A Concern for Applying the Bible to the Natural Sciences

[The Barbarian]

6 minutes ago, Sparks said:

I don't think you have ever refuted my claims.

I showed you the racist foundations of YE creationism.    I showed you that Darwinists debunked the eugenic ideas of early YE creationsts and of the Nazis.  Specifically, Reginald Punnet showed their ideas were not only morally objectionable, but scientifically absurd.   Would you like some more details?

1 hour ago, The_Patriot21 said:

In fact, I very much doubt you've read the English. I went through it in detail, in my initial answer to the op, the accuracy of the text in English and Hebrew, and the significance of the wording and contex if you are curious you may scroll back up and read it. Though I very sincerely doubt you will. But regardless I won't be repeating it.

Sorry, even early Christians like St. Augustine showed that the "days" of creation could not be made to be literal days.    You may disagree with them, but it really doesn't matter.

1 hour ago, The_Patriot21 said:

But the reality is, God gave us His book.

So just let it be His way, instead of adding new interpretations to it.  

1 hour ago, The_Patriot21 said:

So in the text, both English and Hebrew, in the context it is absolutely literal.

As noted before, there can be no mornings and evenings with no sun to have them.   No way to dodge that one.

1 hour ago, The_Patriot21 said:

There is absolutely no room for a figurative translation. At all. Period. It's not there.

I realize you want it to be so, but St. Augustine is a much more reliable source than you are.

1 hour ago, The_Patriot21 said:

As stated scripture is black and white clear on the matter,

If it was, there would be broad agreement among Christians on it.   But as you know, there is not.   Demanding otherwise really won't make you more believable.

1 hour ago, The_Patriot21 said:

so I won't try further.

Wise move.  You have a good evening, too.

[RV_Wizard]

3 hours ago, Sparks said:

Where do you get this stuff? 

He has his own Bible.  It begins, In the beginning the universe created itself from nothing.  (Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing." - Christopher Hitchens)  Then in a geothermal vent some chemicals got together and formed a living cell.  And the evenings and the mornings were the first million years.

Then this single celled organism split into multi-celled organisms and eventually crawled out of the sea to become a land dwelling reptile.  Some grew legs and some grew roots, thus from the seed of the daffodil man would one day arise.  And the evenings and the mornings were the next million years.

Then the reptiles got larger and more violent, roaming the earth and eating each other.  Plants grew into trees.  Death and violence were everywhere.  Then the meteor hit and killed everything larger than a Pop Tart.  And the evenings and the mornings were the next 10 billion years.

After about 13.4 billion years, one primate evolved to the point where he could stand on two legs, take a wife, and kill off everyone else who had been born before him.  And this primate called himself Adam and his wife he called Eve.  There was no particular reason for him to do so.  But Adam and Eve had many children who had many children.  And the evenings and the mornings were the next three hundred thousand years.

Then one day there was a knock on the door.  A person said the he was their creator and that he was responsible for all that had happened.  Since there were no Fuller Brush salesmen at the time, Adam believed him.  And thus was written the first Bible.  Of course, nothing that was recorded was accurate because the universe had created itself out of nothingness. 

Today we have a modern day prophet saving us from the folly of the words of ancient shepherds and this is the religion he expects us to believe.

 

[RV_Wizard]

43 minutes ago, The Barbarian said:

I showed you the racist foundations of YE creationism.

Yes, how fondly I remember sitting around the fire with my grandparents, singing hymns and roasting marshmallows on a burning cross.  My G.G. grandfather, who was a fierce abolitionist and fought with the 91st Ohio infantry during the Civil War, would have been a little offended by being called a racist.  In fact, he would have put a .50 caliber ball between your eyes for the offense.  Fortunately, we know you're just spouting off and calling names because you think it's cute, having no real clue how many people you are libeling with your words.  Should we go into the sins of the Catholic church next?  Perhaps we should condemn Catholics because Pope Pius XII was notably silent on the Holocaust and the deportation of Italian-born Jews.  Do you see the parallel?

43 minutes ago, The Barbarian said:

As noted before, there can be no mornings and evenings with no sun to have them.

That's right.  In your Bible the command "Let there be light" never happened.

Flashlights don't work.  Neither do neon lights, LED's, incandescent bulbs or arc lights.  The only known source of light is the sun.  Prior to the creation of the sun, a star a billion times larger would produce only darkness.  Light comes ONLY from the sun... in your world.

Edited February 6, 2024 by RV_Wizard

[Sparks]

2 hours ago, The Barbarian said:

I showed you the racist foundations of YE creationism.   

You showed me the opinion of one man, just like your own opinion.

[The Barbarian]

I showed you the racist foundations of YE creationism.

1 hour ago, RV_Wizard said:

Yes, how fondly I remember sitting around the fire with my grandparents, singing hymns and roasting marshmallows on a burning cross. 

The Klan was officially creationist?  (Barbarian checks)

Powerful racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and popular racist advocates such as Frank Norris worked together to vilify evolution, promote racism, and begin the evolution-creationism controversy in the United States in the 1920s. The links between racism and creationism became explicit during Epperson v. Arkansas, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that laws banning the teaching of evolution in public schools are unconstitutional. Today, the relics of racism, evolution, and creationism persist in many forms, ranging from books such as The Bell Curve to educational institutions such as Bob Jones University.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1049743.pdf

So they were.    But I wouldn't take that to mean that every YE creationist is in the KKK.

1 hour ago, RV_Wizard said:

Fortunately, we know you're just spouting off and calling names because you think it's cute, having no real clue how many people you are libeling with your words. 

See above.   And notice ICR founder Henry Morris as late as the 1990s, was blathering about the imagined intellectual and spiritual inferiority of black people whom he said God intended to be "servants" to white people.

Today, as I said, many creationists have rejected the racist foundations of YE creationism.   But the facts remain.

1 hour ago, RV_Wizard said:

Perhaps we should condemn Catholics because Pope Pius XII was notably silent on the Holocaust

In fact, the Pope hid Jewish Italians on his own property at no small risk to himself.

The Chief Rabbi of Rome became a Catholic because of this.

Early in 1940, Hitler made an attempt to prevent the new Pope from maintaining the anti-Nazi stance he had taken before his election. He sent his underling, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to try to dissuade Pius XII from following his predecessor’s policies. “Von Ribbentrop, granted a formal audience on March 11, 1940, went into a lengthy harangue on the invincibility of the Third Reich, the inevitability of a Nazi victory, and the futility of papal alignment with the enemies of the Führer. Pius XII heard von Ribbentrop out politely and impassively. Then he opened an enormous ledger on his desk and, in his perfect German, began to recite a catalogue of the persecutions inflicted by the Third Reich in Poland, listing the date, place, and precise details of each crime. The audience was terminated; the Pope’s position was clearly unshakable.”

The Pope secretly worked to save as many Jewish lives as possible from the Nazis, whose extermination campaign began its most intense phase only after the War had started. It is here that the anti-Catholics try to make their hay: Pius XII is charged either with cowardly silence or with outright support of the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews.

...

“Playwright Rolf Hochhuth criticized the Pontiff for his (alleged) silence, but even he admitted that, on the level of action, Pius XII generously aided the Jews to the best of his ability. Today, after a quarter-century of the arbitrary and one-sided presentation offered the public, the word ‘silence’ has taken on a much wider connotation. It stands also for ‘indifference,’ ‘apathy,’ ‘inaction,’ and, implicitly, for anti-Semitism.”

...

The Pope’s efforts did not go unrecognized by Jewish authorities, even during the War. The Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Isaac Herzog, sent the Pope a personal message of thanks on February 28, 1944, in which he said: “The people of Israel will never forget what His Holiness and his illustrious delegates, inspired by the eternal principles of religion which form the very foundations of true civilization, are doing for us unfortunate brothers and sisters in the most tragic hour of our history, which is living proof of divine Providence in this world.”

Other Jewish leaders chimed in also. Rabbi Safran of Bucharest, Romania, sent a note of thanks to the papal nuncio on April 7, 1944: “It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and consolation we experienced because of the concern of the supreme pontiff, who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews. . . . The Jews of Romania will never forget these facts of historic importance.”

The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, also made a statement of thanks: “What the Vatican did will be indelibly and eternally engraved in our hearts. . . . Priests and even high prelates did things that will forever be an honor to Catholicism.”

After the war, Zolli became a Catholic and, to honor the Pope for what he had done for the Jews and the role he had played in Zolli’s conversion, took the name “Eugenio”—the Pope’s given name—as his own baptismal name. Zolli stressed that his conversion was for theological reasons, which was certainly true, but the fact that the Pope had worked so hard on behalf of the Jews no doubt played a role in inspiring him to look at the truths of Christianity.

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-pius-xii-protected-jews

Feel free to fact-check this as you might.   It's all true.  

1 hour ago, RV_Wizard said:

That's right.  In your Bible the command "Let there be light" never happened.

If you feel you have to misrepresent what I said, isn't that a pretty good clue about your position?    If morning only meant "big light in the sky", then moonrise would be morning.   C'mon.

 

[The Barbarian]

13 minutes ago, Sparks said:

You showed me the opinion of one man, just like your own opinion.

It's more than Henry Morris.    The creationist anti-Darwinian Louis Agassiz even claimed that blacks were not descended from Adam and Eve.

Naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) became a professor at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School in 1847 and remained at the university in Cambridge for the rest of his life.  He became convinced of the validity of the theory of polygenism--that there was a plurality of origins of the human races.  Defenders of slavery used polygenism to maintain that the different races were completely and genetically distinct and that slavery was a natural condition for an inferior race.

https://collections.countway.harvard.edu/onview/exhibits/show/this-abominable-traffic/agassiz-and-polygenism

A fundamentalist Christian University has apologized for racist policies including a one-time ban on interracial dating that wasn't lifted until nine years ago and its unwillingness to admit black students until 1971.

Bob Jones University founded in 1927 in South Carolina said its rules on race were shaped by culture instead of the Bible, according to a statement posted Thursday on its Web site.

The university, with about 5,000 students, didn't begin admitting black students until nearly 20 years after the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling found public segregated schools were unconstitutional.

"We failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna27845030

Bob Jones University believes the account of origins in Genesis is a factual narrative of historical events; that is, God created the universe, including all original kinds of living organisms (including man) in six literal days

https://www.bju.edu/about/positions.php

There's more.  Would you like me to show you more?

 

[Sparks]

1 minute ago, The Barbarian said:

There's more.  Would you like me to show you more?

Yes, if you can show me the opinion of YEC that ever lived, and then the shift change to what you claim, that would be sufficient. 

[The Barbarian]

2 hours ago, RV_Wizard said:

He has his own Bible. 

I just accept it as God gave it to us.   You're unhappy because I don't accept your revisions.   I know how your Bible works.

2 hours ago, RV_Wizard said:

It begins, In the beginning the universe created itself from nothing.

In my Bible it says "In the beginning God created heaven, and earth."   I like it better than yours.

Why keep inventing new revisions for scripture and just accept it His way?

 

[The Barbarian]

1 minute ago, Sparks said:

Yes, if you can show me the opinion of YEC that ever lived

Remember, I didn't say every YEC is a racist.  Today, many, if not most of them, are not racists.   I'm merely showing you the racist foundations of YEC, which have caused death and misery to many.   I fully concede that many YECs today reject the racism we see from many of their early leaders.

 

[Sparks]

7 minutes ago, The Barbarian said:

Remember, I didn't say every YEC is a racist.  Today, many, if not most of them, are not racists.   I'm merely showing you the racist foundations of YEC, which have caused death and misery to many.   I fully concede that many YECs today reject the racism we see from many of their early leaders.

 

You are showing me the opinion of one man.  Not the racist foundations of the Young Earth Creationists.  Meanwhile, you have to deal with all the racists that ended up killing millions over evolutionary beliefs, like Hitler.