One of the reasons Martin Luther formed the Protestant branch of Christianity was that the Catholic church held that the bible should be inaccessible to common people... also, the bible has been translated, retranslated, passed down, edited for political reasons, and generally gone through the equivalent of a several-generation analog tape copy to such a degree that I wouldn't be surprised if some simplification occured somewhere down the line. Even if it hasn't, it would be rather simpler for God to simplify the process of creation down to the point where people could easily understand it instead of talking about metaphysical time-scale differences.
Correct, but... Martin Luther penned his 99 Thesis to the door of the Catholic church because what the church taught and what the Bible taught were two completely different things. He did publish the Bible in German so that everyone would have access to it in a language they spoke and understood, but that wasn’t the reason he did what he did. He saw the hypocrisy of this and wanted things to return to a where they should be: according to what the Bible taught, not what man thought. This period was called the Reformation. The old way of doing things was reformed and was replaced with the proper way of doing things. I am not bashing Catholics here, but I am not a Catholic, and I don’t trust that church nor it’s teachings due to this and a myriad of other reasons I won’t go into publically. These things mentioned here are historical facts, and not a person’s opinion, therefore I talked about them.
And yes, the Bible has been re-translated again and again, but each time using the same original language texts. I don’t see how having different translations from the same Greek and Hebrew texts is a problem? But, by using your own standard of thinking here, all your school textbooks should be thrown away also. Why? Because every few years they are out of date and need to be updated with new evidence. We do the same thing with the Bible. As new discoveries in linguistics are made, we remain intellectually honest and release a new version updating it by incorporating these new changes. Does it change any of the overall message of the Bible? No. A few words here and there are changed, but that’s it.
As I asked aeberbach, please list some of these edits made for political reasons, simplifications, etc. you claim exist. The fact is, we have things like the Dead Sea Scrols and other ancient manuscripts that verify that to this day we have exactly what was used hundreds of years BC, and possibly even further than that with other manuscript discoveries.
Your analogy of an analog audio tape is also not applicable here. Please read my posted reply to aeberbach about how the copyists were so meticulous in their copying methods of the Pentateuch. The New Testament is an entirely different animal. We have copies of the originals that are second or third generation copies. They are from just about 100 years from the time of the actual events. We also have more than 30,000 different manuscripts from that time, so the evidence for their accuracy is so overwhelming as to be staggering. There is more evidence and copies of the New Testament than any other writing in the history of man. It is more accurate than anything else we have discovered in the world by a magnitude that is staggering. So, is our English Bible we have in our hands accurate and reliable: unequivocally yes it is. If it is not considered accurate, nothing else we have in written form where we don’t have a penned original by the author is to be thrown out using this same criteria. You must apply the same criteria to all written works, not just the Bible.
Not having read Genesis, I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. Could you clarify what you mean by "12 items"?
Since you haven’t read the account in Genesis, I’ll sum it up for you. Ok, the account goes in this order: 1. heavens and earth created, earth was void; 2. light created; 3. light separated from darkness and called night and day; 4. dry land and ocean - a single continent, water mass called seas; 5. waters of the earth separated from the water that surrounded the earth - water canopy; 6. grass, fruit trees, herbs - in other words - grass trees, plants, etc.; 7. our moon and other stars and celestial bodies added; 8. living creatures added to the waters, birds to inhabit the land and air; 9. beasts of the field added; 10. man added. These are the ten I could find quickly in the account, sorry if I missed a couple or remembered the original number incorrectly. Notice the precision of the order listed directly from the Bible. If any one of them was arranged differently you would have a problem. If it said plants before light, problem. Animals before plants, problem. Plants before ocean, problem. Etc, etc. You get the idea. Even with these 10 parts of Creation, the odds of them falling in the right order mathematically is still one in 3,628,800. Not bad for a man who wrote the account around 1500BC, huh!
The thing is, VERY VERY few people live to 120 years. The vast majority die at 70 to 80 in the US, and much earlier in third-world countries. If we are supposed to live to be that old, shouldn't dying earlier be the exception, not the norm?
If you go back and reread my post I think you’ll see something you missed. I never said that everyone
would live 120 years. I said that they would live
about 120 years. That’s a theoretical maximum lifespan, not an actual lifespan granted to every person who lives. I also misquoted in my post, which lead to your misunderstanding. I meant to say the part about 120 being a limit or maximum, not average or Sorry about that. My wife’s grandma died at 105, so she came close.
Rather arrogant to assume one is the highest/best species, isn't it? (Looking at a lot of organized religion from a cynic's view, much of it seems designed to appeal to the ego, or just to one's feelings in general - not one's brain.)
Not arrogance - fact. Look at your own evolutionary teaching and charts that show higher and higher complexity of life forms, and you’ll see that these aren’t my thought, I’m just repeating what evolution teaches. Man is always depicted by evolution as the pinnacle being of evolution. I never said the best species, since in fact all of our faculties are in some ways inferior to certain faculties other species. Since evolution teaches this, that means that evolution is a religion that appeals to the ego since it is evolution that teaches this concept, not Christianity. Evolution appeals to those people run by their feelings in general, not one’s brain.
True Christianity teaches one to be the best thinker you can possibly be. We are exhorted, encouraged, to use our mind. Historically, look at the list of Christian scientists I mentioned a few posts ago. All of them were way ahead of their times, and they were some of the greatest thinkers of their day. Modern Christianity with it’s touchy feel reliance on feelings and experience to base things is not what we are encouraged to do. It is a new thing, and goes against the grain in what the Bible teaches. The ultimate teleological purpose of our minds is to know the mind of the Creator. (Sounds like VGER, huh?)
Since when does the fact that we're made from atoms have anything to do with it? Atoms combine to form molecules, molecules interact... much of biology is how the different organic molecules and combinations thereof send other molecules back and forth.
The difference between a non-living composition of molecules coming together to form other non-living molecules is not the point as you stated. The point is how any combination of nonliving molecules came together and,
poof, suddenly you have life. Having the same combination of these elements come together and form life and at the core of this debate. As I stated, Pastuer discovered the law of biogenesis back in like 1860. Life only comes from life. Never has this been proven otherwise, yet evolution teaches the opposite of accepted scientific principles, this being one of many. Why should I believe something so unscientific as evolution when the whole theory’s basis was blown away almost 150 years ago? Why? According to evolution a bunch of molecules came together in exactly the right combination to form life. Life from non-life. Can’t happen, never did happen, and again flies totally in the face of known scientific fact. The basic building blocks to
have life exist can only come
from life itself, they can’t come from non-life. The biggest missing link in evolution isn’t some Neanderthal man, it’s how in the world did the dead, lifeless atoms that existed suddenly spring forth into life? Let me explain a couple of things. First of all, evolution teaches that lightning and the lifeless atoms that existed 2 billion years ago came together and formed an amino acid. Is that life? No. What’s missing? Well, other than something living let’s start with DNA. An amino acid is not life, can’t replicate itself, and can’t make DNA. DNA only comes from life, not non-life. Next, every single living cell in the universe, no matter how simple contains one of the most complicated things in existence, and without it no living cell can live. What is that? A complex enzymatic protein metabolic motor. What’s that? That’s how every single living cell extracts energy from it’s environment for cell reproduction and other cell needs. Without this incredibly complex organism, there can be no life. And guess what? Only living organisms can produce this thing, which means once again that evolution can’t be correct. If only amino acids are produced, they can’t produce something infinitely more complex like this protein motor, so how did that amino acid produced live, extract energy, or replicate itself? Answer: it didn’t because it is scientifically impossible for this to occur. The problems isn’t from 92 lifeless molecules to first bacteria, it’s in all the infinitely complex parts of life that are needed for that first bacteria to come about. Study how complex even the simplest bacteria is in existence, and tell me it happened by chance. Tell me how many amino acids there are in even the simplest bacteria? How complicated is just the DNA of the simplest bacteria? All these facts that science has discovered again tell us of how incredibly complex even the “simplest” life forms are. These are questions that show us how absurdly impossible evolution is.
Well, since DNA is by nature random, and only heals through randomness, it seems to belie a random designer, not intelligent design. Intelligent design would include some form of error-checking - to prevent bad errors like deformities et al.
Please do a little more research on DNA before making statements like this. DNA is completely redundant, error checking, and does not heal randomly. Zanth can post more here than I can, but your whole point here is erroneous as what you say it should be is what it already is. It DOES heal itself, but not always like you think. Birth defects and other deformities are, quite often, not genetically passed on, and the offspring of those with birth defects corrects itself with the next generation. If can heal certain anomalies, but others take another combination of egg and sperm to correct for. IOW, once it’s broken too much it can’t fix itself. Very, very intelligent design indeed. IT seems that your idea of DNA is that it would have intelligence in and of itself - that it should find all errors itself and correct for them. Once the DNA is damaged in certain ways, it can only replicate itself with those errors.
I also think you missed my point about the link between a life form’s complexity and the number of DNA molecules. According to evolution’s own teaching, the more complex the life form the slower it evolves. Since DNA is the most complicated molecule in existence, it is an accurate barometer for judging complexity. Humans only have 22 pairs of DNA molecules, and yet we are, again according to evolution, the pinnacle of the evolutionary charts. They themselves use man as the most complicated organism in existence. If this DNA is an accurate barometer, then anything which contains more pairs of DNA is, by definition, more complex. Therefore, how do we explain, using evolution, how the fern existed for millions upon millions of years before man. It has nearly 5 times the amount of DNA molecules that we do, and yet is called “simpler” and less complex by evolution. This is not possible. Everything with more than 22 DNA pairs would be more complex than man and would not exist yet since it takes longer to evolve an organism that is many, many times more complex. The analogy of audio equipment THD is quite horrendous to fall back on. We’re comparing life forms composed of the most complex molecule in existence, the analogy of the audio equipment is from objective design figures to subjective perceived sound. (Some amps with a lower THD are better sounding, but that’s irrelevant.
Please don’t try and cop out on me aby saying we just don’t understand enough about evolution, therefore it is still a viable alternative. Take just the known science we have
right now, and tell me how evolution defies and destroys almost every single premise of the known sciences. The point isn’t whether we know everything about what happened in the past. The point is really which explanation is more rational, logical, and scientific to believe?
