Friday, August 19, 2016

The Creationist Mind


8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dennis, in your opinion, can you state 3 redeemable or worthy things about or in the Bible?

Anonymous said...

I am in no way intending to speak for Dennis...

I could come up with 3 redeemable or worthy things about the Greater and Lesser Eddas, the Enûma Eliš, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Illiad and Odyssey, the Aztec codices, and many other ancient documents.

They're primary historical sources. I think our knowledge of our past, and therefore our understanding of our present, is greatly enriched by having them, as opposed to not having them. I wish we had access to a great deal more ancient literature that currently appears to have been lost to antiquity.

However, I am grateful that no one, or at least, practically no one, still has a literal belief in the Greater and Lesser Eddas, the Enûma Eliš, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Illiad and Odyssey, the Aztec codices, and many other ancient documents. I wish that were also true of the Hebrew myth cycle, among others.

DennisCDiehl said...

Anonymous Anonymous said...
Dennis, in your opinion, can you state 3 redeemable or worthy things about or in the Bible?

I Corinthians 13
The Beatitudes
Proverbs 31

But it was never meant to be a 21st Century science reference. It also has much exaggerated history and many of the books are not actually written by the persons whose names are affixed.

DennisCDiehl said...

The video is merely some occasional blog filler to highlight some of the less than convincing apologetics that are offered up in defense of creationism, Bible inerrancy and some of the more crazy stories and perspectives in the Bible that can't possibly be true in real life and never were.

Anonymous said...

female elephants having their mammaries located in the pectoral region rather than in between their rear legs like most other four legged grazing animals is logical given how hard it would be for baby elephants to reach them if the teets were in the rear...

evolutionary logic would have had such tits remain in the rear and be elongated, but engineering logic, i.e., the logic of a thinking entity, would have simply put the teets in the most obvious place...

Anonymous said...

IMO, you have chosen to remain obedient in the things that truly matter.

DBF

Anonymous said...

Speaking for myself, I have come to see that the bible is a historical document of the opinions and journal notes of men who were also on a quest to understand the Cosmos in their time. There are some very good new understandings, like The Golden Creed, but there are also contadictions, maybe because these notes were written by men. For an example, the learned experts in the old testament failed to see Jesus Christ as some sort of fufillment of the old. We are doing the same thing today.

DBP

Retired Prof said...

Anon 7:38, the original mammalian placement for mammary glands was in two rows extending from the chest to the groin. In species that produce whole litters of young--including large grazing animals such as pigs, not just small creatures like rodents and dogs--the archetypal pattern still holds. All those offspring need some place to nurse, and there was evolutionary pressure to keep the full set.

In contrast, evolutionary pressure promotes, over generations, the loss of unneeded organs and the diversion of the energy for growing and maintaining them toward uses that actually contribute to survival (of both parent and offspring). I do not know enough about elephants to evaluate your proposition that elephant calves can easily reach teats in the front but would be unable to do so in the back. It makes sense that the chest is the place for us primates, because mothers regularly sit with their young on their lap or carry them around in their arms. I don't know why the the normal site in herbivores such as deer, cattle, and horses is the groin. The circumstance that caused most herbivores to lose superfluous mammaries in front and elephants to lose the rear ones could simply be genetic drift.

In any case, the evolutionary explanation accounts for the facts more efficiently than yours because it does not posit an extra entity, the undetectable Magic Designer. Ockham's Razor and all that.