Coal is organic matter. We know one way of creating it -- compression over long periods of time.
But the organic matter -- billions of cubic meters of it world wide, had to come from somewhere. It had to have been compressed over some period of time.
It would be a good idea to do more than simply say "God placed it there and speeded up the transition from plant to coal" because, ultimately, the charge you make about God being a trickster if the Bible isn't literally true applies just as much to a God who would fudge the timeline of converting plant material to coal. We have Dan's alternative that it was Satan doing it to tempt man away from knowledge of God by placing these stumbling blocks of confusing physical evidence before us. That's a possibility, I suppose, that Creationism could put forward. But it also has a problem because Scripture includes passages about how the natural world around us is sufficient to convince people that God exists and was/is the creator.
To me, I think this kind of thing boxes one into a corner of believing God MUST have been either a dupe of Satan, a willing co-consipirator, or the sole perpetrator of one or the other hoax.
Insistence on a Biblical literacy that requires the Genesis account to be true and complete (or sufficient) history or all support for belief in the Bible is undermined seems to me to be trying to judge the Bible's historical content from a relatively recent definition of what history IS.
It contains elements of history, to be sure. And for the time in which it was recorded, it probably passed for a historically accurate. But was presentation of history the real purpose? Or, is a moral treatise which has value independent of it's value as history?
That is up to each person to decide. But I will say that I would hesitate to teach a potential believer that the criterion for belief is acceptance of the Biblical account of the Creation story. That is a small bit of a much larger book that presents moral lessons placed in an historical context. Since we like to say that the Bible has lessons for all time, the relevance of the context is more complex than merely for its level of historical accuracy.
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Tres, go burn some coal. Matter converts to energy quite nicely, IMHO.
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Kmbboots, and Bob (although I'm not sure if Bob is being facetious or not) no actual matter is destroyed in burning coal, or consuming food. In both processes (VERY simply) molecular bonds are broken, but these bonds are made of energy, not matter. More complex molecules are simply broken down into less complex ones, while net matter remains the same. Only in a nuclear reaction is matter truly converted to energy.
Slight digression here. This one has always bothered me. If God created the Earth and life to populate it (and the universe, etc), and the Bible is a divinely inspired, but man-made creation, wouldn't the better path to learning about God be to study the world around you rather than reading a book that people several thousand years ago may or may not have gotten right? It seems more direct to me.
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Speaking of coal formation, isn't it cool that dinosaur footprints can be found in the ceilings of coal mines?
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quote:Slight digression here. This one has always bothered me. If God created the Earth and life to populate it (and the universe, etc), and the Bible is a divinely inspired, but man-made creation, wouldn't the better path to learning about God be to study the world around you rather than reading a book that people several thousand years ago may or may not have gotten right? It seems more direct to me.
Why would the two need to be mutually exclusive? And, assuming God did bother to talk directly to specific people, how would we learn this by studying nature?
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Certainly, they wouldn't need to be mutually exclusive; I'm not at all suggesting that Christianity should abandon the Bible. Perhaps this will make my point clearer, though. Ever play the game where a long line of people repeat a message to one another down the line? At the end, the message is nothing like what it originally was, no matter how good the intentions of those in the line. When I read the bible (I mean this in the singular, past-tense; I'm agnostic, and was curious) I'm not just reading the word of God, but the word of God as has been translated, edited, and added to by man. It's hard for me to imagine that a similar phenomenon wouldn't occur. Again, this doesn't mean that I think Christians should consider the Bible worthless. If you wanted to learn about Michaelangelo, wouldn't it be most productive to study his works, with a textbook on the side to aide you? Certainly it would be far better than simply reading the text alone.
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There is a small, but nonzero, conversion of matter into energy when coal (or anything else) burns. Consider : The equation is
C + O2 -> CO2 + photon
The energy for that photon has to come from somewhere; specifically, the mass of the (C + O2) system. You will therefore find that the mass of a CO2 molecule is very slightly smaller than the sum of the masses of a carbon atom and an oxygen molecule, just as the mass of a helium atom is less than the mass of two protons and two neutrons.
However, with chemical reactions, the energies released are on the order of electron-volts, compared to the thousands or millions of electron-volts released in nuclear reactions. It is therefore an extremely good approximation to say that no mass is converted. In fact, the effect is probably too small to be measurable with current equipment.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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So, you are saying that both are good ways to study God?
If so, I agree wholeheartedly.
They go quite well together and the study of one enriches the other, and vice versa, in my experience.
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re coal: burning coal releases energy stored in the coal. If there is heat coming off of the item burned, then matter is not preserved 100%. Some is converted to heat energy.
Nobody said I had to completely convert matter to energy, did they?
The energy came from somewhere, didn't it? If not from the coal, I think we need someone to explain the source of this magical stuff that heated the air surrounding the coal that we burned.
Unless our understanding of Physics has changed radically in the past few years, release of heat when burning something is through the conversion of matter to energy.
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Actually, come to think of it, you could possibly get the energy from re-arranging the electrons. Similar to jumping from an excited state to a less excited one. This may be equivalent to lowering the mass, though; I'm not quite sure.
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quote:Unless our understanding of Physics has changed radically in the past few years, release of heat when burning something is through the conversion of matter to energy.
My old understanding (from high school chemistry) was that the heat came from the energy that had been present in chemical bonds.
I got the impression from one of the popular physics books - Brief History, Elegant Universe, or somesuch - never confirmed, that the energy in chemical bonds is measurable as mass.
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quote:But, of course, unless Treso has himself actually seen something burning, then he's not going to take any of our words for it that things can actually be burned. And unless he's actually seen that the earth is, in fact, a sphere, he's just going to have to continue believing that it's a large, flat plate, supported on the back of a very large number of turtles.
You are attacking the opposite position of the one I just took. I said we SHOULD trust sources until we have a decent reason to believe otherwise. Hence, I DO trust when my textbook says things burn, and I DO trust when people tell me the world is round.
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But we do have a decent reason to believe people do not rise from the dead : To wit, we have never seen it happen.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: But we do have a decent reason to believe people do not rise from the dead : To wit, we have never seen it happen.
Well, actually there are documented occurrences of people being in a medically dead state that have been resuscitated. Regardless, the very fact that we have a decent reason to believe that people do not rise from the dead indicates how miraculous Jesus' resurrection actually was, thus making it very compelling evidence regarding his identity. Of course, that would also require believing the documentation of his resurrection, which some clearly do not believe.
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That depends entirely on how you define 'medically dead'. Recovering from having a stopped heart, for example, would not be regarded as particularly miraculous anymore.
But in any case, this kind of undermines the argument. If there are people who have recovered from being, to all outward inspection, dead, then there is nothing special about the resurrection anymore - that is, unless you want to claim that those other people were also divine. You then have to explain how you know that recovering from apparent death is miraculous in the one case, and naturalistic in the others.
Either the event is unique, which requires a lot more evidence than third-party accounts. Or else it is not, in which case, the argument for divinity is destroyed - you cannot advance something Joe Bloggs can do as evidence for being the Son of GOd. So which is it?
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quote:Either the event is unique, which requires a lot more evidence than third-party accounts. Or else it is not, in which case, the argument for divinity is destroyed - you cannot advance something Joe Bloggs can do as evidence for being the Son of GOd.
You're limiting the options to only the two that fit your argument. Here, let me explain a third option whereby it is entirely possible to view an event that is no longer unique to be very much miraculous.
First, the fact that we can resuscitate a person from a medically dead state proves nothing except that life after "death" is entirely possible. However, life after three days of death is another matter. With the knowledge and technology we have now, it wouldn't take much to speculate that eventually mankind may someday have the ability to "resurrect" a person back to life after an extended period of "death" but doing so would undoubtedly require a great deal of technological/scientific knowledge, such that would have been unavailable to humans two thousand years ago.
If Moses did in fact part the Red Sea with nothing more than a staff, I think it would still be considered miraculous even though in modern times we can simulate the effect with magnetic fields or some other type of manipulation.
So instead of undermining or destroying the argument for divinity, as you suggest, it can actually strengthen it.
So to sum up, we do have decent reason to believe that people do not spontaneously rise from the dead, but we also see that the idea is not completely impossible, ie. a resurrection doesn't contradict the laws of physics. It's a believable event that is miraculous when considering the time and place that it occurred.
I do agree that for many people it may require a lot more evidence than third-party accounts to believe that it actually happened, but I'm not sure what type of evidence you would actually expect there to be beyond a bunch of people saying they witnessed his death and then saw and talked to him several days later.
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For one thing, I'd like to hear from a "bunch" of people. The Bible doesn't provide that, sadly.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Juxtapose; I like your analogy of studying Michaelangelo. Suppose to draw a further analogy, we wanted to specifically study how the Sistine Chapel was painted.
It is useful whenever studying history to distinguish between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources and circumstantial evidence.
If Michaelangelo himself wrote an account of the painting, a diary while he was painting, or wrote letters concerning the painting, these would be considered primary sources.
One level down from that: if someone else watched as he painted and wrote similar documents, they would also be considered primary sources, but not as useful to you as Michaelangelo's own documents, because in this case you can see the specifics of what happened but not as much of the motivations behind it.
Secondary sources would be biographies of Michaelangelo, or external accounts of how the Sistine chapel was painted. In other words, anything that used primary sources for its sources.
Tertiary sources would be articles and sources that used the material above as its sources, and is therefore hardly worth considering for any serious study.
Now, to look at circumstancial evidence: the Sistine Chapel itself is actually circumstancial evidence! Circumstancial evidence is any evidence, either physical or written accounts, that were not direct witnesses to the event in question or are unable to speak for themselves. Therefore any material things, which includes the Sistene Chapel, the object of the event, is still circumstantial evidence. Written accounts of other people describing the Chapel, both before and after painting who did not witness the painting itself, is also circumstantial evidence. If we had material evidence concerning the amount of paint that was used, the sort of supplies that were used, etc, that is also all circumstancial evidence.
Now, what is the role of each of the above materials in studying the event of painting? The answer is that written sources must be analyzed in the light of several factors, the most important of which include primacy (whether it is a primary source or not), reasons to lie/exaggerate, and corroboration with other sources and the circumstantial evidence.
So in other words, the role of the circumstantial evidence serves primarily to validate testimony, but is only one factor among many in doing so. Of course the Sistine chapel can still be studied for its artistic value on its own, but that is not the purpose of the current inquiry. If we want to learn how it was painted, the only reason we would have for studying it on its own is if no written source texts existed or if all that existed were discredited. The relevent thing about this is that you cannot presuppose the non-existence of source material, establish an interpretation of the circumstantial evidence, and then check this interpretation against a source that you then consider. It has to be the other way around: you consider the interpretation you expect given the authority of a source material, then see if that interpretation fits the evidence.
Therefore, because of my views on the historicity of the resurrection, I consider the Bible to be a primary source for all history that it is relevent to, which includes the creation of the earth. Therefore the creation itself, being circumstantial evidence for that event, should be interpreted by the source material first, and then be checked to see if the actual evidence is consistent with this interpretation. Someone who is an atheist would logically not consider the Bible to be a primary source, but would also delegate it to being circumstantial evidence, and so therefore consider all circumstantial evidence equal.
I do not think that my expectation of creation based on the Bible fits 100% with the physical evidence I observe. For instance, I don't know how to reconcile the problem of distant starlight with a young universe. I have heard various creationist theories presented, some of which sound plausible, and all of which gives me some hope that someday it might be reconciled, but for now I count that as circumstantial evidence against my interpretation of Genesis. Yet that does not invalidate it completely, because I feel that my interpretation still is corroborated overall, and that it has more circumstantial evidence in agreement with it than other paradigms do, but most importantly is that I trust the source itself more than my abilities.
By the way, as I stated in the case of studying the Sistine chapel for its artistic merits, the above reasoning does not preclude study of the creation for its scientific AND artistic merits apart from historical material for which the Bible speaks with precedence. Also, another point to those who make the point that creation is made by God but the Bible written by men: according to the Bible itself, the creation was made by God but cursed because of men, whereas the books of the Bible (particularly the Old Testament) were written by men but affirmed by God (Jesus) as being authoritative.
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quote:But we do have a decent reason to believe people do not rise from the dead : To wit, we have never seen it happen.
But depending on whether or not seeing fire burning counts, I don't think I've ever seen matter turn into energy either - or countless other scientific and other claims that I do, in fact, believe are true. I definitely have never seen a proton, for instance. Or a platypus, for that matter, and those seem to be pretty bizarre creatures. So, having never seen something is not necessary a decent reason to assume someone is lying when they claim to have seen it.
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The amount of time light takes to travel from distant stars to reach Earth is circumstantial evidence ?!?
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No, the facts that we can measure light's speed, have posited it to be constant, and can make certain trigonometric observations regarding stars are circumstantial evidences of the creation. The amount of time the light takes to travel from the stars to us is an inference that follows from the previous evidence in the absence of a primary source. This circumstantial evidence as I said, because of said inference, seems to cast disfavor on a primary source that seems to imply that such a length of time has not come to pass, but it is important to make a distinction between the evidence itself, and our interpretation of it. Such a primary source would only be "refuted" as testimony if it could be shown that it is inconsistent with any possible interpretation of the evidence, not just the interpretation that seems most likely given the absense of historical sources. As it stands, the inference seeming likely now, this just casts disfavor on the source, which as I stated, is a problem, but not so much of a problem that I am willing to reject it.
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So tell me, what evidence would you accept? And please realise, if the answer is "I can't imagine any", then your entire line of reasoning on "I don't think the inconsistency is big enough to discard the Bible" is kind of suspect. Because if it could never be big enough, then you are not, in fact, evaluating the evidence rationally, are you?
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quote: And please realise, if the answer is "I can't imagine any", then your entire line of reasoning on "I don't think the inconsistency is big enough to discard the Bible" is kind of suspect. Because if it could never be big enough, then you are not, in fact, evaluating the evidence rationally, are you?
While this may be true, it isn't necessarily. You don't know how much evidence he has that a) the Bible is true and b) it literally describes how the earth was created.
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Sure, but if the evidence is indeed being considered rationally, then for any amount X, there exists some amount X+1 that will force a re-interpretation.
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Your query is certainly valid; I'll try my best to answer if you would try your best to answer the inverse of how much evidence would it take to accept the resurrection as historical for you.
It's of course very hard to delineate exactly "how much" is enough evidence for or against something. Of course, you cannot assign probabilities to any individual argument, collect all and use some mathematical formula to derive a result and say that when the resulting probability passes a certain threshold then it is worthy of being considered true. There are a few things that I think I could say for certain, though. For one, as I already mentioned on this thread, if there could be reliable evidence given that Jesus is still dead, I would certainly reject the resurrection and probably Christianity or the notion that the Hebrew creation account is in any way special. This could take the form of his body or remnants of it being produced in the present day, or reliable historical evidence that it was produced at some time in the past, or possibly even an explanation of how it existed and a logical reason for why it was not brought forth to refute Christianity at any point in the past, particularly in the first couple centuries. Second, if any reliable evidence concerning significant textual manipulation of the scriptures or rewriting of history were to be discovered (not just minor glosses, but significant doctrine changing or fabrication), along with the reason why it was not objected to contemporaneously and why it has not been discovered before, and why up to now only evidence of remarkable faithfulness has been the case.
Another far-off scenario is contact or discovery of an alien civilization. These would cause me to reject a lot of my interpretation, although if contact with the aliens prove that they share a similar faith in God, then I would most likely retain what we have in common, but in the case of no/limited contact due to distance or contact that reveals they have no idea who this God-thing is, I would probably greatly reconsider my entire paradigm of reality.
Other than those major things, I cannot really say what I would deem to be "enough" to be X+1, so to speak, other than the fact that a combination of things would probably be involved.
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quote: In both processes (VERY simply) molecular bonds are broken, but these bonds are made of energy, not matter.
quote: My old understanding (from high school chemistry) was that the heat came from the energy that had been present in chemical bonds.
Aaahhhh. Now this makes sense. Thanks, for the lesson, guys.
quote: That is up to each person to decide. But I will say that I would hesitate to teach a potential believer that the criterion for belief is acceptance of the Biblical account of the Creation story. That is a small bit of a much larger book that presents moral lessons placed in an historical context. Since we like to say that the Bible has lessons for all time, the relevance of the context is more complex than merely for its level of historical accuracy.
quote:For one, as I already mentioned on this thread, if there could be reliable evidence given that Jesus is still dead, I would certainly reject the resurrection and probably Christianity or the notion that the Hebrew creation account is in any way special. This could take the form of his body or remnants of it being produced in the present day, or reliable historical evidence that it was produced at some time in the past, or possibly even an explanation of how it existed and a logical reason for why it was not brought forth to refute Christianity at any point in the past...
What if Jesus never existed at all? How would one produce his body?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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To be fair, I suppose Avin would also accept sufficiently good evidence that Jesus never existed; though proving the non-existence of one particular man 2000 years ago... Time machine, anyone? I think I'll add that a sufficiently cruel death for Avin himself or a close relative might convince him; it suffices for many people. Going back to the historical attempt, perhaps if I produced evidence that the Resurrection was faked? That is, there really was a Jesus, and his followers or some subset of them stole away the body and substituted a close relative. (I have no idea what form such evidence might take; I am merely throwing out hypotheticals.)
Anyway, we seem to have gotten to the point where Avin will give up his faith if the Resurrection proves false; that seems reasonable. However, I would have to ask what distinguishes the Resurrection from the many very similar accounts of miracles in other faiths? Why Jesus, and not the Buddhas, or the Rig-Vedas? Why not the magic of Odin?
Finally, to answer your question in turn : A simple manifestation of a god's voice will do. Other people need to hear it; careful examination should reveal no fakery; and it should give clear and plain instructions along the lines of "This is why I've been quiet so long; these are the parts of the bible (or other holy book) that are actually important; and incidentally, if you do this experiment you will get that result." (Where the experiment, obviously, reveals something humans did not already know, and preferably something we did not suspect.)
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Oh, by the way, if we found a creature with wheels on a macroscopic scale, I would at least consider the possibility of it being intelligently designed. I just don't see a way for a wheel to evolve; what could possibly be the intermediate steps? (Unless, of course, we also happened to find fossils or relatives of the first creature showing what the intermediate steps actually were. Just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean it can't exist.)
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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I am still interested in this question, should Avin choose to answer it.
quote:However, I would have to ask what distinguishes the Resurrection from the many very similar accounts of miracles in other faiths? Why Jesus, and not the Buddhas, or the Rig-Vedas? Why not the magic of Odin?
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