Dawkins made a challenge, on knowing the past.
On Reading The Greatest Show by Dawkins - Parts of it!
Overlooked in Previous, about Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth
Medieval Matters for Richard Dawkins
Do evolutionists ever make unfalsifiable claims?
Two bishop Richards in dialogue (tongue in cheek)
Dawkins said Edgar Andrews had his book "well written" and that is one true word from him
Assortedretorts : ... on "Science Works" quote c/o Dawkins
... on Side issue to "Science Works"
It is from a video series from a debate held in Oxford between Richard Dawkins and Edgar Andrews, here:
Overall problem with this series, it is badly recorded. It is also less well recorded on Edgar Andrews' microphone than on Dawkins'. I hear Dawkins so much that I even suspect that the videos have been made by people who scrapped the parts where Edgar Andrews talked continuously and only took those where Dawkins did so or when Dawkins and Edgar both spoke. But here are anyway the links, and after each link there is a footnote to my comments on the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f0TPd01fJs (1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP06ow2or4k (2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqkTG4PPLgM (3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iguW8OXDM4 (4)
(1) Dawkins: His point of knowing the Roman Empire has been answered by me, basically saying that "records" in the historic sense are eyewitness records preserved, and so totally different from an absense of eyewitness records and a mere reconstruction (as with Proto-Indo-European and not Latin):
http://filolohika.blogspot.com/2012/05/dawkins-made-challenge-on-knowing-past.html
(2) His major point in favour of evolution, genetic similarity, was answered by a rebuttal by Edgar Andrews that there are similarities that are quite unrelated to common descent, like between two boxes.
His point that most genes of chimps and men are held in common is a valid point. It is not genetics, but metaphysics which preclude our supposed descent from something closer to chimps than to us, mentally:
(3) Here they discuss a supposed "orderly progression of species" in the fossile record, which is a bit bypassed by wikipedia. Do use the articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagerstatten
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_sites
Then look up these articles of mine:
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2012/11/do-evolutionists-ever-make.html
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2012/12/feedback-to-tas-walker-on-geological.html
His pleading that Darwinism is worthy of an expanding universe, a universe thousands of million years old, a universe of which earth is not the centre, is one I have answered by saying that his "universe we now live in" is not the true one, that the universe is comparatively small (though much huger than earth) and centred on earth:
http://triv7quadriv.blogspot.com/2012/11/distant-starlight-problem-answered-by.html
(4) It is possible to derive something from something slightly different, which arose from something slightly different, which arose from something slightly different ... so with enough steps, with enough generations, we can derive man from something like a bacteria.
Point answered by the fact that we are not just dealing with loci mutations, that is with mutations of genes on location within a chromosome, but with different numbers of chromosomes.
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2011/11/letter-to-nature-on-karyotype-evolution.html
His peroration was unfortunately very emotional. He called Creationism Blasphemy. I do not find that Christians should bow down to every Muslim who calls any Criticism whatsoever to Mohammed and to his supposedly divine revelation Blasphemy, but neither should we accept that Dawkins wants Oxford University to be the Evolutionist variety of Pakistan./HGL
(1, 2, 3, 4) Videos are no longer available (for some reason ...) - but my notes on them were written while they were so. You'll have to take that on faith from me./HGL
mardi 19 mars 2013
AronRa gets something right I suppose ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5kckGxwJr4
Dawkins once said - in a book I cannot find, but I think it was The Greatest Show on Earth, because that I did read about half of, when once I was guest of its possessor, whom I left the day after, since he was more interested in hashish than in food, fine for him, but not quite my style - that the fossiles are not actually needed. They are a plus, but Evolution is (if I recall this correctly) sufficiently proven by phylogony. Or phylogeny. Or whatever.
Evolution does not need the Taung skull and Evolution does not need the Piltdown man. Evolutionists usually do not use the Piltdown man any more. It was either discovered or fabricated by one Jesuit Father Pierre Theilhard de Chardin, whose spirituality was closer to New Age than to St Ignatius of Loyola. Funnily enough, when they speak of it, they use it as evidence not that Evolutionists are fraudsters, but that clerics are. But, after all, whether he was himself the fraudster or his nonclerical and equally Evolutionists friend in that dig was the fraudster, that cleric was very clearly an Evolutionist. His spirituality is since then flooding the Catholic Church in France, so that you need one of the guys who celebrate Latin Mass or even who call the last Popes since 1958 or 1978 frauds in order to get a Catholic priest in France who does not want to positively foist evolution on a Catholic convert from Protestantism.* Because, to them, Kent Hovind and Jonathan Sarfati were the guys that Trent Council condemned, and insisting on Seven Sacraments or Sacrifice of the Mass, or Special Priesthood, or 73 books (as opposed to 66), are merely minor points compared with accepting evolution, as accepted by modern "Church Fathers" like Theilhard de Chardin or Abbé Pierre. Neither of whom has the credentials of a Church Father**, since neither of them is a canonised saint.
But, still, to mainline Evolutionists (as opposed to clerical ones), Theilhard de Chardin's Piltown Man fossile is a fraud and a clerical fraud. Never mind that it is an Evolutionist fraud as well.
Is that stopping either Evolutionist clerics or Evolutionist atheists? No.
So, not saying Ica stones are a fraud, not saying sandal footprints beside dinosaur footprints are a fraud, but simply admitting they could be each or both be frauds, that does not make Young Earth Creationism any less credible to me. Nor does it make Evolutionism any more credible.
AronRa and myself up to age 9 have pretty similar intellectual histories. 11 is the age he found Creationism and did not accept it. 12 is the age I read Edgar Andrews' From Nothing to Nature (in the Swedish translation "Ur Intet") and accepted it.
AronRa is actually - or was then - wrong about Native Americans not wearing sandals but only moccasins. First of all, if he goes down to Perú, native Americans do wear sandals. Moccasins are as far as I know a North American, possibly or probably pre-Columbian invention. Second of all, supposing this was pre-Flood, we need not suppose the clothing styles of later Native Americans were inherited from back then. Later Native Americans, on any Creationist recconing, have branched out from Mount Ararat, like the rest of present humanity. And third, he was right about something. A human footprint plus a dinosaur footprint need not be considered Adam's just because they were pre-Flood.
But that also cuts both ways. Like dating methods - something which Edgar Andrews discussed in more detail than the footprints, though they were in that edition of his book** (I don't know if they are in second edition or not) - they just might not be any more accurate than the "dating" of those footprints to back 6000 years ago and thus to Adam himself.
But thank you so much for vindicating St George by pointing out how much some depicted dragons look like varanas. It is funny to consider this compared to people who want to say St George and the Dragon legend developed from Apollo Sauroctonus or from Perseus or something.
Now, unfortunately you do follow these people in accepting Job as "the oldest" book of the Bible. Now, if Moses wrote Job, it is contemporary, roughly speaking, to the Pentateuch. There are however people who place the Pentateuch way later saying it developed from Zoroastric Monotheism.
Now, Genesis being one of the "books of Moses" (excluding Job) does not mean all its content is contemporary with the Exodus. Moses did use older documentation. You see, when it comes to Theogony, or Qur'an or Book of Mormon, you have some human author who only follows a supernatural inspiration. When it comes to Genesis, all there is of that is the work of the Six Days, up to creation of Adam. From then on, or let us add the creation of Eve, since Adam was asleep then, and maybe a few more passages, Genesis is recorded history.
Origin of the Species is not.
Speaking of History and record: Centaurs seem to have been recorded a few years before the War of Troy, and they were seen again in Egypt in the time of Sts Paul the First Hermit and Anthony the Great. You said yourself that evolution offers no explanation for them. So, what is your conclusion on that?
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Mouffetard
St Joseph's day
19-III-2013
*This complaint is not as if I were against Latin Mass, but because FSSPX and Sedevacantists are minoritarian here.
**Speaking of faking evidence, I seem to have written "the credentials of a Church Fathers" which is ungrammatical and "in that edition of his books" which is wrong since there was only one I was speaking of. But my grammar is usually very good. How come? Slip of the "pen" (or keyboard)? Had one or two or three or four other such "slips of the pen" which usually do not happen to me, but corrected them before it became apparent. This one slipped my vigilance. I can think of some explanations: post-hypnotic suggestions, kabbalah (my bonnet was "lost" or stolen yesterday plus one Roumanian guy I met yesterday may have "reestablished" my communion with Iasy so as to make his bishop able to excommunicate me). Or, less spectacular: I may have had some medication administered to me without knowing it (some Communists prefer thinking of YECs as Mental Cases than as frauds, and there are Communists in Paris), or simply some admin fidgeting with my screen sicne he can watch it from his. Either case of all these, someone is trying to fake, before me, evidence that I am mad and need "medication" - the kind which makes slips of the keyboard more frequent since concentration less possible. Now, "in that edition of his books" is a fault in English which a Frenchman would commit more readily than anyone speaking a Germanic language or even Spanish. You see, I pronounce the plural s. Seems this fault was planted by someone less able than myself to figure out what faults I could commit when writing English after all.
Dawkins once said - in a book I cannot find, but I think it was The Greatest Show on Earth, because that I did read about half of, when once I was guest of its possessor, whom I left the day after, since he was more interested in hashish than in food, fine for him, but not quite my style - that the fossiles are not actually needed. They are a plus, but Evolution is (if I recall this correctly) sufficiently proven by phylogony. Or phylogeny. Or whatever.
Evolution does not need the Taung skull and Evolution does not need the Piltdown man. Evolutionists usually do not use the Piltdown man any more. It was either discovered or fabricated by one Jesuit Father Pierre Theilhard de Chardin, whose spirituality was closer to New Age than to St Ignatius of Loyola. Funnily enough, when they speak of it, they use it as evidence not that Evolutionists are fraudsters, but that clerics are. But, after all, whether he was himself the fraudster or his nonclerical and equally Evolutionists friend in that dig was the fraudster, that cleric was very clearly an Evolutionist. His spirituality is since then flooding the Catholic Church in France, so that you need one of the guys who celebrate Latin Mass or even who call the last Popes since 1958 or 1978 frauds in order to get a Catholic priest in France who does not want to positively foist evolution on a Catholic convert from Protestantism.* Because, to them, Kent Hovind and Jonathan Sarfati were the guys that Trent Council condemned, and insisting on Seven Sacraments or Sacrifice of the Mass, or Special Priesthood, or 73 books (as opposed to 66), are merely minor points compared with accepting evolution, as accepted by modern "Church Fathers" like Theilhard de Chardin or Abbé Pierre. Neither of whom has the credentials of a Church Father**, since neither of them is a canonised saint.
But, still, to mainline Evolutionists (as opposed to clerical ones), Theilhard de Chardin's Piltown Man fossile is a fraud and a clerical fraud. Never mind that it is an Evolutionist fraud as well.
Is that stopping either Evolutionist clerics or Evolutionist atheists? No.
So, not saying Ica stones are a fraud, not saying sandal footprints beside dinosaur footprints are a fraud, but simply admitting they could be each or both be frauds, that does not make Young Earth Creationism any less credible to me. Nor does it make Evolutionism any more credible.
AronRa and myself up to age 9 have pretty similar intellectual histories. 11 is the age he found Creationism and did not accept it. 12 is the age I read Edgar Andrews' From Nothing to Nature (in the Swedish translation "Ur Intet") and accepted it.
AronRa is actually - or was then - wrong about Native Americans not wearing sandals but only moccasins. First of all, if he goes down to Perú, native Americans do wear sandals. Moccasins are as far as I know a North American, possibly or probably pre-Columbian invention. Second of all, supposing this was pre-Flood, we need not suppose the clothing styles of later Native Americans were inherited from back then. Later Native Americans, on any Creationist recconing, have branched out from Mount Ararat, like the rest of present humanity. And third, he was right about something. A human footprint plus a dinosaur footprint need not be considered Adam's just because they were pre-Flood.
But that also cuts both ways. Like dating methods - something which Edgar Andrews discussed in more detail than the footprints, though they were in that edition of his book** (I don't know if they are in second edition or not) - they just might not be any more accurate than the "dating" of those footprints to back 6000 years ago and thus to Adam himself.
But thank you so much for vindicating St George by pointing out how much some depicted dragons look like varanas. It is funny to consider this compared to people who want to say St George and the Dragon legend developed from Apollo Sauroctonus or from Perseus or something.
Now, unfortunately you do follow these people in accepting Job as "the oldest" book of the Bible. Now, if Moses wrote Job, it is contemporary, roughly speaking, to the Pentateuch. There are however people who place the Pentateuch way later saying it developed from Zoroastric Monotheism.
Now, Genesis being one of the "books of Moses" (excluding Job) does not mean all its content is contemporary with the Exodus. Moses did use older documentation. You see, when it comes to Theogony, or Qur'an or Book of Mormon, you have some human author who only follows a supernatural inspiration. When it comes to Genesis, all there is of that is the work of the Six Days, up to creation of Adam. From then on, or let us add the creation of Eve, since Adam was asleep then, and maybe a few more passages, Genesis is recorded history.
Origin of the Species is not.
Speaking of History and record: Centaurs seem to have been recorded a few years before the War of Troy, and they were seen again in Egypt in the time of Sts Paul the First Hermit and Anthony the Great. You said yourself that evolution offers no explanation for them. So, what is your conclusion on that?
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Mouffetard
St Joseph's day
19-III-2013
*This complaint is not as if I were against Latin Mass, but because FSSPX and Sedevacantists are minoritarian here.
**Speaking of faking evidence, I seem to have written "the credentials of a Church Fathers" which is ungrammatical and "in that edition of his books" which is wrong since there was only one I was speaking of. But my grammar is usually very good. How come? Slip of the "pen" (or keyboard)? Had one or two or three or four other such "slips of the pen" which usually do not happen to me, but corrected them before it became apparent. This one slipped my vigilance. I can think of some explanations: post-hypnotic suggestions, kabbalah (my bonnet was "lost" or stolen yesterday plus one Roumanian guy I met yesterday may have "reestablished" my communion with Iasy so as to make his bishop able to excommunicate me). Or, less spectacular: I may have had some medication administered to me without knowing it (some Communists prefer thinking of YECs as Mental Cases than as frauds, and there are Communists in Paris), or simply some admin fidgeting with my screen sicne he can watch it from his. Either case of all these, someone is trying to fake, before me, evidence that I am mad and need "medication" - the kind which makes slips of the keyboard more frequent since concentration less possible. Now, "in that edition of his books" is a fault in English which a Frenchman would commit more readily than anyone speaking a Germanic language or even Spanish. You see, I pronounce the plural s. Seems this fault was planted by someone less able than myself to figure out what faults I could commit when writing English after all.
jeudi 7 mars 2013
St Patrick after the Ancient Narrations, Rev. Philip Lynch C.S.Sp. - Preview
| Front Cover |
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| P. 150, St Patrick's Maxims for Kings |
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| P. 151, Sources used by Reverend Lynch |
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| Pp. 259 - 265, Animal Welfare is not Animal Rights |
| A very good essay to understand the implications of Creationism and Evolutionism - that is of accepting Creation or Evolution as true - for our treatment of animals or each other. |
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mardi 5 mars 2013
And what of Mark Shea's Attitude to Marco Rubio?
Series on Chestertonian attitudes on Creationism (i e today's Chestertonians being clearly less favourable to Young Earth Creationism than GKC): 1) Mark Shea Basically Calls Creationists Protestants, 2 Mark Shea Responded, 3) And what of Mark Shea's Attitude to Marco Rubio?, 4) Answering Thomas Storck and Solving Problem (I Propose at least) Set by Humani Generis, 5) Trin80ty's bias, his ugly bias
Mark Shea's article on why Romney's party lost
I tried to post a comment about asking him why Marco Rubio - his namesake - lost. Was it because Mark Shea and other Catholics who might morally speaking have voted for him (he comes from a poor and hardworking family) felt oh no, they could not possibly vote, not just not for a young earth creationist, but they could not even vote for one not positively excluding young earth creationism? Or was it for some other reason?
I could have added that people suffering from higher taxes could perhaps get some more sympathy (from other voters) if they did not themselves, some obnoxious ones of them, insist on measures for the poor one more oppressive than the other, that after all cannot be financed other than by taxes, and which are only partially palliated by feeding the poor also via taxes. Because one effect of oppression is increased poverty.
I remember how George Bush Jr deceived me when he caved in to Responsible Rich and after all did keep inheritance duty in place. I mean, when millionaires like Bill Gates said it was not good for someone to be born with a silver spoon in the mouth, they were perhaps not thinking of their own children, some of them lacking such, others sure that their own will be born with siver spoons anyway, they were perhaps more concerned with the "spiritual welfare" (and the more spiritual and less material the better as far as they are concerned) of, say, smaller family business.
But even poorer folks than inheritors of mom and pop shops who need to sell to pay inheritance duty can get a hard time due to the taxes. If the taxes goes to your welfare, it does not mean in some persons' books it must go to your pocket. It may well mean it goes to measures that you do not like yourself, like paying shrinks or social workers to keep watch over you.
As a son of a psychiatry victim, as a victim of social workers more than once (at least three major occasions, 1983, 1993-5, 1998) and that victimhood not meaning a refusal of money but far more bitter things (in 1988 it was ma's and my kid sister's turn), I do have sympathy for people who want to pay less taxes, unless their first reaction seeing certain poorer people is "you go and feed yourself on tax money and we'll push the social workers so they get you to sweep the streets soon, unless you are really retarded".
But awaiting that, it seems there was a Marco Rubio, and he was from a poor hardworking family and he was called incompetent by some (incompetent as in neither knowing nor knowing whom to ask), because he refused to exclude Young Earth Creationism. Could that have been the reason Marco Rubio lost? Could US otherwise have had a President as caring for the poor as Ted kennedy (or more) and as pro-life as Mitt Romney?
Now, I would have made a far shorter comment than this under Mark Shea's blogpost to which I linked, but I am not sure if it is the library and the computer admins in it, or if Mark Shea put me on a spam-list, the comment was written, I clicked "post comment" and the comment did not show.
Happy Birthday Ma, hope you like this and it does not hurt you through the revenge of certain tax financed institutions!
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Mouffetard
in Paris (FR)
Mother's Birthday
5-III-2013
Mark Shea's article on why Romney's party lost
I tried to post a comment about asking him why Marco Rubio - his namesake - lost. Was it because Mark Shea and other Catholics who might morally speaking have voted for him (he comes from a poor and hardworking family) felt oh no, they could not possibly vote, not just not for a young earth creationist, but they could not even vote for one not positively excluding young earth creationism? Or was it for some other reason?
I could have added that people suffering from higher taxes could perhaps get some more sympathy (from other voters) if they did not themselves, some obnoxious ones of them, insist on measures for the poor one more oppressive than the other, that after all cannot be financed other than by taxes, and which are only partially palliated by feeding the poor also via taxes. Because one effect of oppression is increased poverty.
I remember how George Bush Jr deceived me when he caved in to Responsible Rich and after all did keep inheritance duty in place. I mean, when millionaires like Bill Gates said it was not good for someone to be born with a silver spoon in the mouth, they were perhaps not thinking of their own children, some of them lacking such, others sure that their own will be born with siver spoons anyway, they were perhaps more concerned with the "spiritual welfare" (and the more spiritual and less material the better as far as they are concerned) of, say, smaller family business.
But even poorer folks than inheritors of mom and pop shops who need to sell to pay inheritance duty can get a hard time due to the taxes. If the taxes goes to your welfare, it does not mean in some persons' books it must go to your pocket. It may well mean it goes to measures that you do not like yourself, like paying shrinks or social workers to keep watch over you.
As a son of a psychiatry victim, as a victim of social workers more than once (at least three major occasions, 1983, 1993-5, 1998) and that victimhood not meaning a refusal of money but far more bitter things (in 1988 it was ma's and my kid sister's turn), I do have sympathy for people who want to pay less taxes, unless their first reaction seeing certain poorer people is "you go and feed yourself on tax money and we'll push the social workers so they get you to sweep the streets soon, unless you are really retarded".
But awaiting that, it seems there was a Marco Rubio, and he was from a poor hardworking family and he was called incompetent by some (incompetent as in neither knowing nor knowing whom to ask), because he refused to exclude Young Earth Creationism. Could that have been the reason Marco Rubio lost? Could US otherwise have had a President as caring for the poor as Ted kennedy (or more) and as pro-life as Mitt Romney?
Now, I would have made a far shorter comment than this under Mark Shea's blogpost to which I linked, but I am not sure if it is the library and the computer admins in it, or if Mark Shea put me on a spam-list, the comment was written, I clicked "post comment" and the comment did not show.
Happy Birthday Ma, hope you like this and it does not hurt you through the revenge of certain tax financed institutions!
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Mouffetard
in Paris (FR)
Mother's Birthday
5-III-2013
mardi 26 février 2013
Linking to Others
You already know Creation Ministries International, of course, but here is some Catholic stuff for you:
"Is Evolution an Open Question for Catholics?"
Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation
Gerry Keane at the Second International Conference, USA, Oct 18-20, 2002
http://www.daylightorigins.com/what-is-evolution-and-big-bang-theory-problems-and-what-is-creation/gerard-keane/is-evolution-an-open-question-for-catholics.pdf
Daylight Origins Society, Daylight Origins Reading Material
Catholic creation & origins science, countering false macro & stellar evolution views
http://www.daylightorigins.com/what-is-evolution-and-big-bang-theory-problems-and-what-is-creation/reading-material.html
The Big Bang and Stellar Evolution
John Donnelly
http://www.daylightorigins.com/what-is-evolution-and-big-bang-theory-problems-and-what-is-creation/john-donnelly/the-big-bang-and-stellar-evolution.pdf
I was going to write an article about the Flood article in the St Patrick booklet by the late Fr. Philip Lynch C.S.Sp., and possibly will for St Patrick's Day, but before then I will just tip you the book exists (and since main content is Saints' Biographies, mainly St Patrick, it contains lots of other material than this too, more like how Ireland became a Christian country), but will already give two links to other things I said about the booklet. I did subject it to some petty criticism about the whereabouts of Bannavem Taberniae, the article on its flood geology is upcoming, here is what I already have written:
Φιλολογικά/Philologica : St Patrick was from some kind of Britain ...
http://filolohika.blogspot.com/2013/01/st-patrick-was-from-some-kind-of-britain.html
somewhere else : What if a Tradition is Contaminated?
http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/2013/02/what-if-tradition-is-contaminated.html
vendredi 22 février 2013
Pidgins are no more Primitive Languages than Robinson Crusoe had a Primitive Culture
Primitive properly speaking means primal. And Adam was the primal man, he was given a fullfledged grammar, lacking only lexemes for animals, a lacuna he was given opportunity to fill in.
There is no continuity there between Human and Subhuman (supposedly prehuman, ok, actually prehuman by a few hours or minutes on day six), no inbetween reminiscent of the language Tarzan learned or the language which one modern theory attributes to Homo Erectus (10 or 20 syllabic "phonemes" also serving as very general morphemes or lexemes). Nor of a primitive language without such "advanced" features as personal pronouns (confer the sentences in Rahan, where he fairly consistently uses Rahan, his name, or Son of Crao, his Patronym, instead of "I" and then also uses personal names of the people he adresses instead of in each case "thou").
I was just correcting a text* on wiki into:
What I added was: "or otherwise it is also used by Creationists." The rest was already there, added by other users.
Pidgins are indeed of limited expressive power. But they are makeshifts, not typical for language, just as trying to make a bakery with the things Robinson Crusoe had at hand are not typical for origins of baking, which Adam already must have known with some basic perfection. If Christianity is true that is, which is the case. Even apart from that, the culture Robinson Crusoe had did not exhaust his cultural knowledge, and similarily, whoever talks a pidgin is not therein exhausting his or her linguistic competence.
Cicero was an early proponent of "culture" depending on an advancement from the state of troglodytes clad very ill in skins very ill prepared. St Thomas Aquinas, who knew his texts, said: no, that may be the case for certain peoples, but not for mankind as such. Mankind received culture and language as gifts to go along with rationality.
Just as if you were to give away a computer to someone who had never used it - otherwise I do not at all recommend comparing computers to mind - you would probably give away one possible to use programme, whether it be word or excel, whether it be Microsoft, Apple or Linux, and so on.
I was very interested in evolutionist approaches to language origin when I was small. The first word is supposed to have been - on one theory I read in German - identic to the first phoneme, miming the noice you make when you blow on glowing charcoals to start a fire. That noice would have been the first word for fire and for life and for a lot of other things. My problem with this theory is that it would have been a word for so many different things, that it would not have been a word at all.
All of it already there, added by other users, btw. Same article.* Empirical evidence about discontinuity is not limited but very abundant. It is empirical evidence for continuity which is totally lacking. And Pidgins do not provide it.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Audoux
in Paris
St Isabel of France
22-II-2013
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
There is no continuity there between Human and Subhuman (supposedly prehuman, ok, actually prehuman by a few hours or minutes on day six), no inbetween reminiscent of the language Tarzan learned or the language which one modern theory attributes to Homo Erectus (10 or 20 syllabic "phonemes" also serving as very general morphemes or lexemes). Nor of a primitive language without such "advanced" features as personal pronouns (confer the sentences in Rahan, where he fairly consistently uses Rahan, his name, or Son of Crao, his Patronym, instead of "I" and then also uses personal names of the people he adresses instead of in each case "thou").
I was just correcting a text* on wiki into:
'Continuity theories' are based on the idea that language is so complex that one cannot imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form: it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our primate ancestors. 'Discontinuity theories' are based on the opposite idea — that language is a unique trait so it cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans and must therefore have appeared fairly suddenly during the course of human evolution or otherwise it is also used by Creationists. Another contrast is between theories that see language mostly as an innate faculty that is largely genetically encoded, and those that see it as a system that is mainly cultural — that is, learned through social interaction.
What I added was: "or otherwise it is also used by Creationists." The rest was already there, added by other users.
Pidgins are indeed of limited expressive power. But they are makeshifts, not typical for language, just as trying to make a bakery with the things Robinson Crusoe had at hand are not typical for origins of baking, which Adam already must have known with some basic perfection. If Christianity is true that is, which is the case. Even apart from that, the culture Robinson Crusoe had did not exhaust his cultural knowledge, and similarily, whoever talks a pidgin is not therein exhausting his or her linguistic competence.
Cicero was an early proponent of "culture" depending on an advancement from the state of troglodytes clad very ill in skins very ill prepared. St Thomas Aquinas, who knew his texts, said: no, that may be the case for certain peoples, but not for mankind as such. Mankind received culture and language as gifts to go along with rationality.
Just as if you were to give away a computer to someone who had never used it - otherwise I do not at all recommend comparing computers to mind - you would probably give away one possible to use programme, whether it be word or excel, whether it be Microsoft, Apple or Linux, and so on.
I was very interested in evolutionist approaches to language origin when I was small. The first word is supposed to have been - on one theory I read in German - identic to the first phoneme, miming the noice you make when you blow on glowing charcoals to start a fire. That noice would have been the first word for fire and for life and for a lot of other things. My problem with this theory is that it would have been a word for so many different things, that it would not have been a word at all.
This fact that empirical evidence is limited has led many scholars to regard the entire topic as unsuitable for serious study. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject, a prohibition which remained influential across much of the western world until late in the twentieth century.
All of it already there, added by other users, btw. Same article.* Empirical evidence about discontinuity is not limited but very abundant. It is empirical evidence for continuity which is totally lacking. And Pidgins do not provide it.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Audoux
in Paris
St Isabel of France
22-II-2013
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
samedi 2 février 2013
How I Pick my Battles
If I wanted to be flippant I could say that I don't - I just get them anyway.
But since I have systematically had intellectual battles against certain positions rather than others, I guess the question can sort of have an answer.
First off, I do not pick them for others. I am no bishop, no priest, no monk, no prophet, no pope, no patriarch, no messiah and no idiot so as to imagine myself any of above.
On the other hand, I am not quite trusting to ecclesiastical superiors who not only do not share my battlefields, but actually fight on the other side. The Remnant had an article directed to "Cardinal" Pell entitled "Your Highness, Dawkins actually has a point".
Let's not paint Dawkins too white. On one occasion he rebukes a Christian who contradicts him by saying he believes in Adam and Eve, saying to him that "every priest and bishop" is evolutionist. On the occasion evoked by The Remnant, he asks the Cardinal as precisely not an evolutionist where the Original Sin came from, if there was no Adam and Eve, as historical and even primal human individuals. He wants to ridicule anyone who can argue against him, and then he argues against those he does not ridicule - at least on this account.
So, though I am a Roman Catholic, I am not sure "Cardinal Pell" is - or anyone supporting him as a Cardinal.
Some might consider I am not a Roman Catholic because I have been Roumanian Orthodox for a while. Others that I am not because I do not fully and unequivocally recognise the "superior of Cardinal Pell" as being the Pope. I do not recommend combining the charges insofar as Benedict XVI himself considers Roumanian Orthodox a "sister Church" - not as in Uniates at Iasi being a Sister Church of the Latin Church, which would be traditional, but as in non-uniates at Iasi being a Sister Church of Latins-and-Uniates together, usually known as Roman Catholic Church.
His predecessor even made a deal at Balamand of not allowing either individuals or bishops to convert either way between Catholics and Orthodox without their superiors' benediction. And I have converted forth and back again.
Now, this suggests I do not pick battles from a sense of strategy, because this would have been a very clumsy strategy on my behalf.
I am an ex-Lutheran. I was alienated from fellow Swedish Lutherans on two accounts. One being their not very clear stance in favour of the literal meaning of the Blessed Sacrament, the other their stance against the literal meaning of Genesis the early chapters.
I sought the Church which was there in Sweden before the Reformation. And afterwards I was not sure that Catholics in union with John Paul II were really continuing the Church as in the days of Pope Leo X, who was perhaps a worldly Pope, but not a drastically bad one, as he has been painted out. And who had the sense to condemn the wildly unhuman theses of Luther, including the one that said that the souls in Purgatory by the fact of their love for God's Justice would resent an Indulgence that let them off too early from Purgatory.
"But Luther can't have written that! He was a Protestant!"
At the time of Exsurge Domine, he was a badly instructed Catholic. A High Church Lutheran tried to persuade me that Luther was actually a very Orthodox proponent of the Catholic doctrines of Purgatory and Indulgences. The thesis I just cited - it is one of the 41 theses condemned by Pope Leo X, I do not know if it comes from his 95 or his earlier 97 theses, as Exsurge Domine dealt with both collections - is neither good Catholicism, nor the kind of Protestantism I embraced insofar as I was not involved in its active rejection of Catholicism.
I did not want to remain a Protestant, nor did I desire to take Luther's statements even as a not-yet-Protestant for my Catholic Catechism. I never regretted that step, nor is it likely that I will. I do regret however having admired Teilhard de Chardin at a very Jesuit-friendly moment. I still admire St Ignatius of Loyola, of course. But, unlike Pierre Theilhard, he was not an evolutionist.
I have seen that Creation Ministries International are indeed a Para-Church Protestant ministry (more close to baptism than to Lutherans or Anglicans, since they do not accept that child baptism makes one a child of God even before one can speak or learn the Catechism), and on that level I do not want to be part of that. That does not mean they are not free to re-publish my articles, such of them they deem good, with a note that the author does not actually belong to CMI but is a Catholic. Or they can of course link to them as an external link, stating that they recommend such and such an article as it was when they saw it, but cannot vouch for other content on my blogs, or for the article remaining as it was when they saw it. I saw that kind of note for a link to conservapedia. And of course The Remnant has quite the same freedoms too.
I do however admire their teamwork as learned men dealing with question after question as they link to each other - except for the one of the Galileo case. Let us take their principles of how they pick their fights and see how it would apply to the Galileo case.
1) "The Bible explains the Bible"
I do not think that is the case unless you add a few words: "to those who are firm in faith, wise, and intend to stay with the Church".
I will not say that the Bible alone explains the Bible, or that the Bible as cut off from Church or Tradition is supreme authority. The Church has the right to say on "Christ is the only mediator" passages that to the original Catholic hearers of Saint Paul that never implied an exclusion of invocation of the saints or of the Blessed Virgin, nor that it is not in the Sacraments of the Church that He exercises that mediation. The Church has the right to say "the Bible does not always mean what it seems to say to a modern reader" - but it has not had the right to say or believed itself to have it that the Bible would have deceived the first hearers of each word so as to make it decryptable only centuries later. The Messianic prophecies were not as badly understood by the prophets as they were by the Pharisees.
But, one Bible passage is to be taken literally, usually, unless another passage states the contrary. Even Old Law was literally applicable up to the Birth of Christ. Today we celebrate Our Lady obeying the law about Purification.
When Christ states the contrary to certain Mosaic dispensations, he is requesting a higher justice that that of divorce and of revenge. Or ordering it, rather, as the new Moses. But he was not denying these dispensations had their validity up to his day.
So - if Genesis about the days is not to be taken literally, where does the Bible say so? I'll come back to "for God one day is like a thousand years and thousand years like one day" in a moment. But likewise, the Bible never states that Joshua's long day is not to be taken literally either. And as I said just about the necessity of the Church, its magisterium has traditionally not canonised modern theories as dogma. A few passages in the CCC by John Paul II and a few words by him and by Benedict XVI is about all the encouragement we have there. Up to then, it was rather a question of "Hanging Lose" (as Carl Wieland says) on both these questions, but certainly not Hanging Lose but rather clinging on as to the Historical Adam and Eve. One had the choice between Jonathan Sarfati and Hugh Ross as far as Genesis is concerned, and one had the choice between Sungenis and Dom Stanley Jaki as far as Astronomy is concerned - as one had had since the condemnations of Heliocentrism were lifted in 1828.
2) "Evolutionism is proven to encourage atheism"
As far as I have seen in debates - online and earlier among comrades - rejection of Geocentrism can do it nearly as well as rejection of a Young Earth/Recent Creation.
I left the Palmarian Church - to which I had adhered at distance - after fourteen months, half a minute before finding out the founder-prophet-and-pope had committed sodomy, as well as abusing nuns under his obedience (if I had met him, I would have councilled him to go slow on eating meat, since he was celibate and meant to stay so) for the open reason that he did believe the cosmos had more than three dimensions. The relation of time to space is not really a parallel of the relation of up-down to left-right. He believed "Antichrist sees the world from the fourth dimension, but the Purest Virgin from the eighth". Saint Augustine believed God had given the cosmos three dimensions so as to remind all living in it of the Blessed Trinity. So, I made an act of renouncing provisionally Palmarianism half a minute before finding out Gregorio XVII had molested monks under his obedience as well. I wonder what Palmarians now think about obedience to men when not in tune with obedience to God ... if they learnt a lesson, that is good. But believing evolution because one thinks the Church teaches it - because of the passages in CCC just mentioned - is not very recommendable either.
Now, as to the belief in eight dimensions, which made me reject provisionally Palmar de Troya, it reminds me of the more exotic Creationist Cosmologies, by people who refuse to be Geocentrics. Evolution, Deep Time, Heliocentrism - Parallax - Deep Space, Many Dimensional Universe - all of these encourage atheism and for that matter unsound mysticism.
3) "Let us agree as much as we can with Evolutionists and not add disagreements without necessity."
I have seen this morning the injunction to agree as much as the Bible and the Creationist stance allows with the adversary. In order not to get involved with minor disagreements they could ridicule us for. On CMI site, of course.
This is not one of their reasons to be Creationist and Young Earth. It is their reason, probably, for rejecting the primary battle of Sungenis, Geocentrism.
It cannot be that Geocentrism is first of all Calvinist, since one Calvinist on a video recommended a Geocentric book as intellectually the best option, but not for beginners, since not Calvinist. He said the book taught "salvation by works" or "meriting heaven". I e that the stance was, so far, Catholic rather than Calvinist.
We do not deny Heaven is a Gift or Eternal Life is a Gift. We say the Gift begins on earth - usually with Child Baptism - and includes the given ability to earn merits "because it is not I who work, but Christ who worketh in me". And who would deny Christ the ability to merit for us? However, His doing so in oneself, in ourselves depends on our free cooperation with grace.
However, the complaint of the Calvinist shows that Geocentrism is not just a Calvinist cause.
Now, I would say that Sarfati's reason for not being Geocentric is very parallel to Hugh Ross' reason for not believing the Young Earth.
While I mention Hugh Ross, I think I owe him an agreement on Behemoth and Leviathan. His explanation does not presuppose that Dinosaurs never coexisted with men. It presupposes that Behemoth and Leviathan coexist with men living after the flood and if Job is not in Egypt at least in a country not far off (which is true of Edom, where "Tektonics" place the book of Job), and that he knew of Leviathan and Behemoth as contemporary challenges to the art of taming. Therein he also agrees with a Young Earth Creationist and Roman Catholic like Bishop Challoner, or if it was Calmet - the two people Haydock cites most often in his 1859 Bible Commentary.
But is the principle soundly put? If there is something to say for it, why not make it like St Thomas, who said basically: I know by Holy Faith that the Universe is in fact created with a beginning, but let us prove God exists as if I did not know that, let us take an eternal universe as a model and see if that model also leads logically to God. He did that, but he did not ask people to ignore, for fear of ridicule, people holding more directly to the faith.
And of course he did hold directly to the faith too. He used the model only to scrap it later. By Q 45 or so he has established that the universe could only come from God, neither by identity nor by emanation, but strictly speaking only by Creation. And when he describes it, he gets to the days, when speaking of them in general he mentions two models - one-moment creation (held as dogma by Palmarians) and creation in six times 24 hours. Then when he describes the work of each day, he uses only what Sarfati would have used.
But even if Hugh Ross would not endorse or use at all himself the model which we hold is a part of the faith, i e six day creation, he could say "if you are less into modern dating techniques, than I am, you can see how Sarfati criticises them on his site" - and Sarfati could quite similarily link to me or Sungenis - or both.
Where I think Sungenis mistaken is using a Geocentric model that is a kind of perpetuum mobile (or close to) set in motion once in the very beginning by God, but moving on by its own accord.
I believe in a Universe where every day is in a certain way a miracle, insofar as every day depends on "divine intervention." God is not the earliest mover of a clockwork going on by its springs, He is the first mover of contemporary movers, of simultaneous movers. Just as He did not incarnate once two thousand years ago so the Church could run itself by reading the Bible, He takes the form of bread and of wine every day. Every day and every mass is a fresh miracle, even if we do not see it. The miracles we usually refer to as such are only reminders. Joshua's day reminded of who moves the Sun and Moon (and probably also Stars beyond them) each day.
You see, if you take the idea of agreeing with your opponents too far, they end up with tripping you up on your unnecessary agreements.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
Candlemass, or
Purification of the BVM
2-II-2013
PS, I think I promised to come back to the Jericho question, so I take those links and comments first:
creation.com/calibrating-carbon-dating
creation.com/the-walls-of-jericho
creation.com/the-story-of-jericho
conservapedia.com/Jericho_chronology_dispute
conservapedia.com/John_Garstang
1447 - 40 = 1407 was Garstang's "Bible dating".
LXX implies, according to Roman Martyrology: "a Moyse et egressu populi Israel de Aegypto, anno millesimo quingentesimo decimo" -> 1510 - 40 = 1470 as earliest date for fall of Jericho.
But since I have systematically had intellectual battles against certain positions rather than others, I guess the question can sort of have an answer.
First off, I do not pick them for others. I am no bishop, no priest, no monk, no prophet, no pope, no patriarch, no messiah and no idiot so as to imagine myself any of above.
On the other hand, I am not quite trusting to ecclesiastical superiors who not only do not share my battlefields, but actually fight on the other side. The Remnant had an article directed to "Cardinal" Pell entitled "Your Highness, Dawkins actually has a point".
Let's not paint Dawkins too white. On one occasion he rebukes a Christian who contradicts him by saying he believes in Adam and Eve, saying to him that "every priest and bishop" is evolutionist. On the occasion evoked by The Remnant, he asks the Cardinal as precisely not an evolutionist where the Original Sin came from, if there was no Adam and Eve, as historical and even primal human individuals. He wants to ridicule anyone who can argue against him, and then he argues against those he does not ridicule - at least on this account.
So, though I am a Roman Catholic, I am not sure "Cardinal Pell" is - or anyone supporting him as a Cardinal.
Some might consider I am not a Roman Catholic because I have been Roumanian Orthodox for a while. Others that I am not because I do not fully and unequivocally recognise the "superior of Cardinal Pell" as being the Pope. I do not recommend combining the charges insofar as Benedict XVI himself considers Roumanian Orthodox a "sister Church" - not as in Uniates at Iasi being a Sister Church of the Latin Church, which would be traditional, but as in non-uniates at Iasi being a Sister Church of Latins-and-Uniates together, usually known as Roman Catholic Church.
His predecessor even made a deal at Balamand of not allowing either individuals or bishops to convert either way between Catholics and Orthodox without their superiors' benediction. And I have converted forth and back again.
Now, this suggests I do not pick battles from a sense of strategy, because this would have been a very clumsy strategy on my behalf.
I am an ex-Lutheran. I was alienated from fellow Swedish Lutherans on two accounts. One being their not very clear stance in favour of the literal meaning of the Blessed Sacrament, the other their stance against the literal meaning of Genesis the early chapters.
I sought the Church which was there in Sweden before the Reformation. And afterwards I was not sure that Catholics in union with John Paul II were really continuing the Church as in the days of Pope Leo X, who was perhaps a worldly Pope, but not a drastically bad one, as he has been painted out. And who had the sense to condemn the wildly unhuman theses of Luther, including the one that said that the souls in Purgatory by the fact of their love for God's Justice would resent an Indulgence that let them off too early from Purgatory.
"But Luther can't have written that! He was a Protestant!"
At the time of Exsurge Domine, he was a badly instructed Catholic. A High Church Lutheran tried to persuade me that Luther was actually a very Orthodox proponent of the Catholic doctrines of Purgatory and Indulgences. The thesis I just cited - it is one of the 41 theses condemned by Pope Leo X, I do not know if it comes from his 95 or his earlier 97 theses, as Exsurge Domine dealt with both collections - is neither good Catholicism, nor the kind of Protestantism I embraced insofar as I was not involved in its active rejection of Catholicism.
I did not want to remain a Protestant, nor did I desire to take Luther's statements even as a not-yet-Protestant for my Catholic Catechism. I never regretted that step, nor is it likely that I will. I do regret however having admired Teilhard de Chardin at a very Jesuit-friendly moment. I still admire St Ignatius of Loyola, of course. But, unlike Pierre Theilhard, he was not an evolutionist.
I have seen that Creation Ministries International are indeed a Para-Church Protestant ministry (more close to baptism than to Lutherans or Anglicans, since they do not accept that child baptism makes one a child of God even before one can speak or learn the Catechism), and on that level I do not want to be part of that. That does not mean they are not free to re-publish my articles, such of them they deem good, with a note that the author does not actually belong to CMI but is a Catholic. Or they can of course link to them as an external link, stating that they recommend such and such an article as it was when they saw it, but cannot vouch for other content on my blogs, or for the article remaining as it was when they saw it. I saw that kind of note for a link to conservapedia. And of course The Remnant has quite the same freedoms too.
I do however admire their teamwork as learned men dealing with question after question as they link to each other - except for the one of the Galileo case. Let us take their principles of how they pick their fights and see how it would apply to the Galileo case.
1) "The Bible explains the Bible"
I do not think that is the case unless you add a few words: "to those who are firm in faith, wise, and intend to stay with the Church".
I will not say that the Bible alone explains the Bible, or that the Bible as cut off from Church or Tradition is supreme authority. The Church has the right to say on "Christ is the only mediator" passages that to the original Catholic hearers of Saint Paul that never implied an exclusion of invocation of the saints or of the Blessed Virgin, nor that it is not in the Sacraments of the Church that He exercises that mediation. The Church has the right to say "the Bible does not always mean what it seems to say to a modern reader" - but it has not had the right to say or believed itself to have it that the Bible would have deceived the first hearers of each word so as to make it decryptable only centuries later. The Messianic prophecies were not as badly understood by the prophets as they were by the Pharisees.
But, one Bible passage is to be taken literally, usually, unless another passage states the contrary. Even Old Law was literally applicable up to the Birth of Christ. Today we celebrate Our Lady obeying the law about Purification.
When Christ states the contrary to certain Mosaic dispensations, he is requesting a higher justice that that of divorce and of revenge. Or ordering it, rather, as the new Moses. But he was not denying these dispensations had their validity up to his day.
So - if Genesis about the days is not to be taken literally, where does the Bible say so? I'll come back to "for God one day is like a thousand years and thousand years like one day" in a moment. But likewise, the Bible never states that Joshua's long day is not to be taken literally either. And as I said just about the necessity of the Church, its magisterium has traditionally not canonised modern theories as dogma. A few passages in the CCC by John Paul II and a few words by him and by Benedict XVI is about all the encouragement we have there. Up to then, it was rather a question of "Hanging Lose" (as Carl Wieland says) on both these questions, but certainly not Hanging Lose but rather clinging on as to the Historical Adam and Eve. One had the choice between Jonathan Sarfati and Hugh Ross as far as Genesis is concerned, and one had the choice between Sungenis and Dom Stanley Jaki as far as Astronomy is concerned - as one had had since the condemnations of Heliocentrism were lifted in 1828.
2) "Evolutionism is proven to encourage atheism"
As far as I have seen in debates - online and earlier among comrades - rejection of Geocentrism can do it nearly as well as rejection of a Young Earth/Recent Creation.
I left the Palmarian Church - to which I had adhered at distance - after fourteen months, half a minute before finding out the founder-prophet-and-pope had committed sodomy, as well as abusing nuns under his obedience (if I had met him, I would have councilled him to go slow on eating meat, since he was celibate and meant to stay so) for the open reason that he did believe the cosmos had more than three dimensions. The relation of time to space is not really a parallel of the relation of up-down to left-right. He believed "Antichrist sees the world from the fourth dimension, but the Purest Virgin from the eighth". Saint Augustine believed God had given the cosmos three dimensions so as to remind all living in it of the Blessed Trinity. So, I made an act of renouncing provisionally Palmarianism half a minute before finding out Gregorio XVII had molested monks under his obedience as well. I wonder what Palmarians now think about obedience to men when not in tune with obedience to God ... if they learnt a lesson, that is good. But believing evolution because one thinks the Church teaches it - because of the passages in CCC just mentioned - is not very recommendable either.
Now, as to the belief in eight dimensions, which made me reject provisionally Palmar de Troya, it reminds me of the more exotic Creationist Cosmologies, by people who refuse to be Geocentrics. Evolution, Deep Time, Heliocentrism - Parallax - Deep Space, Many Dimensional Universe - all of these encourage atheism and for that matter unsound mysticism.
3) "Let us agree as much as we can with Evolutionists and not add disagreements without necessity."
I have seen this morning the injunction to agree as much as the Bible and the Creationist stance allows with the adversary. In order not to get involved with minor disagreements they could ridicule us for. On CMI site, of course.
This is not one of their reasons to be Creationist and Young Earth. It is their reason, probably, for rejecting the primary battle of Sungenis, Geocentrism.
It cannot be that Geocentrism is first of all Calvinist, since one Calvinist on a video recommended a Geocentric book as intellectually the best option, but not for beginners, since not Calvinist. He said the book taught "salvation by works" or "meriting heaven". I e that the stance was, so far, Catholic rather than Calvinist.
We do not deny Heaven is a Gift or Eternal Life is a Gift. We say the Gift begins on earth - usually with Child Baptism - and includes the given ability to earn merits "because it is not I who work, but Christ who worketh in me". And who would deny Christ the ability to merit for us? However, His doing so in oneself, in ourselves depends on our free cooperation with grace.
However, the complaint of the Calvinist shows that Geocentrism is not just a Calvinist cause.
Now, I would say that Sarfati's reason for not being Geocentric is very parallel to Hugh Ross' reason for not believing the Young Earth.
While I mention Hugh Ross, I think I owe him an agreement on Behemoth and Leviathan. His explanation does not presuppose that Dinosaurs never coexisted with men. It presupposes that Behemoth and Leviathan coexist with men living after the flood and if Job is not in Egypt at least in a country not far off (which is true of Edom, where "Tektonics" place the book of Job), and that he knew of Leviathan and Behemoth as contemporary challenges to the art of taming. Therein he also agrees with a Young Earth Creationist and Roman Catholic like Bishop Challoner, or if it was Calmet - the two people Haydock cites most often in his 1859 Bible Commentary.
But is the principle soundly put? If there is something to say for it, why not make it like St Thomas, who said basically: I know by Holy Faith that the Universe is in fact created with a beginning, but let us prove God exists as if I did not know that, let us take an eternal universe as a model and see if that model also leads logically to God. He did that, but he did not ask people to ignore, for fear of ridicule, people holding more directly to the faith.
And of course he did hold directly to the faith too. He used the model only to scrap it later. By Q 45 or so he has established that the universe could only come from God, neither by identity nor by emanation, but strictly speaking only by Creation. And when he describes it, he gets to the days, when speaking of them in general he mentions two models - one-moment creation (held as dogma by Palmarians) and creation in six times 24 hours. Then when he describes the work of each day, he uses only what Sarfati would have used.
But even if Hugh Ross would not endorse or use at all himself the model which we hold is a part of the faith, i e six day creation, he could say "if you are less into modern dating techniques, than I am, you can see how Sarfati criticises them on his site" - and Sarfati could quite similarily link to me or Sungenis - or both.
Where I think Sungenis mistaken is using a Geocentric model that is a kind of perpetuum mobile (or close to) set in motion once in the very beginning by God, but moving on by its own accord.
I believe in a Universe where every day is in a certain way a miracle, insofar as every day depends on "divine intervention." God is not the earliest mover of a clockwork going on by its springs, He is the first mover of contemporary movers, of simultaneous movers. Just as He did not incarnate once two thousand years ago so the Church could run itself by reading the Bible, He takes the form of bread and of wine every day. Every day and every mass is a fresh miracle, even if we do not see it. The miracles we usually refer to as such are only reminders. Joshua's day reminded of who moves the Sun and Moon (and probably also Stars beyond them) each day.
You see, if you take the idea of agreeing with your opponents too far, they end up with tripping you up on your unnecessary agreements.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
Candlemass, or
Purification of the BVM
2-II-2013
PS, I think I promised to come back to the Jericho question, so I take those links and comments first:
creation.com/calibrating-carbon-dating
creation.com/the-walls-of-jericho
creation.com/the-story-of-jericho
conservapedia.com/Jericho_chronology_dispute
conservapedia.com/John_Garstang
1447 - 40 = 1407 was Garstang's "Bible dating".
LXX implies, according to Roman Martyrology: "a Moyse et egressu populi Israel de Aegypto, anno millesimo quingentesimo decimo" -> 1510 - 40 = 1470 as earliest date for fall of Jericho.
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