[_ Old Earth _] Theistic Evolution and ape-men...

[VirginShallConceive]

If it were true that Genesis was meant to be taken literally, God could have made that clear as well, in a forward. But He did not do that, either.

However, He did give us tools like critical thinking and common sense

By the Grace of God, He certainly did give us the ability to think critically so that we may realize that it is the default position for something to be taken literally unless stated otherwise. If I say, "I went to the grocery store to buy some bread", it is meant to be taken literally at face value.

to be able to detemrine that a narrative that claims that plants existed before the earth was formed is not able to be both literal and true.

Exactly what part of "The Creator of the Universe" do you not understand? The Creator of the Universe claimed it in His narrative.

 

[Adam]

By the Grace of God, He certainly did give us the ability to think critically so that we may realize that it is the default position for something to be taken literally unless stated otherwise. If I say, "I went to the grocery store to buy some bread", it is meant to be taken literally at face value.

Those are assumptions we make on a case by case basis.

If someone said they had a "crappy day"?



There is no default position for communication. We communicate simultaneously in literal and exaggerated terms. We use anecdotes as well as exact measures.

So, yes, if you said "I went to the store to buy some bread" in that instance you meant it to be taken literally. That doesn't mean that everything you say is then, by default, a literal statment.


You could have said "I went to the store to buy some bread. The cashier that rang me up was smoking hot."

Am I to take that literally? Partially, yes. Partially, no.

 

[Adam]

Exactly what part of "The Creator of the Universe" do you not understand? The Creator of the Universe claimed it in His narrative.

Claimed what in His narrative? That the Genesis account must be talken literally? No, He did not.

 

[Adam]

It is VERY relevant to it as God could have created it in any order He saw fit. And He saw fit to create everything in the order laid out in the first chapter of Genesis.

Except for in reality, the order was different than laid out in the first chapter of Genesis.

 

[VirginShallConceive]

Those are assumptions we make on a case by case basis.

If someone said they had a "crappy day"?



There is no default position for communication. We communicate simultaneously in literal and exaggerated terms. We use anecdotes as well as exact measures.

So, yes, if you said "I went to the store to buy some bread" in that instance you meant it to be taken literally. That doesn't mean that everything you say is then, by default, a literal statment.


You could have said "I went to the store to buy some bread. The cashier that rang me up was smoking hot."

Am I to take that literally? Partially, yes. Partially, no.

Everything that you said above is true. These are intelligent, good points. There is one major thing. When you and I are trying to communicate to others, I can assume that we are successful most of the time. If I'm talking to you literally, you can almost always or even possibly 100% always know if I'm being literal or not. Now, The Creator of the Universe gives us a Message. I take it literal. The overwhelming majority of people who have ever heard this message have taken it literal. So, either God lacks the communication skills that you and I possess, or, He meant it literally, and that's why most people took it literally, or He left us out to dry for the LULZ. Take your pick.

 

[Adam]

That's a false dichotomy, as well as an appeal to numbers.

Here is my pick:

Truth is not established by a majority perspective, especially when it comes to God's word.

As it is written, the harvest is great, but the labourers few, many called, but few chosen.


I don't base my beliefs or actions based on what everyone else thinks or does.


Besides, a literal interpretation is rather modern and mostly an American phenomenon and has no bearing on the original intent.

 

[cupid dave]

Gensis is not a science book. It is a book of symbols that represent IDEALS, not historic facts.

No.
No way.
That is merely your subjective opinon.
There is nothing ni scripture that tells us that.

genesis is thegospel truth and every verse has supporting evidence from academia and science.
Some of the things the Bible tells us is in a literary form of metaphor or analogy due only to the need to avoid a more direct statement of facts that th ancient reader never could have handled.

Flood of Modern man during a mass extinction of ape/men ancestors in our ascent could not have been directly stated.
But the story contains certan keys whch tell us that it means what we are discvering now.

Like the inbreeding with Neanderthal is mentioned as the sons of god entering into daughters of men, and like men kliving 950 "years' which is ALMOST believable to those ancients, but means 950,000 years to us.

That is why scripture advises us to remember that a day is a 1000 years to god.

 

[cupid dave]

It wil lnot be. If God's Word says "130 years", it is 130 years. If God wanted to, He would have said "1,000,000", "2,000,000", or "3,000,000".

.

Often god is speaking figuratively because he tells us that "a day is a thousand years t the lord."

But in many cases, the very choice of the words clue us that we could be making an subjectve evaluation as the length of to=ime indicated.

Like in Gen 1, the word for "day" is yowm.Yowm does not actually mean a 24 hour earth day.
It can mean haf a day, a year, or an age.

It aparently was wisely chosen so ancient readers could accept a single 24 hour day of creation, but NEVER eras of millions of years duration






.

 

[cupid dave]

Factual evidence? Well, which is it?
Was Noah a historical figure who built an ark, or was Noah a race we now call Cro-Magnon?

If the hypothesis of you Scripture-tampering mental gymnasts became the mainstream, would you ditch the term "Cro-Magnon" and replace it with "Noah"?
Did Noah take is sons with him, or did he fit three entire races of man on one boat?

Noah apparently was on member of a species I believe was Cro-magnon who developed as a chronospecies, one derived from the earlier Homo sapiensidaltu.
But he was he individual who fathered the three sons, because all men livingtoday have a common father whoived 40,000 years ago according to recent genetic vidence.




Homo sapiens idaltu is an extinct subspeciesof Homo sapiens that lived almost 160,000 years ago in Pleistocene Africa.[1]Idaltu is from the Saho-Afarword meaning "elder or first born". (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)



A chronospeciesdescribes a group of one species derived from the sequential development pattern which involves continual and uniform changes from an extinct ancestral form. Throughout this change, there is only one species in the lineage at any point in time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronospecies



The Ark which Noah prepared was in his mind, held inside his skull that could carry over beyond the extinction of Neanderthals and tht world which they had dominated and understood.

 

[VirginShallConceive]

The Ark which Noah prepared was in his mind, held inside his skull that could carry over beyond the extinction of Neanderthals and tht world which they had dominated and understood.

Interesting. How do these verses fit in?

"Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch."-Genesis 6:14

"Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive."-Genesis 6:20

 

[VirginShallConceive]

That's a false dichotomy,

You are right. You don't have to pick from the three I gave. There are other choices as well, and I am aware of some of them.

as well as an appeal to numbers.

That was literally "me appealing to you to consider some numbers", but it wasn't the argument fallacy that carries that name. When you are discussing the success rate of an extremely capable sentient being(God) trying to get a message across when it appears that this being feels that it is extremely important that its message does get across, an appeal to numbers is just that, an appeal, not a fallacy. Remove the intent/non-intent variable of the agent(God) we are discussing, then sure, it's a fallacy. "You say the earth is spherical-shaped. I and the rest of the world say it is flat. You must be wrong." Now that's an "appeal to numbers" fallacy.

Here is my pick:

Truth is not established by a majority perspective, especially when it comes to God's word.

As it is written, the harvest is great, but the labourers few, many called, but few chosen.


I don't base my beliefs or actions based on what everyone else thinks or does.

I can respect that. I don't want to use the "majority thing" anymore with you because it ain't working. Let me try this: What about the genealogies? Why would God put genealogies in the Bible that contain fictitious characters from parables that are designed for the sole purpose of teaching us good morals but not actual history?

Besides, a literal interpretation is rather modern and mostly an American phenomenon and has no bearing on the original intent.

I'll let you slide on this one, if only you answer the above question about genealogies.

 

[cupid dave]

Let me try this:
What about the genealogies?

Why would God put genealogies in the Bible that contain fictitious characters from parables that are designed for the sole purpose of teaching us good morals but not actual history?

You ask the same question which drew me to Theistic Evolution and the obsrvation that those genealogies were direct evidence of a divine knowledge sent forward to the End Days as evidence that the Scriptures reveal this God who is now so under attack by the atheists especially in the Western Culture of what had been gentiles.

My first impression of the genealogy was that is wasted a lot of God valuable space in this book which rotely lists 22 names in a repetitious series of individual "begats," always followed by an on-going fathering of more, not so specia,l off-spring.
This rote list also puzzled me in that these 22 creatures lived inordinately and, actually, unbelievably long life spans, totally unknown to us today and seemingly impossible, unless these name represent a people using the title or totem of some initial leader or hero.

It is now reasonable to me that the bible writers could hardly have been more direct with us over the ages.
These bible writers could never have presented the Truth directly.
People even today can not get their head around the idea of 22 previous and now extinct species gradually leading to our own appearance.
This would be further compounded in explaining it started 7 million years ago. th
People were locked inside a social paradigm which could not handle the truth, especially ideas like species which lived 950,000 years.

What I see in these genealogies is the unmistakable verification of scripture as having presented the truth to us today, in these End Times, when we are intellectually mature enough to understand the truth and assess the Bible properly.

 

[cupid dave]

Then you apparently have forgotten that God is omnipotent, as He can create anything in any order, since it is His creation, and have it all remain perfect until the fall of man. Regardless of the order in which He created it.

Then on that basis you admit what I say COULD be right, and God may well have created this existence we are experiencing in exactly the scientifically understood way I say????

 

[cupid dave]

Irrelevant to the fact that there IS a particular order that the sun, earth, life was formed and that the bible does not correctly reflect that order, if we are talking about a literal interpretation.

If you were correct then the bible lies an has mislead many generations of people, which not only violates the Twn Commandments but suggests that the Devil, the arch liar, included such satanic verses to mislead us.

I oppose you in this and have demonstrated that one must read Genesis literally and comprehend what it is actually saying.
One is not wise, nor is it fair, to reiterate the nonsense passed down from the Middle Ages as the definitive and correct reading of scripture.

In fact, the older the interpretation of scripture might be, the more certain we ought be that it is wrong as has been shown to be the case as far back as the Reformation.

 

[cupid dave]

Except for in reality, the order was different than laid out in the first chapter of Genesis.

No.
You can insist that the way you decided to understand Genesis proves your claim above.
Equally available to you is the reading of the scriptures which corresponds one-to-one with science.

There was a Big Bang beginning followed by seven eras of time during which every event described in Genesis took place as described by the geologists
scientists.

This included the Cosmic Dark Age that existed before God said, "let there be light.'
There was a "Pangea," surrounded by one Panthalassic Ocean when "all the waters under heaven were brought together into one place."
The two Kingdoms of Life, Plant first, then Animal Kingdom, began with "deshe," i.e.; the "grass" or "first sprouts on the Earth."

The Earth was a spinning accretion disk of hot rocks, void of its present spherical , and darkness was upon that disk rotating around the early Sun.
The first man was an Act-of-God, a mutation of the chemistry that fused two chromosome together.

The 22 kinds of men in our ascent were those 22 species we now believe were our evolutionary ancestors.
Modern man did flood Out-of-Africa , 40 millennia ago, and he rose to the very top of the mountain peaks.
All other types on mankind did become extinct.

It is all true and all in the bible.

 

[Adam]

No.
You can insist that the way you decided to understand Genesis proves your claim above.
Equally available to you is the reading of the scriptures which corresponds one-to-one with science.

There was a Big Bang beginning followed by seven eras of time during which every event described in Genesis took place as described by the geologists
scientists.

This included the Cosmic Dark Age that existed before God said, "let there be light.'
There was a "Pangea," surrounded by one Panthalassic Ocean when "all the waters under heaven were brought together into one place."
The two Kingdoms of Life, Plant first, then Animal Kingdom, began with "deshe," i.e.; the "grass" or "first sprouts on the Earth."

The Earth was a spinning accretion disk of hot rocks, void of its present spherical , and darkness was upon that disk rotating around the early Sun.
The first man was an Act-of-God, a mutation of the chemistry that fused two chromosome together.

The 22 kinds of men in our ascent were those 22 species we now believe were our evolutionary ancestors.
Modern man did flood Out-of-Africa , 40 millennia ago, and he rose to the very top of the mountain peaks.
All other types on mankind did become extinct.

It is all true and all in the bible.

These claims have already been proven false.

 

[Adam]

That is why scripture advises us to remember that a day is a 1000 years to god.

That would not be sticking to a literal interpretation. If days represent thousands of years, this is figurative literature, not literal.

 

[Adam]

Let me try this: What about the genealogies? Why would God put genealogies in the Bible that contain fictitious characters from parables that are designed for the sole purpose of teaching us good morals but not actual history?

I think there is some history in the bible, but I think it has been given the same treatment we give all of our historic heros. Did George Wshington throw a silver dollar across the Delaware? Could he tell a lie?

We have a tendency to hero-worship our ancestors and patron leaders. We exaggerate about their deeds and actions or we assume that the vailent thing the did was for love rather than fear or other motivating factors, such as greed or envy.

I don't see the bible as a single book. It represents an anthology of different purposes and meanings. It is a collection of poetry, dreams, oral traditions, propaganda, cautionary tales, political speech, history, law, riddles and, apparently, genealogies.

Why? That depends on the purpose of the author in the time period and relevant cultural events in which the genealogies were recorded. The question is, were they all recorded by the same hand or was it a collective effort to track families as new children were born? What are the motivating factors in each scenario?

 

[VirginShallConceive]

I think there is some history in the bible, but I think it has been given the same treatment we give all of our historic heros. Did George Wshington throw a silver dollar across the Delaware? Could he tell a lie?

We have a tendency to hero-worship our ancestors and patron leaders. We exaggerate about their deeds and actions or we assume that the vailent thing the did was for love rather than fear or other motivating factors, such as greed or envy.

I don't see the bible as a single book. It represents an anthology of different purposes and meanings. It is a collection of poetry, dreams, oral traditions, propaganda, cautionary tales, political speech, history, law, riddles and, apparently, genealogies.

Why? That depends on the purpose of the author in the time period and relevant cultural events in which the genealogies were recorded. The question is, were they all recorded by the same hand or was it a collective effort to track families as new children were born? What are the motivating factors in each scenario?

All of these questions and statements you provide seem logical if you make the assumption that the Bible is a collection of exclusively man-made oral stories and writings that have been copied, redacted, and even erroneously translated into other languages. Your post above would receive 5 out of 5 stars from Bart D. Ehrman, Robert M. Price, Christine Hayes, and many other secular biblical scholars. Your post makes complete sense if you remove an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator from the biblical equation. Are you only a cultural Christian, like Albert Einstein was a Jew? Do you accept the documentary hypothesis(Wellhausen hypothesis)?

 

[Adam]

I have not claimed that the bible is exclusively man-made. Nor am I a cultural Christian.

I do believe that copies have had additions and subtractions and that translations have not been perfect and I acknowledge that Moses is not the originator of the Pentuach.

I also have taken note that the Catholic Church has, also, not been perfect.