@AllenWitmerMiller rather than playing your game, I am going to keep pushing you on the things you are trying to bury and ignore. My previous ignored comments to you:
More strawmaning. This is sad. Nobody claimed that God is guilty of engineering suffering for his amusement.
You did. You just said that “very good” means “exactly as intended”, and you believe God said that in reference to a world of millions of years of death, disease and suffering prior to Adam and Eve’s sin, correct?
Why did you put heretic in quotes? (I wonder if you’ll be too embarrassed to ignore this yet again?)
@AllenWitmerMiller rather than playing your game, I am going to keep pushing you on the things you are trying to bury and ignore. My previous ignored comments to you:
More strawmaning. This is sad. Nobody claimed that God is guilty of engineering suffering for his amusement.
You did. You just said that “very good” means “exactly as intended”, and you believe God said that in reference to a world of millions of years of death, disease and suffering prior to Adam and Eve’s sin, correct?
Why did you put heretic in quotes? (I wonder if you’ll be too embarrassed to ignore this yet again?)
Did God “engineer” the plan of salvation of history including Christ’s torture and death on the cross?
Yes, as a response to man’s action in the garden of eden. Not because God desired to have Jesus Christ tortured, in general. If mankind had not sinned, no sacrifice would have been needed. As somebody who claims to be a minister, it’s highly embarrassing that I would need to explain that to you.
…original plan being Before The Fall. What is your version of pre-fall vegetarian sharks? How do pre-fall filter feeders avoid ingesting animal plankton? What does a pre-fall T-Rex look like?
You brought up meat eating.
You do not just deny science to suit your theology. If you deny your own eyes, surely nothing technical will convince you. Anyone can see that some animals are designed, by heaven or earth, as exclusive meat eaters, the usual YEC panda bear teeth having nothing to do with it.
There’s also a large amount of scientific evidence Pandas are carnivores which switched to the bamboo diet roughly 2 MY. Bamboo is very plentiful in their environment and provides much more protein than most plant tissue. Pandas have evolved several adaptations for their bamboo diet but still retain many traits of a meat eating predator.
The giant panda, a consummate vegetarian, belongs to a group of mammals called Carnivora, so-called because almost all of them—dogs, cats, hyenas, weasels, mongooses, raccoons, and more—eat meat. But the giant panda’s diet of bamboo, and little else, makes it a vegetarian.
At least, outwardly.
Yonggang Nie and Fuwen Wei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have spent years tracking wild pandas, analyzing exactly what kinds of bamboo they eat, and measuring the chemicals within those mouthfuls. And they found that the nutrient profile of a panda’s all-bamboo diet—very high in protein, and low in carbohydrates—is much closer to that of a typical carnivore than to that of other plant-eating mammals. “It was a surprise,” Wei says. Nutritionally, “bamboo looks like a kind of meat.”
In other words, “the giant panda does what human vegetarians do,” says Silvia Pineda-Munoz of the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We have high protein requirements, so we wouldn’t be able to survive if we just ate kale salad. Thus, we choose to eat tofu, beans, nuts, and other plant-based foods that compensate for the protein we aren’t getting from animal products. In the end, vegetarians and nonvegetarians don’t have such different diets when it comes to nutrients.” And so it is with China’s black-and-white bear.
This discovery explains some puzzling parts of panda biology. The panda’s ancestors switched to a vegetarian diet more than 2 million years ago. In that time, the panda has evolved stronger jaws for chewing tough, fibrous mouthfuls, and one of its wristbones has become a false thumb, for gripping bamboo stems. But despite these superficial hardware changes, it still has a meat eater’s digestive system.
Yikes, it’s statements like this that you make appear as foregone knowledge and undeniable fact, that makes me realize, we truly have no common ground here from which to discourse. How does one even begin to answer a statement so steeped in the evolutionary paradigm as what you have just thrown out there? To say it is anti-biblical is an understatement.
It’s steeped in evidence, in case you didn’t read the article he referenced.
There are many, many Christians who accept evolution and believe in the Bible. You may want to check out the Clergy Letter Project, which currently has the support of 15,000+ christian clergy. Here is an excerpt from the letter they signed:
How about this: Jesus said the Scripture cannot be broken. But I do not think you will understand how carefully this causes creationists to handle the text. I just do not think you will understand or care.
Correct. Jesus did NOT say that your favorite man-made traditions about scripture interpretation cannot be broken.
I most certainly understand it. Many (but not all) Young Earth Creationists tend to be so careless with the scriptures texts because tradition is favored above investigating what the text actually says.
And that is what you have demonstrated whenever Hebrew exegesis and sound hermeneutics is mentioned. You don’t engage it meaningfully.
I have an idea. Go talk to @John_Harshman. He has been arguing with Coe in another thread about how Coe has a misunderstanding about the Genesis days. Now what on earth would make an atheist want to argue like that?
You too. Let’s get @John_Harshman on the line. He and I apparently just want someone to admit what is plainly there. Forget about the original language yayhoo stuff…!! Just admit what is plainly there…!
If you want to claim that Scripture absolutely demands a young Earth and the rest of the YEC stuff, go for it. It would make it that much easier to dismiss the Bible as the works of man and not of a creator. It becomes rather easy to disprove the Bible at that point.