(September 16, 2015 at 4:13 pm)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote:(September 16, 2015 at 2:41 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: You should not apologize. You have given an answer to the question, and he has merely said that he will at some time in the future give an answer to the question. Your answer is similar to how I was taught as a child. It can be summarized thusly:The Catholic Bible teaches animal evolution by giving examples of it. The Protestants believed in magic.
The Bible is the true word of God.
The Bible says that God directly created all species.
The theory of evolution contradicts that.
Anything that contradicts the truth must be false. (This, by the way, is a tautology.)
Therefore, evolution is false.
The argument is logically valid. Its soundness (or lack thereof), however, is another matter.
One can easily avoid deciding that it is unsound by never properly examining the theory of evolution (and by not examining the reasonableness of the Bible too carefully either). One of the very striking things about reading Darwin's On the Origin of the Species is how very reasonable he is. It is understandable to an educated reader; one does not have to be a specialist to understand it. Some of the examples are likely to be unknown to the general reader, but the overall argument and discussion is very understandable. Of course, I did not read it when I was a Christian, only after I became an atheist.
Wisdom 19:18-19 (CEB) = "18 If we are careful to observe events, we can see just how the elements of the universe are transformed. It’s the same transformation that happens when someone changes the sounds that a harp makes by changing the key while continuing to play the same melody. 19 In this way, land animals were changed into underwater creatures, while animals that swam in the waters now moved onto the land."
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se...ersion=CEB
The Catholic Bible also has the creation story in Genesis in which God directly makes animals. (Or I should state, "creation stories," as Genesis chapters 1 and 2 tell different and contradictory stories of creation.)
In the case of the Eucharist ceremony, it is the Catholics who have the magic beliefs, not most protestants. And in that instance, it is far more insane than the idea of a being who can create the universe out of nothing decided to create animals fully formed.
Of course, I could also point out that not every protestant rejects evolution, so the exact nature of where a religionist will diverge from what is most reasonable is rather variable. But one thing is sure, whenever someone is religious, they go off the rails somewhere or other due to their religion, and very often in very many ways. Religion always has magic somewhere or other.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
