Re: Celebrate Evolution! today


<old.salt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:5mrmp4d1aaqugrm9n7g3p7pq8a6qr85lkt@xxxxxxxxxx
On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:31:40 -0800 (PST), Mark
<blueriverday@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Okay, prove it's the word of God without referring to the Bible. I've
asked
you to do this before and you've always dodged the question.

While Ernie wrote this and I have kill filed him long ago
since he really does not want to hear the answers, I will answer this
one.

When I first started to sturdy the Bible, I didn't even belive
in God at that time of life, after studying many other relgions pryer
to that time.

What surprise me about the Bible was where it dealt with
science, while it's NOT a science book, when it does touch on aspect
of science I was surprice by what I found.

That it tells the earth was round and hangs surpended in
space, that it goes into the whole water cycle, and how the plsenta
protects the baby in the wome from the mother's blood.

All things that man did NOT know at the time they were written
in the Bible.

Ah, another cut-and-paste festival!

Our Planet Earth

2 Consider, for example, what the Bible says about our planet, the
earth. In the book of Job, we read: "[God] is stretching out the north
over the empty place, hanging the earth upon nothing." (Job 26:7)
Compare this with Isaiah's statement, when he says: "There is One who
is dwelling above the circle of the earth." (Isaiah 40:22)

The first is Canaanite creation mythology, the second Iasiah's opinion,
nothing more.

3 Consider, too, the earth's amazing water cycle. Here is how
Compton's Encyclopedia describes what happens: "Water . . . evaporates
from the surface of the oceans into the atmosphere . . . Steadily
moving air currents in the earth's atmosphere carry the moist air
inland. When the air cools, the vapor condenses to form water
droplets. These are seen most commonly as clouds. Often the droplets
come together to form raindrops. If the atmosphere is cold enough,
snowflakes form instead of raindrops. In either case, water that has
traveled from an ocean hundreds or even thousands of miles away falls
to the earth's surface. There it gathers into streams or soaks into
the ground and begins its journey back to the sea."1

4 This remarkable process, which makes life on dry land possible, was
well described about 3,000 years ago in simple, straightforward terms
in the Bible: "All streams run into the sea, yet the sea never
overflows; back to the place from which the streams ran they return to
run again."-Ecclesiastes 1:7, The New English Bible.

Ecclesiastes was written c. 300 BCE, long after Greek science had permeated
the region. Aristotle, among others, had figured out the water cycle (and
the Chinese some 200 years before that.)

5 Perhaps even more remarkable is the Bible's insight into the history
of mountains. Here is what a textbook on geology says: "From
Pre-Cambrian times down to the present, the perpetual process of
building and destroying mountains has continued. . . . Not only have
mountains originated from the bottom of vanished seas, but they have
often been submerged long after their formation, and then
re-elevated."2 Compare this with the poetic language of the psalmist:
"With a watery deep just like a garment you covered [the earth]. The
waters were standing above the very mountains. Mountains proceeded to
ascend, valley plains proceeded to descend-to the place that you have
founded for them."-Psalm 104:6, 8.

Borrowed from much older Mesopotamian creation myths. "Now when the Air and
the Waters began to interact, a Great Mountain arose out of the Waters and
into the Air. The Mountain was called the An-Ki, or Heaven-Earth." ("Enuma
Elish" Sumerian, c. 1200 BCE)

6 The very first verse of the Bible states: "In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth." (Genesis 1:1)

Okay, now prove it.

Observations have
led scientists to theorize that the material universe did indeed have
a beginning. It has not existed for all time. Astronomer Robert
Jastrow, an agnostic in religious matters, wrote: "The details differ,
but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts
of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced
suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light
and energy."

I thought God created it in six days? Theres no mention of a Big Bang in
Genesis.

7 True, many scientists, while believing that the universe had a
beginning, do not accept the statement that "God created."
Nevertheless, some now admit that it is difficult to ignore the
evidence of some kind of intelligence behind everything.

Only to true believers.

Physics
professor Freeman Dyson comments: "The more I examine the universe and
study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that
the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming."

That quote is from "Disturbing the Universe," a collection of miscellany,
not a scientific hypothesis. Dyson offers no proof of his musings. And
exactly what does it mean, anyway? That the universe is a conscious organism
which anticipated our arrival on an infinitesimal speck of a planet orbiting
a small star in a remote corner of a medium-sized galaxy filled with a
hundred billion other stars in a cosmos filled hundreds of billions of other
galaxies? And that it patiently waited 12 billion years for the Sun and the
Earth to form and us to evolve up from the Urschleim? Pull the other one,
it's got bells on it. :-)

8 Dyson goes on to admit: "Being a scientist, trained in the habits of
thought and language of the twentieth century rather than the
eighteenth, I do not claim that the architecture of the universe
proves the existence of God. I claim only that the architecture of the
universe is consistent with the hypothesis that mind plays an
essential role in its functioning."4 His comment certainly betrays the
skeptical attitude of our time. But putting that skepticism aside, one
notes there is a remarkable harmony between modern science and the
Bible's statement that "in the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth."-Genesis 1:1.

Yep! If you leave out the unnecessary God part and replace the 6 days of
creation with the Big Bang.

9 Consider the Bible's coverage of another field: health and
sanitation. If an Israelite had a skin blemish suspected of being
leprosy, he was put in isolation. "All the days that the plague is in
him he will be unclean. He is unclean. He should dwell isolated.
Outside the camp is his dwelling place." (Leviticus 13:46) Even
infected garments were burned. (Leviticus 13:52) In those days, this
was an effective way of preventing the spread of the infection.

Whatever it was the Hebrews called "leprosy," was obviously contagious, a
concept first expounded by the Egyptians and probably picked up by the
Hebrews during their captivity there.

10 Another important law had to do with the disposal of human
excrement, which had to be buried outside the camp. (Deuteronomy
23:12, 13) This law no doubt saved Israel from many sicknesses. Even
today, severe health problems are caused in some lands by the improper
disposal of human wastes. If people in those lands would only follow
the law written down thousands of years ago in the Bible, they would
be much healthier.

The Sumerians had city-wide sewers around 3500 BCE. All Mesopotamian cities
did.

11 The Bible's high standard of hygiene even involved mental health. A
Bible proverb said: "A calm heart is the life of the fleshly organism,
but jealousy is rottenness to the bones." (Proverbs 14:30) In recent
years, medical research has demonstrated that our physical health is
indeed affected by our mental attitude. For example, Doctor
C. B. Thomas of Johns Hopkins University studied more than a thousand
graduates over a period of 16 years, matching their psychological
characteristics with their vulnerability to diseases. One thing she
noted: The graduates most vulnerable to disease were those who were
angrier and more anxious under stress.5

A connection doubtlessly made long, long ago, given Mesopotamian and
Egyptian preoccupations with mood-altering drugs.


12 If the Bible is so accurate in scientific fields, why did the
Catholic Church say that Galileo's teaching that the earth moved
around the sun was unscriptural?

Because the Church was trying to make its cosmology fit Joshua 10.

Nevertheless, many
scientists assert that evolution is no longer just a theory but that
it is a fact.

A theory is a proven fact. http://wilstar.com/theories.htm

19 How can the theory of evolution be tested? The most obvious way is
to examine the fossil record to see if a gradual change from one kind
to another really happened.

Whales and horses are lovely examples of gradual evolution if you need one.
But most evolutionary changes are jumps where one species declines and
another, better-adapted species becomes dominant, or where a species
diverges due to a changing environment. An estimated 99.8 percent of all
species which have evolved are extinct today. Scientists have been creating
new species in laboratories using natural selection for a century.

20 Moreover, Hitching shows that living creatures are programmed to
reproduce themselves exactly rather than evolve into something else.

Hitching is a sensationalist TV scriptwriter with no scientific background
al all.
http://www.answers.com/topic/j-francis-hitching


22 So how do evolutionists explain the source of life?

They don't. Evolution is about speciation, nothing more.

What About the Flood?

26 Many point to another supposed contradiction between the Bible and
modern science. In the book of Genesis, we read that thousands of
years ago the wickedness of men was so great that God determined to
destroy them. However, he instructed the righteous man Noah to build a
large wooden vessel, an ark. Then God brought a flood upon mankind.
Only Noah and his family survived, together with representatives of
all the animal species. The Flood was so great that "all the tall
mountains that were under the whole heavens came to be
covered."-Genesis 7:19.

27 Where did all the water come from to cover the whole earth?

From the same place the original Sumerian myth of Gilgamish did?


29 First, is not the idea of the whole earth's being flooded too
farfetched? Not really. Indeed, to some extent the earth is still
flooded. Seventy percent of it is covered by water and only 30 percent
is dry land. Moreover, 75 percent of the earth's fresh water is locked
up in glaciers and polar ice caps. If all this ice were to melt, the
sea level would rise much higher. Cities like New York and Tokyo would
disappear.

We're talking about a flood 15 cubits over the tippy-top of Mt Everest.
(Genesis 7:20)

31 For the Flood to have happened, the pre-Flood sea basins would have
to have been shallower, and the mountains lower than they are now. Is
this possible?

Nope. Mt Everest has been within 2 feet of its present height since modern
humans evolved.

32 What happened to the floodwaters after the Flood? They must have
drained into the sea basins. How? Scientists believe that the
continents rest on huge plates. Movement of these plates can cause
changes in the level of the earth's surface. In some places today,
there are great underwater abysses more than six miles [more than
10 km] deep at the plate boundaries.16 It is quite likely that-perhaps
triggered by the Flood itself-the plates moved, the sea bottom sank,
and the great trenches opened, allowing the water to drain off the
land.

Uh, those trenches have been around for a billion years and would have been
completely filled long before Noah.

33 If we grant that a great flood could have happened, why have
scientists found no trace of it?

We don't grant because no proofs have been provided, only conjectures.

Perhaps they have, but they interpret
the evidence some other way. For example, orthodox science teaches
that the surface of the earth has been shaped in many places by
powerful glaciers during a series of ice ages. But apparent evidence
of glacial activity can sometimes be the result of water action.

Never. Marks of ice action are unmistakable.

35 Another evidence for the Flood appears to exist in the fossil
record. At one time, according to this record, great saber-toothed
tigers stalked their prey in Europe, horses larger than any now living
roamed North America, and mammoths foraged in Siberia.

The Smilodon was more American than European, horses were smaller, not
giants, and the mammoth roamed everywhere except Australia and South
America.

Then, all
around the world, species of mammals became extinct. At the same time,
there was a sudden change of climate. Tens of thousands of mammoths
were killed and quick-frozen in Siberia.

It wasn't all around the world. The cause of that phenomenon is still being
debated. The most recent candidate is a comet impact similar to Tunguska.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/01/090105-nanodiamonds.html

Alfred Wallace, the
well-known contemporary of Charles Darwin, considered that such a
widespread destruction must have been caused by some exceptional
worldwide event.

Where?

19 Many have argued that this event was the Flood.

No one who is taken seriously, since there's not a whisper of evidence for
it.

36 An editorial in the magazine Biblical Archaeologist observed: "It
is important to remember that the story of a great flood is one of the
most widespread traditions in human culture . . . Nevertheless behind
the oldest traditions found in Near Eastern sources, there may well be
an actual flood of gigantic proportions dating from one of the pluvial
periods . . . many thousands of years ago."

The flood myth probably had its origin in the rise of the oceans beginning
about 13,000 years ago, and was passed along in the tradition of all
folktales. The myth of the appearance of the yam in New Guinea has been told
for a thousand years.

Mankind Did Not Forget

37 Geology professor John McCampbell

Who?


38 That the Flood did happen is seen in the fact that mankind never
forgot it. All around the world, in locations as far apart as Alaska
and the South Sea Islands, there are ancient stories about it.

Except in Africa and central North America, which were largely unaffected by
the sea rise caused by the melting glaciers.

39 Thus, in essential features the Bible is in harmony with modern
science.

This is hilarious. Not a single proof has been offered, just wild guesses,
and now the Bible suddenly trumps centuries of painstakingly-collected
evidence. I love you people!

Where there is a conflict between the two, the scientists'
evidence is questionable.

ROTFLMAO!

Where they agree, the Bible is often so
accurate that we have to believe it got its information from a
superhuman intelligence.

PROVE IT, DAMMIT! The challenge was to, "prove it's the word of God without
referring to the Bible," which you haven't touched yet, as you never do.
Cutting and pasting from a Creationist tract doesn't even require much
rational thought.
-- Ernie



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