It depends on how you look at it. First off, I'll say that how you
perceive the Bible depends on how you *choose* to look at it. The
existence of choice is a fundamental component of faith. Let me give
you three possible scenarios.
1. There is no supernatural creator that exists outside the rules and
laws of the observable universe.
2. There is a supernatural creator that exists outside of the
observable universe, may have created the universe and possibly life,
but no longer interacts with us in any way.
pretty non-abramic that one
3. There is a supernatural creator that exists outside of the
observable universe, and while not directly observable, has revealed
himself through interactions at given times within his creation.
4. there is a powerful being that dwells in the universe and
communicates with people from time to time
5. all religions are human constructs. And religious writings are one
aspect of this construction. [PRATCHETT "Small Gods"]
Yeah, I agree that these are other plausible views.
I'd believe something very unusual had happened!
That's the point. How you interpret it depends on your frame of
reference. I think the majority of people who find faith in the Bible
and Jesus Christ tend to be those that are suffering. Contrast the
personas of Pharoah who witnessed the 10 plagues and did not believe
to the blind man whom Jesus restored his sight. There's a lot of pain
in the world, and science doesn't provide hope or a refuge from it.
What it tells me that you're a cosmic accident, destined like dust to
exist and then fade away, with no point other than to observe itself.
As someone who has sat in a car in a garage ready to asphyxiate
himself because of the emotional turmoil from experiences in my youth,
I'm sure that it has put me in a position to think about the Bible in
a different way than others. In 10th grade, there was a girl who was
in one of my classes who was nice but I didn't know very well who on
the monday before easter vacation (we had school on Monday, half day
Tuesday) was acting quite strange, wouldn't give eye contact instead
of her normal friendly self. I thought about doing something nice for
her on Tuesday, but she didn't show up. In the afternoon on the way
home, I had an very strong feeling that I really needed to go over to
her house. I didn't respond to the feeling and went my way home. The
next day I found out that same girl took her parents gun and shot
herself in the head before her parents came home.
When death was staring me in the face, I made the choice to put my
hope in the promises of the Jesus Christ. It may looked upon by
others to be a fool's hope, but it's one that I willingly choose, and
it has changed the way I see things.
advanced technology maybe? I do know people who'll say the area has
enourmous tides (I don't think the Red Sea has enourmous tides) and
that's what really happened. But these are the same people who say
noah's ark is based on a mesopotamiam flood. It's a variance on
Panzoism (the ability to see windmills when there are giants).
In the absence of direct observation, the best one can do is try to
verify what is there. Are the towns and cities and people and
civilizations in the Bible really exist? At least the Jewish people
are still around today. If God showed himself directly to you and
only you, I don't foresee even that changing your mind as you seem to
rely on the collective experiences of others rather than your own.
It's not by any means a bad position to live by, but if you had a
"real" supernatural experience (where real depends on what the person
considers real), I think it would likely be ignored.
It
think it's a pretty amazing universe without adding in the
supernatural.
I can certainly respect that position. It's kind of ironic that if
the universe has no creator is true, why do so many people try to put
a creator there?
at the other end of the scale people will take quite mundane things to
be evidence of miracles. Dreams and such like.
Sure, when I visited Taiwan, I went to one of their places of worship
and the people there would ask a question, cast a lot of some kind
(looked like a pair of lips), and depending on the result (each lip
has two sides, and they had different colors) they would get their
divine answer and act upon it. Or keep recasting the lot until they
get an answer they liked ;-)
creation v. evolution is a false dichotomy. Oranges verses orchards.
Evolution is not about the origin of life but about its
diversification once it existed. In particular it explains why life
follows a certain pattern (a tree or strict nested hierarchy). In
principle evolution is compatible with a supernatural origin (to be
fair no life-scientist would seriously entertain the idea, just as the
people at CERN aren't looking for the Higg's Angel).
While one can certainly create an argument to combine evolution and a
supernatural creator together, I don't think that it's a position that
can be harmonious with the Bible. Granted there are things that could
be considered figurative in the Bible. But once one starts taking the
Bible less literally and more figuratively, you get on a slippery
slope that will lead that person to trust it less and less. Next
thing you know, you'll start believing that people really didn't see
Jesus die on the cross, he really didn't rise from the grave, he was
just a nice guy, or that he didn't even exist, just another story from
someone else who didn't know what they were experiencing or writing
out the machinations of their mind.
We all believe in abiogenesis (that life has an origin) the question
is, is that origin a natural or a supernatural process.
Not just the origin, but what we experience itself. The idea that a
complicated set of physics laws and chemical equations can experience
the universe in the way we do is rather hard to me to accept. Other
people seem to accept it just fine, as I have run into people that
believe that we experience is just the illusion of a very complicated
sequence of chemical formulas, rather than by free will or choice of
what we make. At some level, they have a point. Bacteria do what
their DNA tells them to do. We all start from a single cell with a
strand of DNA telling it what to do. At what point does the illusion
of experience in what we see and feel come into shape?
What the creationist are *really* concerned with is the origin of
huamnity. Were we created by god or did we arise by natural means from
the other mammals? Even the RCC blurs this one a bit. The implantation
of the soul is a plain supernatural invention.
I agree that the soul is in the realm of the supernatural.
I think you're confused with the human genome project (and a rather
distorted version of it at that). You have a number of quite serious
misconceptions. If you are intersted then try the news group
talk.origins. Polite, genuinely interested creationist are usually
treated well. Many of the peopel on that news group are *very* well
informed and would be happy to answer questions about the latest
(naturalistic) theories of the origins of life, and probably why they
don't put DNA in the liquidiser.
It was an antagonistic way of putting it, so apologies for that. I
meant that the process of determining the genome is to break it up
into pieces and do sophisticated pattern matching (at least that's how
the genome lab down the hall from the image processing lab explained
what they were doing to me back a few years ago). Don't get me wrong,
it's an admirable achievement to get to where we are.
I will also fully admit that my highest understanding is what I've
read from web sites (and not just the fundy ones). Unfortunately,
there is only so much time in the day, and there will likely always be
a disconnect between me and those who spend much more time
understanding the low-level details. I suppose I could try my hand at
"fold it", seems like a interesting game.
I don't call 3 billion years "arbitary". Do you think they made it up
or something? What is surprising (to me) is just how soon life
appeared on the planet. Life goes back almost to the oldest rocks. If
I believed in miracles... But no!
No I don't think they made that number up. The question is how can a
scientist observe or repeat this experiment. It's not like we live 3
billion years. The best we can do is to try to recreate environments
that have properties that exhibit some of the behavior we observe in
life and make hypotheses on what it would do (given enough time).
Let's see what forces we have to work with to create a natural
environment to create life: gravity, nuclear forces, electromagnetism,
thermodynamics, radiation. Okay, so we've demonstrated that we can
make some amino acids, some self-replicating polypeptides. Sure
creating amino acids and self replicating polypeptides is interesting
stuff, but most of the research today is from the top-down (it gives
much higher dividends), rather than the bottom up. Are there natural
environment experiments continuing like the Miller-Urey?
There's been a lot of focus on what in the environment can help lead
to life, but what things in the environment work against it. Exposed
to the natural environment, the tendency of life is to die.
Unfortunately, the all environments I'm familiar with lead to the
eventual loss of the "life" property. Take away the ability to
replicate, and I don't know if life could find a place to survive in
the turmoil.
much remains unexplained. That's what makes science fun!
I agree, and unfortunately we only have a limited amount of time here.
Thanks for taking the time (and Sprunk) to state your points. All I
know is that I know enough to know that I don't know all the answers.
I'll take a hiatus on this off-topic question here, and maybe sometime
I'll see you on talk.origins. The only thing is that I find myself
much more compelled to work on C stuff, like hacking around generic
containers. I started playing around with contract programming as
well; if I remember right, I think it was you that prodded me into
checking it out.
Best regards,
John D.
