Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I'm sorry, you seem to have misspelled "awesome".That puts so many unhealthy images into my young mind.
Ask a Theologian III
- Thread starter Plotinus
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GhostWriter16
Deity
@Plotinus- How well or poorly do you feel evolution fits with Scripture?
I think the question should really be how well or poorly Scripture fits with evolution, given that the latter is an established fact. I'd answer by saying fairly poorly, but it would be silly to try to read the Bible as if it were talking about the same sort of subject as a modern scientific text. Also, given that the proportion of the Bible that actually addresses the subject is vanishingly minute, it's only a problem if you can't accept either that the biblical authors got anything even slightly wrong or that they did not mean to be taken literally on every point. Since most Christians are happy to accept one or even both of these, it's not an issue for most Christians (at least in moderately scientifically literate countries).
Bear in mind that the biggest issue regarding YECs and evolution is the time scale, which isn't even explicitly laid out in Genesis 1 or 2.
I'm not sure about either of those points; surely there are issues other than the time scale, such as the fact that the order in which different creatures appear in either of the Genesis accounts doesn't match the order that the fossil record suggests. And as for whether the time scale is explicitly laid out, that depends on whether you think "day" means "day" or not. But of course I really don't want to get into that sort of thing too much here.
That's really something I don't know. Abraham is described as a "wandering Aramean" (Deuteronomy 26:5) in reference to his birthplace, but I don't know how much weight one would put on that. I would guess it's a question that can't really be answered with much certainty by anyone. I'm not sure what you mean by "Arabic" Arameans, though. The Arameans were from Mesopotamia and spoke various forms of Aramaic, not Arabic.
I feel like this has been asked before but here goes:
Do you think the Arians in general had strong philosophical grounding, or did Athanasius & crew pretty well destroy them?
Also, what is the difference between to be begotten/to beget, and to create/be created, especially when it comes to Jesus' divinity.
Do you think the Arians in general had strong philosophical grounding, or did Athanasius & crew pretty well destroy them?
Also, what is the difference between to be begotten/to beget, and to create/be created, especially when it comes to Jesus' divinity.
Berzerker
Deity
Genesis describes a dark, water covered world before "creation" began. This is followed by some process by which "dry land" called Earth appeared from under the waters and life came next... They got that part right... The oldest "continental" rock we have formed under water... The first life was vegetation or seed bearing life forms followed by sea critters, fowl, and land critters and eventually, us. And they weren't far off with that sequence for supposedly ignorant people...
GhostWriter16
Deity
To the bold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_Creationism
In the United States, it is not accepted as a fact.
_random_
Jewel Runner
"Accepted" and "established" are two completely different things.
GhostWriter16
Deity
Are you trying to say something that 10-45% of people in this country deny (No scratch that, 10-45% believe in YEC, that's not counting the OECs) is an ESTABLISHED FACT?
_random_
Jewel Runner
Among people familiar with the sciences it is.
GhostWriter16
Deity
Moderator Action: This is not the thread for an evolution debate
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
Dommy, how many times must we tell you this? Science is not a democracy. It does not matter that 10-45% of the population (an idiotic figure, to be sure) supports YEC. If the evidence supports evolution (which it most surely does), then evolution is accepted, well established fact. Now go back to the evidence for creationism thread and respond to the evolution links I provided before I pull my hair out in frustration.
If 100% of the population believed the earth was flat, it still would be an established fact that it was round. Using different terms shows how idiotic that statement is. If you wish to continue this discussion, form a thread and PM me the link, this is not the place for this.
That is an interesting question. I would say that both sides had good reasons for their views. Both were thoroughly grounded in technical philosophical terms and debates. But they came at the question from different angles.
I don't think Athanasius really destroyed Arianism, from a philosophical point of view. He defended the Nicene formula capably, but I wouldn't say he demonstrated its superiority to the Homoian alternative. I think the Cappadocians were the ones who really did that, in opposition to the Anomean version of Arianism. Even there, though, it was more a matter of showing the philosophical rigour of their own views rather than demolishing their opponents' on philosophical grounds.
Of course, the degree to which any of these people were basing their views on philosophical grounds rather than other ones remains uncertain.
The difference is supposedly one of transmission of nature. A created thing has a different nature from the thing that creates it. A begotten thing shares the nature of the thing that begets it. So in the case of Jesus, the Homoian argument was that because the Son depends for his existence upon the Father, he must be created by the Father (as Proverbs 8:22 says). Therefore he must have a different nature from the Father, although he may be similar to the Father in every other respect (hence the name "Homoian", since these Arians believed the Father and Son to be alike, other than in nature). The Athanasian response is that the Son is not created, he is begotten, and therefore the Father and Son are alike in nature as well as in every other respect.
No, they didn't. The Earth was originally just rocky. Its water arrived on comets. There wasn't ever a time when the Earth was completely covered by water.
Well, this makes less sense to me, to be honest. It seems to me that there are two possibilities here. First, the authors of the opening chapters of Genesis was divinely inspired and what they wrote was a true and accurate account of the origins of the world (either literal or allegorical). Or, second, the authors were not divinely inspired - at least not divinely inspired when it came to scientific information - and they were just guessing. In that case it really was just guesswork since they certainly had no access to the data we do on the basis of which we know the origins of the world as we know it.
Now on neither of these possibilities does the claim that the authors "weren't far off" make much sense to me. If they were divinely inspired to get it right, then being a bit right isn't enough. If they were wrong at all then that's surely an indication that they weren't divinely inspired, at least, not with regard to scientific information. And if they were not divinely inspired in this way, then the argument that they nevertheless got some of it sort of rightish is really of no interest, because it was just a coincidence.
In other words, if you're not going to defend the claim that they were 100% right, why try to make a fuss over the few bits that they did get right? What does it show? That they were really good at guessing?
Of course. You can't appeal to scientific illiteracy on something like this, especially in a country like the US which is especially and notoriously bad at scientific education. There are all sorts of things that are established facts that many people don't believe; it is, for example, an established fact that Jesus existed, but as you know, you'll find an awful lot of people denying it. That's not because there's any serious doubt on the matter, but because those people are ignorant of the evidence and of the expert assessment of that evidence. The same goes for evolution; it is absolutely an established fact. The vast majority of experts know that, and the vast majority of even moderately informed non-experts know that too. That's a given as far as this thread is concerned, because as El Mac says, this is not the thread to debate science - let alone to argue about the plausibility of one of the most well established planks of modern science.
We could talk about the theological issues connected to it, of course, since that would be more on-topic, although I'd say that "young earth creationism" isn't on a much firmer footing theologically than it is scientifically, really.
ParkCungHee
Deity
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As an offshoot of the Arianist question, which major heresy (or whatever term you prefer) had the least reasonable philosophical and theological grounding?
GhostWriter16
Deity
What about the verse when it says "There was no death until Adam sinned."
Catholicism
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