(no subject)
"Well, what DO you want to do?"
People say that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, "because the Bible says so". Where does it say? Is it when you add up the ages of all the people who begot the other people, and were, in turn, begotten? Also, it starts with "God created the Heavens and the Earth" right at the beginning, and "then came the first day". What happened before the first day? Probably a lot of stuff involving the uncoupling of gravity and the strong nuclear force, but I doubt the Bible would have sold as well if it had mentioned all that.
Here's a good one. Galileo got in trouble with the church because he said that the Earth revolved around the sun, when it quite clearly says that Joshua commanded the sun to stop for three days. The sun stopped, not the Earth. The sun moves, the Earth doesn't. Eventually, after Galileo died, the church gave up on this because the evidence was overwhelming that the Earth revolves around the sun, and they didn't want to sit there, looking like idiots.
Point: The church eventually saw reason on an issue where the Bible says, verbatim, that science was wrong. With evolution, the Bible never mentions in exact words that "the Earth was formed X years before this book was written", and yet people refuse to cave on the subject.
Back when people thought the Earth was the center of the universe, they saw that the planets that moved through the sky would stop in certain places and move backwards a short distance before moving forward again. Martin Luther (founder of Protestantism) said that although the movement of the planets was a natural phenomenon, their retrograde motion was a miracle and proof of God's existence. Then people figured out that the planets and Earth orbit the sun together and the retrograde motion is just a point-of-view effect.
Point: Lots of things seem "complex" until you understand how they work. So far, every observable natural phenomenon that has been explained has been completely natural, no "divine intervention" has ever been conclusively proven.Just because something is complex doesn't mean it's magical.
"Maybe God created the Earth and the universe to LOOK like they were really old, but they're actually very young compared to what science says."
Okay, so you're suggesting that God created the Earth with half-decayed radioactive isotopes throughout the crust, countless fossils showing ancestral features to modern species, stars and galaxies billions of light-years away with photons already 99% of the way to Earth to make it look like the light had been traveling for that long, and the human species with 99.5% of its DNA in common with our closest non-human relatives, and dozens of vestigial structures that serve no function at all but suggest a link with non-human ancestors.
Point: I guess you could also say that God created the universe last Tuesday, along with you and all your memories of the years in which you grew up, huh? "Last Tuesday-ism", I think that's called.
"All the answers are in the Bible. It's infallible."
Sure, maybe the LORD YAHWEH did inspire prophets to write the Bible. So, they wrote it in ancient Hebrew, transcribed it a few dozen times, lost the original copies, transcribed it a few more times, and finally it got translated into English. Is it ever so slightly possible that maybe a few key bits of information might have been lost there? Keep in mind that in Hebrew, the difference between certain letters can be as little as a single dot. Just ask Dodanim and Rodanim.
Point: Most of these arguments against evolutionary science boil down to, "because the Bible says so". Even if the Bible is the word of God, it's been handled by flawed human hands ever since, like an ancient game of Telephone. "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth purple monkey dishwasher."
"The science in support of evolution is pretty flimsy"
All it would take is a single rabbit fossil in Cambrian deposits to disprove everything that science has been showing us. Such a fossil has never been found. And don't believe any of that happy horseshit about human footprints in Mesozoic deposits. These fossils have never stood up to scrutiny .
Point: The science is solid.
People say that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, "because the Bible says so". Where does it say? Is it when you add up the ages of all the people who begot the other people, and were, in turn, begotten? Also, it starts with "God created the Heavens and the Earth" right at the beginning, and "then came the first day". What happened before the first day? Probably a lot of stuff involving the uncoupling of gravity and the strong nuclear force, but I doubt the Bible would have sold as well if it had mentioned all that.
Here's a good one. Galileo got in trouble with the church because he said that the Earth revolved around the sun, when it quite clearly says that Joshua commanded the sun to stop for three days. The sun stopped, not the Earth. The sun moves, the Earth doesn't. Eventually, after Galileo died, the church gave up on this because the evidence was overwhelming that the Earth revolves around the sun, and they didn't want to sit there, looking like idiots.
Point: The church eventually saw reason on an issue where the Bible says, verbatim, that science was wrong. With evolution, the Bible never mentions in exact words that "the Earth was formed X years before this book was written", and yet people refuse to cave on the subject.
Back when people thought the Earth was the center of the universe, they saw that the planets that moved through the sky would stop in certain places and move backwards a short distance before moving forward again. Martin Luther (founder of Protestantism) said that although the movement of the planets was a natural phenomenon, their retrograde motion was a miracle and proof of God's existence. Then people figured out that the planets and Earth orbit the sun together and the retrograde motion is just a point-of-view effect.
Point: Lots of things seem "complex" until you understand how they work. So far, every observable natural phenomenon that has been explained has been completely natural, no "divine intervention" has ever been conclusively proven.Just because something is complex doesn't mean it's magical.
"Maybe God created the Earth and the universe to LOOK like they were really old, but they're actually very young compared to what science says."
Okay, so you're suggesting that God created the Earth with half-decayed radioactive isotopes throughout the crust, countless fossils showing ancestral features to modern species, stars and galaxies billions of light-years away with photons already 99% of the way to Earth to make it look like the light had been traveling for that long, and the human species with 99.5% of its DNA in common with our closest non-human relatives, and dozens of vestigial structures that serve no function at all but suggest a link with non-human ancestors.
Point: I guess you could also say that God created the universe last Tuesday, along with you and all your memories of the years in which you grew up, huh? "Last Tuesday-ism", I think that's called.
"All the answers are in the Bible. It's infallible."
Sure, maybe the LORD YAHWEH did inspire prophets to write the Bible. So, they wrote it in ancient Hebrew, transcribed it a few dozen times, lost the original copies, transcribed it a few more times, and finally it got translated into English. Is it ever so slightly possible that maybe a few key bits of information might have been lost there? Keep in mind that in Hebrew, the difference between certain letters can be as little as a single dot. Just ask Dodanim and Rodanim.
Point: Most of these arguments against evolutionary science boil down to, "because the Bible says so". Even if the Bible is the word of God, it's been handled by flawed human hands ever since, like an ancient game of Telephone. "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth purple monkey dishwasher."
"The science in support of evolution is pretty flimsy"
All it would take is a single rabbit fossil in Cambrian deposits to disprove everything that science has been showing us. Such a fossil has never been found. And don't believe any of that happy horseshit about human footprints in Mesozoic deposits. These fossils have never stood up to scrutiny .
Point: The science is solid.