Comments

Posted by Anonymous

Twimmer:

Yes, Collins wanted to believe. But that still doesn't eliminate the question that it is possible that he sees something that we don't. Are you open to that possibility?

Me:

In thinking about this framing, I’m looking for a reasonable, rational explanation for Collins’ behavior. If none can be found, that could leave room for your “something.”

I think that Collins was on a personal search for some sort of evidence that would let him declare that he believed what he had wanted to believe all along. I don’t think that takes any sort of “something.” It takes a mind looking for "something" to believe in and finding it in a waterfall. (Why? I don’t know. He mentions dying patients who took comfort in belief. Did he want something similar? What did he need comforting about? Maybe if you get the book, you can tell us what else was going on in his life.)

If he hadn’t seen the waterfall that day, I think he would have found a tree or a shooting star the next. And because he was primed to see what he saw, the “something” he wanted to see, he would have seen it.

To me, this sufficiently explains why Collins (at age 27, here’s the link to an interview with Collins: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/collins.html) was able to take the leap to openly believing in “something.” Which isn’t the same as the “something” actually being there.

Twimmer:

So let me ask you this, is your mind open to the possibility that something we don't yet understand could have revealed the big bang and evolution to an Israelite who lived 4000 years ago?

Me:

I think that your 4,000-year-old man was really a whole bunch of men and translators and scribes and all of their thoughts and understandings and misunderstandings and lovely language was written out at different times in different texts and was collected into various versions of a book and changed again and again.

DH and I watched an interesting show on the Discovery Channel (or was it the History Channel) a couple of nights ago. It was all about how and why the books that are included in the New Testament were selected and others were not. The show was called something like “Books Banned from the Bible” and it had various church leaders and scholars giving their take on the times and places in which the NT was put together. All very interesting.

That was about the NT, of course. It didn’t go into the history of the writing of the Old Testament. . .

My point being that if your “something” spoke to a particular Israelite 4,000 years ago and explained how dinosaurs were created, he had an odd way of doing it.

The more reasonable explanation to me, as I tried to point out when I posted about the multitude of creation stories found around the world, is that there is a lot of similarity between some of these myths. The void and the light and the water and the starting with small creatures and then larger and then working up to man and woman (or sometimes the other way around, but, of course, we‘re always last and best. :) ) ). It’s all very sensible if you picture someone sitting in great darkness 4,000 years ago or earlier, before light bulbs and computers and the Discovery Channel. His little corner of the world is dark. Really dark. If he thinks about how to go about creating a world, gosh, the whole thing would start off dark. A void, even. Etc. Everything he has seen and that he can imagine -- not knowing one thing about evolution or the big bang -- had to have been created because that’s the only explanation he’s got.

That we can now sit back in our comfy air-conditioned, well-lit, surround-sound-filled caves and read what he wrote is wonderful. But we read it through our modern eyes. Every time this 4,000-year-old fellow speaks, we filter each detail through what we have learned since then.

We can, and you have, dissect each sentence and look for the modern parallel. Tanimin becomes behemoth becomes great reptiles becomes dinosaurs. Knowing what we know now. With imperfect hindsight and a mind quick enough and willing enough to see all sorts of connections.

Which brings us to my mind and how I think of things like this. For me, you have to do better than “could.” With all the vagaries of the human mind, with all the information we have now, and all the information we don’t yet have, and our wonderful ability to concoct connections, whether they are there or not, “could” isn’t convincing.

You asked a few posts ago:

“What would it mean if whoever wrote Genesis I was actually describing the Big Bang and Evolution? Could we write it off as a lucky guess?”

I would suggest it is a lucky rereading.

I appreciate what you are saying. But our current ability to read evolution into the Bible does not prove much to me beyond how flexible our minds can be.

Beauty is in the eye and mind of the beholder?

Which, of course, leaves you and all the other believers with all the room in the world to continue believing -- as you are not trying to convert me, neither am I trying to convert you -- for the human mind is a wonderful thing!

Nance

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Posted by Somerschool

So, in my ongoing science fiction plot, Day Five gets fun. Here's where birds show up WAY before dinosaurs. In my plot, dinosaurs are the descendants of an intelligent bird-man, who fell from grace in some way I haven't exactly worked out yet. In my story, all the stories about talking dragons, feathered serpents, and the like are TRUE--there really were speaking "serpents" that hung around until human times. Parrots today retain a few of those ancient genes...

Go google "birds came first" and you'll see it's great material for science fiction. Or google "can parrots really talk". It's fun stuff!

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Posted by Anonymous

Nance, I asked if you were open to the possibility that my interpretation is correct. I'll take your answer as a 'no.' You are not open to it evan as a hypothetical abstract construct. Forgive me for being blunt and perhaps harsh, but subtlty hasn't been working.

You make an erroneous assumption that I believe that this interpretation is the way it is. But that is not the case. I've never once said that I believe any creation story to be true. In fact, I've said, if you've read between the lines, that I think they are all incorrect, even evolution. In fact, I've said this over and over and over. I've characterized this whole discussion as an intellectual exercise, a "what if..." question, I've titled it with a question: "Is there a synthesis between Genesis and evolution?" I've told you, repeatedly, that I am deliberately pushing the extremes, deliberately being controversial-- even heretical. I've also said that I take nothing as authoritative, nothing as immutable truth. For all you know I might believe that this life is nothing more than an incredibly good virtual reality video game that has as its object finding the right key or path or collecting the right number of "brain points" to exit back to the real "reality." And for all either of us knows that could very well be the truth.

And I have also been very upfront that one of the purposes of this exercise is stretching our minds and exploring our biases. If you will recall, I started this whole series based on your complaint that I was "comforting" creationists and also that "saying [you are ] religious doesn't make it so." I've certainly not given Creationists any comfort in my narratives. I've deliberately drawn conclusions that Genesis was not writen by the hand of God and that it cannot be taken as "absolute litteral truth." Many Creationists would consider my hypothesis heresy.

I will not go so far as to say that your views are religious, but you have certainly demonstrated a significant bias against anything that doesn't accord with your views and conceptions of reality. You haven't even been willing to consider these issues as an exercise. Your denial of deity is as dogmatic as a Creationist's denial of evolution. Rather than engage in the hypothetical discussion, all you've done is find someone else's argument for why we shouldn't even discuss the subject. You want to believe in evolution, and so you do. You want to reject any theological model, and so you do. This is no different than Francis Collins wanting to believe in Evangelical Christianity! So, although I will not call you religious, I can say that your behavior is very similar to the behavior of someone who is. The problem with this behavior in Creationists is their unwillingness to look at other ideas. But that is the problem with any dogmatic view point.

Nance, I hope you aren't going to go away mad. In fact, I hope you won't go away at all. You're kinda fun to fence with sometimes! Stay tuned for the rest of this series. I think you'll find that the conclusions I will draw from this exercise will surprise you.

BTW, Forbidden Books of the Bible discussed The Story of Adam and Eve, Jubilees, The Book of Enoch and several other potential Old Testiment books, not just the New Testiment apocrypha and the Gnostic gospels. It did seem to overlook Macabees however.

Scott, refer to Heinlein's The Number of the Beast., then to Daniel Dennet's Darwin's Dangerous Idea and his references to some very large libraries. If you can wrap your brain around those numbers, let me know and we'll talk about talking dragons. Gotta warn you though, the character Pug in Raymond Feist's first novel, Magician was named Tad in the preliminary drafts!

And finally, to address the notion that we are sick flies thinking the whole thing was built for us to ride around on, I refer the reader to Godel, Escher, Bach's "Prelude and Ant Fugue" by Douglas Hofstadter (also reprinted in The Mind's I by Dennet and Hofstadter.

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Posted by Anonymous

I prefer this view (and you can tear it apart to help me see the way):

There were pre-Adamites.
There were co-Adamites.
The link to humans is an unknown so to establish the separateness and uniqueness of humans.
Adam was the first "Israelite" - the one that would begin the lineage to Christ as the first chosen one to have the keys, and the first human with spiritual awareness for everyone to link their genealogy back to.
Fini - at least for my simple mind.

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To me, it's much more interesting to look at creation ex nihilo vs the denial of creation ex nihilo. That's where you can really get deep into Plato, metaphysics, and religion. When you get down to whether the world was created from "nothing", or "something", there is a chasm between Chrisitan statements of faith and the AoF.

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If literal creationism someday makes it's way in to be taught as truth in public schools, what religion(s) would make up the majority that wholly embraces that literal view?

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RE: The Nicene Creed (I know a new topic in itself)

"And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made."

This is loose, but can you see how the comma placement before "...by whom all things were made." could also support the view that Christ created the earth? It can be read both ways - and as so, it becomes quite a foreign concept to many.

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RE: Scott's comment on birds and dinosaurs

I also like the mention of "other worlds" in the Creed - and with that, we can always go to the thought that Christ scooped up earth from other worlds and part of that earth was Dinosaurs...

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While I tend to think all the "theories" are wrong, and the scriptures left open for interpretation and revelation - one can find that there are common threads in each, to tie controversal thoughts together and toward the truth. That is the gyst of what I am getting from your thoughtful exercise here Tad - Thanks.

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