Gimme a Break, CMI!

If Wikipedia is "biassed" - which I agree - this does not mean it is worthless (Shaun Doyle was saying biassed eyewitness accounts are not worthless the other day, on subject of proving Resurrection).

BUT, what's more, what about this whining?

When you consider who “the mob” is on Wikipedia, it is that subset of people who have access to the internet, know about Wikipedia and care enough about it to make changes on it—and additionally have the technical expertise to do so (since modifying Wikipedia is a bit like using programming language). Wow! Come to think of it, that is a pretty specialized group, isn’t it?

Paul Price, two observations:

• in the classical way it is not like using programming language as much as it is like using html.
• I have learned both in passing, as needed, so can you and lots of people on CMI, and so can lots of the readers of CMI.

So, your article has as upshot to basically demonise wiki and those consulting it. As either part and parcel of the ambient, pro-evolutionist, culture, or willing or likely to despite themselves get duped by it.

Well, where does that leave classical encyclopedias and other works of reference, and those using them? The editors are an even MORE specialised and narrowly chosen group.

Now, you actually had a story worth telling to tell. You ARE (or were) a wikipedian, and you were banned for not taking Eugenie Scott's judgement as well founded.

However, the line:

Eugenie Scott and Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education called Sarfati's Refuting Evolution 2 a "crude piece of propaganda".[6]

is, according to your own saying, factually correct. You objected to it, because it could be considered by some as saying sth about Jonathan Sarfati. But it is, from our point of view, equally revealing of Eugenie Scott.

Whome, btw, I recently contacted on FB, over her primary expertise on "biological anthropology" which presumably would include Neanderthals. I wanted an adverse reviewer's pov, and she hasn't answered so far. Perhaps she won't, and this also says sth about her? Or perhaps she will, and there will be an interesting debate ... (I am not holding my breath).

If you have basics in sifting fact from evaluation, you are likely to get sth out of wikipedia. If you haven't, what are you doing reading or writing anyway?/HGL

Paul Price answers below, in comments:

CMI sometimes admires the wrong men

... like with Luther or with Isaac Newton or Galileo (and not for his abjuration).

But with Jordan Peterson, no such mistake:

Is Genesis psychology or history? A response to Jordan Peterson
by Lita Cosner and Paul Price | Published: 26 July 2018
https://creation.com/peterson-bible-stories

Neanderthal - speculations and certainty

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Neanderthal's Language · Creation vs. Evolution : Neanderthal - speculations and certainty · HGL'S F.B. WRITINGS : Neanderthal Pre- or Post-Flood? Me and Roger Pearlman ... · Neanderthal Flute · Neanderthals as Elves and Trolls and as Pre-Flood · Elves, Trolls, Pre-Flood - Continued

Let's put my certainty first : Neanderthal was pre-Flood. The parts of the Neanderthal genome that survive do so via a daughter in law of Noah who, as a woman, had no Neanderthal or other Y chromosome, and as having a mother as Cro-Magnon as Noah had no Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. This explains perfectly why these two parts of El Sidrón genome are missing whereever we find Neanderthal alleles in our times or after carbon dated perhaps 40 000 or perhaps 35 000 BP. As Neanderthals were wiped out, the last of them, by the Flood, there is no reason why any particular fault in their brain tissue should have made them extinct, if there was a fault, it was a moral one, in not sufficiently agreeing with Noah to allow God to withdraw the threat of a Flood. Moral faults come in all classes of talents, except the very untalented. And that, the Neanderthals were not.

Now, for the speculation.

Some people speculate that if Neanderthal spoke, having larynx very high would have put their voice at a high pitch (also leaving little room for modulation of it). Since their larynges have not been found and the conclusion comes from bones like skull floor, this is uncertain, but could well be true.

Some Neanderthals in Belgium had a diet including fellow men and woolly rhino, and some in Spain had one mainly vegetarian one, like pine nuts.

One reconstruction of Neanderthals has them as very, monstruously, muscular. Others have them look a bit more like Finns, except browridges are larger and chins smaller.

What we do not know is whether Neanderthals were real fully human men, all of them, or "giants of old" - none of which found wisdom (a never countered proclivity to debasing themselves into bad behaviour, as noted in Baruch 3) or whether some of them were human and humane, some more like very degraded ex-humans.

I think the truth either is between the latter two, or, if the former, at least some Neanderthals imitated nephelim or giant behaviour. To which cannibalism belongs.

Now, could Neaderthal nephelim really be coherent with a daughter in law of Noah being of that stock? Well, it seems in Welsh lore (real post-Flood in Arthurian, or loosely modelled on pre-Flood times) one giant called Yspaddadden had a very different behaviour and physique from his daughter Olwen. Perhaps gianthood occurred only on the male side. Perhaps that daughter in law was the daughter of a rape victim, raped by a Neanderthal giant.

Or perhaps, Neanderthals were essentially still men, but by morals some approached nephelim. And the daughter in law of Noah who was part Neanderthal was daughter in a marriage where the Neanderthal man did not.

Either way, stories of trolls and of elves could have come from Japheth's family inheriting pre-Flood lore about Neanderthals.

How, you may wonder?

You meet Neanderthals engaging in cannibalism, you see their physique and you survive (perhaps you more observed than actually met them) - and you tell a story of trolls.

You hear Neanderthals singing or playing flute or speaking in high voices which may have sounded like countertenors - and nothing happens to you beyond an aesthetic experience - and you tell a story of elves.

And these stories were known to some on the Ark, naturally Japheth's wife (if she's the Neanderthal half breed one) and probably quite a few more, probably all, but in Japheth's line these stories survive as family history. Especially where Gomer is concerned (Celtic and Germanic peoples would descend from him). By the times going by, the stories are somewhat distorted, but not very much, imagined in closer by times, mingled with other marvellous or really supernatural and so on.

And if I am right in my hope that Neanderthals were not automatically nephelim, there would have been really beneficient "elves" too, even if rarer than the luring and ultimately malevolent ones. Tolkien elves and not just Erlenkönig elves, if you see what I mean by the literary references.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Camillus of Lellis
18.VII.2018

The premiss in the previous that Neanderthals sounded as talking with speech handicaps, I did change my mind on. I am glad I put it as "speculation" since I think Neanderthals may well have sounded fairly normal. They were certainly capable of normal purposeful behaviour.

What an Occasion!

I found this article - by an Evolution believing probable Atheist, quote and then link:

Let’s imagine a Creationist World (CW), where some rational agent called “God” made everything. In CW, the ultimate explanation for everything about the human race leads back to one first principle: God. In this world we could ask: “Why are there many races, cultures, and languages in this world?” The answer is: “Because God wanted there to be many different humans.” Likewise for other questions; “Why are there two sexes and not one or three?”, “Why are there three spatial dimensions?” In this fictional world, all questions would end up being answered ultimately by “God”, and this would include questions of physics and biology. The division of faith and reason would be different in the Fictional World, and science would perhaps be a sub-field of theology.

God vs. the Fact/Value Distinction
December 31, 2015 Adam Voight
https://adamvoight.wordpress.com/2015/12/31/a-critique-of-the-factvalue-distinction/

Well, Adam, who says that CW (Creationist World) is fiction?

But let’s say that in this world we have some ignorant Dogmatic Atheists. In spite of the existence of a well-founded theory that explains physics, biology and ethics in a set of parsimonious and coherent laws, there are a few ‘irreligious extremists’ who refuse to ‘believe in’ God. I put ‘believe in’ in quotes because CW atheists are different from atheists in our world. In CW, there are very few people who think that God does not exist (‘metaphysical atheists’) , since God has been proven to exist by secular CW cosmology and biology. In CW, atheists tend to believe that even though a God exists, this God has no right to boss us around with his so-called ‘Moral Law’. We shall call these atheists ‘axiological atheists’ (or ‘AA’); they might say that “Sure God made us, but who is He to force us to suffer and die for no good reason? I never voted him God! He might send me to Hell for saying this, but that would just be yet another wrong done to humanity by God. Just because God can enforce his so-called ‘laws’ does not make him right. After all, you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. That would be the naturalistic fallacy.”

Well, there seems to be an inverted parallel to Axiological Christians in "our real world" or sth ...

Does the AA have anything to say for himself? Not much, He can call the CWTs ‘reductionists’, since they try to ‘reduce’ value statements to factual statements. But the application of this label only seems compelling to people who have an ethics without any basis in fact. It’s hard to see how you can ‘explain’ anything at all without ‘reducing’ it to something else. Since Aristotle, ‘explanation’ has come to mean ‘to subsume a particular under a wider universal’, with said universal being agreed upon by all or most of those who would know. In rejecting what he calls ‘reductionism’, in this way, the AA has also rejected the basis of all explanation.

Two observations:

• Making the fact-value distinction such that they are totally independent of each other is obviously not correct Thomism, it is instead the pseudophilosophy of Kant. If even as much as just that.
• However, reductionism has a meaning. There is such a thing as a basic imperative, which then applies to fact. It is "do good, avoid evil". Obviously, what is good and what is evil has to be about facts. Life and mind are in the category good, insensitivity and death in the category evil. But one can indeed imagine men who knowing all the facts chose to ignore the imperative, who knowingly chose to do evil - because of lesser goods it does them, like excitement or feeling of power and so on.

This is of course why the tenet that we DO in actual fact live in a Creationist World and that it is the Evolutionist World which is fiction has to be defended. While some people will ignore the implications of evolution, while others will try to cumbrously mitigate antiethical consequences (or some of them, Feminism as Marxists see it is also antiethical, and Adam Voigt does not seem to be against that), this is bound to crumble in a society which blinded by state or corporation sponsored brainwashing about "facts" like "millions of years" or "we evolved from mindless things", some will in fact start to explore the ethical consequences of Evolution.

I think, unlike Adam Voight, they are ultimately un-Ethical.

Let's take the five ways and see how each way somehow (divorced from what follows in following parts of the Summa) could be replaced with an Atheist and Evolutionist equivalent.

• I God as first mover could be replaced by energy.
• II God as first cause could be replaced by matter/energy.
• III God as first necessary being could be replaced by "atomic" matter.

In some of the updated versions, since Einstein, probably matter would itself be a form of energy, and therefore all three first ways have "energy" instead of God. This seems to be fairly on the "facts-side" of any fact-value distinction, and therefore not have much ethical consequence, or perhaps have non-ethicality as consequence. There are two more.

• IV The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But "more" and "less" are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God. - Here the noblest thing would be, on Atheistic view, whatever is "most evolved" ... and next brings us to meaning of "evolved":
• V The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God. - This intelligence, atheism denies, and puts in its place "failure of all that can fail".

Let's list some type cases:

• 1) Universe would on their view exist because singularity failed to stay lumped together.
  
  
• 2) Solar system would on their view exist because gasses and dust got so heavy they failed to stay aloof. Remains going through inertia and gravity. No free activity nor lightness allowed.
  
  
• 3) Abiogenesis - this seems not to apply, but that is an exception. In fact, failure of all that could have failed would realistically have led to NON-development of life.
  
  
• 4) Biological evolution - failure of less adapted forms favours the more adapted (and somehow this replaces the need for intelligence in adaptions).
  
  
• 5) Agriculture - was invented because hunting failed.

This means, the ultimate hero in evolutionary cosmology is - death.

As I don't believe this is true, I don't believe the ethical consequences of such a view either. But I think the view exists, at least in hiding in a more explicit form than usually stated, closer to how I did it, and will be produced again and again as long as evolutionary cosmology keeps getting the promotion it gets, and sooner or later will come out pretty quickly and openly - and it will not be pretty. National socialism was one try at it, Communism an even more thorough one (unlike NS putting nations on the "has to die" list, as such, while NS preferred putting specific nations there), and it was not pretty. Transgenics is not pretty. Transhumanism is not pretty.

It is probable some of the very not at all pretty ethics in administrations (abortion, contraception, specific homo-rights as opposed to them sharing normal rights and duties, psychiatry, child welfare, school compulsion) partly is under cover planned by people overtly being that kind of death cult, and even more probable that Evolution and Kant each in their own way (for Kant, see Hannah Arendt's comments on Eichmann), contribute on a not quite conscious level to what is horrible in modern society. As a kind of sacrifice or hymn to "death" and "necessity".

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Seven sons of Saint Felicity
Martyrs in Rome*
10.VII.2018

* Romae passio sanctorum septem Martyrum fratrum, filiorum sanctae Felicitatis Martyris, id est Januarii, Felicis, Philippi, Silvani, Alexandri, Vitalis et Martialis, tempore Antonini Imperatoris, sub Praefecto Urbis Publio. Ex ipsis vero Januarius, post virgarum verbera et carceris macerationem, plumbatis occisus; Felix et Philippus fustibus mactati; Silvanus praecipitio interemptus; Alexander, Vitalis et Martialis capitali sententia puniti sunt.

Trying to Break Down "Reverse Danube" or "Reverse Euphrates" Concept

Creation vs. Evolution : How Much was Shinar Devastated by the Flood? · You Find a Fossil Whale Here, a Fossil Pterosaur There ... · Answering Carter and Cosner on Eden · Trying to Break Down "Reverse Danube" or "Reverse Euphrates" Concept · Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl : With Damien Mackey on Four Rivers and Related, I to X · Continuing Previous, XI to XX - are Nile Rivers Excluded? · Continuing Previous : XXI to XXXIII - getting to Troy (as we Tend to Do)

If we say that pre-Flood Frat went South to North from where Persian Gulf is, along present Euphrates or roughly, continued into Danube going from Dobrugea to where the Alps now are and continuing from there to Rhine and Seine and Garonne and on onto the Sea, or that pre-Flood Hiddekel went South to North along Tigris, continued North along Don or Volga and from there East to Syr Darya and Amu Darya and from then out into Yang Tse Kiang, and similarily divided the other first two rivers into North to South White and Blue Niles continuing into respectively Niger Kongo South of White Nile and Indus or Ganges East of Blue Nile, and a river in South Arabia between, because there is a Havilah there, then we are in a way squaring the circle of both affirming and denying identity of Four Rivers with present Hydrology : affirming partially and sufficiently to warrant Moses' language, denying however the complete identity.

We seem also to run into an explanation problem with CMI, who seem better at scientific theories worded in the words they are used to, their own or their adversaries', than at words of an unexpected ally.

I got a very bleak response from Robert Carter when posting the previous reply to him.

So, I'll try to break it down.

• one problem seems to be how ANY hydrology could survive the Flood at ALL;
• another seems to be how any drainage basin could have reversed its direction.

A river is not just a fairly narrow strip of water. It is a fairly broad so called drainage basin, which has smaller contributaries flowing to that strip of water. I agree that a 1 km broad strip of river bed could easily have been covered in sediment or wiped off with the surrounding walls as they eroded under Flood.

ONLY, this is not quite the case for drainage basins 100's or 1000's of kilometers in width.

If a very strong current during the Flood flowed simply along, it would enforce its already existing concavity. Either direction, upstreams or downstreams.

If it flowed instead across, this is less evident. If it flowed across and eroded, arguably it would leave a deepening and rounding of concavity. Only if it flowed across and deposed sediment, it would obfuscate the original concave shape.

My scenario actually argues this happened in places, since if I am right pre-Flood Frat would have been same basin along Euphrates, Black Sea/Kaukasus, Danube and Rhine, Seine and Garonne. But now Kaukasus cuts Euphrates off from Danube, and Alps cut Danube off from Rhine and the rest. And Danube cut off from Euphrates flows into Black Sea and Mediterranean, Euphrates cut off from Black Sea and Danube flows into Persian Gulf - where it originally, on my view, came from (unless from Jordan, as Damien Mackey would argue, where I have reservations at least for immediately pre-Flood times).

This partial cutting off of pre-Flood major drainage basins would explain also reversals of direction, at least combined with the rise of folded mountains in the post-Flood era, as water drained off into the sea.

Finally, a strip of new sediment in between older and harder stone - which a river bed as such could often be just after Flood - could be the bit which sudden drainages of dams broke through, since softer : this way Euphrates would in more than one place (North of immediate post-Flood mouth) actually coincide with pre-Flood Frat, except for direction, even as to river bed. I'll elaborate one point on parenthesis. South Iraq did not exist as land in immediate post-Flood times. Babel was arguably not near today's Babylon or Baghdad, as these were arguably under water. But Mesopotamia is also Assyria, which straddles NW Iraq, E Turkey and N Syria. And a plain in N Syria is just south of a hill in Turkey which is now known as Göbekli Tepe. It is nearly due NW from Babylon, and if Nimrod's successors moved, a move a bit more than 5° S and a bit more than 5° E would be a symbolic identity marker.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Ivry
VI Lord's Day after Pentecost
1.VII.2018

Update 5.VII.2018:

I was debating this with Damien Mackey, who seems to have some good reasons from Sirach to debunk PARTS of this solution. There Gihon does seem distinct from Nile. It could be Gihon is going the way of the Danube instead or it could be it is the Blue Nile, if Abyssinians made wine where they now make coffee. I'll not be dogmatic about each identification, since Church Fathers do not agree./HGL

Can Genesis stand after chapter 11 if you accept uniformitarian dates?

No.

Very simple : defending Genesis 19 and destruction of Sodom will involve you in young earth creationism, at least one tenet on carbon dating, as surely as defending Tower of Babel.

The reason is this:

• Ebla tablets and all later non-Hebrew tablets or papyri with an outlook on contemporary events do not mention Sodom;
• But Ebla tablets are carbon dated as starting c. 2400 BC;
• And destruction of Sodom (Genesis 19) is Biblically around 2000 BC or rather more recent, prior to which Sodom was a flourishing city, which allied to Abraham could take on marauders from Mesopotamia (Genesis 14-15).

If both Biblical dates for Sodom and Carbon dates for Ebla tablets are correct, it is a complete mystery why the ones holding archives at Ebla were not in diplomatic contact with Sodom.

But if Biblical date is correct, and Sodom was even so destroyed prior to Ebla tablets, then it follows that Ebla's carbon dates are off. By some centuries.

In my tables, Ebla tablets would be beginning after Joseph in Egypt. 1730 BC as burial of Joseph's Pharao Djoser would be misdated as 2600 sth BC by the originally lower carbon 14 level in his coffin. Therefore Ebla was beginning its archives between Joseph and Exodus, not before Abraham.

Again, another Classic on YEC territory, apart from "rising carbon 14 content in athmosphere" is Flood legends around the world. One of them is the Greek one. Some of the deviations in the Greek legend from Noah's flood is, on my view, not at all arbitrary "anything goes" but conflating Flood (kept) with Destruction of Sodom (rejected), and replacing Noah's family relations with a conflation of Abraham and Sarah's and Lot and his daughters'.

So, Greek Flood myth gives you the independent hint on Sodom which Ebla tablets deny.

But appealing to lower carbon content or legends around the world as support and explanation for dating discrepancy is precisely the kind of argument we YEC like to make, and some of you don't tend to accept. Are you willing to say Sodom wasn't defended by Abraham, inhabited by Lot and destroyed by fire, just so you can ditch that?

Jews, but hardly Christians, could instead appeal to "lost millennium". Between Exodus and Temple of Solomon, instead of 480, read 1480 years. Problem : this makes shipwreck of the genealogies of Christ in Matthew and Luke.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Ivry
VI Sunday after Pentecost
1.VII.2018