When did you accept God in your life, or realize you did not believe in him?

Also see the fact that Haeckel's drawings, discredited in the 1800's are still in just about every biology textbook published today.

 

what about it? that it existed? how is archeology going to prove that israelites walked around in circles for 7 days and blew the walls down with trumpets?

nobody's saying that the bible doesn't draw from history. using your beach analogy above, should that writing somehow be saved for a thousand years to be examined by our descendents. could they determine who wrote it or the circumstances involved? would it prove the divinity of galethog?

they were just getting their records straight for the big bc/ad changeover.

so it rained for 40 days and 40 nights? this is what i'm getting at. you use select pieces of science to bolster select pieces of your religion and ignore the science that doesn't corroroborate your position.

there was a flood -- probably relating to rising ocean levels as the last ice age ended and water was freed from large ice deposits. there's good evidence that the black sea was totally flooded by this kind of event. probably other areas, too. but was it rain? did it last 40 years? was there a guy who had to save everybody? can you possibly fit 2 of every animal (and plant?) onto a boat? what would that do to the gene pool? why aren't the animals in a homogenous distribution throughout the world? or at least there should be a fossil record of marsupials in israel.


legends are generally born of real phenomena. we have few legends these days because written history allows people to know the truth before the fake word spreads.

 

could you explain what you mean by that?

for example....?

 

jericho:
That it existed, there was a battle fought there, and the walls toppled outward. At the time the bible claimed.

flood:
Freeing water from ice deposits could certainly have increased humidity in temperate areas and caused lasting rains. In fact, it would be likely. Unless the whole world was covered, noah wouldn't have had to save every species, most like just the domesticated ones he was familiar with.

The Bible taken strictly historically and excluding Genesis stands up pretty damn well.

 

Global warming - especially that tied to man made warming - is by no means proven by science, yet it is accepted as fact - even to the point that governments are willing to spend trillions on it. And anyone who questions these scientific conclusions is attacked (do a search on Bjorn Lomborg to see a good example).

Pretty much anyone who tried to invent a cure for something. You would have to be convinced that you can find something to endure all of those failures.

 

if you throw out the details that don't fit.

of course, the details that demonstrably don't fit don't look any different from the details that are impossible to prove. i think it's bogus to assume that if science can't answer the question, then it must be true -- particularly when science discredits many of the details of the stories.


the release of water was a gradual thing. it took a long, long time.

 

But you think it is perfectly fine to think that chance created our universe which is so fine tuned that the odds of its mere existence are impossible to calculate because there aren't enough elemental particles in the entire universe to write that many zeros?

Sure it would have taken a long time, and it would take a long time for the effects to accumulate be felt that far south.

 

i think the "scientific" understanding of global warming is that is actually happening and that man is adding "fuel to the fire". policy makers and political groups will certainly take what science they like and hold it as gospel. i think any honest evaluation would reveal that the concern of the enviornmental scientist is that the potential problems of global warming would warrant doing our best to ensure we're not adding to it.

i'm sure there are plenty of dishonest folks on both sides of the issue who treat it more like... well, like religion.

not at all where i thought you were going with that. clearly the person seeking to cure cancer doesn't believe that every time he mixes up a new batch of something that it'll be the cure for cancer. in fact, there's a huge system in place to vet such discoveries because people know that even if it looks good to start with, there are good chances it'll mess up something else.

 

i don't believe in chance.

you mean the flood thing? i'm not sure i follow you here. how does being south enter into it?

 

But the whole point is that they believe that the end result is there and keep going on. Which was my whole point on the ark thing.