Todd Allen Gates
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Hey Caposkia, I'm only
Hey Caposkia,
I'm only going to respond to a few of your points; those which I think would provide a fruitful avenue of discussion. I don't really concern myself with your Midwestern professor, commenting only on the information I have. If you can produce something, let me know. I'm also not going to dignify your emotional appeals.
I think you've confused inbreeding and interbreeding; the former being breeding between closely related animals (incest), and the latter being breeding between species. Are you under the impression this is how evolution is supposed to work -- through interbreeding? If that were the case, it would be an absurd theory. Evolution actually goes in the opposite direction -- a process more akin to artificial selection in dogs. To give a naturalistic example (using dogs, since we're used to seeing the variation in the species), say a number of dogs were separated from their original home and species by a geological change, and isolated on an island. Immediately, the dogs with the shorter snouts began to suffer because the main source of protein is a rodent that hides a certain depth in a hole. The dogs with the shorter snouts may be malnourished, and would die off more, end be fewer in number than the longer snouted dogs. The majority of surviving dogs are long snouted, and the proceed to breed; their offspring, surprise surprise, tend to have long snouts; those that don't tend to die off. Lather, rinse, repeat, for many generations, and those are some long snouted dogs on that island. Over this time, these animals may be different enough from the ones the left on the mainland, the one ones the mainland having changed as well, that they can no longer interbreed; they would be considered a different species. This process of speciation has been demonstrated in a lab on fruit flies.
I suspect you're wondering about more dramatic differences between animals, expecting there to be a “transitional” example. The fact is, every animal represents a minute transition in a continuum of evolution. Rather than a series of jagged and abrupt steps, imagine a color spectrum: you can pick out a distinct blue, a distinct red, a distinct green, but each point blends into the next; the yellow becomes slightly greenish, greener still, until it's pure green; the green becomes bluer until it's just blue; and the blue fades into indigo. There's no distinct point at all. Another analogy could be a stone from a pond. It's smooth and rounded. When did it become so?
I'd be interested in what your predictions and applications for Creationism or Intelligent Design are. I have yet to hear any from anyone. As Fish pointed out, no one worth their salt considered ID a scientific theory.
most people I've talked to on this blog it seems didn't have much of a relationship when they were “religious“. In fact, the only one that I can think of right now would be Sapient who did have a relationship that he can comment on. For people like him, there is most likely a trigger that made him decide ultimately that God did not exist, whether it be scientific findings or otherwise, I don't know. There has to be a specific trigger though. Why? of the literally hundreds of stories just like sapients that i've heard or read, every single one had a specific trigger.
It sounds like you're just speculating here, and putting arbitrary restrictions on what could legitimately be considered atheism (a No True Scotsman fallacy). Even if it were a valid argument, I could say the same thing about religion, which is generally referred to only when all rational options have been exhausted. It has no bearing the validity of the claims.
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caposkia wrote: If we're
If we're going to talk about evolutionary theory, let's stay specific. It's way too broad of a Theory to talk about in general. My issue is the evolving from one species to another. Or new species forming by inbreeding. Why for example, whenever humans tried to inbreed, were there infertal outcomes, e.g. the mule and the Liger?
While magilum is correct to point out that you are referring to interbreeding, which is not a significant factor in the development of new species, it is true that hybridization (the result of interbreeding) can be a cause of speciation, admittedly a minor one, which occurs mainly in certain types of plants.
More information about speciation caused by hybridization can be found here and here (scroll down to section 5.1).
I beleive that the major factor in the splitting of species in animals is geographic isolation, although I could be mistaken. As far as a linear evolutionary lineage is concerned (which is what I believe you are referring to when you say "one species turning into another" ), this is generally a result of environmental pressures (which includes other species as well as changes in temperature, etc).
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speculations
caposkia wrote:
most people I've talked to on this blog it seems didn't have much of a relationship when they were “religious“. In fact, the only one that I can think of right now would be Sapient who did have a relationship that he can comment on. For people like him, there is most likely a trigger that made him decide ultimately that God did not exist, whether it be scientific findings or otherwise, I don't know. There has to be a specific trigger though. Why? of the literally hundreds of stories just like sapients that i've heard or read, every single one had a specific trigger.
It sounds like you're just speculating here, and putting arbitrary restrictions on what could legitimately be considered atheism (a No True Scotsman fallacy). Even if it were a valid argument, I could say the same thing about religion, which is generally referred to only when all rational options have been exhausted. It has no bearing the validity of the claims.
I didn't ignore the rest of your comment, I'll just have to reply later due to lack of time.
well, it is of course a speculation be it that I'm going by what "it seems like" as far as who I've talked to on this site. If you were to make the same claim about religion... er... eh, let's stop beating around the bush "Christianity!" , then I'd have to say your speculation is correct. Of the 80% of people in the United States claiming to be Christian, only 10% are followers. Followers, to simplify it basically means if you ask them why they believe in God the answer will have something of relevance rather than just a vague 'it's the way I was raised' or 'i just do'.
I am not trying to put any restrictions on what could be any form of atheism. If you don't believe, you don't believe. I'm just saying that many people who claimed to be "Christian" and are now not never really had a relationship to base their opinion off of anyway. I was also assuring that I was not generalizing by saying that there are few that seemed to have a legit relationship and something went awry with that relationship. namely Sapient. My point was there's always a trigger. Something had to click inside Sapient to say, 'nah, there's no way God's real' and to base his future life off that understanding.
Speaking of "speculations" I could also make your claim toward atheism; "atheism is only referred to when all 'rational' options have been exhausted"
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magilum wrote: Aside from
yea, i was kind of focusing on the fact that this person has an anthropology degree and he still holds that view. It seems that to some people on this site, it's what the person has a degree in that's more important than what they have to say... as if that could discredit their claims or something...
Fish wrote: There is no
no indication that he's a professor etc... yea, I believe i implied that and followed up with the site that i found having more... er... something like that. Anyway, for some reason I don't feel like that's a relevant point.
yea, are you referencing to those links? I did check those out. I guess I'm confused. I didn't really see anything that discredited the arguement... its' very possible I missed something, could you help me out?
please don't come back with any "I didn't really look" crap either. The explanations I saw sounded a lot like excuses for not considering alternatives. I did look. I don't mean to sound rude either, but it's really a waste of everyones time to keep coming up with excuses on why what i present isn't credible when I feel that I've thoroughly backed myself up and confirmed any doubt that I didn't understand "X" scientific concept.
Instead of looking for excuses, lets present what we have and see what seems to make sense. I think we all know at this point each side has parts we don't understand still. THAT'S WHY THEY'RE STILL CALLED THEORY! If this argument was so cut and dry, people wouldn't have been wasting the last 100 or so years agruing about it. I've tried to bring this beyond scientific discovery and I've tried really hard to keep it tangable, meaning something anyone can try. The question is who's willing to try?
I also wanted to hear more from Todd Gates. I was really hoping to hear his understanding about some of this presented at some point.
caposkia wrote: magilum
But the truth of a claim doesn't come down to the reputation of the claimant. Their credibility might effect whether we're prone to listen to them, but ultimately, they have to be able to back up what they say. Earning credentials doesn't give you license to decide what is true or not, it just (hopefully) gives you a foundation on which to start your investigation. But if your reasoning is flawed, or evidence doesn't materialize to support your hypothesis, it will lose to a more accurate description of the phenomenon, regardless of who you are. I'm going to paste my previous reply from another thread, so I don't have to rephrase my argument.
'For the majority of people, in the majority of technical discussions, their thought process can be articulated as, “Which talking head do I listen to?” To an extent, this is practical; it's always smart to get second opinions before going through a major procedure, for instance, but there's a certain point where you have to defer to things like expertise and reputation in deciding whether to listen to a doctor. They can give you a layman's description of the problem and their solution, but it's unlikely a real representation of it, and also unlikely you'll have much of a basis to argue with their reasoning (whether it's valid or not). The problem arises when we take the practical limits to our knowledge to be limits inherent to knowledge itself. Just because I don't understand why, from a technical standpoint, a course of antibiotics is supposed to help with an abscessed tooth, it doesn't mean there isn't something to know; that there isn't a very specific framework under which the process of its function can be explained from start to finish. Preachers and their ilk use the opaqueness of technical understanding to portray every belief as a blind deference to authority, because, well, in their case it probably is. I've never seen it demonstrated that there is some precise, consistent content to be understood about religion that really reconciles it with reality or substantiates its claims. There could be, but among vocal proponents of religion, I've seen no such thing.'
caposkia wrote: no
Your argument seemed to rely on there being a professor from the Midwest, which doesn't seem to be the case. Even if it were, his comments are a non-sequitur.
I'm sorry, but you haven't presented anything substantiated -- much of it wasn't even relevant.
Evolutionary theory is intertwined with biological research. Like I said, for Creationism/ID to compete, you would need to find a way to dovetail it into these fields, make testable hypotheses for it, and develop applications for it.
I fail to see what understanding Creationism brings to the table at all.
You're equivocating the colloquial use of the word 'theory,' meaning 'guess,' with the scientific use that is a framework for understanding a system. A scientific theory can be reinforced, applied, replied upon, and it will never be called a 'fact.' A fact is a single piece of information, and a theory deals with how facts fit together.
Your argument is invalidated because the corrections and alterations that have been made in scientific theories increase the accuracy of them. It's not just a stalemate of people shouting at each other which thing they'd rather believe. Which, incidentally, can be applied to a certain brand of reasoning.
I smell an appeal from emotion coming.
This thread really shouldn't have been hijacked. I recommend starting a thread in the science or atheist versus theist forum if you want to continue talking about Creationism, or a new thread for discussing Todd's work.
sporadic contributions, & skepticism of religion, not A Creator
> CAPOSKIA: I also wanted to hear more from Todd Gates. I was really hoping to hear his understanding about some of this presented at some point.
> MAGILUM: This thread really shouldn't have been hijacked. I recommend starting a thread in the science or atheist versus theist forum if you want to continue talking about Creationism, or a new thread for discussing Todd's work.
TODD: First, my thanks to the both of you (and to Fish and Veils of Maya and Archeopteryx) for all the contributions to my pages here. True, the conversation has shifted away from my videos and onto Intelligent Design / blind natural selection (etc.), but it still gives the flattering illusion that my work is generating a lot of discussion!
And I wouldn't use the word "hijacked" . . . breaking off onto tangent topics is just part of the nature of the beast of every online discussion.
> CAPOSKIA: I also wanted to hear more from Todd Gates.
Unfortunately, my time is very limited at the moment . . . I wish I could say it's because of exciting writing projects, but it's the responsibilities of my day job and my family that are absorbing almost all my time.
What little time I do have for myself, I'm dedicating to working on my next video series, which will be a re-make (and expansion of) of my first ten videos. I want to re-do them partly because the audio quality of those early videos is quite poor (every s and p and t crackles), but also because I feel I could have done a better job at presenting the Christian counterargument.
That is, I feel that the YouTube comments I've received from my videos, plus IrishFarmer's blog (http://exposingatheism.blogspot.com/2007/09/dialogue-with-christian-proselytizer-or.html), plus listening to a Christian radio show that trashed my videos (http://tnma.blogspot.com/2007/09/dialogue-with-christian-proselytizer.html), have all revealed certain weak spots in my presentation of the Christian apologist's interpretations, thus making my own argument against the Christian's interpretation not as strong as it could be.
I'm certainly not saying that I agree with the Christians who've criticized my videos in the sense that I think their rationalizations "therefore prove that the Bible is the Word of God" . . . I just think that some of their rationalizations are superior to the rationalizations that I ascribed to Christian apologists. And I do want to present the very best arguments from each side (there's no point in attacking a strawman) . . . and not being Christian myself, I recognize that I "need help" in presenting Christianity's best. So I am grateful for the Christian feedback.
I can't say that my re-make of my videos will indeed present Christianity's best, but I do think it will be an improvement over what I have now.
> CAPOSKIA: I was really hoping to hear [Todd Gates's] understanding about some of this presented at some point.
TODD: I'm hesitant to answer this question, because I don't want to start a debate that I don't have the time to defend. But since you asked, I will admit that I agree with everything that Magilum, Fish, and Veils of Maya have said so far---much of what they've written, in fact, articulates the subject much better than I can.
I really don't have anything to say that will add to or further clarify what they've already written.
But the debate over whether or not there is "a Creator" is one I rarely bring up when discussing religion with theists. Because in the end, all an atheist can do is provide evidence for why a Creator is more improbable than probable . . . and most theists will never be convinced of this, especially when they've felt that they've experienced some kind of personal connection with a Higher Power.
So I much prefer to set the First Cause and the Intelligent Design arguments to the side, and work with the premise that there IS a Creator (at least for argument's sake). That frees up the conversation to focus on whether or not there are reasons to believe the claim that our said-Architect of the Universe and the Author of the Bible are indeed one and the same.
(My Video 7 of 7 on "Using the Socratic Method with Christian Proselytizers" further explains the reasons why I focus only on skepticism of revealed religions, and not skepticism of a Creator. And my re-make of that video will explain it much better!)
Thanks, and again, my apologies for making only sporadic contributions to this site.
- Todd
caposkia wrote: Also, just
I think you're refering to the "Reed Sea" translation error, which is discussed in more detail here.
http://www.crivoice.org/yamsuph.html
Which leads the authors to the following conclusion.
Which implies the istrealites did not cross "an otherwise impossible span of water" but stood up to chaos found in the world.
We do not learn by experience, but by our capacity for experience.
ToddGates wrote:
well, it's good to hear from you Todd. This is the reason why I was hoping to hear from you, you avoid the fluff and the obviously useless arguments and go right to the facts. I truely appreciate that about you.
I got involved because the inquiries came up and of course I just flowed with the current, but looking back I see I should have stuck to your points specifically and ignored the rest. You're right as well, believers will not look at a "probability" as concrete evidence that God does not exist. It works the same way on the other end, a theist is not going to get a non-believer to believe just by presenting the probable evidence. I've seen it before and saw it again here. It's quickly dismissed by claiming it useless information or irrelevent to the conversation and yet is never refuted successfully. Same on both ends it seems. Too many times I've tried to move beyond that conversation just to be pulled back in. I will try to avoid that from here on. I guess I'm a sucker to try to find the answers when the question is asked. If I don't know i will find out. Every question has an answer somewhere.
no need to appologise either. I understand how busy life can get especially if you have a family. Take your time and live your life, this site is trivial in the grand scheme of things and life comes first. I'm just here to support truth and learn more when I have the time. what I mean by support truth btw for anyone who wants to jump on that is TRUTH with a capital T. The ultimate truth whatever that may be. That can mean anything, but the point is it doesn't matter what any of us believe. Whats real is real and that will never change.
magilum wrote: Your
His comments are I believe intended to be a peice of a larger puzzle. Maybe on their own they're as you say "non-sequitur", but with other evidence presented by me as well as much evidence I have not presented here, it holds a lot of water and otherwise would be a, in my words "logical conclusion".
regardless of what his comments can be viewed as, they are all fact.
what I have presented was just about as substantiated as what was used to refute it. if not, then I must ask how, but if we do go further with this one, we should also start a new blog.
absolutely, and I've challenged people to do that on here, none even acknowleged that challenge however.
what challenge? I've mentioned that for people to rationally refute the existance of a God and the Christian view point, they would have to themselves truely try and follow this understanding and after they have done what many non-believers turned Christian have done conclude there is no God. This approach would be a truely scientific process to the conclusion. So far, everyone who has tried this has become Christain and followed this God. If a scientific study was done, the conclusions would show the same processes were taken and the same outcome followed for each transformed person. This would rank in the thousands just in the United States alone. Is this not substantial evidence that something more must be there? let's again not get too off topic with this people.
I fail to see what understanding Evolution brings to the table at all. Especially being the only successful argument I got from anyone was that Evolution exists, to which I repeatedly agreed and emphasized that the Bible backs that understanding up.
I've already gone through this. I'm referencing to the scientific word "theory". I.D. is universally understood as a scientific theory as much as Evolution is. Don't even ask me for a reference, look it up in any scientific book covering the topic.
So then I guess we should really be focusing on those theories and not personal issues with the counterarguments.
so then you're willing to try?
I didn't want to get into creationism like this at all. My original intent was to stick with Todd's videos. Thank you for helping me emphasize staying on topic.
caposkia wrote: His
If you choose to represent the position that mass murder is the consequence of teaching the theory of evolution, please do so explicitly for the people who haven't read the article. I have nothing to say to your general claims about supposed “facts.” The irony of the argument put forth by your 'professor from the Midwest' is that the theory of evolution itself contains no prescription for behavior; I've read The Origin of Species, and it's a science book. That's all. Unless you find lengthy descriptions of the symbiotic relationships between ants and aphids, or the variations of artificially selected pigeons violently infuriating, I fail to see the connection. The idea that Social Darwinism is a tangible threat of teaching evolution is based on the the faulty premise that evolution is a prescription for behavior rather than an observation on biology; in other words, that there's a threat of 'evolutionism' taking the place of religion x, and on the equally faulty premise that the absence of religion does away with moral obligations, which simply doesn't bear out in the statistics and has been explained at length by Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and Richard Carrier. Here's an essay from deludedgod on the subject:
On the Fallacious and Naive Nature of Social Darwinism and Anti-Evolution Arguments Resulting | Rational Responders
You've posted vague references to unidentified TV shows, articles and alleged professors.
Wow. That has absolutely nothing to do with what I asked.
Your premise is at best an appeal to popularity -- so and so many people believe xyz, so it must be valid. How many people believe something has no bearing on its validity if they can't demonstrate why what they believe is so, or that it is so at all. You're also just affirming the consequent here by saying that people who choose to believe in xyz, tend to believe in xyz -- people who don't aren't included in your view. Many of the people on this very board were religious at some point in their lives -- some by birth, and some by choice -- so your premise doesn't hold water.
To reiterate my question about your claims regarding the validity and viability of Creation/Intelligent Design:
Evolutionary theory is intertwined with biological research. Like I said, for Creationism/ID to compete, you would need to find a way to dovetail it into these fields, make testable hypotheses for it, and develop applications for it.
Evolutionary theory is a foundation of biological research and genetic mapping and engineering. The adaptation of pathogens to antibiotics, for instance, is a grave concern that can only be understood in the context of evolutionary theory.
Then what predictions does it make (that would reinforce or falsify it) and what applications does it have (how do we use it)? What 'science' books are you referring to? I know you asked me not to ask for references, but that can't go without question.
As for the rest of your post, keep your “Drink The Kool-Aid Challenge” to yourself.
Science, religion, and "truth" vs. "Truth"
> CAPOSKIA: I'm just here to support truth and learn more when I have the time. What I mean by support truth btw for anyone who wants to jump on that is TRUTH with a capital T.
Religion's claim of possessing "Truth with a capital T"---vs. science's tendency to use a lowercase t---happens to be the subject of an upcoming video series of mine.
This came as a result of a tangent to my re-working of Video 5, which is when the Judeo-Christian Bible is read in the same critical light that was just held up to non-Christian Scriptures. Discussing the way true-believers will sometimes shift between literal and metaphorical interpretations led to a brief tangent on how science & religion have very different approaches when it comes to evidence that conflicts with their currently held beliefs . . . and gradually my tangent got so long that I decided to make a separate series on it.
My below notes are still in the draft stage . . . and the writing style is a bit sloppy, but that's because these are just notes that I'll use to glance down at during the video---I won't be reading these word for word.
Anyway, if you, Magilum, Fish, Veils of Maya, or Archeopteryx have the time to look over these notes and offer any comments / criticisms / suggestions / etc., it will be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,- Todd
Science, religion, and "truth" vs. "Truth" (1 of 3)
That science will spell its truths with a lowercase t, and religion will use a capital T, illustrates the difference between science and religion when it comes to how permanent each considers its own knowledge to be.
In the field of science, you start out with a hypothesis, which in an untested explanation. Once a hypothesis
- gathers enough evidence to be able to explain a wide set of observations,
- and make predictions that agree with observations,
- and it's been reviewed by fellow scientists and people in related fields,
- and peers have tried but been unable to falsify it,
the hypothesis graduates to the level of a theory.
And the scientific use of the word "theory" might be called a "truth" with a lowercase t. And the reason science doesn't issue as capital T Truths, but sticks to the more humble word "theory," is that even though the theory may seem solid enough to call a Truth or a fact, you just never know what new evidence may be discovered tomorrow. And should new and solid evidence arise that contradicts a theory, the theory has to be revised, or sometimes even totally abandoned.
Religion, on the other hand, starts out with the capital T truth—that is, God's Inerrant Word. And if contradictory evidence should be discovered, most true believers, at least as a general rule, don't revise God's Word or abandon it, but take one of two approaches:
One approach is that of the literalists—those that believe their holy book is not only the Word of God, but the literal Word of God. And literalists continue to believe what they call the Word of God even in the face of contrary evidence.
- Literalists themselves fall into two different camps: I'll call the first camp the Faith Alone camp—and these are the people who won't consider even looking at contradictory evidence. Certain young earth creationists, for example, automatically KNOW the scientific evidence for dinosaurs being on our planet for 160 million years, all of which took place 65 million years before the first human appeared, has to be wrong, because that's not how God explained things in Genesis. And God is never wrong … so, end of story, case closed.
- I'll call the other literalist camp the Faith & Facts camp—and by this I mean the true-believers that WILL look at physical evidence, but not in the way that scientists will look for evidence and try to come to conclusions that best fit the facts … rather they HAVE the conclusion—God's Word—so they search for anything that hints of scientific evidence that will support that conclusion. In the case of young earth creationists, you'll find that many of their websites claim to have evidence that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time, such as fossilized footprints of humans & dinosaurs walking side by side. So these Faith & Facts literalists differ from the Faith Alone literalists who won't even look at physical evidence, but the difference between these two camps is slight, because with both, the foundation of their conclusion is "God said so."
The other most common approach, and maybe the MOST common approach that true believers take today, is not denying modern scientific evidence, but instead denying any interpretation of God's Word that runs contrary to that evidence. So in the instance of the universe's age, if the evidence seems overwhelming that it is in fact billions of years old, well, that must mean that the standard interpretation of God's Word is wrong—or at least, the literal interpretation is wrong. When Genesis tells us that God created everything in the universe in 6 days, and when Exodus 20:11 reinforces that by saying "For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them" … well, maybe some of those days were what we humans would consider billions of years. Or, maybe the whole thing is God just speaking to us in figurative language.
The metaphorical approach to the bible started becoming a lot more popular in the late 1800s, which is when the scientific evidence began to mount that a literal interpretation of Genesis could no longer be taken seriously, at least not in the scientific community.
But the roots of the metaphorical approach actually go back to the earliest days of Christianity. Just reconciling the OT with the NT calls for at least some type of non-literal language. If you look at an OT passage like Deuteronomy 7:6, when it says:
For you [Israelites] are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.
---you can tell that Paul & other early Christians couldn't have been interpreting that passage TOO literally, especially when Paul wrote in Romans 3:29:
Is He the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also.
St. Augustine defended metaphorical interpretations back in the fourth century AD. He wrote some strikingly modern ideas in his Commentary on Genesis, where he said it was best to accept Scripture over science, if science has not been proved … But when there appears to be a genuine conflict between demonstrated knowledge and a literal reading of the Bible, then knowledge and scripture could be reconciled by interpreting Scripture metaphorically.
And Augustine said that the reason there might sometimes appear to be conflict between faith and facts was b/c the Holy Spirit only taught us that which was relevant to our salvation, and wasn't concerned with other matters, such as "the form and shape of the heavens."
But again, as ancient as the metaphorical approach is, it didn't gain any sort of widespread popularity until the late 1800s, and one way to remind ourselves of that is to look at the violent reaction to Copernicus back in the 1500s, when he published his book "On the revolutions of the heavenly bodies," which proposed the first model of a sun-centered solar system that could actually make accurate predictions of the positions of the planets.
To be continued in Part 2.
Science, religion, and "truth" vs. "Truth" (2 of 3)
In part 1, I left off by saying that a way to remind ourselves that the bible was read literally for most of its history is to look at the violent reaction to Copernicus's model of a sun-centered solar system—a model that could actually make accurate predictions of the positions of the planets.
There actually wasn't a violent reaction to Copernicus himself, b/c he waited until he was on his deathbed before he allowed his book to be published.
But there was a violent reaction to the ideas in the book, because most people of that age read the Bible literally, and when read literally, the Bible tells us that the earth does not move, and the sun orbits the earth.
The four passages that Christians of that age most frequently cited were
Ecclesiastes 1:5: The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises.
Psalm 93:1: He [God] has established the world; it shall never be moved …
Psalm 104:5: [God] set the earth on its foundations, so that it shall never be shaken.
And Joshua 10:13, which describes God's Holy Halting of the sun in order to give the Israelites more time to slaughter all the Gibeonites:
And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies … the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.
The Roman Catholic Church reaction to Copernicus's proposal that the earth orbited the sun was an official ban of Copernicus's book. In its 1616 Decree of the Roman Catholic Congregation of the Index, it states:
the motion of the Earth … which is taught by Nicolaus Copernicus… is false and altogether opposed to the Holy Scripture …
And the reason the Church issued the ban, in their words, was "in order that this opinion may not insinuate itself any further to the prejudice of Catholic truth."
Protestants also condemned Copernicus.
One of the main leaders of the Lutheran Reformation, a man named Philipp Melanchthon ([muh-langk-thuh n), wrote in his book Elements of Physics that saying that the earth moved showed a "lack of honesty and decency" … He cites the Psalms and Ecclesiastes passages as proof of Copernicus's error, and said "It is the part of a good mind to accept the truth as revealed by God and to acquiesce in it.''
Martin Luther himself also condemned Copernicus, and in his 1539 "Table Talks," he referenced Joshua 10:13 when he wrote "sacred Scripture tells us that God commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth."
Martin Luther also condemned those who dealt with conflicting evidence by switching to metaphorical interpretations. Again, that's what St. Augustine suggested, but Martin Luther detested that idea. In his Lectures on Genesis, Luther writes:
"We Christians must be different from the philosophers in the way we think about the causes of things. And if some [biblical passages] are beyond our comprehension … we must believe them rather than wickedly deny them or presumptuously interpret them in conformity with our understanding."
When Galileo used a new invention called the telescope that actually provided solid evidence that supported Copernicus's theory, the Church charged Galileo with heresy … and b/c there was no separation between church and state back then, the Church had the power to bring Galileo to trial for conducting science that did not conform to Scripture.Galileo was found guilty of heresy, and the Church gave the 69-year-old scientist the choice of being burned alive at the stake or recanting his science and have his punishment reduced to a life sentence of house arrest.
Perhaps needless to say, this is a good example of why a separation between church & state is a good idea.
Here are excerpts from the Church's 1633 indictment of Galileo:
Whereas you, Galileo … were denounced … for holding as true a false doctrine … that the sun is … in the center of the world, and that the earth moves … also, for having pupils whom you instructed in the same opinions; … you include several propositions contrary to the true sense and authority of the Holy Scriptures;The proposition that the earth is not the center of the world, nor immovable, but that it moves … is … absurd, philosophically false and … erroneous in faith.
But Isaac Newton and others continued to provide evidence that the earth DOES in fact move: that it turns on its axis and orbit the sun. Eventually the evidence became overwhelming that Christians everywhere—even the most die-hard literalists—gradually had to switch to interpreting these passages in some type of non-literal way.
So as for the passages from Psalm 93:1 and 104:5 about the earth being immovable: God must have meant something to the effect of the earth would not be moved from its orbit around the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:5: well, when it says "the sun rises and the sun goes down," it's just talking about what we see when we look up at the sky—no different from today's meteorologists using the words sunrise and sunset—no error at all.
Josh 10:13? Well, when God spoke of "stopping the sun in its tracks"—that's just a literary device to show what lengths God will go thru to aid those who serve Him.
In addition to sticking to a literal interpretation of the Bible regardless of facts, or reinterpreting the bible to conform with the facts, there's a third and slightly less popular way that true-believers can deal with conflicting information, and I'll get to that in part 3.
Science, religion, and "truth" vs. "Truth" (3 of 3)
In parts 1 and 2, and mentioned that when true believers are confronted with solid evidence that contradicts a biblical passage, the two most common options are to deny that evidence in one way or another, or re-interpret the biblical passage so that it harmonizes with the evidence.
A 3rd and less frequent approach that true believers can take is to maintain that even though God is inerrant, sometimes humans are just too fallible to understand what God really means.
As an example of this, we can look at an article that the Christian apologist Alvin Plantinga wrote called “When Faith and Reason Clash."
Here's an excerpt, and this is from the September 1991 issue of Christian Scholar's Review:
… Scripture is inerrant: the Lord makes no mistakes; what he proposes for our belief is what we ought to believe. Sadly enough, however, our grasp of what he proposes to teach is fallible.
Hence we cannot simply identify the teaching of Scripture with our grasp of that teaching; we must ruefully bear in mind the possibility that we are mistaken.
“[God] sets the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved,” says the Psalmist. Some sixteenth-century Christians took the Lord to be teaching here that the earth neither rotates on its axis nor goes around the sun; and they were mistaken.Like metaphorical interpretations, this approach also has historic roots. Back in second century a.d., Justin Martyr took this viewpoint is his work Dialogue of Justin when he discussed biblical contradictions. Here's an excerpt from Chapter 65:
If a [biblical] passage apparently contradicts another … I would rather openly confess that I do not know the meaning of the passage.
In the case of the earth's movement, I don't think any Christian takes the "we don't know what God was trying to say" approach anymore, and I believe that there are no literalists left either—probably not since 1822, which is when Pope Pius the 7th lifted the ban from Copernicus's book. So in this area, probably every Christian has moved into the metaphorical camp.
When it comes to the age of the universe, there's a lot of literalists left who maintain that the universe and the earth is only 6,000 years old, even though, as Christopher Hitchens points out, we have strong evidence that the Mesopotamians were already brewing beer by then.
So my point of this video series is how, when it comes to dealing with evidence that conflicts with one's current thinking, science and religion are opposites of each other. And I'm going to close by noting how absurd even it would look—and how totally implausible it would be—for either one to adopt the methods of the other.
Let's take a passage like the following from Aristotle's On the Heavens:
Let us first decide the question of whether the earth moves … if this were so, there would have to be passings and turnings of the fixed stars. Yet no such thing is observed. The same stars always rise and set in the same parts of the earth. … It is clear, then, that the earth must be at the center and immovable.
If science were to pick up on religion's way of dealing with contradictory evidence, then scientists would be split between those who said
(1) the earth MUST be immovable because Aristotle said so, end of story …
and those who said
(2) well, Aristotle must have been speaking metaphorically … when he says "at the center" that must mean "at the center of importance"
and those who said
(3) well, since Aristotle's words conflict with the evidence, we don't really know what he was trying to say.
Or if religion were to pick up science's way of dealing with contradictory evidence, it could take a passage like Joshua 10:13
And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until [the people] had avenged themselves upon their enemies …
—and just revise it … update it with something like:
And God prolonged daylight by stopping the earth from turning, and did not allow its spin to resumeth until [the people] had avenged themselves upon their enemies …
But again, science & religion are the opposites of each in this area, so this could obviously never happen.
So when Aristotle says the earth doesn't move, we just say "Aristotle was wrong."
And when the Bible says the earth doesn't move … it's a literary device, or a metaphor, or just an expression, or maybe human intellect is just too fallible to understand the infallible Word of God.
Thanks for watching.
caposkia wrote:
It was already shown that his comments do not address claims made by evolution. Therefore, they do not in any way invalidate claims made by evolution. It's doesn't matter if they're facts or not.
I have posted (twice!) a lengthy refute to the claims you made regarding evolution and intelligent design. You still have yet to respond to either of those posts.
This is simply not true. Scientific books covering the topic says Intelligent Design is not science. I won't ask you for references because I know you don't have any.
The Dover trials said I.D. is not science.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science says I.D. is not science
The National Center for Science Education says I.D is not science.
The National Science Teachers Association says I.D. is not scienec.
The Interacademy Panel (an international group composed of over 60 scientific organizations) says I.D. is not science
In respect to your other point, Magilum has addressed most of them. In addition, you have yet to reply to my previous posts. I will wait for you to do so at your convenience.
I'm only able to respond
I'm only able to respond to this and have not had a chance to read beyond this post, so please forgive me, but I am not ignoring you or neglecting to answer you. Thank you for all your input.
you seem to be stuck on the article you found. I said that's not the same article. I'm still looking, i can't figure out why it's not coming back up in my searches... Probably because I can't remember the search word used.
Anyway, I'm not basing anything he said on behavior. I'm simply using the emperical evidence he brought forth in the statement I quoted by him (which by the way I have referenced other sites to back up his claim). You decided to claim that it had to do with human behavior and completely ignored the topic at hand. I know he was talking about the school shootings and he holds a belief that many Christians hold. If you want to start talking about how taking God out of our country has affected behavior, we should start a new blog.
...with specific links and a few bibliographies and specific book references that most people who commented on this blog have looked at themselves...
I know how you feel
yea, but being religious and being a believer are two extremely different viewpoints. I know many people who are "religious" but if you ask them anything about God they'd say "yea, he exists", but not be able to explain to you why except for the fact that "my church says so" or "how could he not" something vague like that.
most people I've talked to on this blog it seems didn't have much of a relationship when they were "religious". In fact, the only one that I can think of right now would be Sapient who did have a relationship that he can comment on. For people like him, there is most likely a trigger that made him decide ultimately that God did not exist, whether it be scientific findings or otherwise, I don't know. There has to be a specific trigger though. Why? of the literally hundreds of stories just like sapients that i've heard or read, every single one had a specific trigger.
I've used some attempts that were not aloud to go further. "The truth cannot be told to you unless you're willing to hear it." -POTC
If we're going to talk about evolutionary theory, let's stay specific. It's way too broad of a Theory to talk about in general. My issue is the evolving from one species to another. Or new species forming by inbreeding. Why for example, whenever humans tried to inbreed, were there infertal outcomes, e.g. the mule and the Liger?
I guess then I'd have to look into the I.D. theory a bit more. Be it that I'm not an I.D. theorist myself, nor do I follow that particular belief. Maybe you should ask the scientist or group of scientists that decided that I.D. is in fact a theory. You and I both know it is called a theory in the same sense that Evolution is called a theory. I would like to point out that I'm not the one who brought the I.D. theory into this blog. I was perfectly fine with sticking to the Christian viewpoint and the scientific and historical evidences that back that up.
As I said though, ultimately, I really want to get back on topic of this blog.
wooh, an emotional retaliation. Everyone's "prove this, prove that", and yet when it comes to being challenged themselves, they don't want to touch the water. I'm on here to learn more and to "always challenge what I know" as the Bible says. It seems you're only on here to prove anyone who doesn't hold your view wrong. Please don't waste our time if that's all you're really on here for.