Comment on Supreme Court Decision on Church Employment Case by Mack Ramsy.
It’s not so much that Dawkin’s doesn’t want to debate, it’s that debating with a creationist is fairly useless. Take your initial complaint no new information added to the genome. To a biologist (which I am did my dissertation on dengue fever, very unique little bug) that’s a silly and nonsensical question. Any freshman biology student will tell you that Information is added to the genome all the time, bacteria and so on are promiscuous little buggers. In mammalian genomes genes get copied laterally, mutated, replicated again, inverted, tossed out, added back in. How this happens in nature is explained very carefully over several semesters devoted to this precise topic. To the point where they have exceedingly precise calculations of the additional information. As a biologist I can tell you that not only does new information enter the genome all the time, but that it MUST enter the genome. The DNA isn’t stable enough not to have these kinds of events on a very regular basis. Add in all the other assaults to the DNA and you have a very fluid environment as far as information is concerned. if it helps (it probably won’t) think of DNA less like a perfect blue print and more like an incredibly messy garden where people go around trampling in it all the time and pests and deer to eat the cabbages and that sort of thing. That’s a much better picture of DNA. From adversity comes life, there’s probably a lesson in there. How the DNA not only survives but thrives in this environment is an awesome thing, but the one thing we know for certain is that it was designed to change. There are so many back up and redundancies designed to make whatever changes that DNA faces to be profitable for the organism, or if their deleterious to ensure they don’t damage the subsequent generation (yes there are very complex methods for doing this) The immune system in fact does it intentionally. If that’s your only hangup then join the club because that’s the very very least of your worries. I can think up much more serious concerns about evolution than merely “how does additional information get added?” And you think that one little story about a plane lost in the ice flows somehow refutes what we learn in the ice corps? that’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. Not that i doubt the story, but it didn’t crash on the glacier but on the seasonal ice flow. You might have noticed that it moved hundreds of feet more than glaciers are known to do. These ice cores are extremely reliable. Not only are there a bunch of them scattered all over the globe, but they’re all in sync, AND they’re in sync with history. You can accurately pinpoint known historical events like major volcano eruptions and that sort of thing. Each layer traps pollen and gives a fairly precise historical record of changes in climate. It’s all very interesting stuff. Nor is evolution “blind faith” We didn’t magically think this up and go looking for data to prove our own pet satanic theories. Observation came first, always has. Only religion asks blind faith of it’s followers. For example we know how prokaryotes turned into eukaryotes. We know how information got copied down to start with so it could be passed along. I never said we didn’t know, I said it was directly observable, in the same way that the signing of the declaration isn’t directly observable. It’s history, there’s a record. All you have to do is know how to read it.
@Faith, I applaud your faith. I literally know how much it means to you. But in this church we’ve never lifted any authority above one another (except possibly EGW) We were always encouraged to go to scriptures and to think for ourselves. In this church we believe that truth is progressive. (EGW Signs of the Times, 26 May 1881 and 26 May 1890). It’s always been understood that God will reveal more truth to us. But the jig saw you hold so dear only works if you ignore vast stretches of reality. I’m not saying there wasn’t a flood. there almost certainly was a local or regional event. I was in New Orleans in ’05 I know how your world can be destroyed in a flood. Metaphorically anyway. It isn’t important that the Biblical flood didn’t literal destroy the whole world what’s important is, what is god trying to say when he tells us this story about a time when the part of the world was destoryed? Does it mean less if God started his creation billions of years ago instead of 6,000 years ago? We’ve got cave paintings that are older than 20,000+ years old (assuming the devil didn’t create them just to confuse us). We’ve got a fossil record, we’ve got gene clocks, we so much physical evidence besides logical problems with the story that it makes more sense to see them as a parable or a legend. A story that reveals something important about our world and the character of god without resorting to history. Jesus did so himself numerous times, perhaps more explicitly than moses, but the idea of telling stories to make a point is an old and honored tradition and is entirely consistent with the rest of the bible.
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Mack Ramsy Also Commented
Supreme Court Decision on Church Employment Case
@all you guys hoping for “the shaking” probably shouldn’t hope to much. The church is as minuscule enough as it is. It also rather directly contradictory toward our evangelical goals. It’s awkward to go through purges when you’re trying to recruit new members.
Supreme Court Decision on Church Employment Case
@bill how can you imply that Liberals are secretly in control of the church when it was conservatives who got those researchers fired and the most conservative leadership in years has been elected into office? This rather suggests that political fortunes favor conservatives at this moment.
Supreme Court Decision on Church Employment Case
I think there is some confusion about the role of science here. Science is very explicit about “proof” and “certainty” in that there isn’t any. I presented you with a half dozen articles in a few minutes of searching. There might be better ones out there but from long experience I know that even the best evidence is unconvincing to the close-minded. Like I said before to be comprehensive would take libraries (and you’re welcome to the public access by the way, I included that in my search parameters). That said you’re right the sense that evolutionists may not have a perfect picture of how the world works, but they never claimed to. That claim is reserved by solely by creationists. I never said it would be convincing. In fact I said several times that it would not be. We all achieve the level of enlightenment that we work to obtain. For those who refuse to see truth or reason, libraries of evidence will never be persuasive. The Bar is set too high. You would have to go back in time and observe the events in person without disturbing the events in motion. The only “evidence” that could possibly be convincing is a notarized statement by god saying this is the way it is, which of course you believe you already have. That this doesn’t make sense is readily explained by being the foolishness of the Greeks. This is fine, let’s look at your story and see if that makes sense. The creation story blatantly contradicts itself between chapters 1 and 2, the flood has multiple problems such as number of animals, zoological necessities, sustainable ecology, the coming and going of all the water, the mysterious olive leaf, extant archaeological evidence predating the flood, lack of geological evidence for a truly global flood, the diversity of people and animals, the time it takes to spread from Ararat to the rest of the world, etc. When you look at the stories, it’s quite clear that Adam and Eve and Noah and the Ark are speaking about spiritual truths not literal ones. Ignoring all the physical evidence, logical idiocies, you have the language in the bible. It’s obviously spiritual in nature, the raven finds nothing, the Dove finds an olive leaf. It’s an blatantly spiritual story meant to have a spiritual lesson. This is a very different kind of language used in other places in the bible to talk about more or less literal events. There may well have been a regional disaster on the Mediterranean at some point, but it clearly didn’t destroy the entire world in a literal fashion. It would violate every known law of physics and biology that we know.
