(October 19, 2017 at 12:43 am)Huggy74 Wrote: Name one thing in the Bible that scientific knowledge has debunked.

Sorry Huggy, but science deals with reality so has nothing to say about the Bible which doesn't deal with anything real.

The Bible is a work of fiction that brainwashed people take seriously because they're brainwashed.

Quote:Evolution has nothing to do with creation.

Agreed because creation is a non scientific fairy tale

Quote:evolution is a fact in so much that each creature evolves after its "kind", cats evolve from cats and dogs from dogs, But the idea that we all evolved from some primordial soup is pure conjecture.

Kinds are not a  scientific term . Selectively putting arbitrary cut off points to evolution is dumb . That's not evolution that's Abiogenisis which is itself a well supported idea . Certainly more so then people being conjured up by magic . That's not just speculation that's fantasy . 

Again your the poster boy for creationist incompetence

Huggy, purebred health issues are exactly the point.  The story of Noah isn’t about him domesticating these animals and selectively breeding them to accentuate certain physical characteristics.  It’s about trying to repopulate the planet of all sorts of animals with one mating pair each.  Which is absolutely ludicrous.  Inbreeding negatively impacts the survival rate.

I’ve owned several purebred dogs (German Shorthaird Pointers, all). One had regularly occurring seizures until she was fixed (seemed to be a severe hormonal imbalance). A couple others had frequent UTIs. These were not animals that would’ve been able to survive in the wild, domestication or not.  If I had to rely on them to repopulate the world’s canine population, well, it wouldn’t happen.  It took human intervention and technology (far beyond Noah’s nonexistent level) to ensure they lived relatively normal lives.

A hearty stock requires several unrelated mating pairs to start with.  The more, the merrier.  Farmers have known this forever.

Also, yes, science’s self-correction is indeed a virtue.  It’s not that the truth of a thing changes, but rather our understanding of it.  Sometimes things are complicated.  Sometimes things appear to be something, when they’re actually something else.

I mean, do you even know what the scientific method is?  Why it’s structured the way it is?  It’s a process whose structure is iterative.  Each time through the loop, either precision is gained, or something new is answered/proven wrong, and the cycle starts again.  And because we’re limited creatures with limits to our technology, who may be interpreting data wrong (if we’re actually recording it properly), there’s always a margin of error.

I understand that the lack of certainty is, for whatever reason, uncomfortable to theists, but I find that emotional discomfort to simply be the symptom of a weak intellect.  There’s always a chance, even if it’s microscopic, that we’re wrong.  And that’s okay, because that’s one of the things the scientific method accounts for.  It’s why measurements and experiments are repeated, why things are peer-reviewed, why, from the outset, extraneous variables are attempted to be eliminated.

I find that infinitely more satisfying - intellectually and emotionally - than simply saying “god did it.”

Does huggy not comprehend that inbreeding causes defects and lack of genetic diversity is fatal over time . Ask the cheetah how that works out.

Genetic bottleneck and it's horrors 

Quote:The genetic drift caused by a population bottleneck can change the proportional distribution of alleles by chance and even lead to fixation or loss of alleles. Due to the smaller population size after a bottleneck event, the chances of inbreeding and genetic homogeneity increase, leading to the potential for inbreeding depression to occur. Smaller population size can also cause deleterious mutations to accumulate[3]

Does Huggie not know most domesticated animals do poorly in the wild . Because we have breed them into unsuitability.

Given that he thinks that:

There was a planetary flood that was so severe, that even the tallest mountains were under water
The Ark was not only built, but seaworthy, capable of not only holding the animals, but their food and waste
That nothing went wrong on this boat, even though predator and prey were living in close quarters (no redundancies with only a single mating pair)
That, even if we go by “kinds” (l-o-fucking-l), it only takes a single mating pair several thousand years to repopulate the planet with all of the different breeds
That humanity on the whole would be repopulated through incest, which has the same exact problems as the animal repopulation

I don’t think he thinks much, period.

Of course, even if it’s a parable, metaphor, or whatever else apologists try to wave the story away as, none of that negates the larger point behind it. That god, in his infinite power and wisdom, fucked up so badly he had to hit the reset button on his own creation.

So, it’s not only woefully unscientific, it paints the entity we’re supposed to be in awe of and fearful of as a loser who cannot get it right on the first try.

And, of course, that’s what hell is for, isn’t it? The flood seems wholly unnecessary when there’s an apparatus in place to deal with the wicked. Why, it’s almost as if these stories were sloppily combined into something nonsensical!

(October 21, 2017 at 10:49 pm)KevinM1 Wrote: The flood seems wholly unnecessary when there’s an apparatus in place to deal with the wicked.  Why, it’s almost as if these stories were sloppily combined into something nonsensical!

One would think with all the evangelical councils trying to sort out which scriptures belonged in the Christian canon, someone would have actually read them and identified all the continuity problems.  It almost sounds like the various bishops of the early Church just voted for their favourites without being arsed to read anyone else's favourites.

I can think of a far more elegant way for the OT god to eliminate all the mortals that displeased it, without causing collateral damage in the animal kingdom:  Temporarily render all the good people blind and then just wander around exposing its "no one can look upon me and live"-ness, causing bad people to just keel over dead.

And if anyone is doing NaNoWriMo this year and needs a plot or subplot, feel free to steal this.

(October 19, 2017 at 12:43 am)Huggy74 Wrote: Name one thing in the Bible that scientific knowledge has debunked.

What about numerous failures of prophecies? Would that do?

Isaiah 17:1. Damascus is predicted to cease to be a city. In fact, Damascus is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities.

Jeremiah 49:33 predicts that Hazor will become an everlasting wasteland in which humans will never again dwell and it will become inhabited by dragons. None of this has happened.

Zechariah 10:11. The Nile is predicted to dry up.

Ezekiel 29, 30. The land of Egypt will be laid waste by Nebuchadnezzar, all its people killed and rivers dried up. It will remain uninhabited for forty years. This did not happen.

Meanwhile, in the land of science, there's an interesting experiment highlighting the evolutionary process of bacteria (with E. Coli, in this instance). https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/...-bacteria/

(October 21, 2017 at 3:19 am)Huggy74 Wrote: So I guess It's safe to say that no one has put forth any evidence that proves the flood wrong?

Shall we move on? I believe next on Matilda's list was "a bat is not a bird".

To your next lie?

So our evidence isn't good enough for you, Huggy?

That's it, then. Until we can build a time machine and give you a full scan of human history, with no Adam and Eve, no global floods and no CruciFiction, we appear to be at an impasse.