Comprehending Steven J.

On Jan 15, 10:23 pm, "Steven J." <steve...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jan 15, 3:54 pm, Ray Martinez <pyramid...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:> On Jan 14, 5:46 pm, "Steven J." <steve...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

-- [snip]

Why are you assuming that I [and] my arguments apply to all texts?  

It's called being objective, even-handed - a fair reaction to what you
are advocating. If your argument only applies to the Bible then
pointing out your worldview is fair game and explains your "argument".

Ray, I notice that you have carefully snipped my explanation of why I
apply one standard to the Bible and others to other texts.  This saves
you the trouble of responding to it, helps you pretend I have not
offered it, and enables you to shift the argument to my "worldview"
rather than address the actual issue: how you interpret the Bible, and
how you decide that certain interpretations are "corrupt" while
others, equally fanciful and even more arbitrary, are what the Bible
really means.

You do realize, I hope, that you make yourself look dishonest,
cowardly, and contemptible when you behave this way.

SNIP....

....The conflicts between the literal
sense of scripture and common sense and science have been acknowledged
since the intertestamental period as demanding special exegetical
techniques for scripture, that are not necessarily applicable to
secular literature.

Reference....cite....?

I ran across this in James L. Kugel's _How to Read the Bible_.  He
notes that by the 2nd century before Christ, Jewish commentators had
already wrestled with two problematic passages in Genesis: the bit
about three days of creation before God got around to creating the sun
(whose [apparent] motion in the sky marks out days), and the part
where God threatens Adam that if he eats of the Tree of Knowledge of
Good and Evil, "in that day thou shalt surely die," whereupon Adam ate
of the tree and lived another 900 years or so.  They applied a phrase
from a verse in the Psalms, and decided that the "days" used by God
were really 1000 years long, and didn't depend on the motion of the
sun.

You will note that they would not assume that anyone else meant "1000
years," when he said "day," no matter how many problems with his text
it might solve (as in, e.g. "I'll publish my paper some day soon").

Who is "he" in your point above?

Ancient Hebrew is an ambiguous language that originally contained no
vowels. Words, like very many English words, could have a plethora of
legitimate meanings. We know that the word "day" in Genesis one has
two perfectly legitimate meanings: it can mean twenty four hour period
or thousand year period.


They would assume, for any text that might contain errors, that an
prima facie absurd passage was simply an error.  Because they held (as
you do) that the Bible does not contain errors, they held that it must
be interpreted in ways that are not obvious without detailed
reflection and an extensively figurative reading of the text.  And
this tradition continued, in both Christian and Jewish hands, for
centuries afterwards.


First off: the Bible contains thousands of translation, grammatical,
punctuation and spelling errors due to mistakes made by copyists and
translators. Human beings make errors. But when scholarship corrects
these errors (that is why they take the time to learn dead languages)
and the original text is restored the best it can be: THIS TEXT claims
to be the *factually* inerrant word of God. That is the ancient claim
of the Church made in behalf of the pre-Reformation Canon.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Comment describes scripture with the qualifying phrase "literal sense"
- the same is unexplained as to what is meant. Phrase gives the
appearance that scripture does not mean what it says or say what it
means; the same presupposes scripture as false and must be treated
differently. Comment also presupposes that conflict exists between
"literal sense" scripture and common sense and science. Again, I am
only pointing out presuppositions, that is, things that are assumed to
be factual by supposition and not by evidence. But Steven is saying
these suppositions are based on evidence. Of course Christians
disagree.

Ray, the "literal sense" is the sense in which Biblical references to
a "canopy" (_raqiyah_) with "windows" in it refer to a Babylonian-
style cosmology in which the sky is a literal dome with hatches or
holes in it which can be opened to let rain through or closed to keep
rain from falling.  

And the word in the Hebrew is the same word in which we get our
English word "cataract". There was a canopy covering the atmosphere of
the Earth before the Flood. This canopy contained water. When it burst
it flooded the Earth. Before the Flood it never had rained and the
canopy apparently had holes in it that allowed a constant mist to go
forth and water the ground. These texts are scientifically accurate.

The "literal sense" is the sense in which "God
made Adam from the dust of the Earth" is held to describe a man being
shaped out of mud and being transformed into living tissue.  

You mean clay. Scriptural exegesis says mankind is clay in the hands
of the Potter (Jeremiah 18).

This is the Biblical explanation for the origin of mankind. It too is
scientifically accurate unless you are a Materialist with no capacity
to discern Designer or Creator.

And, yes,
there is a real conflict between science and common sense, on the one
hand, and the idea that the Earth was created four days before the sun
it orbits.

In reality we know only of scripture as opposed to "literal sense"
scripture; and there is no reason to assume these Texts to be in
conflict with common sense or science. Remarkable evidence supporting
this claim is that over half of all adults in the U.S. are
Creationists. This means tens of millions of persons see scripture as
corresponding to common sense and science. With this said we can now
ask: who would presume the Bible to not mean what it says or be false
or not correspond to common sense and science?

First of all, does the Bible correspond to science better in the
United States than it does in, say, France?  In general, creationists
are less well-educated than are people who accept evolution (we see,
e.g. that while half the general population are creationists, this
drops to about a fourth of college graduates, and much, much lower
figures for people with scientific or even engineering degrees).  The
percentage of creationists among actual scientists is miniscule.  It
is hardly absurd to suspect that most people who see no conflict
between the Bible and science are grossly ignorant of science, or the
Bible, or both.  If tens of millions of people hold that a book they
haven't read is in perfect agreement with a field of research they've
never studied, how is that evidence that this Book actually agrees
with science?


I already told you that the Bible is in gross conflict with Darwinian
"science" - and not science.

Persons who accept neo-Darwinism propose ridiculous interpretations
and explanations of scientific evidence. Other times they produce
evidence and data that corresponds perfectly to the Bible, but because
they are Materialists they are unaware of this agreement. Other times
neo-Darwinists deliberately suppress evidence that confirms the Bible
in spectacular fashion.

Answer: persons who advocate Atheist-evolutionism.

I cannot imagine that Kenneth Miller, for example, is an advocate of
"atheist-evolutionism," nor does it seem at all likely that Francis
Collins is such.  

Miller is an Atheist based on the fact that he advocates a theory that
presupposes Atheist ideology for its starting presuppositions.
Evolution excludes God as an explanation (= corresponds to Atheism).
Based on these facts, Miller is an Atheist. If Miller claims to be a
Christian the evidence just explained refutes his claim. No real
Christian would ever even consider leaving God out of the equation.
Christians in history (recent and ancient) die for God and the Bible,
they don't cooperate with the Atheist-ACLU agenda. Miller is widely
loved by the secular world. The Bible, without exception, shows
persons who are in God's will to be rejected and hated by the secular
world. Miller is deceived. He cares more about the praise of men than
of God. He is, in practice, an Atheist, even if he attends Mass.

But even putting aside the number of people you call
"atheist-evolutionists" despite their own insistence that they believe
in God, you are arguing that people's presuppositions can make them
embrace patently false propositions, even on subjects on which they
are well-aquainted with the evidence.  Yet you insist that half the
U.S. population, speaking on subjects (biology, paleontology,
cosmology, etc.) on which they know next to nothing, are immune to
having their conclusions warped by their presuppositions, simply
because you agree with those presuppositions.


False. You misrepresent me and Creationists in general.

Lay Creationists are just as ignorant as lay Evolutionists, Steven.

I argue that if your label is contradicted by your position then you
are as you argue and not as you label yourself. This is logical.

Materialism is the ideology and philosophy of evolution: it assumes
that God is not seen in reality or even worse, that He does not exist.
Now, how can anyone be a real believer and accept Materialism?

My question is rhetorical.

This is why I point out that a claim of Theism is falsified by
acceptance of material-evolution. In this specific context, what is
the evidence that confirms a claim of Theism? Your belief is that a
claim of Theism is evidence and not a claim. Funny how everything can
be contested and require evidence except a claim of Theism? The same
is viewed as evidence when in reality it is just an unsupported claim
contradicted by the evidence that we do have (acceptance of
Materialism).


Now the presuppositions are explained.

One presupposition remains unexplained: your presupposition that
whatever Gene Scott said about the Bible must be correct, while all
contrary opinions are "corruption."


Absurd.

Indeed -- and this is my point -- it is typical to assume this.  You
yourself have mocked the "fundies" who interpret certain passages of
the Bible more literally, or in the context of a different
interpretive tradition, than you do.  

False. I do not mock Fundies for "literality" (whatever that means),
but for corruption.

That would be "in the context of a different interpretive tradition,"
Ray.  In Rayspeak (as opposed to Standard English), "corruption" means
"seeing things differently from Ray and his idol, Gene Scott."

You complain that I insist that
the Bible makes no objective claims, yet, in previous posts, when I
have listed some of the objective claims that the Bible makes, you
insist that it says no such things.  

Such as....

Examples follow.  Have you ever considered learning to read for
comprehension?  But I still recall you snipping away, without comment
or acknowledgment, all my explanation of why the Bible is interpreted
differently from secular text.  I think that you, like many
creationists, read for incomprehension.

When I point out that previous
generations of Christians, including the leaders of the Protestant
Reformation, explicitly espoused these claims, you complain that I am
insisting that Medieval interpretations of the Bible should be
normative -- implying that the Bible's meaning must be determined in
light of the most modern scholarship, and might not be apparent on the
surface.

Given your propensity to misrepresent the Bible and Christianity, I
would have to review the arguments you are speaking about before I
could comment.

We know that both Martin Luther and John Calvin agreed with the popes
that the Copernican heliocentric solar system contradicted the plain
sense of the Bible.  Are they inferior, as scholars and Bible
interpreters, to Gene Scott?  Do you have any advantage, in
determining the true, non-"corrupt" meaning of the Bible, over them,
except later scientific knowledge?  If not, ought you not defer to the
greater scientific knowledge, on the subject of biology, of such
theistic evolutionists as Ken Miller?

The Bible, read literally, says quite explicitly that the sky is a
solid dome with openings.  

False. That is your ignorant reading attempting to make the Bible look
silly. Since you believe there is no difference bewteen 'inference'
and 'real time observation' maybe your comprehension abilities are
truly in a state of retardation.

Then explain, please, why the Bible repeatedly speaks of God opening
"the windows of heaven."  And then explain why your exegesis of these
passages is less strained or more reasonable that theistic
evolutionists' exegesis of the opening chapters of Genesis.


"Opening the windows of heaven" is a figure of speech attempting to
tell persons who meet the required preconditions that God will bless
them with material possessions or rain or whatever good thing the
passage is speaking about. It says nothing about heaven having literal
windows - absolutely absurd!

But I am sure you have no problem comprehending Darwin's metaphor?

How come?

When Jesus said: "Our Father who art in heaven" is He admitting that
He does not know who is in heaven?

It says, quite explicitly, that the Earth
stands immobile while the sun goes around it (possibly attached to the
aforementioned giant collander overhead).  

False - same answer above.

Why false?  Because you say so?  We know from your snipping of my
argument above that you are a liar and a coward.  Those are not
particularly convincing qualifications for issuing infallible fatwas
about the true meaning of scripture.


No, because you are only interested in making the Bible look foolish.
This much is obvious since you understand Darwin's metaphor.


It says, quite explicitly,
that every human born is a direct creation of God.  

True.

See, no one is wrong all of the time.

But be advised: I will explain what this means in my forth-coming
paper.

Lying makes baby Jesus cry, Ray.





You reject
entirely the first two statements, and interpret the other to somehow
permit humans to originate both through embryology and through
creation.  Or,

...

read more »- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Ray


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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Comprehending Steven J.
    ... to be the *factually* inerrant word of God. ... "literal sense" scripture and common sense and science. ... be factual by supposition and not by evidence. ... as is the case with Dr. Miller. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: AiG goes after Francis Collins
    ... principles is incompatible with what science tells us about the world. ... the idea that God speaks directly to any person, ... any "is" claims must be accompanied by evidence. ... was that the proper domain of religion is "ought" claims only. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Comprehending Steven J.
    ... My money is on the latter, but there's so little evidence there's room for lots of TEism in the gap. ... Factually inerrant, yes, how could words from God be otherwise? ... Ray, remember, you tried this claim before. ... "science" - and not science. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Evolutionism: a synonym for atheist-friendly presuppositions - why cant Dana understand?
    ... that they had no idea of modern science is irrelevant. ... somehow in touch with god. ... offered no evidence for it. ... You just don't grasp the concept of faith, ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: God=G_uv proves 40k B.C. Creation
    ... someone is to prove a god exists it won't be you George as even if you ... Also in science you never prove anything unless ... Favourite terms are 'common sense', ... Physics and chemistry are science not religion. ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)