A modern day miracle: Ken Ham delivered the decisive blow in the creationism debate

[kpete]

So I was thinking about this earlier, and it seems to me that, in the question of whether or not creationism is a viable scientific field of study, despite Bill Nye's very good, factual answers, it was Ken Ham the creationist who delivered the decisive blow in the debate. Alas, for young earth creationists, it was against Ken Ham.


When asked what would change their minds, Ken Ham's response was, in effect, "nothing". "Well, I'm a Christian," he explained. And that was indeed explanation enough: evidence does not and cannot trump belief. By contrast, Nye responded with "evidence".


That, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference, the only answer you will ever need to "is creationism science?" Scientists reshape ideas to fit evidence, not the other way around. Nye responded as a scientist. Ham responded as a zealot. Ham has every right to be as zealous and as closed-minded as he likes. But that is not science. It is a direct rejection of science and rational thinking.

So I would say that Ken Ham, even more than Bill Nye, delivered the decisive answer in last night's debate: no, creationism is not science. It is a belief system based on a literal reading of select parts of a scientifically inaccurate book. Nothing less and certainly nothing more.

http://rachelshobbithole.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-modern-day-miracle-ken-ham-delivered.html



and this commment from the post blew my mind:

As a doubter sometimes I wonder why people never consider the fact that
"the Bible" didn't exist in Jesus' time, and he never mentioned it.

awe

and

peace,

kp

[raging_moderate]

1. Creationism is a Faith based concept….

Creationism is a Faith based concept. Those that feel the need to "prove" it have a faith deficiency. If you are truly faithful, you believe despite all evidence AGAINST something. The modern political tribalistic neoconservative pseudo-christian movement is NOT one of true faith. It is about fear and misunderstanding and control.

My 2 cents.

[snooper2]

2. not really, didn't you know the flood thing created the Grand Canyon in a couple hours?

They have evidence!

[brooklynite]

4. The thoery I've heard was that the Grand Canyon formed from water draining from the Great Flood...

...where did the water drain TO?

[snooper2]

8. The South Pole to make all the ice

Come on silly, everyone knows water flows down hill

[3auld6phart]

18. That's funny

That is a goodun.

[11 Bravo]

6. And all of humanty would have drowned had they not ridden dinosaurs to safety.

[Warpy]

26. Silly, that was dug by the butt of Pecos Bill's rifle

when he saddled and rode a tornado.

You people don't know anything!

[lastlib]

7. I think "control" is the operative word here.....

Fear and misunderstanding are the means to the end. 'Hell' is a concept invoked to create the fear that will give the "tribe" control.

[Major Nikon]

9. It's not even about proving anything

The whole idea behind masquerading creationism as "science" was to try and overcome SCOTUS rulings that forbid the teaching of religion in public schools. It's never been anything more than a Trojan horse designed to force their belief system on kids.

[jamejest]

3. Another interesting tidbit to ponder is

there are no biblical accounts of Jesus reading or writing or that he even knew how. A messiah of illiteracy?

[exboyfil]

10. Jesus opened the scroll when he preached

in Luke 4. Yes he could read according to Luke

16He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

18“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”f

20Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

[Grins]

19. Luke never met Jesus.

So how would he know? More...

"The Gospel of Luke was written 60-70 years after Jesus had died, when Christianity was quintessentially a Roman religion and no longer a Jewish religion and the gospel writers were very interested in making Jesus someone who would appeal to a non-Jewish audience. But the facts of history speak for themselves. And I would say the vast majority of Biblical scholars would agree that the illiteracy rates in Jesus’s world were somewhere around 98%. Ninety-eight percent of Jesus’s fellow Jews could neither read nor write. The notion that a tekton, as Jesus is referred to in the Bible, a woodworker, which would make him the second-lowest rung on the social ladder in his time just above the slave and the indigent and the beggar, the notion that he would have had any sort of formal education, let alone the kind of education necessary to debate theological points with the scribes and the Pharisees, is difficult to reconcile with what we know of the history of the time." - Author of "Zealot", Reza Aslan

[exboyfil]

24. The post said no biblical reference

I corrected that posting. We have no way of knowing how much of the Jesus story is true. I have my beliefs which I do not care to share. As Aslan states it is highly improbable that a woodworker would be able to read in that culture. On the other hand if someone accepts that a man/God can die for our sins and be raised from the dead, then it is not a reach to believe that the individual could also read.

[alfredo]

21. Luke, or whoever actually wrote the book of Luke, obtained the stories by word of mouth.

Luke was supposedly close to Paul, not James (the just) the brother of Jesus. I would be more confident in the veracity of what James said than Paul or Luke.

Luke is probably the source of the dramatic story of Saul's conversion. Paul never speaks of the blindness and other aspects of the conversion. If we can doubt Luke's account of Paul's conversion, can we also doubt his accounts of Jesus in the Synagogue?

[exboyfil]

25. Then the original poster should

say that any story that Luke has about Jesus should be suspect. He made a blanket statement that no biblical sources said Jesus could read which is not true.

[alfredo]

27. I'd be more willing to believe if it came from James, rather from the Paulist.

BTW, how many common laborers from Nazareth could read or write? Some hellenised Jews of high birth might be able to read or write, but Jesus was not one of them. If he was educated, he would have put his words to the page and his partisans would have saved those texts.


Remember, the Bible was written by political partisans. They wanted to free their land of the Roman occupation, and to cleanse the temple of the greedy Pharisees. This wasn't just a war to free their homeland, it was a class war against those Jews who were profiting from the occupation at the expense of the poor. Refer back to the teachings of John the Baptist.


Many Messiahs (rebel leaders) were executed by the Romans. Jesus is the one that had a very good PR team.

[gLibDem]

14. A messiah FOR the illiterates.

[AtheistCrusader]

5. Not different than Behe admitting as much on the stand in Kitzmiller vs. Dover.

[exboyfil]

11. Poor Behe

all of his Creation Institute buddies abandoned him by withdrawing from testifying. Behe still has nightmares about the plaintiff's lawyer I bet.

[AtheistCrusader]

13. Yeah, they really left him twisting in the wind.

I almost felt sorry for him.

[ladjf]

12. "Creationism" is the name applied to a certain religion based notion about how the Universe and

Earth were created. It is in no way a science.

[calimary]

15. Good Grief - "well, I'm a Christian" ???? WFT??? That's your license to be completely ignorant?

"Well, I'm a Christian" means you're entitled to be an absolute card-carrying dumb-fuck?

[Iliyah]

16. Are these the same people who believed the earth was flat?

[3catwoman3]

17. You mean to say...

Jesus didn't write the bible himself in English, or at least dictate it to his followers? OMG!!!

[Dread Pirate Roberts]

20. Well-Explain THIS Mr. Science guy!

I'll bet you can't, can you?

[cthulu2016]

22. The bible existed in Jesus' time, and he mentioned it

Arch atheist here, but I don't get that last quote.

The new testament didn't exist during the presumed lifetime of presumed jesus... which is sort of obvious.

But the old testament certainly did. (Not in the precise order and grouping it exists today in Christian bibles, but all old testament writings existed before Jesus)

And "the law" Jesus said he was not there to overturn was the law based in those works.

Since they didn't have books as we know them, copies of the torah were not everyday household items, but they existed.

[Brother Buzz]

23. You know things are bad for a creationist when even Pat Robertson is calling him a joke

Talk about friendly fire. Televangelist Pat Robertson is usually in the news for rants about gays or independent women, but on Wednesday night he criticized creationist Ken Ham for debating Bill Nye over evolution. "There ain’t no way that’s possible … To say that it all came about in 6,000 years is just nonsense and I think it’s time we come off of that stuff and say this isn’t possible," he said. Robertson implored Ham, "Let’s be real, let’s not make a joke of ourselves." Apparently the feud is not exactly new, as in 2012 Ham attacked Robertson for doubting the young-earth theory of creationists.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2014/02/06/pat-robertson-shut-up-ken-ham.html

[Gothmog]

28. We need to be careful how the debate is framed. It is NOT science vs religion

The key is not to let the debate be about science vs. religion. If the debate is on this issue, we will lose. However if the debate is framed that it is science vs. extremist views, then we are able to win the debate. Not all religions are hostile to science. While there are some Orthodox Rabbis who believe that the earth is 6000 years old, most Jewish scholars and the Reform branch take a different view of the Torah and science. Here is a good example how Judaism views science and the Torah. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-geoffrey-a-mitelman/why-can-judaism-embrace-s_b_880003.html

I recently had a conversation with a neuroscientist, who also happened to be a self-described atheist. He knew I was a rabbi and so, in the middle of the conversation, he very tentatively asked me, "So ... do you believe in evolution?" I think what he was really asking was, "Can you be a religious person who believes in science?" And my answer to that question is, "Of course."

While some people think of science and religion as being inherently in conflict, I think it's because they tend to define "religion" as "blind acceptance and complete certainty about silly, superstitious fantasies." Quite honestly, if that's what religion really was, I wouldn't be religious!....

Instead, when Jews read the Bible today through a rabbinic worldview, we are trying to answer two separate questions: First, what did the text mean in its time, and second, how can we create interpretations that will give us lessons for our time?

Indeed, the Bible shouldn't be taken simply literally today because circumstances, societies, norms and knowledge have all changed.

A great example of that comes from how the rabbis interpret the verse "an eye for an eye." While that is what the Bible says, to the rabbis, that's not what the verse means. Instead, the rabbis argue, "an eye for an eye" actually means financial compensation, and they go on for multiple pages in the Talmud trying to explain their reasoning. They don't read that verse on its simple, literal level, but through the lenses of fairness, of common sense, of other verses in the Torah and of the best legal knowledge they had at that time.

So now we can also see why in Judaism the beginning of Genesis is not in conflict with the big bang theory or natural selection. On the one hand, for its time, the Bible provided an origin story that was a story that worked then, but now, science provides a much better explanation for how we got here.

But the Bible isn't meant to be taken only literally -- it's designed to be a source of study and exploration for the questions of our time. The point of the Creation story is really to challenge us with questions like, "How should we treat people if everyone is created in the image of God? What are our responsibilities to this world if God has called it 'good'?"

In Judaism, there's no concept of "God says it, I believe it, that settles it." Instead, Judaism pushes us to embrace the text for what it was back then, and to create new ways of reading the text for what it can be now.

Here is an interesting example of how a couple of Jewish scholars were able to reconcile the big bang with the Torah and come up with an estimate for the age of the universe that is in the ballpark of current theory. Remember that the part of the bible/scriptures being relied on the young earth idiots is the part of the scriptures (Torah for me) that has been looked at and studied by Jewish scholars for a long time. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-adam-jacobs/the-jewish-view-of-creati_b_800257.html

To the secularist, the notion that we should flippantly toss aside hundreds of years of scientific investigation unequivocally demonstrating an extremely old universe simply because some ancient tome says it was created less than 6,000 years ago is nothing short of idiocy. What I hope to demonstrate is that Judaism's understanding of this matter (and many others) is significantly more nuanced, complex and surprising than what is currently believed to be the standard religious gloss on the subject. The truth of the matter is that Judaism is frequently (and unfairly) lumped together with other religious systems that actually have vastly different ways of looking at things.

One thousand years ago, the great Jewish philosopher and physician, Moses Maimonides, wrote that there is no contradiction between Torah and science and that if one is perceived, then there was a misapprehension of the science or the Torah. Two centuries later, Rabbi Isaac of Akko, a disciple of the great Moses Ben Nachman (Nachmanides) and one of the foremost Kabbalists of his generation, wrote some surprising commentary regarding the age of the universe. In his work "the Trove of Life," he explains that the Earth was actually 42,000 years old when Adam was created and that these years are "divine" years and should not be thought of as 365 regular days. Rather, a divine year is 1,000 times longer or 365,250 years. He based this on a verse in Psalm 90 that says "1,000 years in your eyes is like a day gone by." Do the math. According to Rabbi Isaac, the universe is 42,000 x 365,250, or 15,340,500,000 years old. This figure is squarely within the ballpark of where modern cosmology places the age of the universe. How did he know this? And how did he posses the temerity to conclude it in the midst of the Dark Ages? Perhaps our fundamentalism is not quite as primitive as is supposed.

Religion and belief in science are not inconsistent. It is wrong for us to let the young earth people to frame the debate as being science vs religion. Both science and faith are consistent unless you are an extremist. The debate is not about religion vs. science and the debate needs to be framed as science vs. extremist views that are outside of the mainstream views. As a Jew, I have no trouble making this argument.

[colsohlibgal]

29. Creationists Have Nothing But Mumbo Jumbo

I have to laugh at the "why aren't apes turning into humans now" question. It's a lot like righties using a big snow event to challenge climate change.

The earth is not 6,000 years old, period, end of story, we did not live with Dinosaurs. It's provable.

People for years have cherry picked what parts of the Bible they want to use to make their points, all the while dismissing other parts. Then there is the issue of what made it into the Bible and what did not. All arbitrary and well after the "events" for the most part.

Also, in recent years, people have turned Jesus into some kind of hard line sin avenger instead of what he was - for the poor, against the rich, the original socialist. As John Fugelsang says, he never asked for a co pay.

Look back to the Dark Ages, things have never turned out well when science gives way to hocus pocus - as in when it was not healthy to state that the Earth orbited around the Sun, not the other way around.

[MisterP]

31. the 17th c.'s the Dark Ages?

[spanone]

30. k&r...