You said earlier the “story of Jews in Egypt IS another biblical fairy tale!”

And now, hours later, your’re admitting that it’s a historical fact: “sure there have been Jews in Egypt for a LONG time, but no where’s near in the numbers that the bible states.”

So let me get this straight: first you scoff at the notion that the Jews lived in Egypt, then you retreat and say, “Okay, they were there but not in the numbers the Bible says they were.”

This is too funny. Like I said earlier, if archaelogists find evidence today that the Jews travelled in the numbers the Bible records, then you’ll just discount that and move on to the next atheist-inspired “but.”

But. But. But. Your stumbling arguments make for good fodder.

No, we Atheists aren’t the ones moving the goal line! We’re just trying to cross it by getting thru all the “blockers” who promote a rigged outcome of the game. The promoters of this “game” have been employing invisible players with imaginary powers. The fans have been fooled for centuries! We members of the “A” Team know their play book and are moving the ball up the field. Who knows, we might even start to win over some of their huge fan base!

Like I told Lynn, it sure is funny to watch unbelievers scoff at each and every scrap of evidence that exists. I imagine that the imprisonment of the Jews is easily proven as a part of their history, though since I’m not Jewish nor a Jewish historian I’m not the person to take up that issue with you. Did Jesus even exist since the Jewish historian Josephus mention him briefly, or was Josephus an invention, too? Did the Jews even have historians?

Let’s say that I had the evidence of the Jews in Egypt to say right now — pow!! — there’s the evidence from a source such as a National Geographic expedition, a reputable university or some such source that you would trust.

Even after that, my friend, you would move the goal line once again. And that’s why playing ball with you is boring — you can’t even agree that the history of the game we’re discussing is even the least bit legitimate.

It’s like the Gospel accounts of Jesus: since they’re not similar, then we should discount them since they disagree on the details. If they were almost exact in word and paragraph, then they’re just copies of each other.

Keep moving the goal line, Bill. You’re doing a great job — I sure am laughing out loud…but not at the Torah.

Dr. Lemaitre was the first physicist to establish that the universe and everything in it were created out of nothing, that time and space had a beginning, and that the universe expanded from an infinitely small point.

Even some of Behe’s strongest critics believe he may have scored important points in his mid-October court appearance. His detailed presentation might have given intelligent design the appearance of credibility it had been struggling to achieve, they said.

“Behe does not convince me in the slightest,” said Michael Ruse, a Florida State University philosophy professor who wrote “The Evolution-Creation Struggle” and is in the Darwinian camp. “But he’s a genial, personable guy, and he comes across as a very serious man. I don’t think you can dismiss him as a crank. He is a real scientist.”

As I was saying, feature biochemst Behe having to admit on the witness stand, under oath, that his colleagues think he’s an idiot. Or at least that they consider his work and writings unscientific, and coming from fellow scientists that’s pretty damning commentary.

You’re really not helping your argument with citations like that.

WJ… agreed.:-)

As well:

I am not a leader on these issues but a follower. Not a scientist; not a theologian. I do not have to qualify myself as either to be a believer or give an opinion (that’s what we look to priests, Reverends and scientists for). In the case of science I’ve choosen to look to those scientists who have taken the course and still believe in God, for guidance in that area.

We all have limited time in this world to study and work, and one cannot re-invent every wheel.

Seems Noel would require I would learn more, or prove more as a lay person on religion, science, medicine, …every subect…than they, or be termed “wilfully ignorant”.

Perhaps Noel has led a very privilged life that allowed him a degree in every subject and now is wilfully ignorant on none of them. Even so, whose to say his learning on the subject exceeds that of the scientist Michael Behe, amongst others..who have their degrees and do believe in Intelligent Design.

The Case of Behe vs. Darwin
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-behe5nov05%2C0%2C7440396.story?coll=la-home-nation

To show you what I mean, let me add a fourth scenario:

Spend your life believing in and devoted to Christ Jesus, die….and find that Allah is not happy with you at all.

Or the other way around.

Notice what Noel said in an earlier post: “The bible is a collection of stories from a time when we as a race were for the most part ignorant and afraid of the things we did not understand.”

And what race would that be? The Bible is mostly the history of the Jews, written by them and for them, and only in the last thousand years or so has it reached the Gentiles. Who is the “we” in that sentence?

If I’m following him correctly, that borders on anti-Semitism to call the Jews an ignorant race of people when, in fact, the holidays they celebrate today — Yom Kippur, for example — were carried down from thousands of years and hundreds of generations. Apparently their ancestors were never really imprisoned in Egypt — lots of fables and stories, right?

It was also telling that Noel scoffed at your on-target message about DNA and its incredible design and detail. While there was a time when religion and science were competing for followers, it seems that science today is the very tool that shows God’s awesome wisdom. Yet even as science shows us the fingerprints of a creator, the creation is running around in the dark, stumbling and tripping over each other to explain away the amazing world we live in.

There was a time when the scientist asked some priest in the Dark Ages to explain again why the world was flat when the evidence pointed against it. Now those roles have reversed, and it is the scientist insisting that the world is flat and holding on to a foolish faith despite the evidence in from of him.

Should you ever need a surgeon Noel, will you not put your life in his hands even though you are not learned in his field?

And as long as there are learned scientists who have studied all this stuff, and STILL believe in God, along with learned theologians….well, surely I won’t learn more than they about the subject in the small amount of time I have left on this earth.

One of them, Michael Behe, is in Court in Pa. arguing this subject, even as we discuss it here.

Noel, I’ve been a little busy in life, filling four roles instead of two…..mother,father,breadwinner and homemaker, (and was a business owner of a 15 hr a day, seven day a week business I built to support it all) Growing up in a farming family, I was not allowed the benefit of college.

There are many fields I have an interest in and skills I’d like to learn, some of which relate to computers. First I must dig my way out of the situation I find myself in after an embezzler hit my business, thus destroying the free time I had promised myself during this time period of my life. Unfortunately, rebuilding something else might take up a good chunk of the rest of my life. I’m tired, very tired.

Science has never drawn me, as it seems to fascinate you. I hope someday to have the luxury to study some subjects, but even then I doubt science will be one of them.

God isn’t a science. He is a presence some of us accept on faith, as has been done before the dark ages, thru the dark ages and into the present.

Tomorrow, new discoveries could completely change the THEORY of evolution.

Three scenarios:

Accept God and die….and there is no God, no other dimension.

Accept God and die, and there IS a God.

Reject God and die…and there IS a God.

I don’t care for that third option, nor do I care to reject a presence I feel strongly. Even scientists have made startling discoveries following their intuitions. Perhaps I can’t prove them in this lifetime, but I’m following mine.

You find this preposterous, but you don’t have a knowledge of science. You can’t write things off without understanding them first. Wanting to believe something, in the absence of any evidence to support it and despite plenty of evidence to dispute it, is willful ignorance.

Would you like us to be like the mullahs in Iran and turn the clock back to the dark ages?

Nor will anyone. And, if there is no higher power, we won’t even get to know it then either.

Now let me ask you a question. Based on what can you say for certain that there is a God?

As they say, nothing is certain…..

But, I find it more preposturous to think the DNA, the blueprint so to speak of the world, and it’s patterns, order and complexity, all just designed itself randomly, than the alternative explanation that a higher power exists.

Now let me ask you a question. Based on what can you say for certain that there is a God?

As the Christian (and other religions I am aware of) understands it, yes, I have discounted it.

As religion understands it, you have discounted it. That seems to suggest a way you have not discounted.

Just curious Noel…what would that look like?

I think the “fixed star” comes from within you, stemming mostly from what your parents or other people who cared about you taught you when you were growing up, but mostly stemming from your own character. It is the values you live by, the things you would or would not do. You can live by a personal code without having to subscribe to a religion.

There do seem to be “natural” laws of good and evil ie: making good choices in life usually will lead to living a more rewarding life than bad choices – and – One need only look around to see how quickly evil can morph and masquarade as good.

There is a suggestion here that if you profess a religious conviction, you have the right to judge and condemn people who do not see things your way. Lynn, there is nothing evil about using your mind and preferring knowledge over fairy tales.

“Science does not arrogantly claim to have all the answers, including those of the hereafter, if there is one. Religion arrogantly does, based on no facts, no evidence, no proof, nothing.”

I can almost see that as reversed Noel.

Science offers evidence, religion offers none. The statement is not reversible. Science does not claim to have all the answers. It is searching for them, but it accepts it hasn’t got all of them. Religion believes, based on no evidence or facts or proof, that it has all the answers, but refuses to debate those answers based on evidence or facts or proof because it does not have any evidence or facts or proof.

My faith is in that which I haven’t all the answers, in the “powers that be”.

You are the “powers that be”. An old woman once told me that the secret to the universe is contained within each one of us. It just takes a little confidence in yourself to bring it out and it always helps to starts with the facts.

If we strip away the term “God” and “heaven” etc. and put in “hereafter” and “higher power” I get the feeling it’d be a concept you’d see more possibility in.

Changing the terminology doesn’t really change anything, at least nothing substantive. It could just as easily be space aliens who “intelligently designed” life. What I would like to know is who or what this “higher power” or “intelligent designer” is, what exactly it is supposed to have done and why exactly he is taking an interest in our moldy little planet?

… you wrote the word if “the hereafter, if there is one” so perhaps you haven’t totally discounted that.

As the Christian (and other religions I am aware of) understands it, yes, I have discounted it.

We know of no way to prove a higher power had a hand in any of it, and no way not to.

I can think of a way – all the creator has to do is make an appearance, say on the McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour and answer a few direct questions, one I’d like answered being: Why did God make Abraham feel it was necessary for him to be willing to kill one of his own children to prove he loved God?

On your story about the woman declared clinically dead, I am sure there is an explanation and am also sure we do not know what it is yet, but at least science investigates these things. For example, scientists photographed a leaf and its electro-magnetic field. They then cut a piece out of the leaf and photographed it again. In this second photograph, the electro-magnetic field of the leaf was whole even though it was missing a piece. They kept photographing it. A few hours later, its electro-magnetic field shrank to the new size of the leaf. There is no question that when something dies, be it leaf, germ, or person, the binding energy leaves and the body decays. This does not mean we go to heaven or hell. This does not mean there is a God. All it means is that while we are alive there is energy within us that leaves and dissipates when we die. For those of you who like ghost stories, one could claim that occasionally the imprint of life sticks around for a while in some cases.

We don’t know what we don’t know.

Too right, but at least science investigates it, like in my previous example. Here are some of the facts we have discovered in this discussion:

Fact 1: Exactly how evolution occurs is a matter of debate, but that it occurs is a scientific fact.

Fact 2: The earth is not 7,000 years old. It is approximately 4.5 billion years old.

Fact 3: Science strives to prove its theories. Religion does not.

Fact 4: The bible is a collection of stories from a time when we as a race were for the most part ignorant and afraid of the things we did not understand. What knowledge there was resided with a very small percentage of the population. It wasn’t like today where anyone can buy a bible or a book by Pythagorus on Greek Math, or even if they could, be expected to know how to read it.

Even the best of sailors need a fixed star to navigate by. As we’ve seen in the translations subsequent to the earliest records of Christ’s teachings, distortion happens in the best of translations. One need only look around to see how quickly evil can morph and masquarade as good. It’s a slippery slope indeed.

Having that code is a sort of impetuous to keep drilling down, to keep trying to be less sinful tomorrow than one may be today, rather than continually accepting the lessor evil – as you may have even have seen happen in your corporate studies.

science does not arrogantly claim to have all the answers, including those of the hereafter, if there is one. Religion arrogantly does, based on no facts, no evidence, no proof, nothing.

I can almost see that as reversed Noel. Science does claim to be the place for all the answers, and rightfully so. They just haven’t discovered all of them yet.

On the contrary, my faith is in that which I haven’t all the answers, in the “powers that be”. If we strip away the term “God” and “heaven” etc. and put in “hereafter” and “higher power” I get the feeling it’d be a concept you’d see more possibility in, as you wrote the word if

the hereafter, if there is one

so perhaps you haven’t totally discounted that.

There do seem to be “natural” laws of good and evil ie: making good choices in life usually will lead to living a more rewarding life than bad choices.

Christ contributed to our Spiritual health, scientists like Jonas Salk, and Louis Pasteur contributed to our physical health. We know of no way to prove a higher power had a hand in any of it, and no way not to.

Maybe there won’t ever be. Then again, maybe science will someday prove the existence of something other than our physical selves.

A year or so ago, I read an article where a women had been clinically dead on an operating table. I don’t remember the details, but the article explained that the usual hallucinations could not take place, because the state the woman’s body was in was akin to a computer being denied it’s electrical source. They got her back and when the woman woke up, she clearly reiterated exactly what had been done, and when, where and how on her leg….(a part of her body which had not been part of the scheduled procedure but from which they had taken something to use somewhere else I think), and which she could not have physically seen or felt. She described watching the entire thing from outside of her body while she lay “dead” on the table.

We don’t know what we don’t know.

I do not think Jesus was the Son of God, born of a virgin, flew up into heaven, turned water into wine (unless he had a sideline in magical tricks) or any of the other supernatural powers and affiliations he is credited with. It’s human nature to exaggerate, a tendency that is one of the more entertaining aspects of human nature.

I can be entertained by these exaggerated stories without believing in them, just as I can pop down to my local pub for a Guinness and hear Tall John recount for the 30th time that time he knocked the stuffing out of 74 muggers on his way home from late night bingo. It started out as one 50-year-old arthrithic toy gun wielder with a cane and an eye patch who fled the second he said boo, but never mind.

It’s true lots of people have believed in a creator without any evidence to back up their belief. Usually, not always, it starts in childhood. It’s easy to get children to believe in magical, unseen forces. Santa, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny spring to mind. The difference is that when they get to be a certain age, their parents tell them the truth. With religion, no one dares. Perhaps it’s a carryover from the Inquisition when people were burned alive at the stake by the church for daring to question the church. Imagine if George Bush started doing that, justifying it by telling everyone it was a matter of national security.

As for monotheism, believing in one God, that is relatively recent in our history. People long believed before that in many Gods. I have more tolerance for this perspective since they at least understood there was a force causing the wind to blow or the rain to fall or the fire to burn. Of course, you and I now know that praying to the God of wind is not going to stop a hurricane, but at least they were believing in something they could feel, touch or see. Why have faith in something you don’t know exists?

Christ did exist, but science never agreed he was the son of God. We know very little about him and what we do know is hearsay told by people after he had died. There is no question he was charismatic. At the time he came along, the Jewish religion had become very rigid and in need of some loosening up. There were thousands of people preaching around the time of Jesus – he is the one who is remembered most, martyred in a public execution, with loyal followers there to witness his horrible death and keep his name alive. Doesn’t make him literally the ‘Son of God’.

Fact is, nowadays when people ’speak to God’, they are put on medication, like the people who think they are Napoleon or Bugs Bunny. Just because somebody 2000 years ago who claimed they spoke to and for God decided arbitrarily that the earth was a few thousand years old doesn’t mean it’s true. In fact, we know for a fact that it isn’t true. Denying it or inventing ways that it could be true is unnecessary and denies the progress we have made since the bible was first published.

There is one telling difference between the scientific view and the religious view and it is this: science does not arrogantly claim to have all the answers, including those of the hereafter, if there is one. Religion arrogantly does, based on no facts, no evidence, no proof, nothing. I prefer the more humble view of science which understands better our tiny place in the universe. What science does understand it has studied and tested, unlike religion which just proclaims it and then insists we believe. We are born with minds and whether you believe God put them there or they evolved naturally, they are there to be used.

You are free of course to believe what you want. I’m not saying you have to see things my way. I think it might be a good idea if you’re really interested in the subject to look a little deeper into both sides of it, but only if it suits you.

Thank you for arguing your point of view so tenaciously. The best way to sort anything out is through open, honest discussion where there are no taboo subjects and no fear of causing offence by exploring every possibility.

The book we are publishing details corruption, or at the very least incompetence, at the highest levels of corporate America. The name of the company involved however, is being kept secret until the book is released, currently at the printers and on schedule for December 2005.

Even some people who’ve attended biology or physics or astronomy or geology classes and wound up with degrees in them, ….have wound up still believing in a Creator.

I wasn’t trying to prove myself right, or you wrong. Simply having a discussion about it.

Faith isn’t the sort of thing one can prove. Not even to oneself, much less someone else.

Nor can someone else demand you have it. Until the end times come, it will never be proved. At any given time, one either feels there is a God and a Spiritual presence, ….or not.

It’s not like science where the experiment is successful and then all the observers believe, or at least they do until new or contrary evidence is available from the next experiment.

Christ teachings appear in the Bible, (I believe most scientists do not dispute Christ’s existence even if they don’t believe him God) and we learn more about God from Christ’s Parables therein, but reading it won’t prove or disprove God’s existence, or even the age of the earth.

When the pupil is ready to seek, somehow the teacher appears. Maybe for today it was you that became mine as it was your questions that had me reading in new areas. I’ve never been much of a Bible reader, as I alluded to before (November 4th, 2005 at 2:58 pm) but today you asked me a question I had never considered….not having much time in the past to ponder things…..and so I searched a bit on the Internet and also in a Book explaining Bible stuff, to see if the Bible mentioned how old the earth is.

All I found is only what Bible scholars figured it to be from all the begets and begots.

So far, it seems what science has been written into the Bible, eventually matches up with “real” science, – so who knows what could someday become in “sync” with science. Perhaps something happened that raised or lowered temps dramatically for an instant, and affected the aging of materials, or perhaps a “day” in pre Biblical times was much longer than now….whatever.

By the way, I clicked on your website…now THAT is quite different from anything I’ve seen before! What corporation will it be about?