Should intellectually honest fundamentalists live like the Amish?

What is the matter with you? I used the name "Hutton" knowing full well who he is and when he lived and obviously used it as a symbol.

But that was my point, Faith. The fact that you would knowingly use an 18th century geologist as a symbol for modern geology is quite telling of your understanding of geology. It is even worse than thinking that Darwin said everything there is to say about evolution.

You are still precluded from making blatantly false statements. In this case you advanced a position and were shown evidence that this was completely factually incorrect.You never dealt with those factual inaccuracies and instead repeat them in order to make other arguments and draw other conclusions.Whether you want to believe in geo models or not, the way they were built requires none of the assumptions you say must be made, nor was it built using such assumptions. The history and principles have been laid out to you. If you have a problem with that, then bring counterevidence.Otherwise you are knowingly perpetuating a falsehood, which is lying, and against forum guidelines, even if one does not appeal to science.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

Come on, Holmes, you have to quit this. Lying is willful misrepresentation of what one believes to be true. Faith does not believe unconformities took a long time to form so it can't be a lie. Furthermore Hutton could NOT prove deep time for the unconformities. It was the 18th century after all. We can prove it today and that is one of my contentions with Faith about modern geology versus 18th century geology.

I guess we aren't going to get to the unconformities on this thread as it is nearing its end and you want to have this side conversation about my supposed iniquities. No, I meant what I said about the whole thing being a matter of interpretation. Hutton SURMISED that the uncomformity had to be old. There is no way to PROVE any theory about what happened to create such an unconformity. The best you can have is educated guesses about all of it. That is the case with the ToE and the OE on every point. It is all conjecture, all competing plausibilities.I also meant it when I said that you'd have to show me that Genesis can accommodate millions of years. I don't see it. Hutton had apparently not grappled with the implications of Genesis in his naive Christian faith.As I said, it is possible that a dino and a human could be found together, but it is apparently highly improbable given the way the fossils sorted themselves. That's is a typical story, told by others here at EvC. You believed in YEC on blind faith. You hadn't possessed it yourself, thought it through, made it your own. That sort of belief is easy to lose. That's the kind of Christian faith I also had as a child and I lost it at adolescence under the influence of teachers and friends. But I had no belief in YEC or any other theory of origins at that time to lose. I would have to guess that leaders in my childhood church were evolutionists because with a woman pastor for some period it was clearly a liberal church I now know in retrospect, but they never taught anything on the subject. If they had I suppose I'd have taken evolution on faith the same way I took God on faith.As a teenage atheist I started thinking about evolution. I found it hard to prove in my own mind. It certainly wasn't that I had any allegiance to any other theory at the time, none whatever, it's just that I couldn't see how evolution could have worked -- and I had no desire to criticize it, I just wanted to understand it. The answer everyone gave was "lots of time." Well that does not explain how you get through tiny increments of apparently useless changes that have no reason to be selected because they are nonadaptive, such as early stages of antlers, to a finally useful adaptation. Millions of years isn't going to make that process make any more sense. I guess you could surmise that female preference for tiny bumps on the male head was a factor that led to the selection of bigger and bigger bumps, or that the ones with the bumps butted competitors out of the way from the very start or something, but it seems farfetched to me. But there's an example of evolutionistic thinking -- a fine plausibility and nothing more to go on as with all evolutionistic thinking. Anyway I couldn't convince myself that anything along those lines made sense BUT I nevertheless continued to believe in evolution, I just couldn't make the case for it I wanted to be able to make.I didn't become a believer in YEC until I'd been a Christian for some years and read some of the creationists.The childish things *I* put away were atheism and the ToE.

THERE IS NO IMPLICATION THAT I THINK HUTTON REPRESENTS THE BE-ALL AND END-ALL OF GEOLOGY JUST BECAUSE I CASUALLY USED HIM AS A SYMBOL FOR THE FIELD NOR THAT I THINK DARWIN WAS THE PINNACLE OF EVOLUTIONISM. WOULD YOU PLEASE GET OFF THIS FINGER-POINTING MANIA YOU ARE ON???This message has been edited by Faith, 08-26-2005 11:40 AM

It is not about how Faith believes geological forms developed. My comments are about her repeated assertions regarding how age (even relative) was actually determined.She can no longer claim to be ignorant regarding the history and methodology of RELATIVE age determination. And if she is not ignorant, then she is lying. Those are her two choices. This was in my own posts, perhaps you have missed this. I admit that deep time to the length of time that we have now as models was not possible to Hutton. However, what was available was relative age dating, and using that we could clearly remove YE standards for dating. That is all I was saying.Faith claims OE assumptions were made, but as I have shown estimates actually varied greatly in the early days. Thus no real OE assumptions could be made in order to build geology, there wasn't even agreement. OE models were simply being extrapolated, and YE assumptions disproved based on principles of how to determine relative age.She of course has repeatedly refused to address the list of principles used, which I asked her straight out to show which involved immediate assumptions of OE models.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

You appear to be blathering away about some sort of historical fine points that I could not care less about. I haven't denied anything about such things because I haven't given them a moment's thought TO deny them. I don't recall saying anything more than generalizing that OE ideas are conjectures that are not subject to proof. That there were many phases and versions of OE is irrelevant. As I recall I mostly emphasized that the interpretation of descent was simply surmised from the ordering of the fossils and was not and is not subject to proof. I believe this. YOu may think me wrong but calling me a liar is WAY out of line.

Well Faith you may consider it a side conversation. The title of the thread is a little open ended so it is hard to say but I have been pressing you on the "intellectual honesty" part. We all have our discomfort zones. The fact that you would react as violently as you did in post 291 suggests to me that I am getting pretty close to your discomfort zone. If you don't want to be pressed this way I would say you shouldn't post on these threads because someone is going to press you even if it isn't me. Just believe what you have to believe and let it go at that. I for one will leave you alone because the last thing I want to do is upset anyone about their faith. Some people have to believe in YEC to make their faith work. I don't but that is me and that doesn't make my faith better or worse than yours, just different.

YOur personal attacks are offensive in the extreme and you are a lousy psychoanalyst if you think frustration with your false needling insinuations is some sort of proof of your puerile theories about my motives. That's the most primitive stupid kind of psychologizing there is.

What a smug self-satisfied piece of BS. Speak for yourself and leave your theories about why I believe what I believe out of it.

And there we have it.You want an "educated" guess, Faith. But all you are giving us is make believe.Making an educated guess means looking at the data and extrapolating what it means.You're not doing that. You're making suggestions about the Flood that don't even stand on their own logically. (ie Fleeing animals left tracks in older layers before the new lays were set down.) Exactly which animals were running across the bottom of the ocean at the time?You keep saying it's all up to interpretation but if I take a helicopter back in time to the Dark Ages who's going to have a better interpretation of what the machine is?If you want to Believe in the Flood, or the toothfairy, or whatever, no one is going to stop you. It's your right to believe that. But don't try to hold that belief up to science. Don't try to cram that belief into the classroom.

Ok fair enough. But consider this. What did I say that you have not said yourself? You have to believe in YEC to make your faith work. Is that not a true statement? The fact that I am saying that I don't need YEC makes me smug about my faith? No. I just don't need YEC. There are plenty of things about my faith that I am not sure of, that I need to "work" on. In fact I rather admire someone who can attest to little doubt about their faith. Jesus said that "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. (John 20:29) I am a doubting Thomas, no doubt about it. But yet I believe.This message has been edited by deerbreh, 08-26-2005 12:53 PM

No it is not a true statement. "Make my faith work" is meaningless. I don't "need" anything to "make my faith work." I believe what I believe because I believe it is true. I don't NEED it to be true, I believe it IS true. I didn't CHOOSE to believe. You psychologize and relativize these things.{EDIT: And I didn't mean smug ABOUT YOUR FAITH, but about your opinion about my motives and about what faith is.This message has been edited by Faith, 08-26-2005 12:59 PM

Not believing that God authored the Bible leaves you open to every kind of doubt and whim of doctrine.