John, You seem to have attempted to answer my challenge on 2 fronts. First, the geocentricity of the Earth and the Second, the age of the Earth.
OK, Let's examine the evidence you've provided. First, you came up with the opinion of a man and proceeded to demolish it. If this is not a clear example of a Strawman argument, I don't know what is. I won't even bother to rebute this argument as it is clearly fallacious. I said provide a statement FROM THE BIBLE, not some person. Second, you question the integrity of the Bible by saying that it claimed that the Earth is ~6000 years old. Please point to me where it says in the Bible that the Earth is 6000 years old. This age is a conjecture by scholars when they attempt to trace back the genealogy of people mentioned in the Bible. This figure is by no means an agreed figure. This is just the opinion of some scholars. But I do believe in a young Earth, how young exactly, I do not know. The Bible does not say. You also mentioned Noah's flood and you provided Ice core "evidence", sea shell "evidnece" etc. Show me the data for these? All you have provided are conclusions of people. This is by no means settled science. These are just conjectures and conclusions. Regarding your statement the all the ice is assumed to have melted in Noah's flood. Why would you assume that? What evidence do you have that that indeed happened. Other researchers say the opposite of what you are assuming. A global deluge would cool the Earth and form ice, not melt it. Come on, this is your best scientific evidence? You can do better and it does not help that you cap out immediately by saying that I will not look at your evidence. I am currently in an offline discussion with a respected member of Vortex and he can attest that I am looking at the data he presents. Regarding you claims of contradictions, please elaborate. What contradictions? Jojo PS. As I said in my original challenge. It would help if you can post one objection at a time. If you overwhelm me with a bunch of issues to address and respond to, I will not be able to answer it in a meaningful way. That of course is counterproductive, unless that is what you want to begin with. ----- Original Message ----- From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2013 4:02 AM Subject: Re: [Vo]:[OT] The Bible and the Copernican Revolution On 1/01/2013 2:47 PM, Jojo Jaro wrote: ... I have still to encounter a statement in the Bible that science has found to be categorically false. I challenge you or anyone to prove me wrong on this. But do it one at a time so that I can respond properly to it. Do not cut and paste a blog from an Atheist web site. I won't have time or the capability to respond to that in a meaningful way. Let's start with one that we can probably all agree on: I was rather amazed to find recently that there was a Professor Philip Stott arguing on an international website of a doctoral degree granting theological seminary, that the earth really was fixed and that the sun etc revolved around it! (I don't blame the seminary - I am impressed that they allow such freedom of expression! and he is not a Professor of the seminary) Here is a link to some of his writing regarding geocentricity: http://reformation.edu/scripture-science-stott/geo/pages/01-thinking-reasoning-geocentrically.htm Quoting a snippet: To the Bible-believers of Copernicus's day there was simply no doubt about the Bible's geocentricity. Copernicus said "surely it is more reasonable to assume that the earth rotates once each day than that the entire universe rotates around it." Calvin countered with "The heavens revolve daily; immense as is their fabric, and inconceivable the rapidity of their revolutions" [commentary to Psalm 93:1] in deliberate scripture-based contradiction. Luther, speaking of Copernicus's idea said "Even in these things which are thrown into disorder I believe the Holy Scriptures." Galileo was so confident that the Bible puts the earth stationary at the centre of the universe that to disregard it he had to say "In matters concerning the natural sciences Holy Writ must occupy the last place." Why were they so certain of the Bible's stand? Well for one thing Genesis 1 tells us that God created the unformed watery waste of the earth on the first day. On day two He separated the waters above from the waters below by an expanse called the "firmament," and on the fourth day He set the sun moon and stars in this firmament. Where is the possibility for the day-one-created earth to be circling around the day-four-created sun? And so he goes on, completely convinced that the Bible states that the earth is fixed in space and accepting this fact "by faith" in "the testimony of the One who can [stand outside the universe and look in]". As scientific support for a fixed earth he mentions the famous Michelson and Morely experiment and quotes Bernard Jaffe "The data were almost unbelievable. There was only one other possible conclusion to draw, that the earth was at rest ..."! Unfortunately he doesn't seem to be aware of the Sagnac effect which is a very similar experiment (and was also attempted by Michelson) and proves rather convincingly that the earth really does turn! One wonders what Prof Stott's answer would be if this Sagnac effect was pointed out to him. I expect that he would simply change his mind on the interpretation of the Bible passages that suggest geocentricity, and accept that Christendom of Galileo's day had universally misinterpreted scripture, and that the modern interpretation is after all, correct. This illustrates that attempting to find "a statement in the Bible that science has found to be categorically false" is likely a pointless exercise. If the evidence is convincing enough, then the believer will simply reinterpret the passage in the light of scientific discoveries. If the evidence is less convincing (by not being aware of the enormity of the evidence), then he will simply say that the scientists have got it all wrong, they made incorrect assumptions and they are self-deceived, or they are lying to protect their income source. Since I have no idea of Jojo's position on how literally he interprets Genesis, let's skip the ridiculously young (~6000 year old) universe, young earth, very recent life creation, and take a quick look at Noah's flood - because I would guess from a previous posting that Jojo considers this to be an unembellished historical account. According to the record Noah's flood should have occurred approx 4400 years ago. Since it was global, there really should be some signature of its occurrence in some paleoclimatology proxy - such as the ice core data (since I imagine that all polar ice should have been melted by the flood?). But to the best of my knowledge there is absolutely none - and I think that in this case absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Individual year cycles can be easily counted much further back than 4400 years in some of the proxies: In fact it seems tree rings can be counted back well beyond a young earth date (from Wikipedia): "Fully anchored chronologies which extend back more than 11,000 years exist for river oak trees from South Germany (from the Main and Rhine rivers) and pine from Northern Ireland. Furthermore, the mutual consistency of these two independent dendrochronological sequences has been confirmed by comparing their radiocarbon and dendrochronological ages." The cycles in the ice core data can apparently be counted back much further: "The first 110,000 annual layers of snow in that ice core (GISP2) have been visually counted and corroborated by two to three different and independent methods as well as by correlation with volcanic eruptions and other datable events." Checkout the agreement between the entire ice core data and the benthic foramanifera core data (which come from tiny shellfish living and accumulating on the sea bed) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles. This data is from such different sources that this agreement can only be produced by a common driving mechanism (ie climate). Yet one would expect the arctic snow fall to be far more affected by a global flood than the steady accumulation of foramanifera on the sea bed (which would be scarcely altered by a flood). So one can't suggest that many of the ice core layers were produced by multiple snow storm events in a single year, and still have the two independent data sources agreeing so well. I realise that this approach is probably pointless as almost no amount of this type of evidence will induce someone to let go of their lifeline. However I have witnessed someone letting go of biblical inerrancy as a result of an on-line discussion. It resulted from an attempt to explain the following biblical contradictions: (1) What were the names of Benjamin's children, (2) Who wrote on Moses' second set of tablets, and (3) Where did Aaron die. The first is particularly interesting because the structure of the Hebrew in the two contradicting passages do not allow the disagreement to have been produced by a copyist's error. The error *must* have been present in the original autographs - which proves inerrancy errant! But as the pastor of the church next door says "inerrancy is an issue of a bygone era", and his faith remains completely intact regardless of stories about Eden and Noah being clearly non-history. "A man with an experience is never at the mercy of an argument." Regards - John
