Disagreeing and Agreeing w some Protestant Y E C

Quoting an essay on Galileo Quadricentennial by Creationists denying Geocentrism:

Many historians of science have documented that the first to oppose Galileo was the scientific establishment, not the church. The prevailing ‘scientific’wisdom of his day was the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic theory—an unwieldy geocentric system, with the earth at the centre of the universe and other heavenly bodies in highly complex orbits around the earth. And it had its origins in a pagan philosophical system.

Hang on. Creationism adversaries among Liberal Theologians are saying that Creation in short period of time as well as a Global Flood (or flatworld-wide flood if earth had been flat) came from Babylonic Mythology.

To show that it was not mainly “religion vs science”, an example of the Church’s early attitude was shown by their top theologian, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. He said it was “excellent good sense” to claim that Galileo’s model was mathematically simpler, and:

“… If there were a real proof that the Sun is in the centre of the universe, that the Earth is in the third sphere, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and we should rather have to say that we did not understand them than declare an opinion false which has been proved to be true. But I do not think there is any such proof since none has been shown to me.”

Actually, Galileo had not proven his case at the time—indeed, his best “proof” involving the tides is now known to be wrong. It is unfair to judge the church according to knowledge they couldn’t have possessed at the time.

Theological knowledge the Church ought to have had since Jesus Christ. But I concede that Galileo had not proven his case at the time, unless you put too much stress on "at the time". The theory of tides I was taught in school comes from Sir George Darwin, grandson of the famous or infamous Charles.

But the Psalms are clearly poetic (not historical like Genesis), so were never intended to be used as a basis for a cosmological model.

Wonderful idea, if you dismiss poetry as inherently non-factual. The fact that psalms are poetry does not preclude them being science. It is a very modern notion that science has to be unpoetic and therefore poetry irrelevant to science, unfactual for instance.

Remember the Psalmist is ancestor of Our Lord. Who had a similar literary bent. We will make a comparison.

Take Psalm 93:1–2: “The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.” The next verse says that “[God’s] throne is established of old.” Here the same Hebrew word (כּוּןkôn) is translated “established” [i.e., stable, secure, enduring, not necessarily stationary, immobile]. Also, the same Hebrew word for ‘moved’ (מוֹטmôt) is used in Psalm 16:8, ‘I shall not be moved.’ Surely, even skeptics wouldn’t accuse the Bible of teaching that the Psalmist was rooted to one spot! He meant that he would not stray from the path that God had set for him.

Now, that reminds me of Our Lords parallelism between Pneuma and Pneuma (thank you very much, Owen Barfield):

John 3:[6] That which is born of the flesh, is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit, is spirit. [7] Wonder not, that I said to thee, you must be born again. [8] The Spirit breatheth where he will; and thou hearest his voice, but thou knowest not whence he cometh, and whither he goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

Douai-Reims has "spirit" in verse 8, but King James (read by Owen Barfield) has "wind" here. And indeed pneuma can mean either. If Our Lord used the physical wind as a parallel to the Holy Spirit and to the man born again of Holy Spirit, it would mean that the same words are used concretely about physical fact (with exact description) and also metaphorically about the faithful who is born again. That one word is used metaphorically about another faithful (physically it would be hard for a faithful to fulfill at once both roles, though Simon Stylites and Francis of Assisi came close to fulfilling them between them) does not hinder it being used literally in another psalm.

But the psalms was not all the Bible involved in the Process. There was also the Sun standing still and resuming its movement when Joshua had trouble getting a victory complete before nightfall. And surely THAT is history. On any Orthodox Christian view.

So moving the earth away from the centre was, in the context of the middle ages, actually exalting it. Rather, what really upset the establishment was Galileo’s discovery of blemishes on the sun (sunspots), precisely because it undermined the idea of perfect heavenly bodies.

Very correct.

But it is also very correct that the Church in the end condemned Galileo not for the blemishes on the Sun, but for exalting the earth up to the third heaven.

Even the antitheistic publication New Scientist admitted, “Galileo’s Catholic faith was completely unshaken by his discovery,” and wondered whether this counted against his greatness.

But his so called discovery was not unshaken by his faith.

One year before he died, while already blind, he was convinced by the argument given by his former friend Pope Urban VIII.

God was free to create the universe any way he wanted it to be. He was also free to make it appear any way he wanted it to appear.

Does that mean: "he could have created it geocentric and yet make it look heliocentric to test our faith"? No, it does not look directly heliocentric in the first place. Just like the earth does not look "billions of years old" in the first place.

The real filling in of the argument would be: It is therefore according to God's will that it appears geocentric, and God is free to have created it geocentric. Also, God is no liar.

A correspondent wrote on Biblical Age Objection (which linked to that previous page):

It is remarkable to see the extent to which humans can go to justify a preconceived notion. We have seen Christians make a stand on unjustifiable grounds before; for example when they believed that the sun orbited the earth and that the earth was the centre of the universe. The assertion that the earth can be reliably dated at 6000 years by biblical genealogy alone, and in the face of modern science, is surely rather childish, and it undermines the authority of the same folks who are trying to spread the gospel of Christ.

But the problem is that precisely Heliocentrism is a preconceived notion. As well as the idea of non-historic dating of earth. Who says there must be a dating method totally independent of the preeminent dating discipline history? Some details are answered pretty well by Don Batten. His answers on age dating beats my capacities in that respect. Read that link too, will ya!

Hans-Georg Lundahl
From Beaubourg G.P. Library
St Radegond's Day
13-VIII-2012

Grandeur

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." - The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

In a century as dedicated to grandeur as the XIXth, the C of Wagner and the late Beethoven, that must have been final, must it not?

From Antimodernism, February 5th 2006

Why Hate Creationism in Schools?

Just saw a video with the beautiful Autumn Lauber. The one about South Carolina primaries.

A lovely person, but ... Autumn, how come you hate Texas for saying Creationism should be taught alongside Evolution as two alternatives in science classes?

Are basically saying State should leave science class to each school and choice of school to each parent? Then I am with you. But somehow that sounds a bit more Tea Party than I heard you on politics so far.

You see, Southern Baptists do not have a monopoly world wide on not being used to people not thinking as they do. Growing up as a Creationist after my return to Sweden from Vienna, a return at age 11 and a half in 1980, and as a Creationist among Darwinists, I know something about people not being used to being with someone who thinks differently from them.

It is a trait which can work for good or for evil depending on which side has the upper hand. It is a trait that can be rationally motivated and limited to a proper use, or exaggerated, or abused.

If I am right, every time Darwinists use that trait and the upper hand against Creationists, they simply abuse it. If you are right, are you sure you do not exaggerate it?

Teaching Darwinism and up to Sarkozy very recently no creationism of any kind in French schools has not spared France some Islamist Terrorists, one could even say it has helped provoke the Islamic Sectarianism by its Secularist Sectarianism.

In Sweden it has bred a mentality among atheists where a Secularist like Anna Lindh could say that "Islam and Christianity are very close". True enough if by Christianity you mean the very watered down Lutheranism of Swedish State Church as it was up to year 2K, very different from the more traditional Lutheranism you know from your own family. I mean if they put up with doubts about Holy Trinity in some cases and put up with or even encourage a certain repressive teetotalism in others, are they very far from Muslims? No, but some Christians are.

Serbian Orthodox are pretty conservative as European Orthodox Christians go. Anna Lindh was foreign minister when Sweden decided to defend Kosova's Muslim Albanian majority against the Serbian attempt to drive them onto the Albanian side of the common frontier. And after Serbia was beaten, one Orthodox monastery had every monk killed, another the buildings burning.

Of course Serbia was to recently part of Yugoslavia where religious differences were played down Anna Lindh style. And where the Darwinism Anna Lindh believed in was taught in every school and Creationism was taught legally in no school. And Kosova was part of Serbia, and neighbouring Albania was even more Communist.

Anna Lindh was killed by a Serbian emigrant in Sweden. After he was declared criminally insane, a Serbian priest declared: "the word Kosovo" (I think he used the Albanian form, with -o) "was not mentioned in the process."

So, Anna Lindh for growing up like a Darwinist was neither exactly avoiding bloodshed in Kosova nor exactly avoiding it in Sweden, since her careless words provoked the killing of her.

If Darwinism is wrong, that is to be expected. If Darwinism is right, that doesn't help the fact that countries teaching it with obligation and excluding Creationism's scientific argumentations (or un-scientific, but scientific type) from science classes is in reality making for a trouble which it pretends to avoid. Albania, Serbia, Sweden. Cases in point. I suppose the gunmen at Columbine High School, Klebold and his pal, were Darwinists too.

If Christianity is true, some people risk an eternity in Hell for not hearing about it. If Darwinism is true, who risks what for not hearing about it? Intolerance on earth? But what if intolerance is being taught as much by Darwinism as by anything else? Is that a reason for the state to be intolerant in favour of Darwinism? Or do you think Evolution is part of some "Cosmic Enlightenment" necessary for the next "Nacaals" to avoid the next "Atlantis Catastrophe", or something? As you would kind of be guessing, we Christians do not agree.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Georges Pompidou Library
10th Sunday after Pentecost
5-VIII-2012

PS: I was going to write you a kind of love letter, but I think we might have these things to sort out - and if we do not it will not be appropriate.

PPS: I can realise why science teachers hate Texas. If they are, as most are for historical reasons, Darwinists. It would not be nice for them to voice the case against their convictions. And it would not be nice for them to hand over parts of their lessons to opponents. But is that a reason for everyone else to sympathise with them?

Christian Piatt is Wrong Here

It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. This is a little "joke" some Christians use to assert the superiority of opposite-sex unions over same-sex ones. But here's the thing: if you really believe the first and only two people on the planet at one point were Adam and Eve, who did their kids marry and have babies with? This, my friends, is incest (happened again if you believe Noah's family members were the only survivors of the great flood).*

A) It did not happen again at the flood, since Noah's family was his wife, his three sons and their three not sisters but wives. Generation after that you get cousins marrying, but that was not incest during the Old Testament (Catholic and Orthodox Church Law makes it incest during the New Testament).

B) It was not incest in the generation after Adam and Eve, because right in that generation siblings were the furthest away relatives you could possibly marry and have babies with.

C) Incest may be emotionally worse or less bad than sodomy. But before and above emotions there is objective goodness and badness of an act. We Catholics really believe the "having babies with" part is essential to the goodness of the marital act. We believe a married couple using condoms to avoid having children while having sex is committing a worse act than an incestuous couple making a baby. Adam and Eve really could make babies with each other. Adam and Steve cannot. Adah and Eve cannot. But Adam's sons could with Eve's daughters.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Mouffetard Library, Paris
St John Maria Vianney's Feast Day
4-VIII-2012

*Ten More Cliches Christians Should Avoid, nr 8.

Thunderf00t, Welcome to the World of P C

No, not P Z as in Myers, but P as in Politically, C as in Correct and all of it as in P Z Myers' attitude about your issue.*

Combatting sexism is of course very important on a community where P Z himself is shocking his wife (if he's married) continuously (well, every week) by stating how he prefers cephalopods to cats. Do I recall blogposts about brutally killed cats or is that just my imagination? Similarily about islamophobia when the whole concept is just a bit more anti-islmaic than Christianity traditionally is.

But to quit the quips, yes, there are people who are dreadfully PC, and when it comes to misogynism in others than himself, P Z is obviously sensitive about it.

Now, P Z, I am going to take a serious one about your other post on chromosome numbers. But this one is for thunderf00t.

There was a time when being an atheist was politically correct too. It was the one stand for the Puritanism of George Bernhard Shaw. A Calvinist who dedicated himself to deleting faith in God's freewill as much as his ancestors had deleted that in man's (you know the TULIP of Calvinism? T=Total depravity of man, U=Unconditional predestination ... in short, a man like Monty Collier who believes that stuff actually believes man has no freewill). There are about two ways of denying God's freewill. Outright denial of his existance or denying he is distinct from a universe which shows much of automatism and can be imagined - by Calvinist spooks - as totally automated.

And since being an atheist was politically correct, so was being a Darwinist.

In the monkey trial - Chesterton spoke of it as a contemporary - there was no side pretending the father should have a real choice as homescholing parents have. It was political correctness of either Calvinist or Atheist, either paleo-Calvinist or neo-Calvinist type imposed by whatever side got the upper hand in the trial and in similar trials and in other states and so on.

Now have you ever wondered how much you owe to a political correctness that your creationist ancestors (go back a few generations and do not limit creationist to creationist debaters, if you want to get my point correctly without any strawman, I am not saying you are a grandchild or greatgrandchild of Kent Hovind) would have reacted to exactly as you react to P Z Myers' attitude on Freethoughtblogs?

I have been posing that question to atheists and Darwinists in Sweden and been getting the response I am a conspiracy theorist. If conspiracy of equal stupidity, prejudice and ambition to exclude Christian good sense counts, then - and then only - do I stand guilty as charged. Except when it comes to fomenting that situation in the first place, there I am rather classical as conspiracy theorist.

Comments under my blogs are not 100% free speech. If someone does the verbal equivalent of what P Z Myers did with purportedly consecrated hosts, it will be deleted. If someone is consistently merely nasty about my own or someone else's person, it will be deleted. But apart from that, comments here are free speech. Up to you to estimate the percentage of free speech on those conditions, but you may feel welcome to drop a comment on science or philosophy or whatever whenever you like to.

Not meaning I am a scientist. I am a critic of modern science and believe that criticism can and should be done even by people not fully mastering the details of the disciplines they criticise - except they should try, and I try myself, to master the details of the specific points I criticise.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Beaubourg/Centre of
Georges Pompidou
19-VII-2012

Will probably be up on the blog by tomorrow. Done, 20-VII, with a few edits.

*FreeThoughtBlogs and PZ Myers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96FtpDLi_Vw

Now, here is a link to a debate I had on your fan page on FB
Thunderf00t's fan base - no full freedom of speech
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.fr/2012/07/thunderf00ts-fan-base-no-full-freedom.html

Creation vs Evolution series on my main blog

1 Creationism vs. Evolution, considering Thomism, Bi... 1 b Good and bad news 2 Chromosome numbers (first published on Communities... 3 Ancient Sea Scorpion ... (news with comment) 4 Old News, New News, Good News (link) 5 Update on chromosome numbers 6 Speciations observed - but not in mammals. 7 Citing, again, Ian Johnston 8 Non-replies 9 Chromosome numbers

I found a good link on Creation Ministries International

The main gist of the article deals with supposed impossibility of a recent flood with 8 human survivors as argued from "how could we be so many" and argues, as I had done myself in my high-school days (I was unlike Dr Don Batten a Creationist well before University and even before my Catholic Conversion), that the population growth implied is quite believable if you reason mathematically.

But he actually goes on from there to make an argument against the evolutionist scenario. I leave it to your own reading, since I link to the article (see below).

And - here is a point too, but one which I have been making much more recently - he says modern welfare society produces smaller families than rural societies. Here is where I will quote, since he makes a point and still does not get all of it:

What causes population growth?

The population grows when more people are born than die. The current growth rate of the world population is about 1.7% per year.2 In other words, for every 100 million people, 1.7 million are added every year; i.e. births net of deaths.

Many assume that modern medicine accounts for the world’s population growth. However, ‘third world’ countries contribute most of the population growth, suggesting that modern medicine is not as important as many think.

Population growth in a number of South American and African countries exceeds 3% per year. In many industrialized countries with modern medical facilities, the population growth is less than 0.5%. Some relatively wealthy countries are actually declining in population.

The move from agriculture to manufacturing/technology has been a big factor in slowing population growth in industrialized countries. Farmers needed to have sons to help with the farm work. This was particularly necessary before mechanization. My own family records show that in the early- to mid-1800s in Australia, couples commonly had 8–10 surviving children. One couple had 16! And this was before the discovery of the germ basis of disease,3 aseptic surgery,4 vaccines3 and antibiotics. Opportunity to expand, combined with biology, saw growth in population of 4% or more, plus increases due to immigration. High rates of population growth were also seen in Quebec, Canada, from 1760 to 1790, following the British conquest of Canada in 1759,5 and well before the impact of modern medical knowledge.

In industrialized countries, the advent of social security pensions and retirement plans (superannuation) has probably been another major factor in the decline of population growth. These schemes mean that people do not see the need to have children for security in their old age. Furthermore, people can now easily choose how many children they have because of modern birth control methods, such as the contraceptive pill.

Now, the problem with this latter approach is also, it will only work for so many generations. In Europe indigenous women (excluding immigrant and few immigrations after immigration) are below reproduction rate. That is: either welfare system will break down when there are too many old among the young, or it will be kept up for a time by immigration. But if ever immigrants of a non-European culture - or of a few non-European cultures combined - become the majority, they will hardly keep on paying to a welfare system which ruined the majority position of the previous majority population, us. Not because they are monsters with no sense of solidarity or brutal hatred of white men (some few at least are a bit like that too, but that is not my main point), but simply because they are not stupid.

If you inherited a house because previous owner ruined himself by opium abuse - would you want to keep the opium pipe smoking any longer than when you could stop it? The welfare system is the opium of the people, specifically of women. Solidarity naturally spells: couples raise children, grown children provide for aged parents. Aged people without children capable of looking after them are looked after by neighbours. And that is not an incentive for women to stay away from childbed and go to work, but the reverse.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
BU-UPJV, Beauvais
23-V-2012

Article cited:
Where are all the people?
by Don Batten
creation.com/where-are-all-the-people

Even if he is not a Catholic, he did provide an argument for Catholic sexual and family morality. Thank you!