Holding their feet to the fire ...

[Jorge]

So what? People who want to commit atrocities will use any justification they can find, no matter how flimsy. Religion has been used that way too, and very frequently.

The subject was Evolution so stop trying to change the subject.

Yeah, so secretive that they publish there stuff in libraries, where anybody can read it. Ooooo. Secret!

Wow ... another one thinking at a preschool level.
Yeah, I really needed another one of those.

Jorge

[Jorge]

IIRC it was in his later writings that Augustine explained his ideas that the creation did not take place over six 24 hour long days (he advanced the idea that all of creation was instantaneous).

Be Augustine's position "instantaneous", "6 seconds", "12 minutes" or "6 thousand years" - the point remains clear that he was NO friend to Theistic Evolutionists or Old Earth Creationists yet YOU PEOPLE time and time again quote him out of context / without exposing the TRUE picture. You yourself have done this many, many times over the years here at TWeb. Are you FINALLY repenting and correcting? That would be a good step.

As for scholars I would suggest folks like Bruce Waltke (evangelical professor of Old Testament and Hebrew) and John H. Walton (professor of Old Testament whose specialty is Genesis)

Don't trying to toss in a distraction. The point was that many, many Biblical Creationists are experts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin ... etc. And it is by drawing upon that expertise combined with decades of study that their conclusions validate the Biblical Creationist position. What my own studies have revealed is that ONLY by distorting the Bible in some way (as I have defined the term "distort") can a person retain megayears/gigayears in their "Christian" theology. Tap dance all you want, you cannot escape that reality.

Jorge

[Poor Debater]

What specifically am I referring to that is 100.00% pure fact? It is that Evolution has been, is and will undoubtedly continue to serve as "scientific" justification for a large set of human atrocities - in this case eugenics.

So what? People who want to commit atrocities will use any justification they can find, no matter how flimsy. Religion has been used that way too, and very frequently.

Furthermore, the promoters of Evolution are secretive and deceptive - satanically so.

Yeah, so secretive that they publish there stuff in libraries, where anybody can read it. Ooooo. Secret!

[Omniskeptical]

No the important thing is that he creates, and you must believe he is a three. Ruheally...? No bible unitarians allowed.

[rogue06]

I think even 7614ya counts as a young earth. Though I'm anticipating Jorge will refuse to acknowledge Augustine's figure being 27% higher than his own.

Roy

In this month's Screwball thread I posted the following about Augustine concerning his beliefs about the creation and when it took place:

In his De Civitate Dei ("City of God"), Augustine seems to say that he thinks that the world is only a few thousand years old. He writes:

Unbelievers are also deceived by false documents which ascribe to history many thousand years, although we can calculate from Sacred Scripture that not 6,000 years have passed since the creation of man.

And chapter 10 is even entitled "Of the Falseness of the History Which Allots Many Thousand Years to the World’s Past."

So Augustine did appear to believe that the earth was young.

But elsewhere in "City of God" while Augustine does indeed say that "not 6000 years have passed since the creation of man" he also quite clearly states that:

I own that I do not know what ages passed before the human race was created, yet I have no doubt that no created thing is co-eternal with the Creator.

So this definitely leaves room for an old earth but a young human race. And of course nobody is claiming that that the earth is eternal.

One other thing to consider is that Augustine in his Confessiones ("Confessions") castigates Manichæus (the founder of Manichaeism) and some of his followers (particularly one of their bishops Faustus of Mileve) for "impudently dar[ing] to teach" on things he knew nothing about and their utter ignorance of scientific matters saying

For their books are full of lengthy fables concerning the heaven and stars, the sun and moon, and I had ceased to think him able to decide in a satisfactory manner what I ardently desired—whether, on comparing these things with the calculations I had read elsewhere, the explanations contained in the works of Manichæus were preferable, or at any rate equally sound? But when I proposed that these subjects should be deliberated upon and reasoned out, he very modestly did not dare to endure the burden. For he was aware that he had no knowledge of these things, and was not ashamed to confess it.

It was for these reasons that Augustine ended up abandoning Manichaeism and embracing Christianity.

This all suggests that if Augustine was exposed to the scientific evidence in support of things like an old earth and even evolution it is extremely likely that he wouldn't have rejected it but rather abandoning his young earth views and embracing either Old Earth Creationism or Theistic Evolutionism/Evolutionary Creationism. And although this, I admit, is conjecture on my part, it is supported by what he has said in his "De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim" (The Literal Meaning of Genesis – in the last phrase he paraphrases I Tim 1:7):

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although "they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."

This sentiment is expressed elsewhere in different ways by Augustine. Again in "The Literal Meaning of Genesis":

With the scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures. In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation.

In Contra Felicem Manichaeum ("Reply to Faustus the Manichaean"):

In the Gospel we do not read that the Lord said: I send you the Holy Spirit so that He might teach you all about the course of the sun and the moon. The Lord wanted to make Christians, not astronomers. You learn at school all the useful things you need to know about nature. It is true that Christ said that the Holy Spirit will come to lead us into all truth, but He is not speaking there about the course of the sun and the moon. If you think that knowledge about these things belongs to the truth that Christ promised through the Holy Spirit, then I ask you: how many stars are there? I say that such things do not belong to Christian teaching...whereas you affirm that this teaching includes knowledge about how the world was made and what takes place in the world.

In his De doctrina christiana ("On Christian Doctrine"):

At the outset, you must be very careful lest you take figurative expression literally. What the apostle says pertains to this problem: "for the letter killeth, but the spirit quikeneth."　That　is, when　that　which is said figuratively is taken as though it were literal, it is understood carnally [carnalia]. Nor can anything more appropriately be called the death of the soul than　that　condition in which the thing which distinguishes us from beasts, which is understanding, is subjected to the flesh in the passing of the letter [hoc est, intelligentia carni subjicitur sequndo litteram]

[rogue06]

It would appear that Augustine did misinterpret the referenced Latin passage. The big picture is what's interesting here. Augustine "evolved" in his thinking as his later works show. And in that respect Augustine is NO friend to the Theistic Evolutionists yet the TEs ignore the facts and continue using Augustine to support their cause.

Also ...

Time, being limited as it is, does not allow any of us to be educated in all things that we would like. For this we rely on others that have spent a portion of their lives learning what we could not. We trust those people based on the testimony from their lives. Related to this, a large number of Biblical Creationists have indeed become very well versed in ancient Hebrew (Barrick, Th.D. and Boyd, Ph.D. come to mind - there are, of course, many others).

Jorge

IIRC it was in his later writings that Augustine explained his ideas that the creation did not take place over six 24 hour long days (he advanced the idea that all of creation was instantaneous).

As for scholars I would suggest folks like Bruce Waltke (evangelical professor of Old Testament and Hebrew) and John H. Walton (professor of Old Testament whose specialty is Genesis)

[lilpixieofterror]

I think even 7614ya counts as a young earth. Though I'm anticipating Jorge will refuse to acknowledge Augustine's figure being 27% higher than his own.

Sure, but remember Jorge's claim in which he said:

"Biblical Creationists uphold the literal chronology of Genesis giving us an age of circa 6,000 years."

So his own argument would tell us that Augustine was not upholding the literal chronology of Genesis because he wouldn't hold (in 2014 that is) that the earth is 6,000 years old. Now, asking what age the church fathers thought the earth was and asking what their theology was about creation is two different things. Something Jorge can't quite figure out. The age of the earth doesn't seem to be as much of a concern to them as it being a created thing. An idea that would be more important to Christian theology than the age of the earth (again this is something Jorge can't quite figure out).

[Roy]

Still showing you can't read Jorge? Augustine would have thought the earth is over 1500 years older than you do, using your own chronology and arguments against you. Besides, I don't recall anywhere saying that he believed the earth wasn't 'young' in the modern sense, do you? Do you actually know what TE's use his name in arguments? It isn't due to what he says about the age of the earth dim wit, it is the fact that he doesn't agree with your YEC narrative at all. I don't know what math courses you took, but mine seem to say that 5600BC + 2014AD would be 7,614 years ago, not 6,000 years ago. Therefore, the argument stands and you're just an idiot.

I think even 7614ya counts as a young earth. Though I'm anticipating Jorge will refuse to acknowledge Augustine's figure being 27% higher than his own.

Roy

[lilpixieofterror]

It would appear that Augustine did misinterpret the referenced Latin passage. The big picture is what's interesting here. Augustine "evolved" in his thinking as his later works show. And in that respect Augustine is NO friend to the Theistic Evolutionists yet the TEs ignore the facts and continue using Augustine to support their cause.

Still showing you can't read Jorge? Augustine would have thought the earth is over 1500 years older than you do, using your own chronology and arguments against you. Besides, I don't recall anywhere saying that he believed the earth wasn't 'young' in the modern sense, do you? Do you actually know what TE's use his name in arguments? It isn't due to what he says about the age of the earth dim wit, it is the fact that he doesn't agree with your YEC narrative at all. I don't know what math courses you took, but mine seem to say that 5600BC + 2014AD would be 7,614 years ago, not 6,000 years ago. Therefore, the argument stands and you're just an idiot.

Also ...

Time, being limited as it is, does not allow any of us to be educated in all things that we would like. For this we rely on others that have spent a portion of their lives learning what we could not. We trust those people based on the testimony from their lives. Related to this, a large number of Biblical Creationists have indeed become very well versed in ancient Hebrew (Barrick, Th.D. and Boyd, Ph.D. come to mind - there are, of course, many others).

Your appeal to authority is rather amusing, but I wasn't aware that truth was established by the letters attached after your name nor have you actually established your claims as true. Do you not know how to count and read Jorge? It appears you don't and you really need help, quickly I might add, on learning these two things. Perhaps an 8 year old can teach you how to do these things since you seem to need one.

[lilpixieofterror]

Other than to say what follows I'm not wasting much more time on you, Terror ...

No Jorge, what is happening is that you're unable to actually deal with the facts, so you really hope that repeating your assertions, ignoring all counter arguments, and hoping will make what you believe become true. It doesn't Jorge as I'll demonstrate soon.

Over the years I discovered a rather simple test for 'flushing out' severely dishonest people - people for which "honesty" is only a vague, foreign concept. The test is simply this: note if they EVER concede a point, even a relatively small one, that has some substance to it. If that never happens then you're probably dealing with someone that has the integrity of a toilet bowl. You and others here at TWeb (and they either know or suspect who they are) are such specimens.

This actually applies to your Jorge and your massive problems with reading comprehension as I'll show right now. First I need to establish your claim:

You are so fanatical about promoting your position that, like a mindless fool, you don't even think about what you're saying/writing. OEC's cannot - by definition - be Biblical Creationists because Biblical Creationists uphold the literal chronology of Genesis giving us an age of circa 6,000 years.

So you're claiming that in order to be a 'biblical creationist' you need to uphold a literal chronology of Genesis with an age of the earth as being established as 6,000 years old. Problem is, you showed that you can't read because here is what your own source claims about when Augustine thought the earth was created:

Not quite, but a young earth definitely. Augustine wrote in De Civitate Dei that his view of the chronology of the world and the Bible led him to believe that Creation took place around 5600 BC...
http://creation.com/augustine-young-earth-creationist

So Augustine believed that the creation took place at about 5600 BC. Can you not count Jorge? 5600+2014 does not equal 6,000 years old, but 7,614 years old. Using your own source and definition against you, how can you claim that Augustine was a YEC when your own words and your own source would say he is not? Do you have problems reading and remembering what you previously said, are you just plain stupid, or were you hoping that nobody closely read your words and seeing that what you are saying doesn't match up to what the facts actually say? My my... you accuse others of stupidity and dishonesty when you can't even read? How embarrassing...

As the latest example of your 'integrity', in your post above you state things that clearly distort reality since the author of the article directly quotes a number times from several of Augustine's works. Furthermore, the author is is an expert in the field having directly worked on the topic he is writing about. But heaven forbid that you should grant one iota of acknowledgement - that would burst your agenda and your lies. Those are your 'fruits' ... that is how you become 'known' to me and to others.

Paraphrasing isn't quoting. You do know the difference, right? I also really don't care if the author is an 'expert' or not. The claim needs to be established and giving paraphrasing isn't an argument. Besides your own words do a rather good job of showing how big of an idiot you really are. It isn't often that somebody so thoroughly refutes themselves and is totally clueless to how well they actually pwned themselves. Did you actually READ the link or did you quickly browse it, linked it, and thought that was good enough? Finally, can you quote me where I said anything about Augustine being a OEC or a TE Christian? What I actually said was:

And yet, Augustine didn't think that at all, so I guess Augustine wasn't a 'true Christian', eh? Back to bodly declaring that only YEC's are 'True Christians', eh?

And you have demonstrated my claim for me and seem too wrapped up in calling others a bunch of names to see how thoroughly you just refuted yourself. I guess that is what arrogance stacked on top of stupidity looks like. It makes somebody make grade school errors that they should know better than to make. Keep digging Jorge, China should be coming up any moment.

Now ... BUG OFF!!!

I'm sure you want me to 'bug off' since you have thoroughly embarrassed yourself. Keep digging...

[Jorge]

How interesting is that in Jorge's suggested reading re Augustine http://creation.com/augustine-young-earth-creationist
that the author said Augustine misinterpreted a Latin passage, thus coming to a wrong conclusion. The author went on to warn us to "know your Greek!" Well, we, especially YECs, should know ancient Hebrew also!

It would appear that Augustine did misinterpret the referenced Latin passage. The big picture is what's interesting here. Augustine "evolved" in his thinking as his later works show. And in that respect Augustine is NO friend to the Theistic Evolutionists yet the TEs ignore the facts and continue using Augustine to support their cause.

Also ...

Time, being limited as it is, does not allow any of us to be educated in all things that we would like. For this we rely on others that have spent a portion of their lives learning what we could not. We trust those people based on the testimony from their lives. Related to this, a large number of Biblical Creationists have indeed become very well versed in ancient Hebrew (Barrick, Th.D. and Boyd, Ph.D. come to mind - there are, of course, many others).

Jorge

[Jorge]

Give yourself a big fat F since you miserably fail your own test.

WOW ... I guess that shows me who's right around here.

NOT !!!


BTW, you're in the same herd as Terror so it's clear why you're lashing out.

Jorge

[Truthseeker]

How interesting is that in Jorge's suggested reading re Augustine http://creation.com/augustine-young-earth-creationist
that the author said Augustine misinterpreted a Latin passage, thus coming to a wrong conclusion. The author went on to warn us to "know your Greek!" Well, we, especially YECs, should know ancient Hebrew also!

[rogue06]

Other than to say what follows I'm not wasting much more time on you, Terror ...

Over the years I discovered a rather simple test for 'flushing out' severely dishonest people - people for which "honesty" is only a vague, foreign concept. The test is simply this: note if they EVER concede a point, even a relatively small one, that has some substance to it.

Give yourself a big fat F since you miserably fail your own test.

[Jorge]

Looking in that mirror again Jorge because you misrepresented myself and other people all the time and cry foul every time you even think somebody is misrepresenting you (even when you fail to prove that charge, over and over again). So let me get this straight; comparing me to a Nazi is ok in Jorge land, but God forbid Jorge even thinks anybody is misrepresenting him. What irony! You keep proving, over and over again, that your computer is a mirror that reflects yourself.



Getting that charge from you is sort of like being on the Nazi worst criminal list for smuggling Jews out of Europe. It's a badge of honor and thanks for bestowing that honor for me. See, the thing is, in order for your opinion to matter, people actually have to take you seriously. Even many of your fellow YEC's tend to keep their distance from you and even go as far as to stand in opposition of you. Hummm... I wonder why...



Sorry Jorge, I see lots of talk, but I really don't see any references going back to what Augustine actually said. While on the other hand, Rogue has provided direct quotes, of Augustine's words, that prove the opposite. Who should I believe... a source where a mere 2 sources of information or actual quotes by Augustine himself. Hummm... decisions decisions. Funny thing is though, even if one accepts the idea that Augustine later changed his mind, there is no evidence to suggest that he changed his mind due to thinking positions other than YEC were heretics or not 'true Christians'. If you believe YEC is a central doctrine of the faith... why is it not included in the creeds of the church? Can you explain where non YEC positions were ever declared a hearsay or is it because Jorge said so, so it must be true?



While bald assertions made by ignorant creationist, who look towards other creations for confirmation of their theory, well... amuse me to no end; where are the actual words of Augustine himself held up to be analyzed with a thoroughly conclusion that Augustine was a YEC Christian or at least came to see non YEC positions as a hearsay? What we have here is a populist article, with no contributed sources (beyond creation.com that is) to support its conclusions with. Just a list of broad assertions. While that might work fine for time tested theories that you don't need to go into detail on, it doesn't cut it when it comes to actually dealing with the theory in question. You might as well give a link to a populist article on the heliocentric model, while trying to refute a geocentric view. You need to get into the nitty griddy details of the heliocentric model, if you are dealing with somebody who questions the heliocentric model to begin with. Instead of giving a link to an article that basically assumes its conclusions are correct, why don't you give us an article that actually goes into depth on the issue or am I asking too much from you?

Other than to say what follows I'm not wasting much more time on you, Terror ...

Over the years I discovered a rather simple test for 'flushing out' severely dishonest people - people for which "honesty" is only a vague, foreign concept. The test is simply this: note if they EVER concede a point, even a relatively small one, that has some substance to it. If that never happens then you're probably dealing with someone that has the integrity of a toilet bowl. You and others here at TWeb (and they either know or suspect who they are) are such specimens.

As the latest example of your 'integrity', in your post above you state things that clearly distort reality since the author of the article directly quotes a number times from several of Augustine's works. Furthermore, the author is is an expert in the field having directly worked on the topic he is writing about. But heaven forbid that you should grant one iota of acknowledgement - that would burst your agenda and your lies. Those are your 'fruits' ... that is how you become 'known' to me and to others.

Now ... BUG OFF!!!

Jorge