Re: Top three reasons for optimism about the ID scam

On 12/4/2024 4:56 PM, Vincent Maycock wrote:

On Wed, 4 Dec 2024 21:24:48 +0000, Ernest Major
<{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk> wrote:
 

On 04/12/2024 19:05, Vincent Maycock wrote:

They should never have been on it in the first place as there was
nothing heretical about them

Except that the Bible says the earth does not move.

>
The Bible also says that the earth is flat.
>
The Catholic Church recognised that the Bible includes idiom, metaphor,
poetry and allegory, inter alia. Augustine, an early Church Father,
recognised that empirical data trumped Biblical interpretation, and
advised Christians not to bring the faith into disrepute by adopting
positions (such as flat earth) that were obvious nonsense.

 Right.   I suppose Holy Scripture would have to be "interpreted"
before one could conclude that anything was contrary to it or not.

The Reason to Believe old earth creationists continue to claim to be Biblical literalists.  They are not flat earthers, not geocentrists, and they have a loopy literal interpretation for the sun and moon not being created on the 4th day (period of time) as is claimed in Genesis.  They claim that one word was left out.  The word for "made" or "make" is used in the Bible verse, but the Reason to Believe creationists believe that the sun and moon were only "made visible" on the 4th day and not "made" during the 4th period of time.  They understand that the sun and moon were created billions of years before land plants were created on the 3rd day (period of time), so they are claiming that there was some vapor canopy shrouding the earth until after land plants were created.  They have some fruity claims that there was a vapor canopy around the earth for billions of years, but they have no explanation for why it would matter if the sun and moon were visible or not when only the creator would have been able to see them from the surface of the earth for billions of years, and the creator would have obviously known what he had created when he is supposed to exist outside and inside of our universe.
These types need to believe that they can take the Bible literally, because they do not have enough faith in their beliefs to live without the Biblical "evidence" for those beliefs to not be infalible.  The YEC state this clearly.  If the Bible cannot be taken literally for all parts, then there is no reason to believe the parts that you want to believe.  They can't deal with the fact that the Bible can not be taken literally for aspects of nature that we can crosscheck ourselves.  If the Bible is wrong for the things that we can determine for ourselves, then there is no reason to believe the things that we can not crosscheck in order to determine their validity.  The YEC do not have the loopy claim that the sun and moon were only made visible on the 4th day.  They claim that the sun and moon were created the day after land plants, just like the Bible says.
Ron Okimoto

 

When I looked into the subject I found that the Catholic Church was
rather more literalist than I had expected. There is a presumption of
literalism in the absence of contrary data. I have read that Galileo had
a theological dispute with the Church - he argued that the Church should
not give hostages to fortune by unnecessarily nailing its mast to
interpretations that might be overturned by later discoveries.