... where GMS takes on Christian Evolution believers and I take on him ...

... where GMS takes on Christian Evolution believers and I take on him ... · GMS Took on Atheist Caricatures of Christianity · Responding (I hope politely enough) to GMS' response to Kent Hovind

How to Fit Christianity with Science (feat. Aron Ra)
Genetically Modified Skeptic | 4.V.2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xBXomSRwa0

I

1:29 7200 years ago.

Luckily, neither Big Bang nor 13.8 billion years ago are anything like proven. (I'm willing to back that up against pretenses of presenting proof for them).

1:55

• 1) "our world" being created 7200 years ago involves stars created on day four as seen "elsewhere in the universe".
• 2) "days long periods" to accomodate for certain dating techniques very unluckily would have to have day six end 7200 years ago, which is not very different, according to uniformitarians from 8200 years ago. Both are supposed to be after Göbekli Tepe.
• 3) "parts myth or metaphor" - if you take "day" as a metaphor for "a glimpse of a complete aspect of creation from light vs darkness to man versus beasts as given to the angels in a single moment, to cut up the one single moment in which God actually created" you have St Augustin on your side. Any other metaphor within context of creation (and not referring prophetically to New Testament) is a no no, and what does "myth" mean anyway? When both Hesiod's "anti-Genesis-1" and Iliad can be stamped as "myth", there is no common core to the concept.

2:07 "the genealogies were obviously some kind of metaphor"

When I call sails "wings of the boat" I know why "wings" are a fairly apt metaphor for sails:

• they are flat (not quite as flat as a sail, but still)
• they catch air (not quite same direction as a sail, but still)
• they propel the bird forwards as the sail does with the boat.

If Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies are a kind of metaphor, what is it a metaphor for and why is it anything like apt?

2:44 I agree with your point on doesn't match, but what does "as determined by science" mean in the context?

You mean as pretended by the Solar Nebula myth, right?

3:18 "we know that it is the light of the sun that illuminates day" - now.

We do not know it was so the first three days.

Obviously, the sun on day four was not created so hot it would have killed off the plants, and with the light (or even before it) the first three days of Earth had sufficient heat not to have plants freeze to death (the days also involve liquid water, right).

II

5:12 So, the idea of "day age" lands us with classifying anatomical and cultural humans as pre-Adamites.

Not a great deal for the Christian, I'd say.

A very poor deal, which I for one won't make.

Some Catholics in the time of Pius XII had a solution - "man" is only ontologically human when culturally human, so out go any anatomical humans without human culture, but even worse, "culturally human" doesn't exist before agriculture.

But worse again, this won't even solve the problem, since with agriculture existing around the times of Göbekli Tepe, this would land us with "cultural humans" several thousand years before Adam + this happening at a time with some modern populations already in place in the respective places, that is, no very good guarantee in that scenario for every man on earth really being Adamite and eligible for redemption by Christ.

So, I'd call this idea of 80 000 years of man a no no.

Btw, I am not limiting man to Homo sapiens sapiens, I also include Neanderthals and Denisovans and Heidelbergians and Antecessors. At least.

And since they existed less than 7200 years ago, and no longer exist now, I think they are races mostly vanished in the Flood.

This OBVIOUSLY involves some reevaluation of dating techniques.

III

5:38 AronRa is somewhat off in logic.

The question is not like "where does blue become red" but more like "where does non-red become red"?

Yellow does not count, perhaps orange does or perhaps orange doesn't. But a certain clearly red nuance that is slightly orange definitely does.

So, this leaves you with two possible limits : yellow to orange or orange to red. Either way, you'd have a piece that is unclear and a terminus post and ante quem for when the sought for quality starts.

Now, I can agree that Homo erectus of Java or Peking or Flores hobbit are uncertain as seen in fossil form. But as I am not an evolutionist, I will not agree we would have been uncertain if we had met them. There is no "grey shade" about being human.

If AronRa invokes the gap between 300 000 and 80 000 years ago, either of those dates is non-carbon, and either could be actually younger than a carbon date 50 000 years ago. They are most probably Ka-Ar dates, and this most probably reflects how quickly the lava cooled and therefore how much excess argon was trapped.

6:53 AronRa says Neanderthals would have been called non-human.

I think this is incorrect, and at worst they had a speech handicap and a temper handicap due to some transgenics with ape genome parts in mitochondriae.

At the very worst they were the Nephelim, in which case the Neanderthal genome parts we now have, for instance in European populations, came about by rape or from the human population Neanderthals were from.

Against Neanderthals being nephelim, one could cite the man in Shanidar who was kept alive for years after acquiring a handicap. On the other hand, one can imagine Siths keeping Darth Vader alive.

For Neanderthals being nephelim, one could cite traces of Neanderthals showing traces of having cannibalised each other. BUT, this could also happen among men imitating nephelim bad manners, with misdating they could also have been cannibalised by even Homo sapiens sapiens (that was one earlier theory on how they disappeared), or they could be victims of unknown perpetrators (those perhaps really nephelim) or the marks could be from sth other than cannibalism.

IV

8:35 AronRa is talking of Blombos cave:

"The Later Stone Age sequence has been radiocarbon dated to 2000–290 years BP,[25] while the Middle Stone Age sequence is dated to ca. 101,000-70,000 years ago through a number of methods, including: thermo-luminescence (TL),[1] optically stimulated luminescence (OSL),[2][3][4][30][31] uranium-thorium series (U/Th)[3] and electron spin resonance (ESR).[32] The lowest levels of the M3 phase has a preliminary age of >130,000 years ago, while the unexcavated sediments below these levels remains undated (June 2013)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blombos_Cave

In other words, the Middle Stone age sequence he's talking of is NOT dated by radiocarbon, so we cannot even confidently say it is pre-Flood.

V

9:09 Genetically Modified sceptic very well sums up why a Christian compromising with "science" (falsely so called, as is the case with Evolutionism and Palaeoanthropology in so far as Deep Time and Evolutionist) is incompatible with believing the Bible.

Metaphors aren't supposed to be hazy, they are supposed to be precise. So a "metaphor becoming even hazier" is a sign it's not even a metaphor, it's a token acceptance of words not believed in any sense of them.

VI a

[He outlines a scenario in which first, Adam and Eve can't be distinguished from other but soulless humans, and then several decades or millennia all doctrine has to be trasnmitted only orally up to very recent creation of writing - in VI b, my answer takes on both aspects, but very separately. In his argument, they belong together.]

VI b

9:54 "same mental capacity as Adam and Eve, but are not eternal"

Sorry, but the mental capacity of using language shows you have an immaterial, spiritual soul, which is eternal because it can't be pulled apart by its pieces, since it doesn't have any.

So, your scenario is metaphysical complete nonsense.

10:34 From Adam to Abraham we have 3200 years (or 2000 according to King Jamesers like Ussher).

Considering the longevity of early man and how short the corresponding 11 chapters of Genesis are, preserving these by oral tradition would not have beeb difficult from when they happened to when Abraham could possibly start writing them down. Even an oral tradition down to the times of Moses is not necessarily bad, though less likely for some longer chapters of Genesis down from 12 to 50.

Here is what Haydock had to say about Genesis 3 and he is using a Vulgate chronology basically identic to Ussher, not a LXX one, a slightly greater number of non-overlapping generation steps in LXX, but no big problem:

"Concerning the transactions of these early times, parents would no doubt be careful to instruct their children, by word of mouth, before any of the Scriptures were written; and Moses might derive much information from the same source, as a very few persons formed the chain of tradition, when they lived so many hundred years. Adam would converse with Mathusalem, who knew Sem, as the latter lived in the days of Abram. Isaac, Joseph, and Amram, the father of Moses, were contemporaries: so that seven persons might keep up the memory of things which had happened 2500 years before. But to entitle these accounts to absolute authority, the inspiration of God intervenes; and thus we are convinced, that no word of sacred writers can be questioned. H."

VII

11:22 "Science explains the beginning of the universe ..."

So does Norse and Greek myth. Badly.

Now, Chaos giving rise to Gaia without God or sparks from Muspelheim melting ice into streams from Niflheim freezing over Ginnungagap and making Audhumbla and Ymir without God, that's also explaining the universe without God.

AND without proof your explanation is correct.

Accepting Genesis 1 usually comes with accepting it was given to Moses as revelation. Accepting Moses as receiving real revelations from a real God has some perks when explaining how he parted the Red Sea. And accepting he did that has some real perks in explaining how the Hebrews came to think he did. So many perks, in fact, one can in historical certitudes actually speak of proof. Not that history really does admit of geometric proof.

Atheistic "science" does NOT explain Abiogenesis and also NOT explain the mental capacities of man.

VIII

12:26 "we can readily observe naturalistic causes all the time"

You can reconstruct Earth's inertia and Sun's gravitational attraction accounting for an elliptic orbit, but you cannot actually observe this is what happens.

You can observe Earth being still and heavens moving about it and some bodies having orbits gravitation and inertia are hard put to explain and some being simply too heavy to be in the orbit they are in (like Sun around zodiac around Earth), and you can from there alternatively reconstruct that the forces governing day and night, summer and winter in fact are supernatural.

Also, to date, there is no naturalistic explanation in terms of "matter + energy" for the mind of man.

ONLY the supernatural explanation "man has a soul which is a spirit" will actually explain what we do with our minds. No, I'm not referring to hypnosis, though I enjoy it, I'm referring to very everyday things like saying "there is no water on the cloth, it doesn't feel wet". Or like saying "physically good things are the things and processes that are biologically useful specifically for man".

IX

13:13 "falsehoods meant to be taken literally"

I'd agree if I agreed in believing in "science" the way you do.

As it is, I don't agree on "falsehoods".

Hebrews 11:1 - Here is Haydock on that one:

"Ver. 1. All this chapter is a commendation and recommendation of faith, which is the substance[1] of things hoped for, giving as it were a substance in our minds to such things as we are in hopes and in expectation of hereafter, and making them present to us before they come to pass. — It is also a sure conviction[2] of things that appear not. For when God has revealed things, and we believe them upon the divine and infallible authority of the revealer, we have a greater certainty of them than any demonstration can afford us. By this virtue of faith, they of old, our forefathers, obtained[3] a testimony from God that their actions were pleasing to him. Wi. — Faith is the basis, the foundation supporting our hope; for unless there be faith, there cannot possibly be any hope. Menochius."

While the Bible is about faith, in the sense that it is what gives a correct shape to our faith, it is however in very many chapters naturally occurring historiography. It's very often on the Homer side, not the Hesiod side. God intervenes to preserve historic memory from any accidental falsehoods (unlike Homer, where absence of even memory of Hittites and presence of palaces in Mycenae and Pylos are arguably anachronistic, and where some items in ship catalogue certainly are so, and inserted to please patrons or displease non-patrons), but if God hadn't, it would still be worth accepting as very good historiography.

And what is more, the history of the Bible gives a better ground for accepting the theoligical interpretation of that hstory by the hagiographers than the history of Iliad and Odyssey give for accepting there is a conference of gods on Olympus.

Sure, Ulysses' coming home was providential, so far I agree with Homer, the problem is just ... his version of providence involves Zeus making promises to his darling daughter Athena. Who happens to like Ulysses because he's a sly liar. Any other version of divine providence, including the Christian version, explains about as much (this does not cover that other aspect of Athena in Odyssey where she interacts with Ulysses, but that's another problem).

13:41 "because the definitive truth of Christian doctrine can only be hoped for"

No, because the Christian doctrine describes the definitive truth of what we are supposed to hope for.

You are misrepresenting what St Paul is conveying. Obviously, to those interested in getting what he's saying which seems to exclude you.

"as any evidence for it is always unseen"

On the contrary, five hundred men seeing Christ risen is definitely not "unseen" evidence.

"Thank you for watching!"

My displeasure, mitigated by the prospect of contradicting some of your less apt remarks ...

No, seriously, I think I can for a lot of the video say "my pleasure" - there are some "Orthodox" and some "Catholics" who needed to hear this.