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The Bible, Creationism, and Prophecy (part 1)
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I too would like a read of thisdaithifleming wrote: »Post it up!
Hmm, well I think there might be a copyright issue now. I always thought that Science was public domain, living as I do in this Ivory Tower with access to almost everything.
Unless I get the specific go-ahead from the mods, I'd rather not get anyone in trouble, least of all myself!
As a concession, here are a few excerpts that get across the gist of the thing:Science: Jennifer Couzin wrote:SOLOMONS, MARYLAND--On a clear January day, Stephen Godfrey is dressed for fossil-hunting: frayed baggy jeans, a puffy green vest, and a leather jacket that's seen better times. A paleontologist and curator at the modest Calvert Marine Museum here, Godfrey frequents the nearby Calvert Cliffs, which rise from the shoreline of Chesapeake Bay and hold everything from ancient shark teeth to dolphin skulls. "You start collecting them because, well, they're beautiful," he says of his beloved fossils.
It was the study of fossils that, 25 years ago, set Godfrey on an anguished path. Raised in a fundamentalist Christian family in Quebec, Canada, embracing a 6000-year-old Earth where Noah's flood laid down every fossil, Godfrey began probing the underpinnings of creationism in graduate school. The inconsistencies he found led step by step, over many years, to a staunch acceptance of evolution. With this shift came rejection from his religious community, estrangement from his parents, and, perhaps most difficult of all, a crisis of faith that endures.
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Now 48, Godfrey came of age after young-Earth creationism took hold in North America in the early 1960s. Its leaders argued that during the previous 150 years, Bible-believing Christians had gone too far in accommodating science in their interpretation of scripture and pushed for a literal reading of the Bible, says Ronald Numbers, a historian of science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Fossils, for example, are the remains of plants and animals left out of Noah's ark. The description of Adam and Eve in Genesis suggests that humans had never been subject to evolution. Using calculations drawn from genealogy, young-Earth creationists consider the planet to be 6000 to 10,000 years old. (Geologists say it is about 4.5 billion years old.)
Godfrey, who subscribed wholeheartedly to these views, vividly recalls his earliest encounter with evolution. In the first grade, when he was about 6 years old, a student teacher said that apes were the ancestors of people. "I remember having this visceral reaction … and saying, 'No, that can't be.' " Around the dinner table that night, his family discussed the experience, concluding that the teacher must have been mistaken. "It couldn't be true because apes aren't evolving into humans today; they're apes," Godfrey remembers. And that was that.
Although creationism might seem bizarre to individuals who have never believed in it, for those who do, its power is almost beyond words. Alters remembers, as a young teenager, sitting in on a sermon by Robert Schuller, a televangelist whose California church is fairly liberal. Listening to Schuller endorse the views of scientists who consider rocks to be millions of years old, Alters began to cry, horrified that the preacher would lie. "It was almost as if he stood there and said Jesus Christ didn't exist," he recalls. For biblical literalists, belief is generally an all-or-nothing proposition.
Godfrey entered college convinced that scientists were engaged in a vast conspiracy to promote evolution. At Bishop's University in Sherbrooke, Quebec, he majored in biology and lived at home, several kilometers away. In one sense, his studies had little effect on his faith. "You can learn facts, and you can do really well on exams and not believe" what you're learning, he says. But then, his classes also raised niggling questions that biblical literalism could not easily answer.
For example, there was the quandary of death. A literal reading of Genesis indicates that no animals perished before Adam and Eve ate the fateful apple--in other words, that there were no carnivores preying on other animals. But in his biology classes, Godfrey learned of predators perfectly framed to kill: cats with stereoscopic vision, enlarged canines, and claws; spiders that weave webs as traps; and sharks that replace serrated teeth throughout their life. "They're not eating seaweed," says Godfrey, who puzzled over how these animals had emerged if God hadn't intended them to prey on others. "That was the first thing at university that really started to disturb me," he says.
Then Godfrey's world came crashing down.
His first summer in graduate school, he was invited to join a field expedition in rural Kansas, where University of Toronto paleontologist Robert Reisz and some students were digging for pelycosaurs, 300-million-year-old animals that display some features of mammals that evolved later. Living in tents on a farmer's field in searing heat and humidity and surrounded by cows, the group visited the nearest town, Garnett, weekly for food and other supplies. At night, the sky glowed with stars, and Godfrey pointed out the constellations to his companions.
By day, quarrying through thin layers of rock, "we started to come across footprints of terrestrial animals," says Godfrey. "You can't imagine a global flood and animals finding ground to make footprints on. … That, more than anything, any other experience in my life, really shook me to the core." Godfrey agonized about where these footprints might have come from. Some creationists argue for floating mats of vegetation during the flood, but Godfrey found that unconvincing.
"He was one of the brightest students that I'd ever seen," says Reisz, who at the time knew that Godfrey was a devout Christian but had no idea of the crisis triggered by his fieldwork. "The ease with which he learned, the ease with which he accumulated new ideas, … all spoke to a superior intelligence."
Godfrey held out from embracing evolution, however, until after moving in 1989 to Drumheller, Alberta, dubbed the "dinosaur capital of the world" because of its diversity of fossils. Godfrey often drove southeast to Dinosaur Provincial Park, passing through a landscape of sediments laid atop one another: deposits from freshwater and terrestrial environments in one, marine organisms and mollusks in another, and a third that mimicked the first, a mix of fossils from fresh water and land. "These animals were living here in this same place, but they couldn't have all been there at the same time," he says, a fact that was irreconcilable with flood geology. It was then that "the rest of the young-Earth creationist ideas kind of exploded."
There's a bit more to the story than that. It's actually a little sad how much it affected his relationships with other family members.:( He still believes in God but has doubts like anyone else. The piece ends with him wondering if and how he should influence his children's beliefs...0 -
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This is the difference in our perception then: Creationists with advanced degrees in their scientific field put forward technical explanations and arguments in those fields and you say they are only philosophical.On the contrary, their scientific argument is not being suppressed at all. They do not have a scientific argument, only a philosophical one. A fact that has been explained exhaustively to you and others.
LOL @ using Ben Stein's awful, less than honest movie (I have watched it) to support your point.
I can understand you arguing that they are defective science, erroneous scientific conclusions, etc. But philosophical? To me, that smacks of a neat means of censorship. And I provided evidence before that just such dishonest treatment is used against other non-conformist scientists, secular scientists who have no connection to Creationism.
Why the fear?0 -
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