If I can get you to understand that your understanding of the Bible is broken, then I don't need to go point by point with details that are relatively simple.

You are free to feel however you want about interpretations of the Bible. It's like asking me to interpret the Qu'ran. I really don't have an informed opinion. I'm welcome to whatever random way I choose to read it, but just because I have an opinion does not imply that it's worth discussing or that a Muslim would have to defend against it.

One might say that it's as old as the Bible...

When reading the Bible, you should read it for high level themes, first. It is an error of particularly American Christianity to try to force literal readings of the Bible, and especially of the Old Testament. Jewish writings are known for having multiple meanings, and the literary genres are known for embedding theological concepts into their historical narratives rather than being primarily focused on what we would call "historical facts."

Once the larger themes are understood, you can then go back and read things again, knowing more about the perspectives of the writer, and then attempt to sift out what parts seem to be referring to* factual history and which ones are more poetic in form/structure, and so forth.

(*"Referring to" does not mean the same thing as "should be read as literal.")

It's so I don't waste my time with nonsensical questions from someone who clearly hasn't thought more than about 30 seconds about the questions that they're asking.

Were on paragraph one and you're already saying my interpretation is "broken" because it's not consistent with what you say can be taken literally and what can't. I expected more from you tbh.

I'm sorry to disappoint you that I allow for nuanced reasoning instead of trying to approach things with blunt instruments. But if you want to think that a compilation of writings exhibiting a diverse range of forms and written at many points in history should be treated bluntly, you're welcome to your opinion.

So again, what's your explanation for fossils and carbon dating? Did God create these things to test our faith?

I just think they should be properly examined, rather than examined to look for an interpretation that fits with a pre held belief.

My explanation of fossils is that they're the result of a process by which creatures that die are buried under some type of material (usually soil) and the decay of the bones creates a void into which mineral deposits are left.

Carbon dating is the process by which we measure the proportion of certain radioactive forms of carbon from a formerly living creature. We observe that living creatures have a certain proportion of naturally occurring radioactive carbon through the consumption of other carbon-based life forms, and we know that the intake of these radioactive forms of carbon ceases when a creature dies. Therefore, by knowing the half-life of these radioactive elements, we can extrapolate backwards to approximately determine the point in time at which the creature died.

I'd like to encourage you to stop being stupid.

I agree. You should definitely do this.

Fine, I have no problem with the watchmaker being such a weak and really quite useless argument. There could plausibly be design...ok.

The level of flippancy demonstrated here combined with your erroneous representation of the argument should lead you to conclude that you have much to learn, and that during this period you should allow your beliefs to be more malleable so that you become capable of learning more.

I'd like to encourage the same from you. Or that you stop willfully misinterpreting my questions. With that in mind I will be very specific.

What is your interpretation of the fact that carbon dating shows that the earth is far older than suggested by the Bible and indicates that significant time passed between the creation of earth and the creation of man, and that many creatures existed before man.

This isn't doing anything useful, it's just a variation on 'you're wrong'. What information supports your assertion that the majority of scientists don't adhere strictly to the Naturalism paradigm?

Again, not a problem at all:

* What do you even mean by "divine nature"? - I'm using it as 'like god', so having god's characteristics such as being immaterial and spirit. I.e. not physical.

* Can immaterial interact with material? - There is nothing that is 'immaterial', it doesn't exist. This question is not relevant in the scientific paradigm. My point throughout the thread.

* What does it mean to have a "natural explanation"? - Please refer to multiple previous explanations ITT.

* Does "useless" imply "not existing"? It doesn't imply anything, it explicitly states that something is useless. Since it's useless, you can't draw any meaningful conclusions from it at all.

You mean for me to stop answering your stupid questions? I might do that.

My interpretation of it is that it's consistent with both Hebrew poetic forms and science that Genesis 1 should not be interpreted as a literal accounting of historical fact.

So whats your interpretation of the creation story? I'm not sure how you expect me to know how you interpret things without asking you. There are people who take the Bible literally.

For clarity by that I mean. How and when do you think the earth and man was created?

It's not flippant, I'm simply stating my position, and we all have much to learn Aaron.

By the way, you never responded to my argument for why 'plausible' makes 'rational' unworkable in the context of belief. Is there a reason?

It's true that there are people who take the Bible literally. And it's also true that there aren't. If you really want to go deeper into this topic, I would suggest that it's probably better for you to search out an actual book or website that shares this view and read that. My perspective isn't exactly what one would consider unique or unorthodox.

The earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and man first emerged a couple hundred thousand years ago.

The creation of planets is not a well-known process, but there are a number of hypotheses, including the coalescence of dust and gas particles from some large astronomical event.

What we consider to be man is the result of a process of gradual changes over time to previous creatures.

This is part of the line of reasoning where I'm saying that your definition of irrational would imply that lots of things are rational that most people consider not to be rational. This is a result of your definition of irrationality being the primary one and then defining rational to be "not that."

A better approach for understanding rationality is to define rationality. Most people, when given that understand, will likely end up in a different place, and consider plausibility as part of the structure of rationality.

For example, in my coin-flipping example (a million coins or whatever), I think most people would consider that the extremely high probability of there being at least one head would imply that it's completely rational to conclude that there's at least one head, even though it's logically possible for there to be no heads at all (and would hence be irrational by your definition because such a conclusion goes beyond the evidence and precludes the logical possibility of all tails).

Can you recommend a website that explains your view?

If it doesn't lead to the god of the bible, why do you believe Genesis?

You haven't dealt with my criticism that adding 'plausibility' to the requirement for 'rational belief' creates the problem of beliefs about beliefs having to be examined for plausibility in a never ending chain. It makes defining a rational belief impossible. And it transfers 'rational' from being a property of the thinking leading to a belief (and leaving a void for what we now call that and how we judge the quality of it), and makes 'justified' redundant as a property of the belief itself.

It's not going beyond the evidence though. We know the probability of the coin being heads or tails and no one would be coming to this situation from a void, they will bring with them prior knowledge about coin tossing. However... whatever you can reasonably predict, you can't know anything until the million tosses have been completed, and it could come up tails a million times thereby providing evidence that doesn't just weaken your inductive conclusion that there will be at least one head, but shows it to be wrong. It's actually a good example of one of the problems with Inductive reasoning (specifically Hume's problem) but I'm not ready to have that conversation yet.

This is probably a good starting point:

http://biologos.org/blogs/archive/cr...ypeople-part-1

I'll jump in here. This is a useful explanation of the issue you're having:

https://youtu.be/0VIRA6T33o4

You're better off watching at least the first 10-15 minutes of that video rather than repeatedly banging your head against a wall.

My beliefs are not built off a singular collection of observations.

No, it doesn't. It does, however, end up with a definition of rationality that requires interpretation and understanding. If you're looking for black-and-white definitions, you're going to find yourself in a weird and useless train of thought.

Yes, it does go beyond. Without even running the experiment, I'm saying that there *WILL BE* at least one head *IF* someone ran this experiment. According to your definition, this thought is irrational. I'm saying that it's a perfectly rational conclusion.

No, this really isn't about induction. It's about probability.

And it's not really a problem in the sense of rationality. Rational conclusions can be wrong. That's a perfectly acceptable condition. (There are "problems" with inductive reasoning, but they're not problems of the type you think they are. Inductive reasoning is perfectly rational.)

How did you come to the belief that we as humans are 'special' to the creator of the Universe? Do you believe that the creator designed the universe with us in mind? If so, at which point in our evolution did the creator start to take extra interest in our species?