Rediscovery of Technology

biochem wrote:For those who do, we can disagree on exact mechanics but can agree on the MUCH MORE IMPORTANT part which is the God revealed himself to us through the Bible and the Bible is the ultimate truth. Any errors are not divine but are the result of human misinterpretation.

I hope you can see the inherent contradiction here. The bible is ultimate truth, but it contains errors? What, then, is the distinction between an error and the ultimate truth? How do you divine which is which?

The E wrote:

biochem wrote:For those who do, we can disagree on exact mechanics but can agree on the MUCH MORE IMPORTANT part which is the God revealed himself to us through the Bible and the Bible is the ultimate truth. Any errors are not divine but are the result of human misinterpretation.

I hope you can see the inherent contradiction here. The bible is ultimate truth, but it contains errors? What, then, is the distinction between an error and the ultimate truth? How do you divine which is which?

My phraseology must have been at fault. The Bible does not have errors. People interpreting the Bible make errors.

How do you divine which is which?

Not easily! Which is one reason why there are so many Christian denominations out there.

biochem wrote:

The E wrote:For those who do, we can disagree on exact mechanics but can agree on the MUCH MORE IMPORTANT part which is the God revealed himself to us through the Bible and the Bible is the ultimate truth. Any errors are not divine but are the result of human misinterpretation.

I hope you can see the inherent contradiction here. The bible is ultimate truth, but it contains errors? What, then, is the distinction between an error and the ultimate truth? How do you divine which is which?

My phraseology must have been at fault. The Bible does not have errors. People interpreting the Bible make errors.

How do you divine which is which?

Not easily! Which is one reason why there are so many Christian denominations out there.

The Bible as it it written contains errors, and many people maintained that the Bible was created by man (written down) so either god had the writers write down lies and errors, or god is mistaken. Either the Bible is a 100% factual creation of god, or it's a series of books written by men with an imperfect understanding of history and the world around them. It can't be both perfect and flawed.

Zakharra wrote:The Bible as it it written contains errors, and many people maintained that the Bible was created by man (written down) so either god had the writers write down lies and errors, or god is mistaken. Either the Bible is a 100% factual creation of god, or it's a series of books written by men with an imperfect understanding of history and the world around them. It can't be both perfect and flawed.

I prefer to believe that the Bible is meant as a means of education (which can also be called "Lies-to-children"). It uses extremely simplified symbology which most uneducated minds can just about follow while containing subtleties that the more-educated minds can notice (and feel smug about noticing).

The bible is a map to history. However, the map is not the territory, merely a fairly good guide to it (depending on the techniques used). At the time that the bible was written, people didn't need to know about the failure known as the Dinosaurs (which were wiped out, allowing Humans to appear), thus they simply weren't mentioned. After all, why worry the ignorant people by telling them that if they did something majorly wrong, God could slam several thousand tons of rock into the Earth and start over yet again.

Of course, it might be the case that Earth was made by wizards...

One of the great things about the human mind is the ability to pattern match, to extrapolate from very small amounts of data very quickly.

Back "in the day" (and even today, for people inclined to live that kind of lifestyle) this was a skillset which was literally a matter of life or death. Identifying the Saber tooth tiger crouching in the tall grass, or the prey animal you were hunting for hidden in the shade of the grove of trees based on a tiny clue (the tip of an ear, the slight twitch of a tail) was so important to survive that huge amounts of brainpower work on this all the time in your subconcious mind.

False positives might be annoying, but didn't hurt too much (you ran naway from nothing; you threw your net onto a shadow), but false negatives got you removed from the gene pool real quick.

Flash forward to today, and people will see patterns hidden in large amounts of "noise". People who are really good at this become millionaire stock traders and so on. People who see things in the noise that are not really there (false positives) become believers in UFO's, Alt History and other things. I once read Hoagland's book which talked about the Face on Mars, extraterrestrial civilizations, hyperspace energy and a host of other things, and was struck at the end that the entire book (and indeed Hoagland's life work now) is entirely based on two low resolution photographs (all the other stuff comes from looking at equally low res pictures taken around the area of the "Face").

So don't be too hard on people who are looking for the lost treeasure of the Knights Templar, high tech ancient civilizations and so on; they have made a "false positive". It does not hurt you, might not really be hurting them (except perhaps socially), and is mildly useful if you use these things not as a chance to dismiss them out of hand but (to yourself) go through the steps in logical order and use that as a way to train your own mind to sift through data and reject false positives.

Wasnt that number from mathmatics of ages in the bibile? IIRC, it was calculated by a scholar by the ages of the ladies when they gave birth, from eve onwards throgu past jesus, and then linked into his modern times to get the creatin date of 4004 bc? IF so, its not human interpretation, its whats stated in the bible.

biochem wrote:Whether or not the earth is 6000 years old has nothing to do with whether or not the Bible is the revealed truth of God. As mentioned by Michael, the 6000 year number was a human interpretation of the Bible. As a matter of fact individuals who specifically believe in young earth creationism aka the 6000 year old earth are a minority although a vocal one (which correlates with my personal experience in the Christian community so I am inclined to believe it). The rest believe in some other variation of creationism, intelligent design, theistic evolution etc. All different human interpretations of the same document. For those who don't believe in the 6000 year earth, fine I don't either (I actually line up with the theistic evolution belief myself). For those who do, we can disagree on exact mechanics but can agree on the MUCH MORE IMPORTANT part which is the God revealed himself to us through the Bible and the Bible is the ultimate truth. Any errors are not divine but are the result of human misinterpretation.


Note as the following post explains in detail, be careful of poll numbers. Many of the pollsters have been asking sloppy questions, which tend to combine young earth creationists together with other types of creationists and then reporting the whole lot as being young earth creationists.

http://www.skepticblog.org/2014/05/28/h ... are-there/

Regarding the statement below, how do you know that it is true? Many others would say the same of the Koran, Torah, Book of Mormon, and many other sacred texts.
Why are you right and they wrong? Why do you need such?

Not trying to be offensive, just very curious.


"For those who do, we can disagree on exact mechanics but can agree on the MUCH MORE IMPORTANT part which is the God revealed himself to us through the Bible and the Bible is the ultimate truth. Any errors are not divine but are the result of human misinterpretation"

Thucydides wrote:...

So don't be too hard on people who are looking for the lost treeasure of the Knights Templar, high tech ancient civilizations and so on; they have made a "false positive". It does not hurt you, might not really be hurting them (except perhaps socially), and is mildly useful if you use these things not as a chance to dismiss them out of hand but (to yourself) go through the steps in logical order and use that as a way to train your own mind to sift through data and reject false positives.

Problem is that when concerning religion, there is a major tendency to "hurt" others, one way or another.

The Bible is a collection of Bronze Age fairy tales intended to keep ignorant and illiterate peasants in line, and the writers were themselves profoundly ignorant by modern standards of knowledge. They had no idea that we live on an oblate spheroid just under 8,000 miles in diameter gravitationally bound in an elliptical orbit around a giant ball of fusing hydrogen. They did not understand atomic theory, or know why minerals and chemicals behaved the way they do. They did not know about bacteria, viruses, parasites and fungal pathogens.

They invented gods, demons and spirits so they could pretend to understand what happened in the world and rule over those who believed them, demanding that they have "faith" instead of seeking real answers. Their biggest lesson is "don't question authority" - Adam and Eve were booted out of Paradise for seeking knowledge.

What would their lives have been like in that "Garden Of Eden"? Only one person to talk to and nothing to talk about, forbidden to learn, forbidden to build anything, every day just like every day before it and every day after it. Sounds like a fair description of Hell to me.
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When someone does a foolish thing, you should say it is a foolish thing. They may still continue to do it, but at least the truth is where it needs to be.

My wife, BJ, says I'm too picky about details. But:

Tycho Brahe's observations - > Kepler's elliptical orbits - bye bye the Ptolomaic paradigm.
Galileo's experiments with falling weights - bye bye Aristotelian physics.
Various chemical experiments - bye bye the phlogiston paradigm. Isaac Asimov noted that three of the chemists who provided the experiments would not accept the oxidation theory. He ascribes it to the fact that Lavoisier didn't give them credit for their work. "Even chemists can do a slow burn."
Radioactivity, interference fringes, etc. - bye bye eternal matter and the paradigm that things must be either particles or waves.
Thomas Kuhn's work noted that we tend to anchor on a paradigm and then explain everything using it. In theory, one contrary experiment or observation that can't be forced to fit invalidates a paradigm. In practice, we don't. Details are important altho paradigms let us see patterns.

"The problem, dear smr, is that any explanation you want to come up with that turns a bible story into history fact, especially when it comes to cataclysmic events, would leave tons and tons of corroborating evidence all over the place. Since we haven't been able to find anything to corroborate the "global flood 4000 years ago" theory, we kinda have to assume that what was described was either allegorical, or only descriptive of a strictly localized phenomenon."

There are tons and tons of sediments. Look at the Grand Canyon. There is a disconformity at the top of the Muav Limestone, and Karst topography at the top of the Redwall. Also there is the modern erosion on top. But there are at least 14 uncomformities, and most of them don't show signs of above-water erosion. According to Wikipedia, six of them, using the usual circular fossil date reasoning show gaps of over 100 million years!

We have many experiments and observations re erosion and deposition, ranging from the very high water speeds where cavitation eats into rock like eating cotton candy to the slow velocities that allow fine clay particles to settle out. A small stream produces small gravel banks, sand banks, and mud banks. A large river produces large ones. Some of the formations are hundreds of miles long and hundreds of feet thick. What size the flow?

We can't observe everything ourselves. Things observed personally:

Several hours driving through the Wind River canyon showed almost all strata tilted up toward the Rockies. The only signs of gullies, etc. that I saw were at the top. There may have been some I didn't notice, of course.

More personally: My mother told me that when she got badly sick as a child, they couldn't get her to a doctor. The grandparents prayed for her to be healed, in the name of Jesus, and she got well. Tonsil removal when a young adult led to the surgeon commenting that he had never before seen tonsils with a scar tissue cross on each. Hearsay evidence.

Later, A job produced small nicks on each hand, two or three a week. This allowed an experiment. Picking a hand at random, I prayed in Jesus name for one hand, not the other. The hand prayed for healed faster. For you this is hearsay.

Late in his life, Dad had rheumatoid arthritis so bad he had to have Mom dress him. Regularly he asked for prayer at the church. One night he came home without the arthritis and it never recurred while he lived. This after several years of worsening conditions. For you this is hearsay.

The point is to look for solid data that contradicts our paradigms. The hardest part is knowing our assumptions. The next hardest is checking the solidity of the data since none of us has seen everything. We confuse theory and facts.

BTW, the "error" of different timings in Kings and Chronicles was solved decades ago. Read "The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings," by Edwin R. Thiele.

Dumb mistakes are very irritating.
Smart mistakes go on forever,
Unless you test your assumptions.