Can a "True Christian" Believe in the Water Cycle?

[ZooGirl02]

From what I understand of Christian beliefs, not all of the Bible is meant to be taken literally and also, as far as I know, most Christians do not believe the Bible to be a science book. Therefore, I personally see no reason why a Christian couldn't believe in the water cycle.

 

[Parsimony]

The primary measure of a good theory is in whether it predicts things. Evolution has had more successful predictions than many other theories, including the theory of plate tectonics. Do you think we should be using a different theory to predict earthquakes?

Plate tectonics is an excellent parallel.

No one has ever seen two continents collide to form a mountain. No one has ever seen them diverge to form an ocean. No one can make mountains in a lab with plate tectonics. It is unobservable and cannot be reproduced. Why should we believe it? Surely it is wrong wrong wrong! All we see is microtectonics (plates moving small distances) and not macrotectonics (plates moving large distances)!

 

[johnhanks]

My description of where babies come from is woefully incomplete--even incorrect--from a scientific standpoint. And yet it's all my son is ready to understand and comprehend at that point.

My first grade teacher said you cannot subtract a number from a smaller number. The concept of negative numbers repudiates this. Does this mean that my first grade teacher was lying? Or is it remotely possible that she had to limit the truth she told me, until I was ready for details?

I've never understood the appeal of the argument that Bronze Age humans needed to be fed myths and untruths because they couldn't have coped with full scientific reality. As both of the above quotes show, it leans heavily on metaphorically identifying Bronze Age humans as children, modern humans as adults and the history in between as a kind of intellectual growing up - a fundamentally flawed analogy, as Bronze Age adults were not mental children but had brains indistinguishable from ours. Bronze Age brains could have coped as well as ours do with scientific reality, and it should not have been beyond the capability of an omnipotent deity to let them see that reality from the start rather than feeding them untruths that would impede intellectual and technological development for several thousand years.

 

[Mycroft]

Because the water cycle phenomenon doesn't present the problems to Christian fundies that evolution does to their Noah's ark story. It's why creationism exists: to explain away how Noah could house, feed, and care for the 8.7 million species that now populate the world. They didn't exist as such before the flood, but rather as a much smaller and manageable number of "kinds," whatever that is.

I would think that maths is more a threat to the Noah's Ark story than water cycles.

 

[rusra02]

Since no child born has to have God blow air in their nostrils to make them breathe, it's obvious that this passage is figurative and not literal. In all reality, a baby starts breathing by taking a breathe of air. So if that's God, then God is Nature. And Genesis talks about Nature as God.


Not if God and Nature are the same. And not if you try a little harder to read the passage as religious prose rather than historical document.

One of many problems here is that the author (scribe or whatever) of Genesis wasn't there during creation. How would he/she know exactly what went down? And if he/she had a vision, how can we know that he/she interpreted his/her dream/vision correctly or even had words to describe it?

To read Genesis literally requires the reader to assume the authors to have meant it to be literal. How would anyone be certain of that? Who says in the Bible Genesis must be literal?


It's the same problem here. You would have to read it on a different level, from a different approach, to really understand the meaning behind the words. Reading them literally is killing the spirit of the words.


Myth is not the same as a lie. Myth just means that it's not historical. A myth portrays truths in a context of story. Man (Adam), is humanity in its early days. The sin is our ancestors and our own strive to separate us from Nature through knowledge which can bring both good and evil. Jesus, that's who we have to become to save ourselves from the knowledge oriented mind and come into a spiritual and experiential mind. That's how we're born again, by becoming Jesus. He's a template for us to become. This doesn't contradict evolution at all.


God = Nature.

Nature brought about Adam and Even (mankind, Homo sapiens).


Or you're reading the Bible literally instead of allegorical (like Philo of Alexandria understood already 2,000 years ago, an actual contemporary of Jesus).


Here's a key for you: he talks about the origins of life, not Evolution per se.

Behe believes Evolution to be true, except that he believes God is guiding it instead of just natural selection. He believes that there's more to evolution than just natural processes, but he doesn't deny that evolution is actually happening!

So by quoting him to support your view, you are in essence agreeing that Evolution is true.

And if you would take my approach and accept Nature as God, then there's no conflict between a Nature/God guiding Evolution, since that's how Nature/God is/works.

The conflict is only an illusion.

Putting an allegorical twist to what the Bible plainly teaches as fact simply has no justification, IMO. It is, rather, a vain attempt to reconcile the reliable Bible history to the unreliable and shifting theories of men. Or as Abe Lincoln once said; 'that plow don't scour.'

 

[rusra02]

How so? You agree with so many of their points in your post--where do you disagree with them?



Again, how so? Please explain how my acceptance of the ToE requires me to repudiate my belief in Christ as my savior. Because a lot of people have missed that, such as the God of Evolution bloggers and the entire BioLogos Foundation.



What evidence does not support it? Evolution has made thousands of predictions. Many of these have been tested and verified. To my knowledge, no contrary predictions have borne any fruit. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please share it, because Tyler Franke sums up the current state of things as I see them:



The primary measure of a good theory is in whether it predicts things. Evolution has had more successful predictions than many other theories, including the theory of plate tectonics. Do you think we should be using a different theory to predict earthquakes?



See the above. What fossil issues are you talking about? Be specific.

YECs claim the earth and all life was created in 6 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago. The Bible doesn't teach that. As mentioned many times before, Genesis 1:1 simply states; " In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." This is before the seven creative periods or days began, thus allowing for the earth to be billions of years old.
As to evolution being a repudiation of Christian faith, if there was no Adam and if Adam did not sin, there would be no need of Christ's ransom sacrifice. And further, Christ would be a false witness, since he declared he did come to provide the ransom.(Matthew 20:28)
Finally, the fossil record does not support transitions from one family of animals to another. Claims that they do are simply without foundation. Here is a quote from The Origin of Life: "Imagine that you found 100 frames of a feature film that originally had 100,000 frames. How would you determine the plot of the movie? You might have a preconceived idea, but what if only 5 of the 100 frames you found could be organized to support your preferred plot, while the other 95 frames tell a very different story? Would it be reasonable to assert that your preconceived idea of the movie was right because of the five frames? Could it be that you placed the five frames in the order you did because it suited your theory? Would it not be more reasonable to allow the other 95 frames to influence your opinion?

How does that illustration relate to the way evolutionists view the fossil record? For years, researchers did not acknowledge that the vast majority of fossils—the 95 frames of the movie—showed that species change very little over time. Why the silence about such important evidence? Author Richard Morris says: “Apparently paleontologists had adopted the orthodox idea of gradual evolutionary change and had held onto it, even when they discovered evidence to the contrary. They had been trying to interpret fossil evidence in terms of accepted evolutionary ideas.”

 

[Triumphant_Loser]

Putting an allegorical twist to what the Bible plainly teaches as fact simply has no justification, IMO. It is, rather, a vain attempt to reconcile the reliable Bible history to the unreliable and shifting theories of men. Or as Abe Lincoln once said; 'that plow don't scour.'

You mean kind of like "snakes can talk" "bats are birds" "rabbits chew cud" and "the Earth is flat?"

 

[ImmortalFlame]

YECs claim the earth and all life was created in 6 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago. The Bible doesn't teach that. As mentioned many times before, Genesis 1:1 simply states; " In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." This is before the seven creative periods or days began, thus allowing for the earth to be billions of years old.

And on what basis do you make the assumption that that is an accurate interpretation of that particular passage? Why would there be a gap of billions of years?

As to evolution being a repudiation of Christian faith, if there was no Adam and if Adam did not sin, there would be no need of Christ's ransom sacrifice. And further, Christ would be a false witness, since he declared he did come to provide the ransom.(Matthew 20:28)

Matthew 20:28 simply states that Jesus gave his life for ransom. Where does it state that this specific ransom was related to Adam?

Finally, the fossil record does not support transitions from one family of animals to another. Claims that they do are simply without foundation. Here is a quote from The Origin of Life: "Imagine that you found 100 frames of a feature film that originally had 100,000 frames. How would you determine the plot of the movie? You might have a preconceived idea, but what if only 5 of the 100 frames you found could be organized to support your preferred plot, while the other 95 frames tell a very different story? Would it be reasonable to assert that your preconceived idea of the movie was right because of the five frames? Could it be that you placed the five frames in the order you did because it suited your theory? Would it not be more reasonable to allow the other 95 frames to influence your opinion?

How does that illustration relate to the way evolutionists view the fossil record? For years, researchers did not acknowledge that the vast majority of fossils—the 95 frames of the movie—showed that species change very little over time. Why the silence about such important evidence? Author Richard Morris says: “Apparently paleontologists had adopted the orthodox idea of gradual evolutionary change and had held onto it, even when they discovered evidence to the contrary. They had been trying to interpret fossil evidence in terms of accepted evolutionary ideas.”

This quotation doesn't even remotely support your above claim that the fossil record does not support evolution, and your attempt to spin it as such appears blatantly dishonest. Richard Morris accepts evolution theory, and was writing purely about the expectation of gradual change rather than punctuated equilibrium.

This is dishonest, and I expect a retraction of this quotation, as well as a source.

 

[metis]

Author Richard Morris says: “Apparently paleontologists had adopted the orthodox idea of gradual evolutionary change and had held onto it, even when they discovered evidence to the contrary. They had been trying to interpret fossil evidence in terms of accepted evolutionary ideas.”

I caught Morris in a three hour debate here with an anthropologist from the University of Michigan broadcast here in the Detroit area many years ago, and Morris got taken to the cleaners real good. Even the moderator at the end shook off his impartiality to tell Morris that so much of his "evidence" was illogical.

It wasn't a debate-- it was a complete massacre.



Edited: Oops, we may be talking about different Morris as the one I was referring to was the co-head of the "Creation Research Institute".

 

[Ouroboros]

Putting an allegorical twist to what the Bible plainly teaches as fact simply has no justification, IMO.

Philo from Alexandria, 20-50 CE (same time as Jesus), wrote quite a bit about how to interpret the Jewish text allegorically. He was a Jewish philosopher. So, you're 2,000 years too late.

The whole hard-core fundamentalistic literalism that we see today wasn't an issue until quite recently in our history.

So how can it be that a Jewish philosopher 2,000 years ago didn't have a problem with this, but you do?

Also, Philo's texts were saved from destruction by no other than the early Christians... so if they didn't have a problem with the allegorical views (they even saved texts about it)... why do you?

It is, rather, a vain attempt to reconcile the reliable Bible history to the unreliable and shifting theories of men. Or as Abe Lincoln once said; 'that plow don't scour.'

The Bible as history is just a modern anti-science reaction that doesn't have to be a problem (and it isn't for quite a number of Christians).

 

[FranklinMichaelV.3]

Philo from Alexandria, 20-50 CE (same time as Jesus), wrote quite a bit about how to interpret the Jewish text allegorically. He was a Jewish philosopher. So, you're 2,000 years too late.

The whole hard-core fundamentalistic literalism that we see today wasn't an issue until quite recently in our history.

So how can it be that a Jewish philosopher 2,000 years ago didn't have a problem with this, but you do?

Also, Philo's texts were saved from destruction by no other than the early Christians... so if they didn't have a problem with the allegorical views (they even saved texts about it)... why do you?


The Bible as history is just a modern anti-science reaction that doesn't have to be a problem (and it isn't for quite a number of Christians).

Don't you know that Jews are wrong? Like they don't know what they are talking about man, they turned their back on Jesus, so only certain Christians (JWs) know the truth.

 

[rusra02]

You mean kind of like "snakes can talk" "bats are birds" "rabbits chew cud" and "the Earth is flat?"

The Bible doesn't say snakes can talk, that bats are birds, or that the earth is flat.
As to hares chewing the cud, "It should not be overlooked, however, that the modern, scientific classification of what constitutes chewing of the cud provides no basis for judging what the Bible says, as such classification did not exist in the time of Moses.....Certain British scientists made close observations of the rabbits’ habits under careful controls, and the results they obtained were published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 1940, Vol. 110, pp. 159-163. Briefly this is the way the hare reingests its food: If a rabbit eats a breakfast of fresh food, it passes through the stomach into the small intestine, leaving behind in the cardiac end of the stomach some 40 or 50 grams of pellets that were already present when the fresh food was eaten. From the small intestine the morning meal enters the caecum or blind end of the large intestine and there remains for a period of time. During the day the pellets descend, and in the intestines the bacterial protein in them is digested. When they reach the large intestine they bypass the material in the caecum and go on into the colon where the excess moisture is absorbed to produce the familiar dry beans or droppings that are cast away. This phase of the cycle completed, the material stored in the dead end of the caecum next enters the colon, but instead of having all the moisture absorbed it reaches the anus in a rather soft condition. It is in pellet form with each coated with a tough layer of mucus to prevent them from sticking together. Now when these pellets reach the anus, instead of being cast away, the rabbit doubles up and takes them into the mouth and stores them away in the cardiac end of the stomach until another meal has been eaten. In this way the special rhythmic cycle is completed and most of the food has passed a second time through the digestive tract." (Insight on the Scriptures vol 1, P.555)

 

[rusra02]

Philo from Alexandria, 20-50 CE (same time as Jesus), wrote quite a bit about how to interpret the Jewish text allegorically. He was a Jewish philosopher. So, you're 2,000 years too late.

The whole hard-core fundamentalistic literalism that we see today wasn't an issue until quite recently in our history.

So how can it be that a Jewish philosopher 2,000 years ago didn't have a problem with this, but you do?

Also, Philo's texts were saved from destruction by no other than the early Christians... so if they didn't have a problem with the allegorical views (they even saved texts about it)... why do you?


The Bible as history is just a modern anti-science reaction that doesn't have to be a problem (and it isn't for quite a number of Christians).

No. Philo's teachings were not accepted by the early first century Christians but by the apostate "Christians" of later centuries, when pagan Greek philosophy was accepted by false teachers claiming to be Christian. Philo himself turned from the clear teachings of the Bible to speculation and falsehood. Deuteronomy 4:2 states: "You must not add to the word that I am commanding you, neither must you take away from it, so as to keep the commandments of Jehovah your God that I am commanding you." Whatever his intentions, Philo was guilty of doing that, IMO. That is why I have a problem with his allegorical views. They are quite simply, grossly erroneous.

 

[FranklinMichaelV.3]

No. Philo's teachings were not accepted by the early first century Christians but by the apostate "Christians" of later centuries, when pagan Greek philosophy was accepted by false teachers claiming to be Christian. Philo himself turned from the clear teachings of the Bible to speculation and falsehood. Deuteronomy 4:2 states: "You must not add to the word that I am commanding you, neither must you take away from it, so as to keep the commandments of Jehovah your God that I am commanding you." Whatever his intentions, Philo was guilty of doing that, IMO. That is why I have a problem with his allegorical views. They are quite simply, grossly erroneous.

Do you know what an allegory is??

 

[Triumphant_Loser]

The Bible doesn't say snakes can talk, that bats are birds, or that the earth is flat.

Talking Snakes: "Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, "Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?"~ Genesis 3:1

Bats are Birds: "These are the birds you are to regard as unclean and not eat because they are unclean: the eagle,[a] the vulture, the black vulture, 14 the red kite, any kind of black kite, 15 any kind of raven, 16 the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, 17 the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, 18 the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, 19 the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat."~ Leviticus 11:13

Flat Earth: And after these things I saw four angels standing on four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.~ Revelation 7:1

 

[Ouroboros]

No. Philo's teachings were not accepted by the early first century Christians but by the apostate "Christians" of later centuries, when pagan Greek philosophy was accepted by false teachers claiming to be Christian. Philo himself turned from the clear teachings of the Bible to speculation and falsehood. Deuteronomy 4:2 states: "You must not add to the word that I am commanding you, neither must you take away from it, so as to keep the commandments of Jehovah your God that I am commanding you." Whatever his intentions, Philo was guilty of doing that, IMO. That is why I have a problem with his allegorical views. They are quite simply, grossly erroneous.

To interpret the Bible as an allegory is not to add or remove anything from the word but to read it spiritually. By reading it literal, you read the words/texts, to the letters (that's what literal means), instead of reading it spiritually. The spirit of the text is different than the letter.

2 Cor 3:6 "...not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."

You're the one who's killing it by reading it literally.

Jesus taught in allegories, called "parables":
Luke 8.9-10: (9) "Then his disciples asked him what this parable
meant. (10) He said, 'To you . . ." (His disciples) ". . . it has been
given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but to others I
speak in parables, so that 'looking they may not perceive, and
listening they may not understand.'"

That's how the spirit talks, through allegories, not literals.

 

[DeepShadow]

I've never understood the appeal of the argument that Bronze Age humans needed to be fed myths and untruths because they couldn't have coped with full scientific reality. As both of the above quotes show, it leans heavily on metaphorically identifying Bronze Age humans as children, modern humans as adults and the history in between as a kind of intellectual growing up - a fundamentally flawed analogy, as Bronze Age adults were not mental children but had brains indistinguishable from ours. Bronze Age brains could have coped as well as ours do with scientific reality, and it should not have been beyond the capability of an omnipotent deity to let them see that reality from the start rather than feeding them untruths that would impede intellectual and technological development for several thousand years.

Your argument rests on several false assumptions:

1) That these metaphors were needed because of the primitive nature of bronze-age humans. In fact, God has always spoken using huge amounts of metaphor, analogy and parable. When dealing with concepts as abstract and cosmic as these, this is really the only way to communicate. You might as well argue that modern poets should write poetry instead of prose, because we're mature enough as a species to just come out and say things.

2) That brain size is a good measure within a species for cognitive maturity. Between species, brain size is a great measure of cognitive ability. Within a species, not so much. WRT humans, not only do many people with very low I.Q.'s have larger than average brains (including a large part of the autistic spectrum), but people with identical brain sizes can have wildly different I.Q.'s.

In particular, cross-cultural studies of Piaget's stages of cognitive development show that without formal education, most adults will not reach the fourth stage. The window of development closes, and this is why many people who grow to adulthood without formal education demonstrate concrete operational thinking but not formal operational thinking.

Formal operational thinking includes the ability to think abstractly about abstract ideas, which is what is required for sciences AND religious understanding. Bronze-age people, lacking this kind of education, would therefore be likely to struggle with such ideas. They would need metaphor and parable even more than the rest of us do (see item #1)

3) That God's purpose would be better served by being more scientifically accurate. God has actually commanded us to seek out knowledge. This purpose is hardly well served by just telling us everything. If He did that, then we would count those things as true not because we tested them repeatedly, but because He said them. We would gain the information, but would not appreciate it or build on it properly.

God's purpose in telling a parable is to teach a lesson. That lesson is not improved by additional scientific accuracy. On the contrary, the lesson could easily be bogged down in unnecessary details until people missed the point.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

Your argument rests on several false assumptions:

1) That these metaphors were needed because of the primitive nature of bronze-age humans.

2) That brain size is a good measure within a species for cognitive maturity.

Um, neither of these assumptions were made in the post you quoted. In fact, the post you're responding to seemed to specifically contradict these assumptions.

3) That God's purpose would be better served by being more scientifically accurate. God has actually commanded us to seek out knowledge. This purpose is hardly well served by just telling us everything. If He did that, then we would count those things as true not because we tested them repeatedly, but because He said them. We would gain the information, but would not appreciate it or build on it properly.

God's purpose in telling a parable is to teach a lesson. That lesson is not improved by additional scientific accuracy. On the contrary, the lesson could easily be bogged down in unnecessary details until people missed the point.

Problem being that there are now millions of people around the world who are actively trying to inhibit scientific advancement because they prefer a literal interpretation of these parables, and see many of them as being contradicted by scientific theories.

 

[DeepShadow]

YECs claim the earth and all life was created in 6 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago. The Bible doesn't teach that. As mentioned many times before, Genesis 1:1 simply states; " In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." This is before the seven creative periods or days began, thus allowing for the earth to be billions of years old.

So you believe the earth is billions of years old, but that animal life did not evolve during that time period?

As to evolution being a repudiation of Christian faith, if there was no Adam and if Adam did not sin, there would be no need of Christ's ransom sacrifice. And further, Christ would be a false witness, since he declared he did come to provide the ransom.(Matthew 20:28)

For the love of pete, I've never said there was no Adam. Evolution does not require a rejection of Adam. :no:

Finally, the fossil record does not support transitions from one family of animals to another. Claims that they do are simply without foundation.

I named several transitional fossils. They have been found in large numbers, exactly where the ToE would predict them to be. Predictions that have borne this kind of fruit cannot honestly be said to be "without foundation." Do I need to go through the list again? Here goes:

We have found fossil series that clearly illustrate the transitions of dozens of major features in various lines. We have found “fishapods” and “frogamanders” and walking whales and feathered dinosaurs and half-shelled turtles. We have often and repeatedly found exactly what the theory of evolution predicted we would find, in the time period in which the theory predicted we would find it.

Author Richard Morris says: “Apparently paleontologists had adopted the orthodox idea of gradual evolutionary change and had held onto it, even when they discovered evidence to the contrary. They had been trying to interpret fossil evidence in terms of accepted evolutionary ideas.”

That is a shameful distortion of Morris's position. Morris is talking about how the transitions support punctuated equilibrium over gradual change, and he refers to transitional fossils. Your use of his words here is a railsplit, and I'm shocked to hear it from someone who claims to follow Christ. Tell me, do you think arguing against evolution excuses you from Christ's command not to lie to fellow Christians?

This is what comes of putting anti-evolutionary stance ahead of Christ's actual words! In order to justify it to other Christians and yourself, you have to lie, ignore or distort scripture, and generally corrupt the words of God with the words of men.

 

[johnhanks]

Your argument rests on several false assumptions:

1) That these metaphors were needed because of the primitive nature of bronze-age humans.

No, the "primitive nature of bronze-age humans" is the very thing I was disputing. The side of the argument that depends on the child/adult metaphors - to shore up the false idea that bronze-age humans couldn't have coped with the facts - is yours.

2) That brain size is a good measure within a species for cognitive maturity.

My post made no mention of brain size. When I said that bronze-age humans had brains indistinguishable from ours I was referring to their entire anatomical structure, not just size. I don't believe you will find any evidence for significant changes in brain structure over the last few thousand years.

That God's purpose would be better served by being more scientifically accurate.

So it's better served by letting Bronze Age people think diseases are caused by demons and evil spirits, rather than letting them in on germ theory? How would letting people practise a few basic hygiene rules (that might save their lives) have interfered with "God's purpose"?