* Shalom! Rowland Croucher * * http://jmm.org.au/ * (15000+ articles, 3200 clean jokes/stories)

Ken [K]

A quick response to one part of Don’s response. I’ll give a response to some other parts in a subsequent response.

D:

Some say, “The Bible is authoritative in matters of faith and practice”. This is dangerously deficient: if we cannot trust the Bible in matters of history, for example, how can we trust it in matters of faith and practice (theology)?

K:

There are exceptions from earlier times, but the dominant view has been to import into reading the Bible all the current (at the time of reading) aspects of culture, and then interpret the Biblical text to fit the culture.

D:

That’s exactly what happened in Galileo’s time. The church had imported Aristotelian philosophy into the Bible and they judged Galileo accordingly. And it is exactly what you are doing today: modifying the clear teaching of the Bible to make it fit with the conjectures of historical science (the culture of today). I am not smuggling into the Bible any novel scientific view; I am understanding the Bible as it has always been understood. You have not demonstrated that the modern creationist view of origins is anything different to the traditional view of the EO and RC churches.

K:

Creationists do not realise that scientists, on the whole, have a very jaundiced view of Christians who attempt to make scientific statements on the basis of some interpretation of some passages in the Bible.

D:

O come on Ken! Of course we know that most scientists dislike what we are on about. And this is only to be expected, since only a minority of scientists accept the authority of the Bible. However, the vast part of the scientific enterprise has nothing to do with the Bible; it is only parts of historical ‘science’.

K:

Now let’s at least get Galileo straight. This debate is, in part, at least about how the Bible is to be interpreted. And I want to know who is to be our infallible interpreter. I posted, earlier today, a list of commentaries on Genesis by evangelical scholars, and pointed out that none of them supported six-day creation.

Galileo was persecuted because his ideas conflicted with the interpretation which had always been held by the Church – it isn’t hard to dig out from the writings of the Reformers that they, also, accepted that the Sun went around the Earth.

And this is just the main point. The views of Christian scholars have changed through the ages. If you are going to accuse any theologians who don’t hold to a six-day creation of having some sort of deficient theology, then you will find yourself in a very small minority among writers from the 19th century onwards.

But doubtless some of this will come up again once we start talking about scientific matters.

Dr Ken Smith – Christian, husband, unpaid mathematician, skeptic, … `To demonstrate that evolutionary theory was not true, they [creationists] did not hesitate to misquote, distort, take out of context, and in other ways violate the biblical injunction against false witness.’ Isaac Asimov

D:

So, this is Ken Smith’s approach to being civil? You use the words of an atheist to slander your fellow Christians, accusing them (and by implication me) of lying! On JMM you also cited the atheist Ho-Stuart to say of my colleague and brother in the Lord, Jonathan Sarfati: “Sarfati is an idiot, and he is telling you lies” (with no substantiation of such sin). You have a funny idea of being civil, Ken.

K:

I will have to dig out some of the very large number of evangelical Christians who have said much the same thing and compile several posts of their quotations.

In your response to a couple of my posts which Rowland put up on the JMM site, and which Rowland put up in the same place, you made some comments about Jonathan Sarfati’s criticisms of John Stear’s No Answers in Genesis site. Up to that time I’d only read the shorter article on NAiG, and decided it wasn’t worth a response. However reading the full article on the True Origins site I realised that the two were different. I printed this out and took it home to show my wife.

She was so incensed at the misrepresentations that she promptly wrote a short piece which John Stear put up on his site. And I added my response as well.

You, and other people reading this thread, can look at both of these on http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/default.htm under thw “What’s New” part. Helen’s is in the April list and mine is in the May list.

I’ll let other people decide about who is lacking in veracity.

Dr Ken Smith – Christian, husband, unpaid mathematician, skeptic, … `If you go on doing that, Joe, I’ll go off and sit by myself. We aren’t married yet.’ She removed his hand and kissed it. Jean Padgett in “A Town Like Alice”