(December 13, 2014 at 9:30 am)professor Wrote: Clown?So we noticed.
OK I can do that.
See, that's the thing: the Bible, like lots of other stories, happens to have numbers in it. Lots of them. And apparently, people have spent the last 2,000 years taking some of those numbers and plugging them into formulas and coming up with dates which -shockingly- are always pretty close to the time that hey happen to be living. If the results aren't perfect, don't worry: the sheep will still believe you if you promise them a reward in the near future. The JWs, for example, date the fall of Babylon to 607 BC because that allows their "Bible chronology" to put the date of "the presence" of Jesus as the autumn of 1914, and that lets them pretend that they nailed that prophecy (after all, there was such turmoil in 1914).
The fact that Babylon was conquered in 539 BC doesn't even slow them down; they simply explain that Satan has clouded the minds of the people of the world (except for them, because they're better than you). In any event, they use "Bible chronology" to either set dates or imply that the end is really close (this time for sure!) because that's how you keep the sheep from getting restless.
"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
