Please clarify some things concerning veiws, bible folks!, page 1

Originally posted by mental modulator
How old is the earth again?

Nobody knows precisely. Although the Earth's age is not stated anywhere in the Bible, some imaginative folks count the generations in the Old Testament and arrive at an age of less than 7000 years. Geologists, on the other hand, think the Earth is more like 4.5 billion years, although they can't prove their hypothesis any more than the theists can.

Originally posted by mental modulator
Where did races come from?

Again, it doesn't say in the Bible where the "races" came from. In Genesis 11 (which is the Tower of Babel story), it speaks of God scrambling languages, but that's not the same as creating "races"... The notion of "race" is pure intellectual folly. Science tells us that we're all one species, a species that is highly adaptable to diverse climates. In adapting to those climates over hundreds of thousands of years, we developed specialized pigmentation and cardiopulmonary systems. But we're still the same species. I agree with all of that.

Originally posted by mental modulator
What are dinosaurs and how old are dinosaurs if they are real?

That's a great question, one that paleontologists still can't answer. For a long time science thought they were reptiles, then they started thinking dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds, and now they believe the dinos were a distinct form of life that was neither cold blooded nor warm blooded, neither reptile nor mammal, neither lizard nor bird. But the short answer is the same as the answer to the Earth's age question: Nobody knows for certain. The Bible talks about there being Giants in the land in those days, which some people construe as an allusion to dinosaurs, or mammoths, or even giant people; but, again, nobody knows who or what these "giants" were.

If you're trying to date dinosaurs by the Bible, I'd say that's an impossible task. Nobody knows how God works or how God thinks, so dinos may have been created in a flash about 6000 to 8000 years ago (unlikely, but we are talking about God here), or God may have simply set Life loose on Earth to evolve as it would for a few billion years. We just don't know. The Bible was written fairly recently and sort of leaves out some 35,000 years of prehistoric human development; and a great deal of folklore was intentionally omitted from the Old Testament, as well — so it's an incomplete collection of data. Anyway, most open-minded Christians realize that the Old Testament is mainly a jumbled compilation of Middle Eastern folklore and shouldn't be viewed as a strictly historical text.

As for the question "how old are dinosaurs if they are real," well, that's a peculiar question. You want me to say they're only 7000 years old or something like that, even though Science says the last of them died out 65 million years ago. Science also says that soft animal tissues cannot survive intact for hundreds of thousands or millions of years... Yet soft, pliable tissue (with flesh and bone and even capillaries intact) has been discovered embedded in the "fossilized" skeleton of a T-Rex. They're still trying to extract sequenced DNA from the incredibly rare and fragile sample. So...either the dino tissue sample is not millions of years old or they're going to have to rewrite a few textbooks on the survival of soft animal tissues. Which part of Science do you want to sacrifice for your answer?

Originally posted by mental modulator
What indicates proof of an event if the event was in the distant past?

Unfortunately, unless you were there to see the event for yourself and take measurements, you can't prove that anything ever happened in the past. Some of the greatest thinkers down through the centuries have commented that our written history is nothing so much as the lies spun by the people who won the wars. And I agree with that.

Science cannot prove that anything happened in the distant past. All they have is "evidence to suggest" that an event "probably transpired" in a certain fashion. Probability is not proof.

Originally posted by mental modulator
Why does some science threaten your faith in god?

I love this question. I grew up as "the scientist" in a religious household. My interests in chemistry and geology and biology and botany and herpetology and astronomy and mechanical engineering were never hindered by my family or by religion. There was no contradiction between science and religion whatsoever, as far as I was concerned. They're both works in progress, incomplete notions created in the mind of a hairy little bipedal animal on the surface of a small world on the edge of a galaxy in a universe of countless galaxies. To shut one notion or the other out of your mind is to limit yourself, to place shackles on your intellectual growth.

Also — and I know I've explained this a thousand times before — there's no such thing as threatening someone's Faith. If you know what Faith is, you know that it can't be threatened.

For the rookies out there, religion is not the same thing as Faith. There are a thousand religions out there for the choosing, and some people bounce from one to the other, looking for an elusive something that suits them. You know, you can worship Christ or Buddha or Muhammad or Bob Dobbs or Bigfoot or the Goddess Diana or UFOs, or take your pick. There's enough harebrained crap out there for everyone. You can attack religion all you want, nothing to stop you, fire at will.

Faith is not the same as belief, either. Beliefs can change from one week to the next, just listen to John Kerry or Barack Obama speaking — they start every sentence with an authoritative "I believe..." followed by a bunch of mumbo jumbo bullshît. Next week they'll do a complete about-face and "believe" something else. This sort of ambiguity has cheapened the word "belief," so it really doesn't mean anything anymore. So let's not confuse belief with Faith.

Faith is a state of mind. Faith is knowing. It is certainty. It is not wishing — wishing implies that you acknowledge failure. Faith never acknowledges failure, so it cannot be attacked and needn't be defended. Faith is the ultimate but seldom-attained objective of all serious religions.

So, based on that definition of Faith, you might say, "There must be damn few truly Faithful theists out there," and you'd be right. I've been alive 48 years, have lived with and around Christians my whole life, and I think I can count the number of truly Faithful Christians that I've ever known on the fingers of one hand. They're an extremely rare breed, but if you ever met one you'd know it.

Now, how can Science, which is just another idea dreamed up by human beings, possibly threaten Faith, a state of mind that cannot be threatened? Science only "threatens" those who fail to understand and accept it for what it is — another utterly human attempt to describe the way the universe works. Same as religion.

[edit on 6/25/2008 by Doc Velocity]