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Ken Ham Challenges Pat Robertson To Debate YEC

Brainache said:
I think I actually saw a YEC argue once that the speed of light used to be a lot faster in the old days and that was how all that light from millions of light years away could get here in just 6000 years.

Seems legit...
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I refused to sift youtube for videos of YECs explaining that fascinating idea, but rather turned to AiG, where I found this
It is usually assumed that the speed of light is constant with time.2 At today’s rate, it takes light (in a vacuum) about one year to cover a distance of 6 trillion miles. But has this always been so? If we incorrectly assume that the rate has always been today’s rate, we would end up estimating an age that is much older than the true age. But some people have proposed that light was much quicker in the past. If so, light could traverse the universe in only a fraction of the time it would take today. Some creation scientists believe that this is the answer to the problem of distant starlight in a young universe.
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My hiliting.

There's more in a similar vein here
https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/does-distant-starlight-prove-the-universe-is-old/
 
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TMI, Gawdzilla.
I'm thinking more in terms of watching the live streaming and commenting on the fun and games with JREFers in a chat space. Or in this thread, if need be.

Is there a date set?
Will there be live streaming?


Brainache said:
Good. I'm glad I wasn't imagining it.

Or, maybe I wish I was...

My brain hurts.
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I have an Evangelist colleague who actually advocates the variable light thingie, so I felt quite sure AiG would have something on it.
 
To try to summarize the problem even better, the Catholic position of reconciliation with science is basically that

1. There was no actual tree of knowledge. (Indeed sentience happened through evolution, and predates Homo Sapiens. Even without counting the side-branch that are the Neanderthals, there are at least two sentient and social species among our direct ancestors. Possibly 3 if you include erectus.)

2. There was no "garden of Eden" stage where there was no aging, no death, and nothing bad. The T Rex was never an immortal herbivore. Therefore Adam and Eve couldn't possibly have caused that.

3. There was no talking snake episode, nor deceiving Eve, or her tempting Adam, since see #1 and #2, there was nothing for such a snake to tempt them with, nor any consequences it could have.

4. Incidentally, there were none of the other supposed consequences for that 'sin entering the world' either. It also didn't cause humans to hide their nakedness. Far as we know, the Neanderthals used furs and skins long before H Sapiens even existed. Nor was there a discrete point, as far as we can tell, where some God suddenly made childbirth non-fun for humans alone as revenge for something. Again that seems to be something that predates H Sapiens.

Etc.

It's all just a big metaphor, see?

... yet the original sin is still a central Catholic doctrine, and still explained as, "Original sin is the privation of sanctifying grace in consequence of the sin of Adam."

You know, while accepting that Adam never existed, the ingredients or stage for that sin episode never existed, and the consequences ascribed to it in the book never existed (or rather, were not consequenes of that)...
 
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HansMustermann said:
[ . . . ]

It's all just a big metaphor, see?

... yet the original sin is still a central Catholic doctrine, and still explained as, "Original sin is the privation of sanctifying grace in consequence of the sin of Adam."

You know, while accepting that Adam never existed, the ingredients or stage for that sin episode never existed, and the consequences ascribed to it in the book never existed (or rather, were not consequenes of that)...
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And it's still the #1 selling product of its kind.
Fascinating.
 
HansMustermann said:
[...]

It's all just a big metaphor, see?

... yet the original sin is still a central Catholic doctrine, and still explained as, "Original sin is the privation of sanctifying grace in consequence of the sin of Adam."

You know, while accepting that Adam never existed, the ingredients or stage for that sin episode never existed, and the consequences ascribed to it in the book never existed (or rather, were not consequenes of that)...
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How to read the account of the fall

390 The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man.264 Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.
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"yeah adam, he did not exists, but we wills till say your ancestor committed the original sin because otherwise we can't use JC as a redeemer from sin which did not exists , you see ?".

To be fair with Cathos, you can hardly fault them to attempt to keep their religion alive. They HAD to ascribe an original sin somewhere, because no sin, no redeemer, no redeemer, no JC. Otherwise the whole religion implode.


Anyway trying to ascribe logic and reason to religion is mostly pointless.
 
I can't fault any mega-corporation of that side for wanting to keep its market, but I can fault those who buy a patent contradiction and nonsense.

If I told you that

A) I know that Star Trek: First Contact is just a movie, it's not based on anything real (as depicted) and the borg are just a metaphor for something else,

BUT

B) you gotta pay me a part of your income to build a defense against the borg invasion from ST:FC

... you'd probably think I'm either a really bad scammer or lost my frikken mind. But either way, you'd need to be way left on an IQ curve to actually buy it.

As for the part about "yeah, but it was some other event at the beginning of mankind", as they do now rationalize it, the problem is that as I highlighted, none of the stuff in there has anything to do with the beginning of mankind. The evil effects of that primal event, that we're blamed for, either never existed or pre-date humans by BILLIONS of years. There's no logical way to keep blaming humans for any of that, any more than I could blame you for the fall of Rome.
 
Have you considered the ambiguous nature of "Original Sin" when it's used in metaphor? When I was raised Protestant, I heard little to nothing about "Original Sin" being the reason why Jesus died on the cross, regardless. Rather, there was more a sense that Adam and Eve's original sin stood for mankind losing their innocence and understanding the concepts of sin, good, and evil in the first place and that Jesus died specifically for the sins that we had committed and would commit.
 
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HansMustermann said:
... you'd probably think I'm either a really bad scammer or lost my frikken mind.
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Fancy that I thought you STILL were speaking about catholicism. (ETA : indulgence )

*cough*

Sorry ;).

But either way, you'd need to be way left on an IQ curve to actually buy it.
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I am not so sure of that. The easiest people whicha re scammed are actually those toward the high end and the upper middle of the IQ curve. Lower IQ people are actually a bit harder to be scammed.

Reason for that seems to be that the higher IQ the more likely people make their own jsutification for something which "looks to good to be true".

As for the part about "yeah, but it was some other event at the beginning of mankind", as they do now rationalize it, the problem is that as I highlighted, none of the stuff in there has anything to do with the beginning of mankind. The evil effects of that primal event, that we're blamed for, either never existed or pre-date humans by BILLIONS of years. There's no logical way to keep blaming humans for any of that, any more than I could blame you for the fall of Rome.
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You are preaching to the choir. All what most of us can only do is nodding. But it is nice somebody is paying atttention and putting this in nice word.
 
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As with the obsession with "the devil", this original sin meme is something my early life was completely free of. As a default atheist child, I had no iron in the fire, and couldn't care less.

Then as awareness that religion existed in the world crept into my mind, I began to notice that religions were pushing this thing that "Jesus saves", and I had no idea what they were on about (and carried on ignoring them). Eventually from somewhere I heard that Jesus had come to do away with the old laws of the Old Testament, and replace them with the new age of love.

That would seem to solve their concerns about "redemption", and the necessity for JC to save them. Save them from "an eye for an eye", and replace it with "turn the other cheek" and "love your neighbour". Problem solved.

So I'm surprised to hear that they've cooked up all this baloney about YEC just to maintain their need for JC. I can see the Catholics needing to keep the redemption from sin thing going, cos that's their whole guilt trip core, and defines their mumbo jumbo elite mystical raison d'être sort of thing… but Protestants? WTF?

I'm so glad my parents never bothered telling me about religion. It's all so irrelevant to me that I'm simply bemused by their clinging to such convulsive contortions of their own peace of mind in order to … what? Bring some excitement and contention into their boring humdrum circumscribed lives?

I've always thought it's because they were jealous of the manifest joys of hedonistic anarchy they observed hippies enjoying in the 60s. Poor sods. They are their own frustrated Frankenstein's monster, lumbering about in their decaying corpse.

I just keep well clear of them. I don't like the musty cobwebs of their thought cloying tacky dullness in my head. I pity them, and move on.
 
HansMustermann said:
I can't fault any mega-corporation of that side for wanting to keep its market, but I can fault those who buy a patent contradiction and nonsense.

If I told you that

A) I know that Star Trek: First Contact is just a movie, it's not based on anything real (as depicted) and the borg are just a metaphor for something else,

BUT

B) you gotta pay me a part of your income to build a defense against the borg invasion from ST:FC

... you'd probably think I'm either a really bad scammer or lost my frikken mind. But either way, you'd need to be way left on an IQ curve to actually buy it.

As for the part about "yeah, but it was some other event at the beginning of mankind", as they do now rationalize it, the problem is that as I highlighted, none of the stuff in there has anything to do with the beginning of mankind. The evil effects of that primal event, that we're blamed for, either never existed or pre-date humans by BILLIONS of years. There's no logical way to keep blaming humans for any of that, any more than I could blame you for the fall of Rome.
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That is true. The one advantage to the Catholic position (from my point of view) is that it moves the debate from science to theology, where it belongs.

When I was a kid, in elementary catholic school, it was explained that evolution is all well and good, but that at some point God infused a soul into the human race, and something happened at that point to cause the State of Sin. The Adam and Eve story was a metaphor of that. The details were unspecified.
 
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