Lukraak_Sisser
Philosopher
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2009
- Messages
- 6,025
Ok, this one might be long, I hope you'll take the time to read it David.
Since you claim really not to know how science works nor seem to know much of its history.
In science theories are proposed then tested by their proposers. They then publish those results to convince the rest of the world. Other scientists in their field, often bitter rivals read those papers and then try to pick them apart to prove them wrong, either by repeating the experiments or looking at their own experiments and seeing if these support the conclusions. They publish these results. Over time the theory either gets accepted or rejected. As new techniques and understanding forms it is sometimes necessary to go back and reject older accepted theories.
Case in point, how the sun works has been refined as times goes by from we don't know, to coal buring in eather, to meteoric material hitting some undefined fluid to nuclear fusion.
Now I know this might shock you, but most of the sciences started as subdivisions of theology on deeply christian universities practiced by highly devout men. These men never set out to prove the bible wrong, they sought to understand how nature worked to better understand the glory of god. The problem was, that the more they understood, the better their theories explained how things work, the less it confirmed with the bible.
Now its not that a single scientific community rejects the story in genesis and the rest keeps quiet about it. So I'll try to go through them in an orderly fasion.
Biology: Current biological knowledge shows that its impossible for our ecosystem to recover from global extinction in the time indicated between the flood and exodus nor would it be possible to repopulate the earth with enough people, especially as the extremely small genepool would cause massive problems for human health. The second and consequent generations would have had to reproduce with their own brothers and sisters, which we don't do for a good reason.
Genetics: This relatively new field consitently indicates that while all mammals do descend from common ancestors, these ancestors lived many millions to hunderds of thousand years in the past. The way cells are built up also gives a large amout of credibility to gradual evolution.
Physics: Astrophysics shows a universe that is several billion years old in which we are nothing but a tiny spot of dust in a distant corner of an average galaxy. Nuclear physics has given us details of radioactive decay which has been used to date rocks to several billion years. Yes, the original measurements had errors, which have been noted and corrected for.
Geology: Detailed analysis of the various geological layers in the world show no global flood deposit at 6000 ish years ago. Fossil deposits are utterly incompatible with a flood as each individual layer contains mixtures of unique large and small animal bones, with the oldest and deepest layers containing only small aquatic animals. There is no evidence at all for the migration of all animal species from the middle east to their current locations. Plate tectonics show how the continents move along or over hotspots. The Hawaii islands have been used in detail in a different thread and even if only those are taken into account the world is far older than the bible suggests. The
History: The chronologies of egypt, the mesopotanian cultures and china continue uninterrupted through the time of the flood. Neither even so much as mentions it, nor do they make any mention of the people of judea/israel except as a province on the edge of their nations when they conquer it. The study of languages shows a clear radiation of the various language groups from various parts of the world which is not the middle east for most of them. We have found artifacts clearly predating the flood date showing continuous human presence in the americas.
All of these conclusions are due to literally tens of thousands of man-years of work, continuously scrutinized and re-checked. Proving even an obscure sub-part of any of these disciplines probably takes more effort than that put into putting the bible together.
On the other hand, the bible consists of the combination of jewish myths and legends put together by their priests to show their population both why they should obey the priests and why they were the best people ever. And the new testament, originally put together at the behest of Constantine the great to get his state religion, then re-written by the various theological leaders to best fit their interpretation of the faith.
I personally, and many with me on these boards accept the conclusions of the various scientific fields not because they are infallible and true, but rather because they accept to be the best possible current theory because of published, testable and reproducible results. And at the moment these results do not suggest literal truth in genesis.
One ancient book, or rather about 50-100 different versions of that book which tend to disagree even with each other to me is not enough to say, let's ignore all that data and work and claim its all a lie. Especially since, as pointed out, you have no problem USING the results of all those lying scientists. So you clearly trust their work enough to be clothed/healed/transported/heated/fed by. I doubt you use the methods described in the old testament to do all those things.
But you are right. In the end it does come down to faith. Who do you have faith in. several dozens of bronze/iron age writers of several million people dedicated to trying to unravel how the world works while accepting critisism of their work and adapting to new situations as necessary.
I did not include links in this post to limit its length and because the background to each of the subjects can easily be found through either wikipedia or your local library with far more detail and better reading lists than I could ever hope to add.
Since you claim really not to know how science works nor seem to know much of its history.
In science theories are proposed then tested by their proposers. They then publish those results to convince the rest of the world. Other scientists in their field, often bitter rivals read those papers and then try to pick them apart to prove them wrong, either by repeating the experiments or looking at their own experiments and seeing if these support the conclusions. They publish these results. Over time the theory either gets accepted or rejected. As new techniques and understanding forms it is sometimes necessary to go back and reject older accepted theories.
Case in point, how the sun works has been refined as times goes by from we don't know, to coal buring in eather, to meteoric material hitting some undefined fluid to nuclear fusion.
Now I know this might shock you, but most of the sciences started as subdivisions of theology on deeply christian universities practiced by highly devout men. These men never set out to prove the bible wrong, they sought to understand how nature worked to better understand the glory of god. The problem was, that the more they understood, the better their theories explained how things work, the less it confirmed with the bible.
Now its not that a single scientific community rejects the story in genesis and the rest keeps quiet about it. So I'll try to go through them in an orderly fasion.
Biology: Current biological knowledge shows that its impossible for our ecosystem to recover from global extinction in the time indicated between the flood and exodus nor would it be possible to repopulate the earth with enough people, especially as the extremely small genepool would cause massive problems for human health. The second and consequent generations would have had to reproduce with their own brothers and sisters, which we don't do for a good reason.
Genetics: This relatively new field consitently indicates that while all mammals do descend from common ancestors, these ancestors lived many millions to hunderds of thousand years in the past. The way cells are built up also gives a large amout of credibility to gradual evolution.
Physics: Astrophysics shows a universe that is several billion years old in which we are nothing but a tiny spot of dust in a distant corner of an average galaxy. Nuclear physics has given us details of radioactive decay which has been used to date rocks to several billion years. Yes, the original measurements had errors, which have been noted and corrected for.
Geology: Detailed analysis of the various geological layers in the world show no global flood deposit at 6000 ish years ago. Fossil deposits are utterly incompatible with a flood as each individual layer contains mixtures of unique large and small animal bones, with the oldest and deepest layers containing only small aquatic animals. There is no evidence at all for the migration of all animal species from the middle east to their current locations. Plate tectonics show how the continents move along or over hotspots. The Hawaii islands have been used in detail in a different thread and even if only those are taken into account the world is far older than the bible suggests. The
History: The chronologies of egypt, the mesopotanian cultures and china continue uninterrupted through the time of the flood. Neither even so much as mentions it, nor do they make any mention of the people of judea/israel except as a province on the edge of their nations when they conquer it. The study of languages shows a clear radiation of the various language groups from various parts of the world which is not the middle east for most of them. We have found artifacts clearly predating the flood date showing continuous human presence in the americas.
All of these conclusions are due to literally tens of thousands of man-years of work, continuously scrutinized and re-checked. Proving even an obscure sub-part of any of these disciplines probably takes more effort than that put into putting the bible together.
On the other hand, the bible consists of the combination of jewish myths and legends put together by their priests to show their population both why they should obey the priests and why they were the best people ever. And the new testament, originally put together at the behest of Constantine the great to get his state religion, then re-written by the various theological leaders to best fit their interpretation of the faith.
I personally, and many with me on these boards accept the conclusions of the various scientific fields not because they are infallible and true, but rather because they accept to be the best possible current theory because of published, testable and reproducible results. And at the moment these results do not suggest literal truth in genesis.
One ancient book, or rather about 50-100 different versions of that book which tend to disagree even with each other to me is not enough to say, let's ignore all that data and work and claim its all a lie. Especially since, as pointed out, you have no problem USING the results of all those lying scientists. So you clearly trust their work enough to be clothed/healed/transported/heated/fed by. I doubt you use the methods described in the old testament to do all those things.
But you are right. In the end it does come down to faith. Who do you have faith in. several dozens of bronze/iron age writers of several million people dedicated to trying to unravel how the world works while accepting critisism of their work and adapting to new situations as necessary.
I did not include links in this post to limit its length and because the background to each of the subjects can easily be found through either wikipedia or your local library with far more detail and better reading lists than I could ever hope to add.
