Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls What do you believe in?

Well, I got involved in another forum a while back where the question of evolution vs. creation was discussed, and I was kind of surprised at the results and the ensuing arguments. So, I thought I'd ask you what you take for granted, just to be able to compare things.

Edit:
It was pointed out to me that I forgot an option: That you don't have to believe because there's enough proof for ID. Sorry about that. Last time I discussed that topic, I was told that it's quite easy to prove the progress of things (like how creatures changed over time), but incredibly hard, if not impossible, to either prove or disprove the existence of a Creator. Which is why I forgot this option. Sorry about that. I did not mean disrespect to any fraction.

A very interesting poll, Mellie.

Personally I think it's a good thing to be careful before you say that you know that something is true. Yes, there are some things that are so overwhelmingly probable that it is quite all right to say that we know that they are true. It is, for example, overwhelmingly probable that the Earth is round. The members of the Flat Earth Society are fighting an uphill battle if they want to change school books so that schools teach children that the roundness of the Earth is an unproven theory.

Other things are harder to know, and various religious statements definitely belong among those. I have an old relative who once said, when I was a kid, that even if she had grown up among heathens who had never even heard about God or Jesus or the Bible, she herself would nevertheless have been not only a Christian but a Pentecostalist, because God would have spoken to her heart and revealed the truth of Pentecostalism to her. I remembered thinking that that was a bold statement of hers, because she had grown up surrounded by Pentecostalists who had taught her that Pentecostalism was the only revealed truth of God. To herself my relative is a Pentecostalist because Pentecostalism is the revealed and hallowed truth, but to me she is a Pentecostalist because she has been brought up to believe that way, and she has lived in a massively Pentecostalist small town all her life.

But while it is easy to poke fun at some religious beliefs, I also think that many people are too uncritical when it comes to various claims made in the name of science. For example, what exactly do you mean if you say that you know that the Big Bang really happened? A point I tried to make in my recent "The Big Bang and the Universe" series in the Off Topic folder here is that astronomers themselves don't fully understand the Big Bang and can't fully describe it. Astronomers themselves don't really know what the Big Bang truly was. So if you answered that you know that the Big Bang really happened, are you sure that you know what the Big Bang really was?

I want to underscore, however, that I personally haven't heard of a single astronomer who rejects what I would call "a Big Bang universe". Such a universe is one that came into existence at a certain time in the past and has been changing and evolving ever since. The way I understand astronomy, there is a massive amount of evidence that the universe is between ten and twenty billion years old (the current best estimate is 13.75 billion years) and that it has been expanding and cooling ever since it was "born".

Similarly, there is a massive amount of evidence that life on Earth has changed and diversified because of evolution. However, in the same way that astronomers don't understand the details of the Big Bang, biologists don't know how life on Earth actually came into existence.

As a non-religious person, I don't think that God has anything to do with either the emergence of life on Earth or the beginning of our universe. But I don't know that God wasn't involved, and I won't claim that I have such knowledge. I will, however, definitely say that I believe that no God was involved.

And of course, since I grew up close to people who said that only Pentecostalism was the only revealed word of God, so that, by extension, God himself was really a Pentecostalist God, I will always ask, "Which God?", when people say that they believe that God created the universe. I will always wonder if they mean the Jewish God or the Muslim God or a Hindu God or the Baptist God or the Mormon God or another God, maybe even the Pentecostalist God, and then I always want to know how they can know that it was their own God and no other God who created the universe.

Ann

I had a hard time choosing between your options. I had a problem with your definition of Intelligent Design:

The problem is the phrase "everything evolved."

That is not how the people I know who subscribe to Intelligent Design would describe it. Most of them do NOT believe that people and animals evolved from more primitive creatures through a process of natural selection over millions of years. Their beliefs are much closer to creationists, i.e. God created man at a specific time less than 6,000 years ago, in his own image. They accept the idea of evolution on a small scale, as long as it applies to animals and not humans. They accept the existence of fossils, but dispute their age as given by scientists.

I finally chose to say that I "believe" in evolution. That is not to say that evolution is a religion (even though some of my students claim that it is). I have not personally examined the mountains of evidence that went into developing the Theory of Evolution, but I believe the scientists who have spent their lives studying the evidence, and they have come up with the best explanation they could. However, my belief in evolution does not rule out a belief in God. God does not have to personally direct each breath we take; He has set up a mechanism so that our bodies usually breathe on their own. He also does not have to personally direct each raindrop; He has set up certain conditions that bring about rain. So it is conceivable that God could set up the mechanism of evolution and use it to create humanity. Many Christian denominations accept this and have no conflict with the Theory of Evolution.

However, it is impossible to believe in both the Theory of Evolution ("people and animals evolved from more primitive creatures through a process of natural selection over millions of years") AND the literal word-for-word truth of the Bible. If you insist that every word in the Bible is true, you must believe that the world and everything in it was created in seven days. I will not argue with you because I will never change your mind. If you believe that the Bible was written by inspired but imperfect humans and it is colored by their perceptions and the ages that they lived in, then it is possible to accept evolution as the means by which God brought about creation. And if you are a complete nonbeliever, you will have no conflict at all.

I do not mean to argue religion with people, and this is not the place to do it. I also know that I have not expressed this as well as I would like. But I felt that the options listed in the poll did not really fit and it bothered me enough that I had to comment.

Heh - but I believe in fractions

sorry, I know I should resist temptation but.... the devil made me do it.

c.

Shame on you, Carol, for that infraction!

PJ

Just feeling fractious, Pam.

c.

*sigh* If you find any typos, you may keep them. *grumbles*
Note to self: factions, not fractions...

Lara, I really am apologising now. It's one of my many weaknesses - never ignore a possible one-liner.

As for typos - I believe I hold the record for more typos per line than any FoLC out there.

c.

I've said know rather than believe because I think that evolution doesn't NEED my belief to be true.

It works, if you do the right experiments with bacteria you can see it happen over a few weeks, it's pretty obvious that it is NOT intelligent in any sense of the word (compare the structure of the human and octopus eyes for one of many examples of where vertebrate evolution went badly wrong), and, in short, it's just something that's there.

It's a combination of natural forces that occasionally manage to come up with something beautiful, and also produces endless horror stories like drug-resistant superbugs, BSE, AIDs, etc.

It doesn't need my belief. It doesn't need me to like it or hate it. It's just there. There may or may not be some sort of supreme being that got the ball rolling - I doubt it, but I have no way to know - but whatever may have started it, the process itself is NOT intelligent.

Originally posted by Marcus Rowland:

Marcus, I'm with you - like you, I think that evolution doesn't need my belief to be true. In fact, I strongly believe that evolution doesn't need my belief to be true. So I believe in evolution.

But I wholeheartedly agree with you on this: what is true is true, quite regardless of whether I or anyone else believe in it or not. In fact, that is a constant source of wonder to me: the universe it what it is, and it doesn't give two hoots about whether or not I know, or can even remotely imagine, what it is.

Wow.

Ann

Belatedly remember to post this - those eyes work better than yours do, or would if they were the same size!

I believe that we're all part of God's great big science experiment. He started it with the Big Bang (or whatever caused the universe to be created), and he "tweaks" it now and then. It gets to be an amusing thought when I think of a great big hand poking at genomes and such. (Think of Monty Python...)

This is where I subscribe to the great giant cloud, for lack of a better phrase coming to mind. It's all the same god/supreme being. It's just different names and faces. For instance, if you ask 10 people to describe 1 particular person, you'll get 10 different descriptions. In this case, you get many descriptions, including multiple beings on some cases, but they pretty much boil down to the (mostly) same tenets as far as morals and ethics go.

My argument for this is that it's God. Who's to say that his day is 24 hours? If you look at just our solar system, a day can be 176 Earth days (Mercury), 117 Earth days (Venus), 24 hrs (Earth), 24 hrs 40 min (Mars), 9 hrs 55 min (Jupiter), 10 hrs 33 min (Saturn), 17 hrs 14 min (Uranus), or 17 hrs 6 min (Neptune). And of course there was no one but Him to witness it. His day may be an eon or two!

Now, mind you, these are the thoughts that go through my lil head. They amuse me. I shall never attempt to sway anyone's decisions... that's how religious discussions got banned at work for awhile. *whistlse*

But where does that differ from creationism?

They claim that all animals were created as described in the bible and brought forth offspring of their own kind, with a rather lax definition of "kind". (As in, all felines might or might not be of the same "kind", as are all equines and so on.) They claim that the world was created a few thousand years ago because, if you add the ages of the men from Adam to now when they sired their firstborn sons, you'll come up with roughly that number. They also usually claim that the world was created in 7 days as described in Genesis. If you lool up a few sites with that kind of belief, you will find that the people there refer to themselves as creationists or even creationist scientists.

Cookiesmom's aquaintances are, as far as I can tell, creationists.

I would say that all creationists believe in Intelligent Design, but not all believers in Intelligent Design are creationists.

And, I think it is equally true that all atheists believe in Evolution*, but not all believers in Evolution* are atheists. (Case in point: theistic evolutionists, who believe in both Evolution AND Intelligent Design!)

I found an answer to the question (How does Intelligent Design differ from creationism?) on, of all things, "Yahoo Answers!" I thought this person did a fairly good job of explaining it:

"Intelligent Design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence" (Dr. William Dembski). Or, the definition on IntelligentDesign.org: “The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process...” That's it; it says nothing of who the creator is and how he/she/it/they did it. Intelligent Design encompasses every "creation" story, even aliens seeding life on this planet (directed panspermia). Theistic evolution also fits under that umbrella (the creator used evolution to create). The God of the Bible is just one possible candidate. Some creationists (like those at Answers In Genesis) don’t like the ID movement because they say it divorces the Creator from the creation.


* NOTE: When I say "Evolution" I am not referring to what is commonly known as "microevolution" (changes within a species). Everyone, including creationists, acknowledge the existance of microevolution. I am referring to the theory of "macroevolution" (the idea that the changes seen in microevolution eventually produce new species.)

I don't agree with that. Because ID means that everything did some evolution (at least microevolution) according to Gods great plan. Quite a few creationists (like those on AiG) believe that Microevolution without any special sort of guidance took place, for all animals evolved from those Noah took with him in his ark. And since there's no place in Genesis where it's stated that God made animals change according to that great plan of His, they probably won't even argue that point.

Your definition of Intelligent Design sounds more to me like creationism than ID.

ID doesn't say anything happened according to God's great plan, because ID doesn't say anything about God at all. ID makes no attempt to identify the designer.

Microevolution is indisputable. Bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics is a form of microevolution. Everyone agrees that microevolution happens. Proponents of ID would say plants and animals were DESIGNED so as to give them the greatest degree of adaptability to any ever changing environment. Creationists and theistic evolutionists would say GOD designed life that way. Evolutionists (what they used to call "Darwinian Evolutionists", although that phrase is becoming less popular) would say that it was an incredibly fortuitous chain of random events which resulted in life having this amazing ability.

Now, if you are talking about macroevolution, then the belief that this happened according to God's great plan would be theistic evolution.

Some proponests of ID do not believe in macroevolution. (This would include the creationists.) Others *do*. They believe that certain features of life were designed, but once the design was in place, early species did evolve into later species. (This would include the theistic evolutionists). But either way, although the subgroups of creationists and theistic evolutionists believe in God, ID does not attempt to identify the designer. Some proponents of ID are agnostic, while others believe not in God (or the God of the Bible), but in some sort of impersonal intelligent force or power.

Fractious factions!!! (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Well, you know what I believe, Mellie. I did have a hard time picking an answer though. While I do believe that God created the earth, I'm not entirely sure I think it was literally done in 7 days. I ended up picking the one about I don't have to believe because God doesn't lie. But I was hmmming the whole time, but, you know, I had to see how people were voting.

Marcus, what the heck is that thing? Octopus??

I guess I malphrased my statement. Make that into this instead:
"Because ID means that everything did some evolution (at least microevolution) according to some creator's great plan - be it God, Allah, Quetzalcoatl, Pastafarian or {insert creator name here}."

Also, isn't there a clear line between creationism, ID'ism, theistic evolutionism?

Not really; they sort of overlap.

Creationism is usually used for those who believe in the Biblical creation story. Young Earth Creationism teaches that the earth was created by God approx. 6,000 years ago, in six 24-hour days.* Old Earth Creationism (OEC) looks at the word for "day" in the Bible and notes that the same word is used elsewhere for "period of time", thus the 6 "days" are taken to mean 6 divisions of time which could each be millions of years long. Some OEC proponents believe the earth is old, but life is young; others believe God created life over the course of the earth's long history.

The main difference between OEC and Theistic Evolution, as I can see, is that OEC says God created the various species uniquely, while Theistic Evolution says the species evolved but that this does not mean God was not involved. Although, even in Theistic Evolution there are differing points of view as to how involved God was. Some say He actively guided the process of evolution (thus, it is not "random"), others say it *is* a random process, but that God, in his infinite wisdom, is the creator of the process itself, and knew in advance what the end result would be. Either way, theistic evolution believes that evolution is the tool God used to create mankind.

ID differs from creationism in that ID does not insist on God as the creator, and ID allows for (but does not insist on) the existence of macroevolution.

ID differs from theistic evolution in that ID does not insist on God as the creator, and ID allows for (but does not insist on) the absense of macroevolution.

ID differs from what I'll call "Darwinian evolution" in that ID does not insist on (although it does allow for) the existence of macroevolution, and, more specifically, ID states that at there are some features of life which appear to have been designed. Well, actually, Evolutionists readily admit that life "appears" to have been designed. Francis Crick is famous for saying, "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." Entire books have been written by evolutionists explaining why evolution is an adequate explanation for the appearance of design in life, and entire books have been written by ID proponents explaining why evolution is totally inadequate.

Sorry for the long post. I was a Biology major in college, and I have always found this a fascinating subject!

*edited to add (after reading Terry's posts, below) that not all YEC believers say the earth is 6,000 old, but all say it is relatively young.

Hmmmm. I'm not passionately interested in evolution, which means I have so much less to say about this subject than I have about astronomy. Because of my somewhat lukewarm interest in evolution, I'm even less interested in ID.

The way I see it, however, there can be two reasons for a person to believe in Intelligent Design rather than in evolution. ID can be regarded by its supporters to be an intellectually stringent and highly scientific and coherent way of explaining the world. Or it can recognized as, but not acknowledged as, pure religon dressed up in scientific clothing.

The scientific reason for supporting ID would be that this theory is the one that its supporters find most scientifically plausible when it comes to explaining the emergence and diversity of life forms, more so than the theory of evolution. The way I understand it, that is how most ID proponents describe themselves: they are ID supporters because this is the position that, to them, describes reality in the most scientifically accurate way.

(One argument for ID is that the human eye is so complicated that it could not have come into existence without the help of a creator, so it must have been created from scratch rather than having evolved gradually. I think Marcus was arguing against this position with his picture of a tiny octopus, whose eyes don't resemble the human eyes at all, but work better than ours.)

Anyway, I think it is perfectly intellectually legitimate to be a supporter of ID if you honestly believe that the scientific arguments for this position are better than the arguments for evolution. (Of course I'd expect an honest ID supporter to be willing to reconsider his position if a supporter of evolution can present arguments for evolution that are better than the ID supporter's arguments for ID.)

But if there is no clear dividing line between ID and creationism, then I can't regard ID as a scientific position or a scientific belief at all. Because then the main arguments for ID can't be scientific but religious, and then ID is not a scientific position but a religious one.

Let me slightly amend that. There is only so much we humans can know. It is acceptable, indeed sometimes necessary, to say that you believe rather than know something.

But if you are a creationist, then you believe that the biblical story of the creation is the accurate one. This is not a scientific position, in my opinion. Consider what Genesis actually says about the creation of the world and the life on it:

This is a very weird description of the creation of the "sky", as if it was some sort of bubble of air suspended in the middle of an ocean of water. I don't see how anyone can argue that this is the best scientific description of how the Earth's atmosphere came into existence.

But Genesis contains even weirder statements:

Here in verse eleven, God creates vegetation and fruit trees on the Earth. But now look here:

What is going on here? Well, God creates the Sun and the Moon. But wait a minute. That means that the Earth not only existed before the Sun did, which is contrary to everything that astronomers believe about the formation of stars and planets, but it also means that the Earth was a living planet, full of vegetaion and fruit trees, before the Sun even existed. Okay, but it has been scientifically proven that most kinds of vegetation, and certainly all fruit trees, need sunlight in order to process the nutrients that they need to survive. According to the Bible there can have been no sunlight when the first fruit trees bore their first fruit because there was no Sun back then. But even so we should accept the Biblical statement that life forms that are totally dependent on sunlight existed before the Sun did? What kind of scientific argument is that?

Yes, I know. It says in verse three of Genesis that God created light, even though this light did not come from the Sun. So this light that had no source would have been enough to provide the fruit trees with the light they craved? Oh, but after God had created the Sun, this source-less light disappeared and was replaced by sunlight - not that the Bible tells us so, but it must have happened since the source-less light is gone now, and we have only sunlight left? But that light without a source must have existed and it must have kept the first trees alive and well, since the Bible tells us so?

Really. This is not a scientific argument. This does not make scientific sense.

If the ID proponents can't separate themselves and their beliefs from the beliefs of creationists, then I don't see how the ID people can claim to be supporters of science at all.

Ann

Ann,

ID is defined as you explain. This is also the definition I give above in my previous posts. As I say in my last post, ID scientists have written entire books explaining why evolution fails to explain the design evident in life, and why they believe intelligent design best explains certain features of life.

Where the overlap comes is in personal beliefs which was the topic of this poll. A person who believes in the Biblical account of creation might find it fascinating that the science of ID has discovered evidence that life *was* in fact designed. Said person could say he or she believed in both creationism and ID.

Likewise, there are many religious people who believe God created the universe and also that God used evolution to create mankind.

The first view can no more be used to discredit ID as a science than the second view can be used to discredit evolution.

It is also possible for a person to believe that ID is correct in stating that certain features of life could not have come evolved, but rather clearly show elements of design, and yet find the evidence of the existence of evolution compelling. (I'm speaking of macroevolution here, that is, the belief that new species evolved from older ones.) Thus it is possible to believe in both ID and evolution.

Interesting.

About a month ago, I went to hear a lecture by a man who used to belong to a rather hard-core Christian sect, but he has now left it. I expected him to talk about his time in the sect and why he joined it and how he left, but instead he devoted almost his entire lecture to hailing the accuracy of evolution and attacking the fallacies of ID. I was more than a little bored and had a hard time concentrating, but I remember two things that he said, that I would like to ask you about, Vicki.

First, this man said that proponents of ID in the United States had taken ID to court to have it accepted as a fully scientific theory that could be taught in American public schools on an equal footing with evolution. But instead the judge had ruled that the proponents of ID had not managed to present any compelling scientific evidence to bolster their claims, so that, therefore, ID did not deserve to be treated as a scientific theory. Do you know anything about this, Vicki?

The second thing I remember from this lecture is that the lecturer claimed that ID proponents had taken a book that promoted creationism and simply exchanged the word "God" every time it appeared in the text with words like "creator" or "intelligent designer". The lecturer thus claimed that a book promoting ID was basically identical to a book promoting creationism. Do you know anything about this, Vicki?

Ann

I assume the gentleman was talking about Kitzmiller v. Dover. Yes, I have heard of this case. It is, basically, as you have described. If you're asking my personal opinion, I have read the court decision in the Dover case and find it to be seriously flawed.

I have never heard of the second incident. I strongly suspect what he actually said was that if a book about creationism were edited so that the word "God" were changed to "creator", you would have a book about ID. In which case, I would say he is mistaken. If he really did say that ID proponents had actually done this, then I would accuse him of lying.

Thanks for your opinion on this, Vicki. Thank you, too, for providing more information than I had myself.

Ann

Btw, the book Ann is referring to would be "Of Pandas and People".

Btw, I'd like to dispute that:


And, yes, I've been bombarded with lots of evidence for various splinter groups, and I haven't found anything "disproving" evolution that couldn't be explained just as well without a creator. (But maybe that's because most of the people I argued with were Young Earth Creationists.

Oh, OK. I did not recognize the Of Pandas and People controversy from the man's description. It appeared to me from Ann's post that the man was saying some ID proponents had taken a previously published book about creationism, changed the word "God" to "creator" and then declared it to be a book about ID. This simply did not happen.

The supposedly "telling, significant, and revealing" chain of events regarding Of Pandas and People is as follows: The authors of Pandas believe in Intelligent Design. They wrote a book, in which they did not discuss religion or religious doctrine, but rather explained why empirical evidence and observation had led them to believe in ID.

The controversy stems from the fact that in an early draft of their book, the authors used the word "creation" to describe the, well, creation of life. Before the final draft was written, however, the Supreme Court ruled in the Edwards case that Biblical Creationism is religion and cannot be taught as science. Although their book is not about Biblical Creationism, the authors were certainly well aware of the efforts of Evolutionists to paint the ID movement as "stealth Creationism". If I were one of the authors, I might also have looked again at my rough draft and said, "You know, *I* know what I meant and *you* know what I meant, but I can just see the Evolutionists jumping on this word here, claiming it is proof positive that they were right all along about ID being nothing more than creationism in disguise. I think it would be best to change this word before we publish, just to be sure there is no confusion."

As it turned out, the plaintiffs in the Dover case argued that the efforts by the authors of Panda to distance themselves from Biblical Creationism was proof that ID is, in reality, nothing but Biblical Creationism. Unfortunately, the judge agreed. I guess it just goes to show that sometimes, you can't win for losing.

Yes, that's what I was saying, but I told you I was bored by the man's lecture and had a hard time concentrating. So I got things mixed up. Sorry for confusing you, Vicki, and thank you for identifying the book for me, Mellie.

Ann

I can understand changing a possibly offensive word, should it turn up occasionally - but 150 times?

I found a few excerpts of both "The Mystery of Life's Origin" by Charles Thaxton, who later edited "Of Pandas and People". The book is strictly creationist stuff.

The latter quote shows how the replacement of the word "creationists" with the term "design propononents" took place, as parts of the original word were not deleted. With a dose of irony, this mistake is referred to as "the missing link between creationism and intelligent design".

Thank you. I believe those quotes show exactly what I was trying to say regarding the overlap of beliefs.

Of course, whether or not ID can be considered "science" is another altogether. Science depends on the methodology, not the beliefs (religious or otherwise) of the scientist.

I once tried to have a discussion with a Young Earth Creationist, and it was like getting blood from a stone. Or it was like hitting a brick wall and getting blood from my own forehead.

It happened back in the eighties. I read in Sweden's most prestigious daily newspaper that a hardcore creationist worked as a science teacher in northern Sweden. Among the things that he taught his middle school pupils was that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that people and dinosaurs existed at the same time. Back then I had just finished reading the Bible carefully, and I was just raring to take on a fight with someone who insisted that everything in the Bible was absolutely true. So I wrote a circa 60-page letter to this guy, asking him how he could tell his pupils that everything in the Bible was true. I also made a list of what I regarded as glaring errors in the Bible, beginning with the fact that Genesis starts off with two completely different and mutually exclusive accounts of the creation, namely Genesis 1:1-2:3 versus Genesis 2:4-25.

Well. After a while this guy wrote a three-page letter back to me. He told me that I had misunderstood the Bible, that everything in it is absolutely true, and that the two accounts of the creation are actually one and the same story, written from two different points of view. Now I was even more infuriated, so I wrote a 119-page letter back to him.

I got another short letter back from him. He ignored absolutely all my arguments, but he complimented me on my fine grasp of language. And because of that he offered me the chance to help him write the book which he was currently working on, where he argued that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago and where people and dinosaurs existed at the same time.

I wrote a half-page letter back to him. I told him that his second letter to me was the most insolent one I had ever received. What would he say if I refuted every argument he could ever have against evolution by saying that everything in On the Origin of the Species was absolutely true, but just told from different points of view? And what would he say if I offered him the chance to spend months helping me write a book where I made the kind of argument that he would absolutely hate, such as claiming that everything in the Bible was utter mumbo jumbo?

I never heard from him again. And I have never again made such an ambitious attempt to have a serious discussion with a Young Earth Creationist.

Ann

It could be that many of you think that I was far too aggressive when I attacked this man's religious beliefs, and unfortunately I have to agree with you that I was too aggressive. I want you to understand, however, that I wasn't attacking the man's religious beliefs as such, and I have never attacked another person this way just because he or she was religious.

No, I was attacking this particular person because he was a creationist who worked as a science teacher, and who used his position as a science teacher to foist his religious beliefs on children. He actually forced his pupils to repeat his creationist beliefs if they wanted to get a passing grade, can you believe it?

Also, this man was utterly shameless about what he was doing. He was interviewed by Sweden's biggest and most prestigious daily newspaper, and he frankly admitted that he taught his middle school pupils that the Bible was the only source of scientific knowledge that they needed, because the Bible was right about everything it said. It was this claim of his that I was challenging in my letters to him. I wanted him to explain to me how the Bible could be so utterly trustworthy when it contradicted itself so many times. And his reply to me was that the Bible doesn't contradict itself, it just tells the same story from different points of view.

Just for the sake of the argument, imagine that you yourself had fiddled with the truth and told the same story in two quite different, and mutually exclusive, ways. Imagine too that someone pointed this out to you. Instead of being embarrassed, you would frankly admit that you had told the story differently, but you had not been lying at all, because the two mutually exlusive versions of the story were both gospel truths, just told from two different points of view! Could any of you be so shameless as to make such a statement and expect to get away with it? I doubt it. But this creationist teacher was that shameless. The reason why he was writing a book, by the way, was that he needed a school book that taught creationism in Swedish in a way that was suitable for children, and no such book existed. So he had to write it himself, which is why he was enlisting my help, apparently expecting me to actually give it to him.

Looking back, I can see that I went about this whole affair in a way that was utterly improductive. If I really wanted to force this teacher to change the things he taught his pupils I should have contacted his principal, not written letters to the man himself. And I should perhaps have contacted the Swedish National School Inspection, too. I can't be proud of my own behaviour here. But the whole thing made a lasting impression on me and helped cement my conviction that I myself am a non-religious person.

Ann

Looking at the last post by Vicky and the ones that have been posted before for comparison, I have to seriously ask if there are two Vickies.

Nope. Only one me.


Ann,

You will get no argument from me regarding the YEC teacher.

Lara Joelle Kent wrote:

That's not an original observation, Lara. But your analysis is flawed.

That's the way the story has been since it was written down. Do you really think that if your argument was valid it wouldn't have been changed sometime in the preceding millennia?

Here's what you're missing. In modern literature, whether fiction or non-fiction, the narrative thread is linear, going from beginning to end unless otherwise specifically labeled. But ancient cultures, including Greek, Babylonian, Hebrew, and others, didn't record information that way. It wasn't unusual, for example, to read a summary of a series of events followed by a more detailed exposition. The play "Antigone," credited to Sophocles, begins with a simple statement by the two sisters about a freshly-concluded battle in which their two brothers had both died. The next scene describes the battle in more garish detail given by the Greek chorus. Immediately following that, the king comes on stage and restates the narrative a third time.

Each telling gave a bit more detail and a different point of view to the story of the battle. And just because the tale is thrice-told does not mean that there were three battles. The "contradiction" you pointed to in Genesis 2 is not a contradiction at all. It's simply an ancient narrative device that we don't use all that often any more.

Of course, there are modern histories of Europe which state that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo by the Duke of Wellington and his allies, and then which go on to give a detailed account of the battle. That doesn't mean that the battle was fought twice. It only means that the author is telling the story in two different ways.

There is a statement in Genesis 2:5 that says "No shrub of the field had yet grown on the land, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not made it rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground." When my wife came in from her garden a few weeks ago, she told me she'd planted carrots and tomatoes and strawberries and a few other things. I went out to the garden and didn't see any of those plants. All I saw was dirt. But I understood that she meant that she had placed the seeds in the ground and that they would sprout soon, after she watered her garden.

Genesis 2:5 does NOT say that there were no plants or trees. It says only that the shrubs and plants of the field hadn't sprouted. Remember, by a literal account, it had only been three days, and that's pretty soon to expect a crop from what you've just planted.

The implication in your parenthetical statement that YECs don't think but only parrot what they're told is incorrect. I hope I have explained the argument sufficiently.

Lara also wrote:

Carbon-14 dating is based on comparing the amount of the mildly radioactive isotope carbon-14 to the amount of its inert byproduct, carbon-12, in a given organic sample. The half-life of carbon-14 (at which point it has lost half of its previous radioactivity) is about 5,730 years. Once a given sample has gone through seven half-lives, it cannot be dated any further back. So the maximum time a carbon-14 dating can give any organic sample is about 40,000 years.

I say this to state that I am an "young earth" creationists, but I do not hold to an absolute limit of 6,000 years in the Bible. The Bible never makes any claims about the age of the Earth, only about how it and the life on it came to be. I personally have no problem with dating the Earth at around 50,000 to 60,000 years of age. Not all YECs are as dogmatic (and selective) as the ones you have encountered.

Of course, let's not forget that everyone is selective and views the world through certain lenses. I am very up front about my lenses. Others on this board, both among those who agree with me and those disagree with me, are equally up front about their lenses. Some are not.

Here is a link to more fully explain carbon-14 dating.

Originally posted by Terry Leatherwood:

The comparison between "Antigone" and Genesis is good enough, Terry. It is certainly good enough as a foundation for a religious belief in the historical accuracy of Genesis. Indeed, Genesis itself is good enough as a foundation for a religious belief in the historical accuracy of Genesis.

But if you want to claim a scientific knowledge of the historical accuracy of Genesis and base that knowledge on the narrative similarity between "Antigone" and Genesis, then, in my opinion, your argument isn't good enough. And if you want others to accept the historical accuracy of Genesis, then I think you have to do much better than just point out the similarities in narrative style between "Antigone" and Genesis.

The bottom line is this. Would any historians claim that "Antigone" definitely portrays a millennia-old battle in a perfectly historically accurate way? Would any historian claim that all three descriptions of the battle that can be found in "Antigone" are all perfectly accurate? And for that matter, would any historian argue that the battle that "Antigone" describes must have happened in the first place just because Sophocles says so?

Yes, narratives were different in the past. And in the past it was harder to know what the exact historical truth might have been. Back then there were no photos, no newspapers, no television, no voice recordings. There were few records of the past, few eyewitness accounts. There were legends of things that had happened in the past, but people had no way of really knowing if any of it was true. Why shouldn't our ancestors tell the same story three times in three different ways, when they couldn't know which if any of the three versions was true anyway?

Our present ability to record the world around us for posterity is quite new. Today we are used to the idea that we can be relatively sure of what happened in the (recent) past, but our ancestors simply couldn't know very much of what had happened a hundred years or more before they were born. There were stories but few or no reliable records. So the past, therefore, became a realm of fantasy and myth. Of course our ancestors might as well believe in these myths, because they could never disprove them, could they?

As I read the stories of the Gospels of how Jesus had risen from the dead and shown himself to various people, I was struck by how the people he showed himself to didn't recognize him at first. That would have made sense if he had already been given his "heavenly body" that Christians believe in, but it is noteworthy that the people who met the risen Christ didn't seem to react to his appearance at all. Not only did they not recognize him, but they also didn't seem to think that he looked at all "heavenly" or stunningly beautiful. They didn't recognize him, pure and simple.

And then I asked myself, how could these people be sure that the person they met was Jesus in the first place? How could they recognize him? And it struck me that most people just wouldn't be able to recognize Jesus. Think of it. Not only were there no photographs back then, but all Jews were also strictly forbidden to make pictures or images of anything. Therefore, no contemporary image of Jesus can ever have existed. Only those who had seen the living Jesus themselves could ever hope to really recognize him. Really, only those who had met Jesus in person and were particularly good at memorizing faces could really recognize him.

My point? The four Gospels all tell completely different stories of how Jesus showed himself to other people after his resurrection. Not one Gospel confirms a single post-resurrection story of another Gospel. There can be different explanations for this. One possible reason, however, could be that the stories of how people met the risen Christ began circulating gradually, and that they were based on rumors, not hard facts like the details of the crucifixion, which are pretty consistent. Anyway, if you really don't know what Jesus looked like and have no way of ever finding out, how can you be sure that you haven't met him? And how can you know that another person who tells a story about meeting Jesus is not telling the truth?

Bottom line, Terry, is that many details of the past are hard or impossible to know. The Bible tells stories of the past, and the Bible does, indeed, tell those stories in different ways, which leads to many contradictions. Creationists who ask other people to accept the verbatim accuracy of the Bible really ask other people to believe that the Bible is the scientific and literal truth because the Bible is the scientific and literal truth.

That is a perfect example of circular reasoning.

Ann

Terry, I understand what different points of view are, but telling a completely different story is telling a completely different story.
Gen 1: plants - animals - humans (male and female)
Gen 2: man - plants - animals - woman
Even if we agree that there must have been some plants, only not those of the field and no trees, either, there is a difference in the order of things. Truly, things get mixed up quite badly in one of the first chapters of Genesis (the first of which, at least, follows some scientific logic, although the timescale is way off), considering this is supposed to be the same story told from different points of view. One of the narrators must have been badly drunk (or whatever) to get things as wrong as he did. Or maybe it's just the archfiend messing with our heads so we just have to believe a little harder? Because it's not just the plants, a point you can argue because not all plants are necessarily included in the group not yet there, it's also about all the animals which are later created as man's help. Later, after man is settled in the garden God planted.

And what about the flood? 2=14? Or 2=4?

Well, yes, that's somewhat obvious. But if your wife told you she had planted a garden with plants, not seeds - and then you go and see nothing but dry dirt, you'll start to wonder. Also, if she told you she had brought a number of animals - and you couldn't find any because they are still to be taught... honestly, wouldn't you start to worry about her sanity? And if she then told you that dinner is ready - would you actually believe it, or expect to have to prepare it yourself? Because that's what happened with the accounts in Gen 1 and Gen 2.

Also, I'm well aware of how 14C-dating works and what its limits are. But there's a number of other isotopes used for dating (half-life given in brackets): uranium(235U: 700 million years; 238U: 4.5 billion years), potassium (40Na: 1.3 billion years), rubidium (87Rb: 50 million years), chlorine (36Cl: 308,000 years), argon (40Ar: 1.25 billion years), iodine (129I: 15,7 million years).

All of these are used in geology, and many of them were used to give an estimate of the age of earth. Also, a number of meteorites have been examined to verify this, since material from our planet can change its composition due to processes in the core. (Since modern theories claim that the solar system was created in the following order: 1) sun; 2) gas planets (first Jupiter, then Saturn, then the others), 3) earth-like planets and smaller pieces of rock, this is not the worst idea.) And you know what? The results of several meteorites plus the oldest lead ores of our planet show pretty much the same results: 4.5 billion years. (One exception shows a result of 4.68 +/- 0.15 billion years.)

@Ann: Re: Circular Argument:

Ann wrote:

Hmm. The resurrection story circulated gradually? Really? Then why did the disciples, all of whom (except a few women) ran away in fear and hid at the crucifixion, yet just a few weeks later were - at the risk of their own lives - loudly proclaiming that Jesus had risen from the dead? Why did the vast majority of these men and women, when faced with the choice of dying or recanting their belief in Jesus' resurrection, refuse to change their tune?

Let me ask another question. Why didn't the Jews just take the body of Jesus out of the grave, tie it to a wagon, and parade it around Jerusalem? That would have squelched the rumor pretty quickly, I'd think, but they didn't do that. The two obvious answers are 1) the disciples stole the body so they could hoodwink the people or 2) Jesus really was resurrected.

If you pick the first choice, you have two other questions which you must answer. 1) If the disciples were going to run a con game on the people, what did they get out of it? There are no indications in any contemporary history that any of them got rich off proclaiming that the Christ was alive again. 2) Why would the disciples willingly die for something they knew was a lie? Because sane people don't do that. Even a habitual con man will fess up rather than die for his lie.

And if you assert that the disciples were all mentally unbalanced, you need to explain how they could all have traveled with a man for more than three years, seen what He did, heard what He said, and witnessed how He died, and all told basically the same story. Insane people don't share their pathologies on that level of detail. They never have.

Your objection isn't original, Ann. Others have put forth similar theories, but they simply aren't supported by the evidence. The behavior of the disciples is reasonable, rational, and logical - if they saw and knew the resurrected Jesus.

Lara, I know that you knew about carbon-14 half-lives. I put that in for the readers who weren't as scientifically literate as you are.

Circular arguments, Lara? Let me present you with one from the "other side" of the question.

YEC: How do you date the fossils found in solid rock?

Evolutionist: By the rock strata the fossils are found in.

YEC: How do you date the rock strata?

Evolutionist: By the artifacts found in them.

You object, I'm sure. So let me point you to an experiment performed by the RATE group ( (here is their home website) for information on dating methods.

In 2000, rock samples were taken from Mt. Ngauruhoe, located in the center of New Zealand's North Island. These samples were from the eruptions on February 11, 1949, June 4, 1954, june 30, 1954, July 14, 1954, and February 19, 1975. They were sent to the Geochron Labortories in Cambridge, Massachusetts for whole-rock potassium-argon dating. The samples were sent on three different occasions, giving the lab plenty of raw material to work with. The samples were not described or identified except as probably being very young rocks with very little argon in them. This would ensure that the lab would take extra care during analysis.

These rocks had been formed from volcanic activity between twenty-five and fifty-one years prior to testing. The lab returned results between "less than 270,000 years old" and "3.5 million years old."

That's not even close, Lara. It seems to me that the reliability of the potassium-argon dating method is at least questionable and at most totally useless.

And if the half-life of uranium-235 is 700,000 years, why hasn't it all decayed down to inert matter and isotopes in the last 4.5 billion years?

For an example of dating items by the strata in which they were found, please examine Eugene DuBois, the man who found "Java Man" in 1891. He claimed that the skull cap he found was from the Trinil layer, which at the time he dated as being pre-Pleistocene. But DuBois was a medical doctor at the time, not a geologist. He was not qualified at that time to make that call. In 1948, Alan Houghton Brodrick (a famous paleoanthropolgist) wrote that the dating of the Trinil beds was still not clear; therefore, DuBois' dating of Java Man was at best a random guess.

On top of that, the femur which is nearly always associated with the skull cap was found a year later and fifty feet away (a figure with which DuBois was not consistent over his lifetime). Anatomists of today - and of DuBois' day - believe that the femur did not belong to the skull fragment. By the end of his life, DuBois was almost alone in his insistence that they were from the same species, if not from the same subject.

DuBois also had in his possession two modern human skulls found in Java in 1888 near the village of Wadjak (now spelled Wajak). In every way, they are modern human skulls. But DuBois didn't publish anything about them until 1920 (except in quarterly and annual reports to the director of education, religion, and industry of the Dutch East Indies government). No one even knew he had them until then. The site where they were found was destroyed by quarrying, so there is no way to date them geologically. But most scientists who have studied both sets of fossils (the Java Man skull cap and femur along with the Wajak skulls) believe that they are similar in age. However, the Java Man skull cap looks more Neandertal than anything else, and the Wajak skulls look quite modern, as does the Java Man femur.

Many feel that DuBois' handling of the Wajak skulls was at best highly unprofessional and at worst deliberately dishonest. DuBois always insisted that Java Man was the Missing Link between ancient proto-man and modern humans. Very few paleoanthropologists today accept that interpretation.

Lara also wrote:

You're not going to like my answer, but I'll give it anyway.

When God created the animals in front of Adam in the Garden of Eden, He wasn't creating them for the first time. There's nothing to indicate that this was the first and only creation of all the animals. And the Genesis narrative was not written to satisfy any person's desire for scientific accuracy.

Your objection to the story of the flood on the basis of how many of which animals Noah loaded onto the ark is interesting, but only because you're trying to be 21st-century scientifically literal again. In Genesis 6:19-20 it says:

Seems pretty straightforward. But another valid interpretation of this instruction is that Noah is to bring mating pairs of every animal onto the ark. The restatement of the instruction in Genesis 7:2-3

is exactly that: a restatement with more detail. If this were a real theological problem with Genesis, why hasn't it been corrected before now? Or, perhaps, why hasn't the entire narrative been discredited? Despite the insistence of many with whom I've spoken about Christianity, it is not a requirement that Believers check their reasoning abilities at the door and swallow everything they're told without investigating it themselves.

In closing, let me refer you to the book "Bones of Contention" by Professor Marvin Lubenow. the professor had spent (by the publication date of 2004) more than three decades researching fossils and human evolution. It is a scientific assessment of human fossils from a creationist viewpoint.

Due to the potentially volatile nature of this thread, I'm not going to post any more responses here. Should anyone desire to communicate directly with me, I'll be glad to respond, but not here. I just don't have the time, and I don't want to light off any fiery controversies.

Okay, Terry, I need to get into more detail about this.

Who were "the disciples" who were loudly claiming that Jesus had risen from the dead? Jesus had twelve disciples that we know by their names, and certainly many others. What exactly do the Gospels say about the behaviour of the different disciples?

Matthew starts off in chapter 27 by saying that Pilate had Jesus' grave sealed by a large stone, and he also posted a guard:

I find this account unlikely for many reasons. Would Pilate seriously think that there was even a possibility that Jesus would rise from the dead? But if he really thought that that might have happened, I really don't think he would have dared to have Jesus crucified at all.

Also, Pilate says that there is a risk that the body of Jesus might be stolen. But to the Jews graves were unclean places and were not to be entered. Please note the behaviour of Jesus himself as he, according to John 11:38-45, resurrected Lazarus:

Jesus himself doesn't enter Lazarus' grave. The reason why he doesn't is that graves were unclean places to the Jews, so that they were forbidden to enter them.

By the way, the raising of Lazaraus is a most sensational miracle, but the story is only told in the Gospel of John, even though it says in the passage that I quoted that there was a "crowd" of people there who must have seen the resurrection taking place. Why didn't the story spread so that Matthew, Mark and Luke also heard it and recorded it for posterity? My answer is that the resurrection of Lazarus never happened, and the story was told by John as a means of "setting the stage" for Jesus' own resurrection. Please note the similar details, the stone in front of the opening of the grave, and the dead person wrapped in strips of cloth. And Lazarus is said to have been dead for four days, while Jesus was said to have been dead for three days before his resurrection.

I find it completely unreasonable that just one out of four Gospels would report this fantastic miracle if it had really happened, but I also note that Jesus never entered Lazarus' grave, almost certainly because Jews regarded graves as unclean places.

Let's return to Matthew. Pilate has supposedly sealed Jesus' grave with a stone and posted a guard. Now this is what Matthew tells us:

The women have come to Jesus' grave to look at it, not to enter it. When they were there there was an earthquake and an angel came down from the heavens and rolled back the stone. The guards faint when they see the angel. The angel tells the women that Jesus has risen from the dead and is no longer in his tomb. The angel commands the women to enter the tomb to see that it is empty, and he commands them to tell Jesus' disciples that Jesus is risen. He also sends the message that the disciples are ordered to go to Galilee, because there is where his disciples will see him.

Jesus shows himself to the women.

The soldiers who have seen the resurrection of Jesus are bribed to keep quiet. Note that the soldiers are nameless.

The eleven disciples went to Galilee to see Jesus. They worshipped him, but some doubted. How could they doubt? If they had seen Jesus die and if they now saw him alive, how oculd they doubt?

Matthew doesn't name a single disciple who, as you put it, loudly proclaimed that Jesus had risen from the dead.

Let's go on to Mark. This is what Mark says:

Note how this differs from the story of Matthew. Mark says that the women went to Jesus' grave specifically to anoint Jesus' body, while the women in Matthew just went there to look at the grave. But it is likely that a body that had been dead for a few days would have begun to smell already, so why would anyone bother to anoint it? Particularly since graves were unclean places that Jews were not supposed to enter?

Also note that the women went to Jesus' grave with the purpose of entering it even though they didn't know how they would be able to remove the stone in front of the entrance.

The stone has been rolled away and the women enter the tomb just like that. Inside the tomb they see a young man "dressed in a white robe" sitting in there.

The man in the white robe commands the women to do the same thing as the angel told the women in the Gospel of Matthew: Go and tell his disciples that he has risen and go to Galilee where you will see him.

In Mark, one disciple is mentioned by name, and that disciple is Peter. Mark doesn't say that the women themselves saw Jesus, but instead he says that the women were too afraid to tell anyone about the empty grave and the message from the young man in white clothes.

As for the remaining verses of chapter 16 of Mark, this is what www.biblegateway.com says about them:

So verses 16:9-20 of Mark would be a later addition.

So far, in Matthew and Mark, we have not seen any disciple at all proclaim anything at all about the resurrection of Jesus.

This is what Luke says:

As in Mark, the women go to the grave specifically to enter it in order to anoint Jesus' body, not worrying about entering an unclean place and not wondering how to remove the stone from the entrance. They see two men in shining clothes, not one, and the two men tell them that Jesus is risen. But these men don't tell the women that they should go to Galilee to see Jesus, but instead they talk about what Jesus had told his disciples while he was till with them in Galilee.

The women don't see Jesus themselves. They tell the disciples about the empty grave and the men in shining clothes, but the disciples don't believe them.

But Peter goes to the grave and sees the strips of linen.

Then follows a lengthy story of how Jesus showed himself to two men on their way to Emmaus.

They don't recognize him. Only one of the two men is given a name at all.

But when the stranger breaks the bread, the two men recognize him as Jesus and he immediately disappears. Only Luke tells of these sudden disappearing acts on the parts of the risen Jesus.

The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon... but we are not told any details about it.

It is very interesting that Jesus goes to such pains to prove to his disciples that his body is alive. Today, when we think of life after death, we very rarely (if ever) think of our bodies being alive after death. To the Jews, however, the soul was not separable from the body, so Jesus couldn't rise from the dead unless his body was also alive.

Jesus commands his disciples to stay in Jerusalem. This is different from Matthew and Mark, where the disciples are commanded to go to Galilee.

After Jesus has finished talking to his disciples, this is what happens:

Jesus ascends to Heaven before their eyes. Nothing like this happens in the other Gospels. As for the disciples, they don't go out in the world to tell the world about Jesus, but instead they stay at the temple all the time to praise God.

This is what happens in John:

Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb herself, apparently just to look at it. She is distraught when she finds that the stone has been removed. She runs to Peter to tell him that the body of Jesus has been stolen.

One disciple is fearful of entering the grave, but Peter enters it and finds strips of linen and a burial cloth. There is no man in shining clothes in the grave.

Jesus shows himself to Mary, but she does not recognize him. I find that quite astounding, since she was supposedly one of the women who regularly followed Jesus.

Jesus tells her to let go of him and to go and tell his "brothers" (disciples?) that he has risen from the dead and that he will soon go to Heaven.

Afterwards, Jesus shows himself to several of his disciples. This is what happened afterwards:

Thomas would not believe that Jesus had really risen from the dead, so Jesus showed him his hands and his side.

Very interestingly, there really exists a "Gospel according to Thomas", an apocryphic gospel that is not recognized by the church. The gospel exists, however, and it appears to be as old as the other gospels. In the Gospel according to Thomas, Jesus is seen only as a teacher. Jesus does not perform any miracles in this gospel, and he isn't crucified and doesn't rise from the dead. Personally I believe that it was well known among people who lived at the time of early Christianity that the Gospel of Thomas existed, and that it said nothing about Jesus' resurrection from the dead. The story of how Thomas meets the risen Christ is not told in Mark, Matthew or Luke, which is why I believe that it never happened. Instead, this little episode in the Gospel of John would be John's way of saying that Thomas knew very well that Jesus had risen from the dead, but he just wouldn't admit it. Or to put it more bluntly: I believe that John made up the story about Thomas to bring home a point.

The Gospel of John continues like this:

Fascinating. Jesus shows himself to Peter, Thomas and several other disciples. Thomas, at least, has definitely seen the risen Jesus before, at least according to the Gospel of John. Yet no one recognizes Jesus. They don't recognize his visual appearance and they don't recognize his voice, even though they must know Jesus so well, and even though they have seen his risen self before.

Isn't it possible that Jesus has already been "transformed" in preparation for his ascent to Heaven? But if so, he doesn't look particularly beautiful or heavenly. His appearance has not been "improved". He just looks and sounds like another person altogether - well, he must do that, since his closest disciples don't recognize him. To me this is utterly, utterly weird and totally improbable.

The Gospel of John ends by saying that the author of the Gospel was himself one of Jesus' disciples. Apart from that testimony, however, the Gospel of John doesn't say that any of the disciples "proclaimed loudly" that Jesus had risen from the dead.

Terry, you asked this question:

Why didn't the Jews take the body of Jesus out of the grave, tie it to a wagon and parade it around Jerusalem? I have already answered that - because they would have to enter the grave of Jesus, which was an unclean place. And it could be that I am wrong, but I can't remember any stories from the Bible where Jewish people batter and humiliate bodies of enemies that are already dead. (The only possible exception would be the humiliation of the dead body of the hated Queen Jezebel - it is typical, perhaps, that it would be the dead body of a woman that was so humiliated. Still, the defamation of her dead body lasted very briefly, while the flagrant mocking of the dead body of Jesus that you described would be a very protracted affair, and it would deeply shock all religious Jews.)

And I certainly can't remember that anyone in the Bible ever goes into a grave to steal a body out of that grave to display that once-buried body in public.

It seems certain, however, that the body of Jesus disappeared from his tomb. As for what happened to his body afterwards, we don't know. No court of law could rule that Jesus had risen from the dead based on the evidence presented by the Gospels.

Terry, you also wrote:

The Gospels say little about what the disciples did after Jesus had been resurrected. I know that the Acts of the Apostles says a lot more, but I have a confession to make - as I was reading the Bible, the Acts bored me almost out of my skull (and it could be that I reacted so negatively because I was deadly tired of people who tried to save me with religious lectures), so, frankly, I only skimmed the Acts. Therefore I don't know too much about it.

Obviously, however, Peter strongly believed that Jesus had risen, and a few other disciples also helped spread that message. I'm not accusing them of running a con game, Terry. I'm not accusing them of being crazy either, although I do think that Peter had a habit of having all sorts of weird visions or hallucinations. Therefore I don't think that Peter would have made a very good impression on a modern court of law.

But the thing is that I'm convinced that many of Jesus' Jewish contemporaries really believed in the resurrection of Jesus, except that they believed in it in a different way that almost all modern Christians believe in it. The way I see it, those of Jesus' Jewish contemporaries who believed in the resurrection of Jesus didn't do it because they thought that Jesus was their personal saviour. No, I'm convinced that they believed in the resurrection of Jesus because it meant that the Day of Judgement was imminent. The Jews were waiting for the Day of Judgement, when every Jew who had ever lived would be judged by the Lord and would either go into the Kingdom of Heaven or into the burning Gehenna. Jesus himself had certainly preached, over and over, that the Kingdom of Heaven was approaching. But first God must judge ever Jew, so that everyone could be sent either to "heaven" or to "hell".

I said before that the Jews regarded the soul as inseparable from the body. Therefore, if God was to judge those Jews who were already dead, he had to raise them from the dead so he could judge them. The dead had to literally rise out of their graves, walking somewhat like zombies into the land of the living, leaving their burial strips and burial cloth behind them in their vacated resting places.

The thing is that the dead had to be resurrected in order to be judged, and they had to rise with their bodies as well as with their souls. Otherwise they couldn't be judged, and the Kingdom of Heaven couldn't come.

This is what you can read in the Book of Daniel, chapter 12, verse 2:

So the Book of Daniel doesn't say that everybody who is dead will be raised in order to be judged, but it does say that multitudes will be raised from their graves. Small difference.

Why do the gospels of Luke and John tell us that Jesus took pains to prove to his disciples that he had risen with his body? The way I see it, Luke and John did this because they, too, waited for the time when everybody (or multitudes) would rise out of their graves to be judged by God on the Day of Judgement, so that those who had lived their lives according to the wishes of God could find their reward in the Kingdom of Heaven.

I believe that this was the message of the first disciples, Terry. They told people around them that the resurrection of the dead that would come before the Judgement Day had already started, and Jesus was just the first person that had been resurrected, so that he was really just "the first little pebble that had started rolling down the hill of resurrection", so to speak. Soon there would be an avalanche of other "resurrectees". This would have been a very powerful message to the Jewish population of that time, much more so than a message that Jesus had risen from the dead because he was everybody's personal saviour.

When the story of Jesus was "exported" to the Roman Empire, the story took on a different meaning. The Romans strongly believed that the body and soul were perfectly separable. To them it wasn't necessary to have people rise out of their graves for a resurrection to take place. To them life after death could be something that wasn't visible to people on the Earth, since it was only the dead people's souls that rose from the dead to the invisible and otherworldly Kingdom of Heaven. No Judgement Day was strictly necessary, since everyone went to their appointed place immediately after death. Now Jesus became the necessary means of gaining entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, since Paul insisted that you couldn't come to Heaven without believing in Jesus as your personal saviour (yes, I know that the Gospel of John says the same thing).

Anyway, by the time that Christianity had really gained a foothold in the Roman Empire, it would have been obvious that dead people weren't rising out of their graves all over the place. So the resurrection of Jesus, if it had happened at all, must mean something different to the Roman Christians than it had meant to the Jewish contemporaries of Jesus.

To the Roman Christians it would have been easy and alluring to latch onto the idea that Jesus was literally the Son of God. To the Jews, this idea would be anathema, yet the idea of Jesus' specialness originated with them. The Jews were waiting not only for "a general resurrection" and the Judgement Day and the Kingdom of Heaven, they also waited for the Messiah. The Messiah was supposed to be the great new Jewish King who would liberate Jerusalem and the Children of Israel:

The Messiah that the Jews were waiting for had to be a descendant of David, and therefore it would be difficult and embarrassing for Jesus to claim this title for himself. The reason why Jesus wouldn't qualify as the Messiah was that those who knew his family regarded him as a person born out of wedlock. This meant that his paternity was unknown, so that he couldn't be generally accepted by the Jewish people as a "son of David". But the idea that he might be the Messiah, the King that would liberate Jerusalem, nevertheless circulated among the Jews. When Jesus entered Jerusalem, there was a crowd of people waiting for him who cheered for him as if he was indeed the Messiah they had been waiting for:

Interestingly, "Hosanna" is a Hebrew expression that means "save". The crowd of people were cheering for Jesus, but they were also crying out to him to be the Messiah they were waiting for and to save them from the Romans.

But Jesus was hesitant to claim Messiah-hood for himself. He usually called himself the Son of Man instead. But he also referred to God as "Father". To the Jews, this would have meant that he acknowledged that God was the father of everyone and that God was a benevolent father who wanted to save his children.

Unlike the Jews, the Romans had no objections to the idea that Jesus might literally be the only Son of God. The Romans were used to the idea that gods could have children with human women, and Hercules, son of Zeus and a human woman, was the perfect example of a "son of a god" who carried out amazing feats of strength and heroism on the Earth. Please note that Hercules also "rose from the dead" and was taken into "the Kingdom of the Roman God Heaven" to live with the other Roman gods there. It was easy for the Romans to think of Jesus in much the same way as they thought of Hercules, except that Jesus, unlike Hercules, was the faithful ones' personal saviour. To the Jews, by contrast, Jesus couldn't possibly be the Son of God, since their God would never have children, and certainly not by a human woman. But to the Romans Jesus was the "Hercules" who died and rose from the dead and went to heaven, but unlike Hercules he did so in order to save the souls of those who believed in him. That is what the resurrection of Jesus would have meant to the Roman Christians.

Interestingly, the first Jewish believers in the risen Jesus were known as Nazarenes, because they believed in the resurrection of a man from Nazareth. As you can see, the most important fact about Jesus himself, apart from the fact that he was thought to have risen from the dead, was that he hailed from the town of Nazareth. That is not particularly heroic. But the first Romans who accepted the resurrection of Jesus were soon called Christians. "Christ" is the Latin translation of "Messiah", which means "The Anointed One". The Jews waited for a Messiah who would liberate them from the Romans here on this Earth, but no such Messiah had appeared. To the Roman Christians, however, Jesus was the Son of God who was also the Anointed One because he was everybody's personal saviour in the life that awaited them after death.

So all in all, Terry, I think that there is little or no evidence that Jesus ever rose from the dead for real, but there were strong reasons for his Jewish contemporaries as well as for the first Christians in Rome to believe that he had risen from the dead. Interestingly and somewhat ironically, I think that the reasons of the Jews and the Romans to believe in a mighty saviour were remarkably similar - their reasons had to do with their situations on the Earth. The Jews were an oppressed people who regarded their occupiers, the Romans, as tyrants, and they wanted a saviour who defeated the Romans for them. The Romans, obviuously, didn't want to have another people's saviour who would defeat them, the Romans! Instead they wanted a saviour who would guarantee the power of the Roman Empire, and Paul's Letter to the Romans all but promised them that the mighty power of the Roman Empire was God-given:

So if there is a Roman Empire, it is there because it has been established by God.

And the powerful backing that the mighty Roman Empire gave to Christianity once it had become the state religion of Rome in the fourth century explains why the story of the resurrection of Jesus could be told all over the world.

Ann

Terry,

After reading your post, I edited my definition of YEC up above. I hope it is more accurate now.

My own views:

I grew up being taught that evolution was not only true, but had been unequivocally proven by science to be true. I was in a program called “Advanced Studies” in High School, and I was taking college-level science courses. In college itself, I was a Biology major. I never once doubted the science of evolution. On the contrary, I was amazed at how knowledgeable and, really, incredibly intelligent, the scientists were, and especially at how much they could ascertain from the often sparse fossil evidence available to them.

When, as an adult, I became a Christian, I began attending a very liberal church which taught that although the Bible is “true”, some of these truths are found deep within fictional stories – parables and such - and that a perfect example of this is the creation story in Genesis. I became a theistic evolutionist.

Years later, I had my “emperor’s new clothes” moment. I was watching a video showing an artist’s rendition of a small animal up on a tree branch. About the size of a mouse, it had huge round eyes, striped fur, and a long tail. It was said to occupy a position on the evolutionary path leading up to humans, and described as “shy and nocturnal”. Yet, the only fossil evidence available for this particular animal is one solitary tooth, the size of a grain of rice. It was at that moment that the scales fell from my eyes. That was the moment I decided to look with a critical eye at everything I had been taught.

The more I study, the more ridiculous the theory of evolution becomes, and I mean that from a scientific point of view. Frankly, the discovery of the genetic code *should have* been the death knell for evolution. Now, scientists are discovering sub-routines within the master code. Amazing.

As for the poll, I did not know what option to pick. I no longer believe in evolution, so all options referencing that are out.

Unfortunately, the choice for Intelligent Design was defined in such a way that I could not, in all honestly, pick that option, either. I could not pick the option about believing in a 6-day creation 6,000 years ago, because I honestly do not know. I cannot rule it out, but I cannot say definitively that it is so. I’m still reading both sides on that argument (OEC vs. YEC).

I do believe in science, and I do believe God made the universe to be knowable. How ironic that today we are told that Christianity and science are at odds, when it was the conviction that God had created laws for nature just as He had laws for man, which led to the search to determine, in a systematic way, just what these laws of nature were. It is only in the recent past that evolutionists have redefined science in such a way that the greatest scientists ever known, the very pillars of modern science, if they were alive today, would be told that their work was not science at all. Evolution, on the other hand, *is* considered science, which is kind of funny when you think about it, because every scientific fallacy known to man is incorporated into the so-called “proof” of evolution.

Anywho… back to the poll. Because of the way the poll options were written, the scientific theory which best describes my beliefs was not included, but my personal, religious belief was. The only option on the poll, as written, that I can unequivocally say I believe to be true is that the Bible is the Word of God, and God never lies. So that was the answer I chose.

Regarding the circular argument about dating:
There are several methods of dating what you find in a stratum:
1) Going by well-known and common fossils (index fossils) which have been dated several times and can be pinpointed to a certain time. (Famous examples for this are the several thousand species of trilobites and ammonites.) So, if you find a rock with an unknown fossil side by side with a cerartarges trilobite (which is very distinctive), you can say two things about the rock: It's from a certain area in Morocco (which is where that trilobite lived, and that the fossil is from the Middle to Late Devonian which is when said trilobite lived.
2) Going by radiometric dating methods (which cannot always be used to date rock, as you and I already pointed out - see explanation below).
3) In sediments, it's pretty much possible to say which strata came before and which after one certain stratum. It's also possible to estimate from the material of the stratum in which way and in which amount of time it was formed.

So, to sum things up, you did what I've seen many a creationist do: Take a scientific statement and simplify (or, in many other cases, falsify) it out of all recognition to make it sound ridiculous.

Also, your example of the young volcanic rocks is nice, but it only proves what I already stated, that material from the core cannot be dated reliably using radiometric dating methods. Especially K-Ar dating cannot be done with volcanic rocks because magma contains gases, argon among them. So, not all of the argon within the sample must have been produced in situ by 40K decay, which means that the measurements cannot be correct. And just as an aside, K-Ar dating isn't supposed to be used for rocks younger than 100,000 years because of the long half-life of 40K.

Science is not only about how a method is applied to find out something, it's also about when that method can be applied to give a reliable result.

I also looked up uranium once again, and this is what I found:
1) You need to keep track of your zeros - 235U has a half life of 700,000,000 years, not 700,000 years. Still, the ratio of of 238U to 235U is too high (on the 238U part), so there must be other factors at work.
2) Both isotopes of uranium are still constantly produced at distinct rates from other radioactive isotopes. Although I could find some of the rates with the probability of exactly that type of reaction, I was too lazy too look up everything known about all the radioisotopes of the world (which is pretty much what I would have had to do), and I wasn't willing to go through the maths right now even if I had all the facts. It would have been pages of forumlas. Offer: You get me all the numbers and decay products, and I'll do the maths.

Vicky, believing every artist's impression is like believing every prophet telling you to repent because the world will end tomorrow (at the latest). Also, taking what you see on TV for truth - well, we all have seen a flying man on TV. We've also seen him shoot beams from his eyes (which is according to a theory of how our eyes work that has been formulated by the ancient Greeks, and proven incorrect I-don't-know-when, only that it was waaaay before Superman.) TV is not the most trustworthy of sources at the best of times.

Your response to this and my previous post indicates to me that we clearly are not communicating, so I think it best to just leave it at you believe in evolution and I do not.


(Edited by me after giving more thought to my original response.)

Oh, my goodness Mellie, that link you gave me about creationist astronomy!!!!

The creationist physicist D. Russel Humphreys makes this argument:

The Earth is near the center of the universe! Right!

And there is more. Since the Earth, according to Humphreys, is near the center of the universe, we are also at the bottom of an enormous cosmic gravity well:

And where gravity is stronger, time passes more slowly. So, since the gravity would be enormous on the Earth, since we are at the center of the universe, time would pass incomparably more slowly here than in most of the universe:

So because of the humongous gravity here on the Earth, only a week went by on the Earth while billions of years passed out in the cosmos. So the light from the stars didn't get here until the fourth day, the same day that God created all the stars! Of course, the Bible tells us that God created not only all the other stars but also our own Sun on the fourth day, after the Earth was already a green and living planet full of herbs and fruit trees! But I guess that the gravity of the Earth was so overwhelming that the light from the Sun, eight light minutes from the Earth, took four days to reach us?

As for the statement that the Earth is very near the center of the universe so that gravity is much higher here than anywhere else in the cosmos, please take a look at this picture of a distant galaxy cluster:



At the two o'clock position in this picture you can see an enormous elliptical galaxy, a so called class D galaxy. This monster galaxy is surrounded by a swarm of other, smaller galaxies, all of them yellowish in color. But you can also see a number of long thin drawn-out lines or arcs. The long arcs are galaxies far in the background of the cluster of yellow galaxies. (The background galaxies are mostly either blue, because they are full of extremely hot young stars, or red, because they are very distant and have had their light severely reddened by the stretching of the expanding universe.)

But why do the background galaxies have such weird, drawn-out shapes? The reason why they look like that is that the light they sent out has been distorted and "bent" by the enormously deep cosmic "gravity well" of the massive yellow galaxy cluster in front of them. Einstein predicted that background galaxies would have their visual appearance bent into long arcs by a massive foreground cluster, so the arcs you can see in this picture beautifully confirm Einstein's thory of relativity, and they also bear witness to the enormous mass and gravity of the foreground cluster.

Do you still think that the Earth is not only at the center of the universe, but that the cosmic gravity is higher near the Earth than anywhere else in the cosmos?

Ann

Anyway, if we are sitting at the rock bottom of the deepest gravity well in the universe, shouldn't all other galaxies have their apparent shapes bent and distorted when their light fell into our gravity well? Surely we could never see symmetrical and undistorted galaxies in the sky as seen from the Earth?

M74, a symmetrical galaxy.

Surely symmetrical-looking galaxies like M74 are impossible, if we are sitting at the bottom of the deepest gravity well of the universe?

Bottom of a well

Things do look different from the bottom of a well!

Ann

I'm in the Intelligent Design camp. I honestly believe that evolution has, and still does, occur in the world. But I believe that evolution occurs at the command of God.