This is fascinating stuff.
A_Nony_Mouse, at first I thought this was more of a challenge or thought experiment, but I get the impression that you seek to get people to strip away all of the baggage that has been attached to the Bible for centuries (millennia?) and work with what is there. For someone like me, raised in religion and finally breaking away from it, it helps to realize that even now I still tend to work backwards when thinking about the Bible and its history.
A_Nony_Mouse, at first I thought this was more of a challenge or thought experiment, but I get the impression that you seek to get people to strip away all of the baggage that has been attached to the Bible for centuries (millennia?) and work with what is there. For someone like me, raised in religion and finally breaking away from it, it helps to realize that even now I still tend to work backwards when thinking about the Bible and its history.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
