Re: The puzzle of Adam

Thanks, Rich. You saved me the effort of saying what you said. Let me add
that "be fruitful and multiply" has now reached the stage where it is
essentially impossible to supply much of the 6 billion population with
pure water. This is only one of a host of major problems.
Dave

On Thu, 09 Dec 2004 10:47:03 -0700 "Rich Blinne" <e-lists@blinne.org>
writes:

On Thu, 09 Dec 2004 07:44:02 -0500, RFaussette@aol.com said:

Dave wrote:

There is a major problem in Ham's statement. He confuses science with
philosophy and theology. Science has to be empirically checkable or tied
to that which is thus testable.

Sometimes scientists make the same disconnect. Note the following from
page 1460 in last week's Science?

Theorists in other sciences focus on explaining experimental data, but
most string theorists study formal aspects of the theory itself, says
Gordon Kane, a particle theorist at the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor. "Only in string theory is there a complete disconnect in which
string theorists don't make any effort to make contact with experiment,"
Kane says. Stuart Raby, a particle theorist at Ohio State University in
Columbus, says string theorists must find a way to account for
experimental observations, especially in particle physics, in order to
maintain the theory's credibility. "You're not going to believe string
theory until you see the real world coming out of it," he says. [emphasis
mine]

rich:

I spoke of Ken Ham's concern as being appropriate and it is.

Dave wrote:

Morality is not determinable empirically.

rich:

Let's talk about that. I think the measure of morality in a society CAN
be determined empirically. If you're talking Biblical morality, consider
Genesis 9:7 which reads, ";you must be fruitful and increase..." If we
take that Biblical injunction at face value, then the measure of our
morality is a measure of our birth rates. Since our birth rates are
dropping and the cultural elite are importing immigrants to fill our
vacant niches, then I suggest it is easy to measure morality by
considering our willingness to replace ourselves with children. Another
measure of morality is the prevalence of STDs in the Christian population
which demonstrates our adherence to what are essentially " ;purity" laws
in Leviticus.

Such a posteriori reasoning is really broken. There is a reason why
casuistry is used to determine morality. Namely, there must be an a
priori component that must be applied to the situation. You empirically
derive from Scripture what the principle is but in the end you need to
discover the first principles and apply them to the contemporary
situation. What you don't do is arbitrarily apply the commands found in
Scripture. For example, when Abraham tried to be fruitful with Hagar,
that was described as being wrong. Why? Because the first principle is
not maximizing the number of humans but faith and covenant blessing.

Why don't these "measurables" occur to you? Why might you think they are
invalid?

The measurables are fine if what is being measured is correct. If you
take an eisegetic approach to the Bible like the gnostics and mystics
did, then you end up being like the string theorists mentioned above. In
the end, the morality being proposed ends up being arbitrary like the
over 10^300 different possibilities for vacuum energy. We must make
contact with Scripture like the string theorists need to make contact
with the experiments. What the opinion of Jewish mystics is all well and
good but is not at all relevant to the issue at hand. We still don't know
what God's morality is. Rather, all we know is their opinion.
Received on Thu Dec 9 18:11:56 2004