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Wirraway
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fish were laying eggses long before dinosaurs.
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rbarcia
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Yeah, my face still has the red marks full of all the evidence I have been hit with.
:slapfight: :yup:
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StAnastasia
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Well, that’s a start. I used to think Young Earth Creationists were essentially kind, honest, well-meaning, but uninformed people. Then the evidence to the contrary began hitting me, demonstrating that they are dishonest people, endlessly recycling old scraps of argument in the hope that it will convince people of the truth of their anti-scientific worldview. They are as dishonest as Richard Dawkins and the other “new atheists,” but where those two sides agree is the claim that “evolution = atheism.”
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StAnastasia
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Wirraway, I didn’t mean to imply that egg laying began with dinosaurs.
I have another question: when did sex become fun? That is, when did sex begin to carry an orgasmic payoff beyond whatever it is instinct-driven reproductive sex conveys? With primates or earlier? I know bonobos engage in recreational sex.
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ralphinal
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Find ym post where I explained that I was to lazy to type yet undiscovered hominoid.
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ralphinal
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I am still waiting for an explination of what makes a day a day. I am still waiting for the place wher God gave us clocks, calenders, and told us how to mark time.
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StAnastasia
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Can’t give you a precise dates, but somewhere between 30,000 and 12,000 BCE. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time#History_of_the_calendar
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ralphinal
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Oh, I mean where in the Bible…
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StAnastasia
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It’s in Genesis chapter 4. Expelled from Eden, Adam had to embark on the nine-to-five, so God gave him an electric alarm clock.
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a_mirror_dimly
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…but seeing the way in which Adam suffered in the toils of his labor, God is His infinite wisdom was merciful and bestowed upon the alarm clock a snooze button.
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RobHom
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And for his birthday, he giveth to Adam one such new model, that containeth a backeth uppeth battery……but seeing the way in which Adam suffered in the toils of his labor, God is His infinite wisdom was merciful and bestowed upon the alarm clock a snooze button.
(I was tempted earlier to do something like this…
But I hesitated… I knew someone would… )
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StAnastasia
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How appropriate that this Adamic clock was a precursor of the atomic clocks of today…And for his birthday, he giveth to Adam one such new model, that containeth a backeth uppeth battery…
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RobHom
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Gottle_of_Geer
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Days ? Before the creation of the sun 
? Very credible LOL.
The interest in dating & days is a sign that the document is by the Priestly author - the days are important because they culminate in the Sabbath, on which God “rests”, having “worked” as though He were a man.That detail about the sun is a clue to the fact that the first creation account is not a description of “what happened” - the text is always to be “taken literally”, but that is not in itself a clue to its sense. “Jack and the Beanstalk” is to be “taken literally” - and understood as the fairy-tale it is. The mythological imagery of the Bible is to be “taken literally”; that does not make a myth in the Bible any more really a real event than a myth outside it. Inspiration does not cause or guarantee or require that the thing told is an event in history. Otherwise inspiration would be a form of magic.
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Gottle_of_Geer
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Certainly not. That definition is useless if we are going to talk about ethics, or make statements of value. And how does a triangle “happen” ? That a triangle is a triangle in virtue of being three-sided is not an event, but an ontological necessity: if a plane figure is to be triangular, then it cannot have fewer than, or more than, three angles; not if the concept of triangularity is to be intelligible, & applicable to an external world. If the concept has no stable meaning, but varies indefinitely, then all rational discourse is at end; for there cannot be rational discourse where words can mean anything at all. If on some distant planet triangles are four-sided, then by human standards they are not triangles, but squares.
How is “Virtue is better than vice” the statement of an event ? Or do judgements of value not matter ? If they do not, to say “X has happened” is as meaningless as to say “X is good” - for judgements that events have happened are themselves judgements of value.Because scientific method requires evidence appropriate to it. The world may stand on an infinite succession of turtles, or be built from the body of a primaval giant - but there is no scientific evidence for either possibility, & a great deal that excludes both. So it would be grossly unprofessional & irresponsible for a scientist to adopt these ideas as well-founded. By contrast, there is a great deal of evidence to support the hypothesis of evolution - if some Christians insist on reading an Ancient Near Eastern creation myth as a reliable record of the origin of the world, that is their problem, & not a reason for those who know better to humour them. To do so, would be as criminal as to take the works of Tolkien as a reliable guide to the early history of the earth - & he tells us a lot about the creation of the sun & moon; the creation of plants; the early inhabitants of the earth & their demographics; the formation of land masses & lakes; mountain-building; the ancestors of elephants; the origin of the Arctic climate; & much more.
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Gottle_of_Geer
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You do know what a poof is… 
?
is psychologically comforting to you, and you’re not teaching science, or practicing it, I don’t see a problem with your holding that personal pov.
Trying to convince others that your pov as fact, though? Well, let’s just say that we disagree there.
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Gottle_of_Geer
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Easy - words don’t change meaning according as they refer to real or unreal things: a tree in a fairy tale about an enchanted garden at the World’s End is as “tree-ish” as any real tree in a real garden tended by a real gardener.
A family tree in the “real world”, OTOH, has no bark or boughs or bole - it is called a tree, because it is tree-like in having a “stem” with “branches” - that real people have family trees does not make their family trees into oaks, aspens, junipers or any other kind of tree that grows from the ground; they are called trees, by a very natural extension of the sense of the word - a sense that is metaphorical, & true as a metaphor.Only someone colossally ignorant or stupid (or both) would say that a picture in a Church window of Jesse father of David was a lie or a fantasy, on the ground that trees do not grow from from men’s bellies - for the “tree of Jesse” is a means of showing, in a vividly pictorial way, that Jesus Christ the Son of David is a descendant of Jesse. So someone dense enough to imagine that such a window is intending to give a lesson in arboriculture, & not setting forth the descent of Christ, has only himself to blame for his stupidity. Such is the “fruit” of the brain-rotting fantasy called Fundamentalism.
- [textweek.com/art/tree_of_jesse.htm (Tree of Jesse)
A tree is real or not, not because of the meaning of the word, but because of the rerality (or not) of the object denoted by the word. Which is why the gardens at Versailles, & the Gardens of the Hesperides, use the word “gardens” in exactly the same sense, even though the Hesperidean gardens belong to myth & those at Versailles to history.
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Gottle_of_Geer
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Creation can be a reality without the details of the story about being real. Verisimilitude is not the same as history. Or is a story about Jesus going to France & becoming the ancestor of the Merovingian kings to be treated as an account of real events merely because Jesus was a real person ? If so, you’ve just put forward a reason for taking “The Da Vinci Code” as sober history…
Gen. 3.15 is not a prophecy, & is not about Jesus at all. As Adam & Eve are as really historical as “The Simpsons”, this is no surprise.
Sin can perfectly well be a fact, even though it is attributed to mythical beings. In the Bible, there is no straightforward relation between a prediction & its fulfillment; & a prophet can be a false prophet even if his prediction comes true. There is a prophecy of the future greatness of Britain in “The History of the Kings of Britain” by the 12th-century author Geoffrey of Monmouth: Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas, goes to an oracle of the goddess Diana, & is told that he will rule Britain (which he has not at that point discovered) & that his descendants will rule a great empire. This was duly fulfilled - & it suggests that fictitious predictions by fictitious deities to fictitious heroes are a lot more reliable than the predictions in the Bible, many of which have very been conspicuously falsified - like the never fulfilled prediction about Egypt in Ezekiel 40. The Romans & Greeks & Assyrians had their prophets who made predictions - & several of these came true. The “argument from prediction” proves too much or too little to be of any value to Christians. Too much, by validating other gods; too little, by failing to show that the god of the Jews is anything special.
Was the British Empire a fiction, because Brutus, Diana, & that oracle were fictions ? If not, then neither need sin be a fiction merely because it is traced back to fictitious characters. The suggestion that its reality stands or falls with theirs is a non sequitur.
What Jesus may have thought about their reality is irrelevant, as there is no reason of any kind to suppose that He was any better or worse informed on that subject than anyone else. The Incarnation was not a guarantee of being able to win “The Weakest Link”. He was a man, not an infallible & exhaustive encyclopedia of theology; so there is no need to suppose He had any knowledge of nuclear fission, computing, or the works of Shakespeare.
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Wirraway
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sometime in 1979.
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StAnastasia
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Jared Diamond, Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution Of Human Sexuality (1998).
"This book speculates on the evolutionary forces that shaped the unique aspects of human sexuality: female menopause, males’ role in society, having sex in private, and – most unusual of all – having sex for fun instead of for procreation. Through comparative evolution, biologist and science author Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies), poses credible and thought-provoking yet entertaining factors: the lengthy period of dependency of human infants, sex for pleasure as the tie that helps bind a mother and a father together, and menopause as an evolutionary advantage that, by ending the childbearing years, allows females to pass wisdom and knowledge on to society and succeeding generations.
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