Answers from Jeanson: Revealing the Truth of Joseph’s Global Famine?

None of the mass extinctions was caused by a worldwide flood. None of the mass extinctions happened within the past few thousand years. Whether a flood would be detectable depends on just how it happened. But in fact there is no mechanism capable of causing a short-term, worldwide flood. Unless you’re invoking a serious miracle, and again there’s no way to know what sort of miracle that might have been. Not sure where you’re going with this.

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Really? I thought there was one happening right now.

That depends on whether we keep going the way we are for another couple hundred years. Regardless, it’s not the one @Mark10.45 is talking about.

Me neither, just asking questions, no direction really…I guess I don’t see the Genesis story as literally as most, I see it as something broader in terms of time. I see God as completely outside of time, so discussions about whether or not He controls this or that just seem silly to me. We are not capable of understanding how He exists, in His Word, He just IS.

So everything to me is “eternity past prophecy” up to the time of Moses when biblical writing became no longer an interpretation of what God was telling someone about the past, but was rather an historical (somewhat) account of what actually happened. Prophecy meaning not necessarily a prediction, but an interpretation of Divine communication, which is what Moses received to be able to write about the past that was before his lifetime.

So in my head (and in my Spirit) there is a lot of leeway time-wise to early scripture, prophecy (past and future) tends to be ambiguous relative to time. Perhaps the stories are parables and the timeline is skewed. Ecclesiastes points out that all of this has already been, even today, there is nothing new under the sun. Perhaps scientifically proven extinction events are markers of God resetting history. I dunno, dreaming and thinking out loud…I am not pressing a point.

Good enough. My point (and I do have one) is that Genesis, at least the creation stories, makes no sense as a literal description of real history and bears no resemblance to actual earth history. You are free to interpret them some other way. (You’re free to interpret them as history too; you just have to abandon reality in order to do so.)

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I agree. I will add though, that I don’t think that makes early Genesis any less valid. Whether it matches up with earth history or not, to me it represents important lessons regarding mans sin nature, why and how sin came about, and how to find God in an evil world. (Means much more to me than that short blurb, but I will spare everyone)

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This sounds like just what someone who wants something which is false, to be true, would say. There isn’t an idea, concept, philosophy, or religion in history, for which there has not been people saying similar things.

Yes but you see, Marx/Muhammad/Moses/Matthew didn’t actually mean this with that word or phrase, he meant this other thing in a metaphorical sense, and you just have to want to see what he really meant to see how Marxism/Islam/Christianity[insert favorite idea] is actually still superior/true. Etc. etc.

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Psalm 1:3:
He shall be like a tree
Planted by the [c]rivers of water,
That brings forth its fruit in its season,
Whose leaf also shall not wither;
And whatever he does shall prosper.

This verse points to many truths, and other prophecies including the “New Jerusalem” in revelation which is yet to be fulfilled…is it about a tree? To understand it fully, you need to study the word and seek truth through prayer and a personal relationship with Jesus. Even after all that, the true meaning may or may not be known, so our command is to keep seeking.

Truth is personal, seems pretty evident from all the conversations here, something we can all agree on.

I don’t claim my belief is superior/true(r) to yours, maybe others do, but I don’t, nor will I in the future. Just want to be clear.

But it’s not meaningless to them, and no one is forcing you to discuss it.

This should be meaningless to me as well, but I still find value in seeing how other process their beliefs.

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I am not out of line or out of place…If you look at the title of the thread, it is about truth in the bible as a conversation on peacefulscience.org (founded by @swamidass) with the tag of theology. If I were in a forum on atheist candlestick making and go off on Jesus, then yes, that is out of place. Here it is not. If you truly find it nonsense, you should take better care of yourself and not expose yourself to such nonsense. By the way, I don’t comment on scientific conversations that I don’t understand as a matter of respect to those that do (unless I have a question). I certainly wouldn’t write it off as scientific mumbo-jumbo and declare it nonsense.

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I don’t mind being exposed to it. I am just saying that it does not lead to any productive discussion or debate. It’s as if someone said “The sky is green,” and when you asked them to support that claim, they just said “When I look at the sky, it’s green,” and then had no interest in further discussing why it appears blue to you and how the two can be reconciled.

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Was this directed at me?

I find the point of that quote to be that we all only glimpse a small bit of truth, but there’s much more out there to uncover. No one can suppose they know an ocean of truth.

Yes. In the upper right corner of your post, you will see a little arrow with the name of the person being replied to. That should be helpful.

Yes, that’s what the quote is supposed to mean. I exapted it to fit your situation. Science of course doesn’t know everything, and there’s more we don’t know than we do. But my point is that we know a lot more than creationists are willing to look at. Compared to what science knows, the universe is a great ocean; but compared to what creationists are willing to see, what science knows is also a great ocean.

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I’m definitely still learning this forum, but I checked, and it shows no reply-to in the corner of your particular reply. I’m wondering if it only does when someone quotes…it took me a while to learn how to do the quoting…haha.

That’s where I think you misapply and twist the quote to be self-serving. The entire point is that you cannot compare all of science to the ocean. It is only the pebbles.

Quite right. Odd.

No, it should happen any time you hit “reply”. Or quote.

Again, I did twist the meaning to change it from what it originally referred to, but I do think the comparison is still apt. If you desperately want to keep science as the pebbles and shells on a beach, then we can consider creationism to pay attention only to three rounded fragments of a soda bottle found on that beach. My point is that creationist ignore most of the evidence we have.

I think it shows that arrow when you click “Reply” on a post. And that arrow points to the post where you clicked “Reply”.

I did not click “Reply” for this. I just selected some text and clicked “Quote”. So I think there won’t be an arrow at the right corner. But you can see who I am replying to because of the quote.

Edit: I see that I was mistaken about that.

No, there’s an arrow either if you click “reply” or if you quote. As you can see.

I used the green one for this post.

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57 posts were split to a new topic: The Validity of Christian Experiences