Misty Moonsilver
TrueLore
Misty Moonsilver
TrueLore
Misty Moonsilver
Well technically, you may very well be accepting everything "unthinkingly" unless you are a scientist yourself. I certainly believe that things "proven by science" are sometimes twisted a little from the way they really are to suit the government.
All I will say is that if you want to debate something such as God, and then you are presented with evidence or facts, maybe you should be a little more open minded. Because unless you've died before and went to where ever atheists go, you don't know, the same way I don't know whats on the other side. I can only believe.
Anyway like I said before, I refuse to discuss this anymore since according to many non believers, all Christians do is "shove their beliefs down everyone else's throat." Good day.
When you call people narrow minded for not accepting your evidence, which is weak as pointed out by the very people who don't accept it, you are shoving your beliefs down everyone else's throat.
I didn't say he was narrow minded for not accepting it. I said he started reading the information with a close mind. You are trying to put me in a box that you have made for Christians before you even understood what I meant. tsk tsk tsk.
That is essentially the same exact thing. You can't possibly know that he read it with a close mind, hence you are asserting that he is close minded because he doesn't accept the argument.
Nope. Because he wouldn't have read it if he didn't want to find something there. What would be the point of reading it if he wasn't looking for an answer. But to find an answer, you have to be willing to see the answer.Either way I say it, anything I say or do, I'm still going to be considered as someone who is shoving religion down someone's throat which was clearly not my intention. I started out wondering why that information was seen as invalid to certain people.
It's not that every single one of those passages is
invalid (although I don't quite know what you mean by that), but rather, all those passages are both vague and based on some fairly basic observable natural phenomena. Just because science confirms that indeed those phenomena occur does not mean that those earlier descriptions of said phenomena are somehow laden with deeper scientific meaning.
The page does rightly admit that the Bible isn't a scientific book, so it isn't like it's making claims of the Bible containing everything scientists need to know. But the page misses the point, and I think misinterprets what the Bible is.
I'm not a Biblical scholar, so I won't pretend to be an expert on what the Bible means or what a particular word means in hebrew or any of that. But wouldn't it make sense that the Bible
does give a glimpse into the nature of science back during the period in which it was written? Far from being a new concept, the idea of science and religion going hand-in-hand was so much the norm that I don't even know if people realized that there was a significant difference between the two. In fact, I don't know if there
was a significant difference between the two, at least not for a good long time! I mean, for a long time, religion provided the main framework for education, did it not? I could be wrong, of course, but it always seemed like religion and science mean to do the same thing, which is understand the way the universe around us works. It's only natural that for them, the Bible probably really
was science in that it was the best working model of the universe that they actually had at the time. Well, not necessarily the
best, I mean the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans had some really marvelous scientific advances going, but I mean for the ancient Israelites.
The danger, though, is that demanding that one particular model be right at the expense of legitimate scientific inquiry and understanding ultimately hinders our progress. Sure, the Israelites' model may have included some of the basics of observable phenomena which can be
explained by science, but sometimes even those connections are tenuous.
Yes, science and religion can coexist. I mean, for me, the two really are practically synonymous, I see science and inquiry as religious inquiry and pursuit of the truth as a sort of religious devotion. Science (which I realize is such a broad term as to be nearly meaningless if examined closer) is by no means perfect, and it is definitely not anything that I would worship, but at the very least, at its core, it is supposed to at least
try to get close to... well,
some kind of truth. Sadly it comes with its own dogmas and rituals and holdouts which can make it a bit fickle to work with, but therein lies the beauty of an evolving, developing system. The Bible is a record of ancient Israelites attempting to understand the world around them, among other things. So now, who are we to attempt to jam our model of thinking into an earlier model's constraints? We have the tools to improve on that model of the universe, and in a sense, fulfill the very reason one makes any kind of model of the universe in the first place, which is to understand it. We cannot understand everything yet, not by a long shot, but to me, that's
exciting! We have that much left to see and explore and experience! Why not embrace it?
Oh well, I'm getting all emotional over something which really ought not to be fought over. Your heart's in the right place. Your URL links might not be, but ultimately you're not
wrong for wanting to combine religion and science. Whatever helps you develop the best model, I suppose. Just be sure you don't demand that the earlier religious models suddenly somehow dictate a current model of the universe. If those earlier religious models are true, then they ought to be able to stand up to honest inquiry and scrutiny.