I think Congo’s artworks would be worth much more than any artwork made by you.
Yeah, the chimpanzees are WAY better than us at some things.
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I agree that the differing creation accounts in Gen 1 and 2 suggest they are not literal accounts of history, but on the other hand, it seems to me that there is evidence to suggest that some parts are indeed literal. For example, Gen 1:14-18 -
“14 Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; 15 and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so. 16 Then God made two great [d]lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. 17 God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18 and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.”
So how do theistic evolutionists interpret Gen 2:7?
Memory is a very poor indicator of intelligence. A seriously retarded person can have a photographic memory but still can’t figure out how to add 1 and 1 or how to write their name.
I think it would be more correct to say that intelligence is a poorly defined concept that is not very helpful in cross-species comparison of cognitive abilities.
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First, do you now agree that animals like chimps (as shown in the links provided by @Witchdoc) are capable of surprising feats of intelligence comparable to humans, even if such feats are far and few in between?
Second, I get the feeling you implicitly referred to the chimp as “retarded” (because there is absolutely no reason to have used that word), but that is just bonkers or should I say retarded, because that chimp is clearly sane.
If you read this literally, then its conflicts with what we know about the universe. Here the Sun (greater light) is created after the earth was already formed, but we know the Sun is older than the earth and was already beaming photons on it as it formed and cooled.
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Which parts? There’s no evidence in there. It’s poetry, translated from Hebrew.
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How many chimps are school teachers?
Other animals besides primates have good memories too:
8 Animals With Incredibly Good Memory (With Pictures) – AnimalHow.com
I am talking about intelligence (which has a memory component) not memory.
I repeat, do you now agree that animals like Chimps are capable of intelligent feats comparable to humans even if those feats are rare based on the links provided by Witchdoc?
How many chimps claim to understand genetics better than biology professors and OT theology better than Hebrew professors?
How many creationists claim to understand genetics better than biology professors and OT theology better than Hebrew professors?
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I’ve spent many an hour on atheists sites, and the primary argument they employ against belief in a literal Adam and Eve is that genetics contradicts it.
Genetics clashes with some versions of a literal AE like the YEC type, not against other ones like that of GAE.
“Absolutely demolish”? I don’t think so. Yes, GAE takes a literal AE off the radar of genetic scrutiny, but at the cost of making it a regular fairy tale. It affords the atheist, on a platter of gold, the opportunity to dismiss an issue quite important to Christendom with ease.
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This is a typical conflation of the point of contention.
Here you are confusing the magnitude of differences in our mental faculties with the consequences of those differences in mental faculties.
The consequences of the result of a small increase in intelligence might be very large, as they result in the ability to cooperate to build large things like cities and particle accelerators, but ultimately the “jump” in cognitive capacity itself might be relatively small. The amount of increase in intelligence it takes to go from not understanding to understanding something (which then makes you able to perform some task you otherwise couldn’t) can be miniscule.
You can be just on the edge of understanding something, and this tiny lack of understanding can mean all the difference for being able to reliably solve some complex task.
A relatively minor increase in some specific area of intelligence might make you a world-class mathematician, or painter, or musician. Now of course, it is also noteworthy that the vast majority of human beings aren’t Large Hadron Collider designer-and-builders, nor Beethoven, nor Shakespeare. In fact the people who are responsible for these achievements probably stand out a lot from the rest of us exactly because their achievements are so far beyond what the rest of us are normally capable of.
Of course, one part of all this is that many of the things we consider great triumphs of the human intellect are not really ex nihilo inventions of any one human’s mind, but instead the product of centuries of learning and development(largely by dumb trial and error), enabled mostly by our capacity to be taught how to read and write (nobody is just born able to read and write), and thus use external devices to store and propagate information.
Have you considered how it affects your argument if you include in the spectrum of human intelligence, the full distribution of cognitive capacities found in the human population, and you compare it to the full spectrum of cognitive capacities found in our primate cousins?
I would suggest that this is not even an argument. Statements like yours are typical from religious people, but all they amount to is this vague appeal to “look at things humans can do which chimps can not”. And then follows a list of examples of things most humans can’t actually do.
You have a sort of vague feeling that there is some immense gulf of cognitive capacity separating humans from non-human primates, but you have no actual objective measure of cognitive capacity with which to determine the magnitude of this gap
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You’ll need to explain why this is evidence of literalism. That God made the heavenly lights with specific purposes is true on any sort of reading.
There’s quite a range of TE approaches, but the issue has more to do with how to read the whole narrative (or even all of Gen 1-11). TEs tend to be non-concordist–certainly scientifically and often even historically (with many variations). More progressive TEs see more non-historical myth taking place. More conservative TEs, who see an historical core (e.g., often accepting an historical A + E) but short of full concordism/literalism, tend to read texts like Gen 2:7 for their symbolic/metaphorical value. A common interpretation is to read “from dust” as a sign of human mortality, b/c this is how the metaphor works elsewhere in Scripture.
It’s not strictly Hebrew poetry at the formal level, but it is poetic in style and register. This is why many classify Gen 1 as sui generis b/c there’s no other text (in or outside the Bible) that’s quite like it.
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Is there even one such person in the world? I doubt it. It’s true that many biologists think that A&E are fundamentally incompatible with evolution, but they’re thinking of the usual conception that they’re the first humans, with nobody outside the garden, and so on. And that’s incompatible not just with evolution but with the genetic data. I’m thinking specifically of the HLA alleles we share with other primates. Since there are more than four, the sole ancestors idea is just out. Of course our fit into primate phylogeny, based on genomes, anatomy, and fossils, is pretty good too. But nobody bases their career or beliefs on that. Who would take it seriously as a motivation for research? Who would take it seriously enough to fund that research?
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Do any such biologists exist? How could someone ever base a career in biology on that idea or belief?
Aren’t there many creationists who claim that the Genesis accounts are not compatible with genetics?
I’m not seeing that. It seems to be aimed more at creationists.
I’m skeptical. How can you have seen a lot if you can’t name one?
Who, specifically? I don’t see that happening. Can you provide some names of those who have said or written, “negligible evidence, so no change to my beliefs”?
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Well not if literal is meant consistent with the Chicago Statements. In that case they could be read literally, ie historical-grammatical.
Perhaps you mean “naively literalistic” or “hyperliteralistic”?
This was qualified earlier in the conversation.
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I think this is correct, if we are clear that “beliefs” include “beliefs about the evidence.”
That is certainly true. This is particularly true for people who made changes to their beliefs in the past because of false science.
Of course, for many people, they never changed their beliefs because of this evidence, because they never thought Adam and Eve were real in the first place.
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