science. God can and does intervene in history, so scientists (and all of us) do well to be humble in the face of miracle. But Christians (and everybody else as well) also do well not to call something a miracle just because we don’t understand it. When both these positions are understood and accepted, science and the Bible are not at odds. They are both gifts from God.

Let’s remember, too, that the Bible is not a scientific textbook. Although Christians accept the Bible as entirely true, it does not use scientific terminology. After all, it was written thousands of years ago! So it uses terms such as “sunrise” and “sunset”, even though we know that the sun does not rise or set. The Bible is a casebook of divine love and admonition, as well as the very human response of failure and triumph.

So although the Bible is not a scientific treatise, it is our guidebook for life. It teaches us amazement in the face of life’s mysteries. On our sickbed when all the answers of science have been exhausted, we throw ourselves on the hope so wonderfully described in the Bible. We live here by faith and reach for life beyond the grave. In its pages we find the story of our origin and destiny. Has it become your guidebook, too? https://www.biblica.com/resources/bible-faqs/is-the-bible-at-odds-with-science/

~

Look As Long As One May

His love endures forever. to him who alone does great wonders, His love endures forever. who by his understanding made the heavens, His love endures forever. who spread out the earth upon the waters,

His love endures forever. who made the great lights— His love endures forever. the sun to govern the day, His love endures forever. the moon and stars to govern the night; Psalms 135"4-9 (New International Version)

One Will Never Observe, Measure, Or Recreate Evolution

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said: Who is this who obscures My counsel by words without knowledge? Now brace yourselfa like a man; I will question you, and you shall inform Me!

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who fixed its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched a measuring line across it?

On what were its foundations laid, or who set its core in place— while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Job 38:1-7 (Berean Study Bible)

Upon The Face Of Earth Today Except I n Saturday Morning Cartoons 

And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world has been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ: Ephesians 3:9 (American King James Version)

i.e., Your Father Is A Rock And Your Mother Is A Turnip, lol~!
Goofy Racists

~

Be Blessed Beloved Of The KING

 The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voiceb goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. Psalms 19:1-4 (English Standard Version)

The Bible contains the mind of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners, and the happiness of believers. Its doctrines are holy, its precepts are binding, its histories are true, and its decisions are immutable.

Read it to be wise, believe it to be safe, and practice it to be holy. It contains light to direct you, food to support you, and comfort to cheer you.

It is the traveler’s map, the pilgrim’s staff, the pilot’s compass, the soldier’s sword and the Christian’s charter. Here too, Heaven is opened and the gates of Hell disclosed.

Christ is its grand subject, our good its design, and the glory of God its end. It should fill the memory, rule the heart and guide the feet. Read it slowly, frequently and prayerfully.  It is a mine of wealth, a paradise of glory, and a river of pleasure.

It is given you in life, will be opened at the judgment, and be remembered forever. It involves the highest responsibility, rewards the greatest labor, and will condemn all who trifle with its sacred contents. 

From The Front Of My Gideon Bible

Edited by FresnoJoe
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9 hours ago, Scott Free said:

90% of "scientific" research in the media is paid for by special interest groups and has not been subjected to peer review at the time of their announcement.

Please support this wild conjecture.

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11 minutes ago, one.opinion said:

Please support this wild conjecture.

Published research findings are sometimes refuted by subsequent evidence, with ensuing confusion and disappointment. Refutation and controversy is seen across the range of research designs, from clinical trials and traditional epidemiological studies to the most modern molecular research. There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false. US National Library of Medicine

Companies routinely use research studies to promote products or positions. White bread won’t cause you to gain weight and is nutritious, a study by the Cooper Institute for Aerobic Research found. Its sponsor: the maker of Wonder Bread. Chocolate may actually inhibit cavities, concluded a study by the Princeton Dental Resource Center, which is funded by Mars, the maker of M&M’s and other chocolate candies. The U.S. public’s faith in so-called scientific research gives the studies impact, even when they contradict common sense and are patently self-serving. “Most members of the media are ill-equipped to judge a technical study,” Crossen correctly points out. “Even if the science hasn’t been explained or published in a U.S. journal, the media may jump on a study if it promises entertainment for readers or viewers. And if the media jump, that is good enough for many Americans.” Harvard Business Review

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9 minutes ago, Scott Free said:

Published research findings are sometimes refuted by subsequent evidence, with ensuing confusion and disappointment.

It is absolutely true that the media frequently overstates and sensationalizes actual reasearch findings. But let’s no go overboard with unsupportable claims like the 90% figure.

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18 minutes ago, one.opinion said:

It is absolutely true that the media frequently overstates and sensationalizes actual reasearch findings. But let’s no go overboard with unsupportable claims like the 90% figure.

90% sounds about right.  Beyond published studies that are in peer reviewed journals, take a look at how few of the work cited can be repeated.  Things are frequently not as they appear.

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1 hour ago, one.opinion said:

It is absolutely true that the media frequently overstates and sensationalizes actual reasearch findings. But let’s no go overboard with unsupportable claims like the 90% figure.

I read that figure in an article, but I can not find it. The term "vast majority" will also suffice in the description of this problem.

Edited by Scott Free
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