the Bible ... can be properly used as a source for lessons on how to treat your fellow human beings.
Funny you should say that. Do you really believe that or are you just being friendly? I can't find anything of value there. You surely don't mean that there is a lesson on treating others in the story of the kids left alone with the snake, choosing knowledge of good and evil over unquestioning obedience, and then they and all of their descendants punished severely for that.
Nor can you mean the story about the god who created man, regretted his own engineering failures, nearly sterilized of all terrestrial life to correct its error, but used the same breeding stock and wound up with the same species with the same sin nature. What life lesson does that teach?
Or how about the Tower. Again man strives to grow as with the apple in the garden and is punished. Is there a message on how to treat one's fellow human being there?
I really don't understand why people praise those stories. Believers have to, but unbelievers are free to call it like they see it. Do you really see value there? Is there value for you? Not one ethical principle I subscribe to comes out of that book or any other. Where there is overlap, that's coincidence. If I don't murder, it's not because I was told not to, and reading those words not only had little effect on me, it doesn't on adherents, either. How many love one another? How many don't lie?
What do you think?
Here is your error. The Iliad and the Odessey just like the New Testament were not historical documents. They may contain facts but to treat them as historical is to completely misunderstand them. They are representations of truth within the context of a religion. Treating them as truth of factual events is to degrade their meaning.
I agree with your main point: historical fiction is not history.
I'll ask you the same thing as I asked Subduction Zone. Do you really find meaning in those books? I've read them both, enjoyed them with their characters and feats of daring and hubris, but that's also Star Wars, which also taught me nothing. Nor Harry Potter, nor The Hobbit. It's all just entertainment to me.
Digression: An interesting distinction between all of these books just mentioned and the Bible is that nobody ever says that one need divine assistance to understand them or a special way of reading them. Maybe that's because nobody's trying to believe that they aren't just stories. Throw in that any of these come from a god, and that's when we hear that from the believers if someone tells them that they're just the words of man and are often vague, ambiguous, incorrect, or self-contradictory. That's when the magical reading method is, and anybody who sees these things just doesn't know the proper way to read them.
Just wondering what scientists say makes - causes a mutation.
I gave you two mechanism for point mutations.
Or try Google. If you're unfamiliar, here's a demonstration:
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=what+causes+a+mutation?
Reality is immutable but human estimation of reality is highly ephemeral because we see what we believe. Every theory is founded not in reality but in our definitions and beliefs.
Fortunately, you don't use that kind of thinking in daily life. You wouldn't be able to get out of bed. What's really out there outside of bed? How are consciousness, fitness, theories, and metaphysics deceiving me?
Instead, you get up, go about your day maybe working, shopping, driving, etc.. with little to no difficulty, then come home to ruminate on how nothing can be known, science is wrong, and the like.
Life is very complicated and so are the causes of speciation. How anyone thinks you can summarize it with "survival of the fittest" while ignoring consciousness and communication is beyond me.
Are you aware that there are other kingdoms beside animals that also evolve? Plants and fungi also evolve. They speciate. And they do so unconsciously.
But you probably call them conscious, although I doubt that you try to communicate with them. Or maybe you do.
They communicate, but chemically, which is a metaphorical usage of the word. Here are the literal meaning of the word and one metaphorical use:
If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it does it make a sound?
No. It makes sound waves. It takes a brain and mind to convert that to and experience sound.
If there were no thinking humans to ponder the fossil record and Darwin was right that every individual was the same species as its parents then could dinosaurs have evolved into birds?
Could they? They did.
Don't be confused by the fact that once there were no humans, that every offspring is the same species as its parents, that humanity exists now, and that nevertheless, there were no first humans:
Sorites Paradox (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
most people call "science" is a belief system used to guard the status quo.
Why should that matter? Most people don't know what science is. They just know that it has something to do with lamps glowing if you plug them in and turn them on and space probes.
Reality will forever be beyond what we see because every experiment shows we see what we believe.
Many RF posters like to address that, but I have no problem there. My understanding of reality, however filtered and distorted by the process that generates conscious content, tells me what I need to know to accomplish my goals. I can't actually use more knowledge about the ultimate nature of reality that lies outside of the mind and in part informs it.
Incidentally, now you're approaching a definition of metaphysics actually in use and the one I use.
The greatest fear for a man of reason is to make the world a better place by dying than all the good he ever did.
I am a man of reason who holds no such fear and have never heard anybody else but you make that comment.
