Re: Top three reasons for optimism about the ID scam

On Thu, 5 Dec 2024 08:34:32 -0600, RonO <rokimoto557@gmail.com> wrote:

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.

I first encountered this in Seventh-day Adventist writings.  I looked
up Reasons to Believe, and I found it funny that their, shall we say,
misunderstanding of how science works, was emblazoned in their
self-description on their web site statement (#4, "The message of
nature *will* agree with what the Bible says" emphasis added).

https://reasons.org/single/creation-model-approach

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.

Ah, yes, the vapor canopy.  A classic part of the YEC superstition
that no one seems interested in anymore.

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.

Non-literal interpretations of the Bible have been around for
centuries, millennia even, but those beliefs were just a
representation of intellectual precocity on the part of the believers
in those days.   It wasn't a result of being essentially forced to
believe in non-literal interpretations because of the advancement of
science.  It wasn't until well past the Renaissance that it became
unusual to take the Bible at its word about origins by the
intelligentsia.

 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.

True.

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.