Comment on Supreme Court Decision on Church Employment Case by Mack Ramsy.
I think I’m going to have repeat myself again. I have enormous respect for God’s word. If God’s word is not consistent with observable phenomena then it is not God’s word that is wrong, but we who are wrong in our understanding of it. I think others have a misunderstanding in interpretation. Many here think that I have a misunderstanding. Who’s to judge? Well that would be Christian fundamentalists I suppose. I jest of course. God is ultimately the judge, but people seem so very confident at which way he’s leaning
@BobRyan Being familiar with Dawkins I’ve never known him for a loss for words. The trouble with the question is that there’s no way to satisfy a person like your self. We can say we’ve observed heritable change over time (this is actually the formal definition of evolution, just for the sake of clarity) The reason it doesn’t satisy a person like yourself is that over the course of a human lifetime that change tends to be small. But sure there are plenty of examples. From plants, insects, animals, you name it. I think there was a paper recently discussing how a particular gene that conveyed disease resistance was able to spread through a population and was beneficial. But oh were did that gene come from? they actually have that answer too, they’ve found similar simpler genes littered about the genome but in our species and others. There was even a paper recently that showed in bacteria how a loss of function of a duplicated gene product (That was discovered in nature) allowed multiple copies of the proteins to interact in a way that was much more stable and efficient. Forget the paper I’d have to look it up. The really interesting part was they were able to go back to the lab and duplicate their observations in nature. I think someone mentioned some Tibetans that had some favorable gene mutations, I know there are similar stories about the aboriginal people in the Andes with similar. On a molecular level they’ve been able to show a astoundingly large variety of genes and proteins that have changed over time in response to various things, especially virus. But, creationists say, that’s not REAL evolution that’s not fish turning into monkeys and that sort of thing. We want to observe THAT. Well that sort of thing takes a few million years it’s not observable in the sense that you can see it happening. It does leave traces that are recorded in the genes and in the fossil record. Which oddly enough tend to line up pretty closely. In the last 10 years there has been an extraordinary amount of work done in that field. You can measure the rate of change or to use your language, the increase in beneficial information, extremely precisely. “Well that’s all speculative” one might say. That’s true, but then they can go back to the lab and replicate the phenomenon under conditions suitable to observation. Laboratories are getting sophisticaed enough they almost work as time machines. You can observe a phenomena in nature and say to yourself “Hey this is change from previous observations? It must have happened like such and such” and then take it back to your lab and see if your hypothesis is true. And if it’s not you do something else. There’s always lots to do. I think there was a paper out recently talking about the genesis of an energy transduction mechanism that helped bacteria utilize a protein gradient for energy. Very interesting article actually, a molecule had the ability to become charged by light (this is fairly common phenomenon actually) but it had found a way to pass along that charge to nearby proton pump. It is, they think, one of the many precursors to chlorophyll. I don’t say any of this to “prove” to you that evolution is true. I think if God cam down from heaven and said so himself you wouldn’t believe. I mean the rain forest is a living breathing laboratory on natural selection and evolution. All of it evolves so very quickly but there are those with eyes who can not see and ears that can not hear. And I’m not going to far in my assertion that if evolution is not true than the devil is responsible for an extraordinary act of creation. He’d have to be responsible for creating all extinct plants and animals in fossil record. He’d be responsible for changing our DNA in clever and sophisticated ways so that it appears to have evolved. There’s all this stuff around that was supposed to be destroyed by the flood. Unless God really did create dinosaurs and just didn’t like them very much and decided to bury them in such a way as to suggest a chronological order? He’d have to be responsible for the 100s of 1000s of years found in the ice record. No, if you don’t believe in Evolution then the devil has been very busy creating things.
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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.
