Which is more reliable science or the Bible?

Johnv

I am familiar with all that. But the creature described does not sound like a hippoppotamus to me. A hippo and elephant have fairly small, slim tails. But the behemoth is described as having a tail like a cedar tree.

I believe the next chapter of Job describing the
"leviathan" might also be describing some sort of dinosaur. Now this creature really sounds like a Dragon including breathing fire and smoke.

Job 41:1 Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord [which] thou lettest down?

Job 41:2 Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn?

Job 41:3 Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft [words] unto thee?

Job 41:4 Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?

Job 41:5 Wilt thou play with him as [with] a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?

Job 41:6 Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants?

Job 41:7 Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears?

Job 41:8 Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.

Job 41:9 Behold, the hope of him is in vain: shall not [one] be cast down even at the sight of him?

Job 41:10 None [is so] fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?

Job 41:11 Who hath prevented me, that I should repay [him? whatsoever is] under the whole heaven is mine.

Job 41:12 I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportion.

Job 41:13 Who can discover the face of his garment? [or] who can come [to him] with his double bridle?

Job 41:14 Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth [are] terrible round about.

Job 41:15 [His] scales [are his] pride, shut up together [as with] a close seal.

Job 41:16 One is so near to another, that no air can come between them.

Job 41:17 They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they cannot be sundered.

Job 41:18 By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes [are] like the eyelids of the morning.

Job 41:19 Out of his mouth go burning lamps, [and] sparks of fire leap out.

Job 41:20 Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as [out] of a seething pot or caldron.

Job 41:21 His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.

Job 41:22 In his neck remaineth strength, and sorrow is turned into joy before him.

Job 41:23 The flakes of his flesh are joined together: they are firm in themselves; they cannot be moved.

Job 41:24 His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether [millstone].

Job 41:25 When he raiseth up himself, the mighty are afraid: by reason of breakings they purify themselves.

Job 41:26 The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon.

Job 41:27 He esteemeth iron as straw, [and] brass as rotten wood.

Job 41:28 The arrow cannot make him flee: slingstones are turned with him into stubble.

Job 41:29 Darts are counted as stubble: he laugheth at the shaking of a spear.

Job 41:30 Sharp stones [are] under him: he spreadeth sharp pointed things upon the mire.

Job 41:31 He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment.

Job 41:32 He maketh a path to shine after him; [one] would think the deep [to be] hoary.

Job 41:33 Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.

Job 41:34 He beholdeth all high [things]: he [is] a king over all the children of pride.

Comments- Now this is surely a fantastic creature the Lord is describing. I believe it might be a huge, fire-breathing Dragon. Some might laugh at that, but even today we have poisonous reptiles. The Spitting Cobra can shoot poison out of it's mouth for some distance. This poison can blind a man or burn the skin. So, I do not have a problem with a reptile actually breathing a chemical fire out of it's mouth. This creature also had armor plating (vs, 15-17) like many dinosaurs.

As I said, I could be mistaken. But these sound like tremendous reptiles to me. I believe the dinosaur may have still been alive in Job's time. In fact, I believe dinosaurs could have been alive (though very rare) up until the middle ages.

I do not see why a Bible believeing Christian would have trouble with this. God describes Satan himself as the Great Dragon.

 

This conversation has been had before. Cedars come in all shapes and sizes. The most common are long and skinny, and whispy at the branches.

That aside, the fact that the word means "water-ox" cannot be skirted.

Same arguement. The Hebrew "levyathan" is, among other things, what the hebrews used to call the crocodile. The NIV and NASB footnotes refer to it as a crocodile. The Amplified Bible reads "the leviathan, the crocodile", while the NLT translates the verse "crocodile" directly.

That aside, dinosaurs are all terrestrial animals that spend all of their lives on land. The animal here is described to live in the water.
Dinosaurs are all terrestral animals that spend all of their lives on land, unlike Leviathan who lived only in the sea.

It is only in imaginative stories does any animal breathe fire and smoke.

Again, as with the leviathan, there need be no concerns from persons of a YEC belief, since understanding the leviathan to be a crocodile does not in any way refute the YEC position, nor does it bolster an evolution position. Yet some YECers will require this to be a dinosaur as if it were gospel.

 

Johnv said,

"It is only in imaginative stories does any animal breathe fire and smoke."

No, it says it right in God's Word.

Job 41:21 His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.

Here we have God's word saying this great creature breathed fire. We also have the many tales from many civilizations all over the world throughout the centuries that fire-breathing dragons existed. Now, I'm am sure many of these stories might be pure myth, but it is possible that some may be quite true.

Here is a page on dragon history.

http://www.genesispark.org/genpark/history/history.htm

Today, if a person considers that dragons may have existed, they are thought to be interested in the occult, or some kind of nut-case.

I am neither.

No, I read God's Word. There is a dragon we know. It is described in Revelation.

Another very interesting thing about ancient tales of Dragons is that they TALKED.

Sound crazy??

Job 41:3 Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft [words] unto thee?

If God said it, it's true.

 

This is an analogy for power. It's a common and powerful scriptural analogy that is used in Revelation as well.

 

" Helen and I have but it violates your preconceived parameters so you dismiss it with much hand waving and plentiful "verbage" as mentioned by the other poster."

Somewhere in the last few days, I gave you credit (without your named attached) as the only poster to actually attempt a response that I can recall.

Now, as I recall the conversation, your best answer was that the original whale "kind" was likely a land dwelling animal. This does, neatly, address much of the evidence. And that you gave such an answer encouraged me that you were really thinking about the issue and not just spouting words.

But there are a few problems. The first, and most important, is that your answer underscores my complaints about arbitrary answers. The evidence was good enough for you to suggest that maybe whales really did come from the land, but then you arbitrarily dismiss other similar evidence from other similar cases. It is not consistent.

To complete the thought, you also require an extremely rapid change from the original "kind" to the forms we see today. It is a fairly significantchange and whales are not exactly small animals with short generation times. Even more problematic is that it does not address exactly why a whale should be most closely related by genetics to a creature like a camel. That detail is unreasolved.

I cannot recall Helen ever addressing the whale evidence. Though I have recently asked.

" So please tell me why it is unreasonable to accept that God did it."

Because of the arbitrary nature of the response.

I say a whale and a camel should specifically be closely related genetically. You have no reason to connect these two particular groups.

And it goes on and on. I can easily predict that birds and crocodiles should be closely genetically related. You cannot give any reason why these two particular groups should be.

The question to be asked is what interpretation best explains the evidence that we observe. As new information comes in, it will either support your interpretation or contradict it. Support tells you that you are on the right track. Contradiction tells you that you need to rethink your theory.

The first observation that gets discussed is morphology. Now if we look at the animals that are alive today and the animals that the fossil record tells us were alive in the past, we see that the form a nested heirarchy. All by itself this could mean that all of these animals were produced by common descent or by common designer. (As a note, I am not trying to set up a false dilemma here. I recognize that there may be other explanations that could be put forward but I am purposely restricting the discussion to the two possibilities under discussion.) So you have to go to the next observation.

The next most obvious observation is genetic. If you examine all the different types of genetic material that has been tested and use it to construct phylogenic trees, you find that you get much the same pattern as you do when you arrange the fossils by morphology. Let's see how these observations stack up.

One easy test is to look at just the functional genes. These can again be used to support common descent or a common designer. Both will claim that creatures that are the most similar should have the most similar DNA.

But you can start to untangle the two by looking into further types of genetic material that is not related to the functional part of DNA. One example would be to look at retroviral inserts. These happen when a virus inserts part of its genome into its host. If this happens in a reproductive cell, then the genome of the virus can be passed on to the offspring. Since this has nothing to do with the functional part of the genome, it can shed light on the situation for us. For example, if common descent were true, then you would expect the retroviral DNA to show the same pattern as the other lines of observation. If a common designer were the true explanation, then you would expect a random distribution of the retroviral inserts when compared between the species. In fact, you see that the pattern follows that which would be expected of common descent. The common designer option cannot explain this pattern.

If you take the retroviral discussion and repeat it with things like paralogs, pseudogenes, retrotransposons and such you will find the same result. One pattern would be predicted by common descent and another by a common designer but the patterns only fit that of common descent. For example, whales have a complete set of psuedogenes identical to what land based animals possess for their sence of smell. If whales evolved from land based ancestors, this is easily explained. But if they were recently created as is, there is no reason for them to possess such useless genes. A common designer advocate is forced into giving an arbitrary, ad-hoc explanation for this observation.

From here let's move on to other topics. Let's first loook at atavisms. Atavistic legs on whales. Two extra toes on horses. Unfused leg bones in horses. Atavistic tails on humans. The observation is that these atavisms ONLY manifest themselves in a pattern consistent with the phylogenic trees generated from the other lines of evidence. The atavisms only make parts that were possessed by their ancestors in the common descent interpretation. You never see atavisms that fail to follow this pattern. Common descent offers a simple explanation. The common designer option gives no reason why we should expect whales to have genes for making legs of humans to have genes for making tails. They are again forced into capricious explanations.

Development tells a similar story.This has the potential to get rather complicated, so I'll stick with an example already in play. We observe that whales go through a developmental stage in which they possess rear legs. Again, this shared developmental trait follows the same pattern as the other lines of evidence. Common descent offers a simple reason for this to be the case. A common designer has no logical reason to send whales through a stage with legs which must later be reabsorbed.

This can keep going for a long time. If you look at other areas of evidence, you keep coming back to the observation that all the bits always fit the tree that you get from morphology and genetics. This is true for parahomlogy. This is true for vestiges. This is true for the chronology of the fossils. Every observation that you make brings you back to these same trees.

So the question is which interpretation of the data fits the observations. The answer is that common descent offers a simple and compelling answer for each one. A common designer can be hypothesized for some of the observations but for many of the observations, the evidence is the opposite of what would be expected. The only recourse for YEers is to ignore these contradictions. They must ignore so much.

 

Here the Lord uses leviathan and dragon in the same verse.

Isa 27:1 In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that [is] in the sea.

How do you know the Lord is not describing a real creature? Afterall, these are remarkably similar to dinosaurs. I believe they were a particular dinosaur. I also disagree that all dinosaurs lived on land. Some probably lived in the seas, and some probably lived on both land and sea.

 

Here, "leviathan" is referring to a great serpent. It has nothing to do with the leviathan of Job. They're two separate instances and contexts. To attempt to relate them in this manner is a twist of scripture.

The Isaiah verse is an analogy. Read the whole verse and chapter in context.

That's simply untrue. Dinosaurs were strictly land animals. You're not well-versed on the dinosaur topic, and I don't expect the typical person to be, so it's not a bad reflection upon you.

 

Friend, in this thread the question was "which was more reliable....?" Now I have indicated that I believe that the Bible is 100 percent. I also believe that science is less than 100 percent. Why then are you trying to drag me into a discussion on whales? I am not answering the question you wish me to.

Now, as I understand it, you have no argument with my assertation that the Scriptures are 100 percent reliable. Are you honestly insisting that science is 100 percent reliable too?

For the sake of this thread all I have to show is that science is less than 100 percent reliable in order to support my position. I think I have demonstrated that.

It serves no purpose to go into your details as we could discuss them Until The End Of The World and not come to an agreement.

It is fine that you wish to discuss this matter. But may I humbly submit that there may be others who wish to talk about something other than the whales and your other "data."

It isn't a distraction to talk about method and philosophy in science. You are suggesting that your conclusions can't be doubted. I have yet to see one logical argument from you to support that. Actually the burden of proof is on your theory.

In my opinion your constant appeal to the "data" is an attempt to distract from the nakedness of your underlying assumptions.

The answer is: "GOD made it that way." That answer interprets the data correctly. Your interpretation is only required when you either leave GOD out of it or you insist on a naturalistic explanation that you can understand. Or maybe if you have the idea that GOD made as some puzzle for you to enjoy. GOD didn't tell you the details. GOD didn't tell me the details either. Truth isn't determined by our understanding of it.

Funny! But I will answer as if it were a serious statement. Of course GOD used the same kind of components to make the different creatures. It testifies to GOD's glory that he was able to produce such a variety of creatures using similar (and even maybe the same kind of) building blocks.

Would you assume your television set evolved? It has a lot in common with your computer. We can even see similarities with your kitchen blender. Does that demonstrate an organic connection? Internal to these devices we can find a multitude of similarities. Yet they don't even have a common designer!

If an engineer makes two different designs he often reuses the same techniques and component types for the newer device. That doesn't prove his devices are organically connected. The connection is in the mind of the engineer.

And what would you expect? Would it satisfy you if every creature was based on a different element (rather than all carbon)? I doubt it. How exactly would you expect the data to look given that GOD created life without evolution?

And why would you think GOD created life? If evolution is the mechanism you have no need for a creator. If there is a creator then there is no need for evolution. I found the fence too painful to sit on for a long time. Since the fence seems to be made of barbed wire I suggest you may wish to be careful as you remove yourself from it.

Then you are obviously and entirely mistaken. "Different is not the same."

If you recall from my earlier post the sequence is " observation, theory, experiment, theory, experiment some more." Theory comes after the observation. It is silly to think that it is always all done at the same time. It is a frequent occurrence that the confirmation comes much later than the theory.

The theories of orbital mechanics were not confirmed by experiment until Sputnik and other satellites were orbited. Experiments confirm if you have fully understood all of the parameters involved. You don't need to test with exactly the same parameters. In fact, you usually want to test a theory with different parameters. Testing with exactly the same parameters adds no new data. The orbits of mall bodies and of large bodies are described with the same kinds of parameters. The math is identical.

For regular objects Newton's is exact with the limits of measurement. Einstein is only needed for things that are outside normal experience. We are pretty sure about Relativity but it hasn't been fully verified. The distinction between a law and a theory is real.

Not at all-it goes to the heart of what I am saying. The science of weather has made much progress but is far from exact. The weather man makes statements according to probabilities. His predictions are only general in nature. The atmospheric system is (as of yet) too complex to treat as an exact science.

Nice try but rather nebulous. Maybe you should start a new thread and give references. Besides, you will need that time machine to prove what actually happened. What actually happened (not what can be done in a lab) is what is in question.

GOD Bless,
A.F.

 

Those explanations are discounted not because they are not possible, but because they are not scientific. They may be excellent theological explanations, something that science cannot comment on. The problems come when we want our theologies to sound scientific and our science to sound theological.

 

Again, you are mistaken. In the most technical sense we don't normally use the word "proof" for the "physical laws." However, for the sake of this discussion, to draw that distinction is just plain silly. Normally we would say "verify." However the word "verify" is synonymous with "prove" in any normal use.

I can verify Faraday's Law of induction all day long. Any first year physics student can verify F=MA. There are a long list of scientific laws and theories which can be fully verified.

To compare any verification of physical laws with a "verification" of evolution would be a gross misrepresentation. That is because the physical laws have been tested every way imaginable and found to hold in all cases. No one, however, has been able figure a way to test Darwin (and friends).

So, for you to say "nothing in science is even proven" in this context is misleading in the extreme.

 

Perhaps you are referring to a plesiosaur. Even though our old textbooks lumped them all together the experts get huffy if you call a plesiosaur "a dinosaur."

A.F.

 

"Now, as I understand it, you have no argument with my assertation that the Scriptures are 100 percent reliable. Are you honestly insisting that science is 100 percent reliable too?"

The Bible is completely reliable. God's general revelation in the Creation is also completely reliable. Both are subject to the ambiguous interpretations of fallible man. So the same problems are experienced when looking at either.

"Why then are you trying to drag me into a discussion on whales? I am not answering the question you wish me to."

I am trying to drag anyone in to it.

The claim is always made that everyone has the same data and they simply come at it with different suppositions and that YE can equally as well if not better account for the observations.

I am merely giving a group of YEers that opportunity. Here is a decent case for the evolution of whales based on observation. If YE really has good explanitory powers, maybe someone will show me why you would expect a common designer to give whales all of the various things we observe about them.

No one seem to have a reason.

"The answer is: 'GOD made it that way.' That answer interprets the data correctly."

Ahhhhh. The answer given when there is no other.

The answer that reduces our all powerful God to a bumbling designer with an inefficient process.

And, just as I said earlier, the answer is an arbitrary answer with no ability to be tested.

You have absolutely no basis on which to suggest that you would expect an intelligent designer to make a whale more closely related to a camel than to anything else. It is not an explanation. It is a catch all for an idea without a connection to reality. Whatever is found, no matter how contrary to your position, you can just claim that God did it that way for some unknown reason. If your logic, or lack thereof, is challenged, you just switch gears and pretend that your opponent is doubting God instead of you. Convenient... but baseless.

"Of course GOD used the same kind of components to make the different creatures."

But many of the best bits of evidence have nothing to do with design. The use of shared retroviral inserts is one powerful way to trace ancestry. You insult our perfect God by suggesting that He would randomly distribute bits of viral DNA into the genomes of various organisms in just such a pattern that they fit what would be expected based on phylogenies obtained from other methods. It is a farce to suggest such.

"And what would you expect?"

I outline some of the expectations I would have if life were recently and individually created above. You missed it?

http://www.baptistboard.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/3/3155/6.html#000084

Last half or so of the post.

"And why would you think GOD created life? If evolution is the mechanism you have no need for a creator. If there is a creator then there is no need for evolution."

[sarcasm]Planets orbit the sun due to gravity. There is no need for angels to push them around and around. If there is a perfectly logical force of gravity to explain the orbits, there is no need for God.[/sarcasm]

God created the natural laws that sustain the universe. You cannot just arbitrarily select one ssytem of natural laws and say that they eliminate the need for God. One you do so for one, then you have no logical reason not to say that you can eliminate God by showing that anything operates under natural laws.

God's method of creation is written in the creation. He used infaltion to create the universe and evolution to create the life on this planet.

"For regular objects Newton's is exact with the limits of measurement. Einstein is only needed for things that are outside normal experience. We are pretty sure about Relativity but it hasn't been fully verified. The distinction between a law and a theory is real."

The orbit of a planet is outside normal experience?

Newton was useful, but incomplete. Relativity is more complete. In many everyday experiences, the inaccuracies imposed by using Newton are drowned out by our inability to measure that accurately and by uncertainity caused by other factors. But they are still there.

"Not at all-it goes to the heart of what I am saying. The science of weather has made much progress but is far from exact. The weather man makes statements according to probabilities. His predictions are only general in nature. The atmospheric system is (as of yet) too complex to treat as an exact science."

You make my point for me.

The atmosphere is too large and complex to directly manipulate. Yet we can still study it through the scientific method. There is yet much we do not know and the chaotic natire of the atmosphere may make it difficult to make detailed predictons no matter how much we know. But we can still study it and attempt to understand how it works.

"Nice try but rather nebulous."

I guess you have never heard of experiements with flies and bacteria and fish and reptiles and all sorts of organisms where they are put under some sort of pressure and watched to change?

 

Perhaps you are referring to a plesiosaur. Even though our old textbooks lumped them all together the experts get huffy if you call a plesiosaur "a dinosaur."

A.F. </font>[/QUOTE]For good reason.

Dinosaurs are archosaurs while plesiosaurs are sauropterygians.

It would be somwhat like the response you would expect if you claimed that some marsupial was really a placental mammal.

 

Some questions to ponder:

Before the Flood, man lived up to 969 years. I don't think it's any stretch to believe that animals also lived much longer as well.
Thus, for the animals that never stop growing, how large would they get over several hundred years? Would their skeletal remains be different than their ancestors today?

When God created the earth in Gen. 1, did it contain coal and oil?
When God cursed the ground in Gen. 3:17, did things in the ground change (e.g. rocks, sediment)?

 

Ute, if you go back you will probably find that I refused to call what you proposed impossible. I don't think there is sufficient evidence to support it as "fact" or anything close to "fact".

My primary point is that life descends from other life. It derives its information from previous generations through DNA. That in and of itself points away from a general trend toward greater complexity and variability and toward a loss of variability and the "fixing" of genetic traits.

 

UTE, That smells of hypocrisy. Assuming naturalism vice intelligence or supernatural force is arbitrary... and you not only accept it, you demand it.

 

This is a completely fallacious line of reasoning not at all worthy of your intelligence... except that it is necessary to support evolution.

Take the equines living today. If only the Clydesdale survived and we had nothing but a mix and match of bones and hoof prints from all of the other kinds... you could easily create a "morphology" to explain how the Shetland pony evolved up through the donkey, zebra, Arabian... to finally arrive at the great Clydesdale.

The only place these morphologies come from is the imagination of evolutionists and their artists.

 

Likewise evolutionists ignore such contradictions and call them anomolies... and if you are honest you will acknowledge that this is true.

You accused someone of God in the gaps earlier in different words. But evolution is guilty of "naturalism in the gaps". Any explanation is good enough no matter how unlikely or far-fetched so long as it supports evolution overall and does not depend on anything other than natural forces.

 

Those explanations are discounted not because they are not possible, but because they are not scientific.</font>[/QUOTE] That is an arbitrary, philosophical assumption that is in no way scientific itself. "Naturalism" does not equal "science". Science observes and studies nature however it is completely unscientific to discount any explanation that might be "true".

They may be excellent philosophical explanations but science cannot comment on natural history then since it cannot be observed and directly studied. The study of the evidence requires far too many assumptions (like proofs for God) to be considered a sound basis.

Evolution is founded on a theological/philosophical assumption... not a scientific one. It is founded on the assumption that God is not necessary to account for what we see in nature. That assumption simply cannot be tested or falsified therefore it is not scientific... by the definition provided by naturalists themselves.

 

Sorry, Scott, it does not so point. The creationist personal refusal to see how evolution theory proposes complexity and variation arise does not in itself constitute evidence that complexity and variation did not arise.