(September 25, 2013 at 3:26 pm)Doubting Thomas Wrote: Yeah, one of the defenses I've seen regarding this is the famous "lost in translation" defense that so many Christians love to use to explain why certain words don't mean what they mean, but mean something else.
I've seen that used a number of times here, and I remember it from my time as a JW. "The Greek word for [term] can be interpreted as [this] or [that] and I'm going to use [that] since it supports my explanation of the verse in question." Which can be combined with "the term [term] meant something different back then" to come up with additional interpretations. If you can juggle words like a pro, you too can interpret the Bible!
"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
