Galatians 1:10-12 - 10 For do I now persuade men, or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ. 11 But I make known to you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. 12 For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ.
I appreciate your concern, but I see things quite clearly. What I don’t know, I admit I don’t know. What I seek to understand, becomes clear. I sit in a unique position here in that my beliefs are not tainted by years of bad teaching. I can use logic and reason to determine what truth is. The Holy Spirit teaches me, and I have ears to hear. I would not take spiritual advice from a YEC because I don’t consider the doctrine valid. I find very little truth in the hermeneutics of the YEC proponents that interpret the bible here.
This is the kind of comment that we were talking about in the other thread regarding “expertise”. I don’t need expertise to know the truth through the revelation of Jesus Christ. I can point to hundreds of verses if you like. I am not a child, nor am I green, but thanks for the concern.
Understood, and you can believe in evolution all you want. You just won’t get my support. Consider the text you quoted above and consider that you might just be seeking the admiration of evolutionists here on this forum above the pursuit of pleasing God.
Yes, small differences at the DNA level can produce big differences at the level of phenotype. The genome is a huge interconnected web where pulling on one thread can affect threads very distant from it. I happened to have started using a software package called Ingenuity Pathway Analysis, and for a newbie like myself it’s like drinking from a firehose. These are the types of results you get:
(1) Speculation about the motives of others is always of questionable valuable—and potentially offensive. We tend to discourage such motivation-speculation on Peaceful Science.
(2) @r_speir, does it really seem likely to you that “the admiration of evolutionists” matters to anyone here? How would any of us gain anything from simply affirming what science established long before we were born?
(3) How do we know you aren’t denying science simply to seek the admiration of the evolution-deniers on this forum above the pursuit of pleasing God?.
The fact that your accusations about others can so easily be reversed onto you should encourage caution and humility.
I would take a look at all the relevant passages of the Bible, see how clear they are, see if any are metaphorical or poetic rather than literal. I would also look to see how clear the science is, and what assumptions it’s built on.
For instance, I has a short discussion about varves there. I found evidence that varve dating is based on assumptions which make the evidence very plausible to someone who doesn’t believe the Bible is clear about the age of the earth. To me, the Bible is more clear, and varves are based on assumptions I find plausible but not very plausible.
I’m probably not explaining this well, but I guess I’m saying I weigh the evidence in the Bible first, decide what it clearly says and what it doesn’t, then weigh the evidence of science to see how clear it is, and then see if I’m actually reading something into the Bible that it doesn’t actually mean.
For instance, I decided that “waters” in Genesis 1:2 doesn’t have to mean H20. After looking at what science says, I decided I was reading H20 into the text, when all it has to mean is “water” is something liquid and transparent as God can make water however He wants.
Someone on Bill’s “team” merely making the claim and then saying something technical is enough for Bill, phylogenetic signal is now falsified in Bill’s mind.
I’m curious how one goes about making such decisions about a text from an ancient culture and an ancient language (even one most likely preceding the ancient Hebrew language of Genesis 1) without a lot of experience in lexicography and Hebrew exegesis.
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And does it matter that even people with world-class training and expertise in such fields of the academy disagree on such “decisions”?
Mine are not rhetorical questions in this case. I’m genuinely interested in understanding how you reached these decisions. (And for the record, I myself in the past have pondered and researched the very hypothesis you described.)
I serve Jesus. I seek the admiration of nobody but Him. You can stop trying to correct me, I don’t need correcting and quite frankly won’t take your advice regarding interpretation of scripture.
You are clearly mistaken, as I have said many times, I am neither. I seek truth and I follow Jesus. There are more than 2 choices on the table, I choose an alternative to those 2 which is to this point undefined. I cannot deny scripture and I cannot deny obvious scientific reality. I would say the truth lies somewhere in the realm of both.
