Gunnar wrote:LittleNipper, you said:If you really meant that literally, then you are indeed appallingly, willfully and obstinately ignorant. I don't actually think that you believe and know only what is in the Bible. If that were really true, you would be unemployable for anything but unskilled, manual labor (if even that), and would probably not be able to afford the computer you use to access the internet, and would almost certainly not know how to use it or keep it updated even if you had one.I only believe what the Bible says.
I'm sure that you never attacked and burned a library, but the kind of mindset exemplified by your ignorant statement is precisely what enabled both fanatical Christians and Muslims to justify destroying recorded truths and knowledge they didn't understand or that conflicted with what they would rather believe. It is true that eventually Christians and even Muslims established schools that helped to further literacy, knowledge and progress, but I guarantee that they were not the same type of Christians who ignorantly and arrogantly denied the truth of anything not found in the Bible!
Speaking of Muslims, if you knew your history, you would know that we owe the Muslim Moors of Spain and other Muslim scholars around the same time a great debt of gratitude for preserving much of what was valuable from ancient Greek, Indian and Middle Eastern science and literature during the time that Christian Europe stagnated and even retrogressed during the "Dark Ages." It was the Arabians' invention of algebra and the introduction to Europe of "Arabic numerals" that helped to spark the European Renaissance that led to modern advances in math and science. These Arab scholars also made some of the earliest advances in anatomy, medicine and chemistry that Christian Europe later built upon to create the foundation for modern chemistry and medicine. It is a crying shame that after such a promising start, the Islamic world later became as intolerant of new and independent secular thought as the Christians were during the European Dark Ages!
If humankind believed and knew only what was in the Judeo-Christian Bible, we would still be living the primitive existence endured by the original writers of the books that were eventually compiled into what we now call "The Bible." We would not have the modern benefits of rapid transportation and communication nor the comforts we now enjoy nor the advances of modern medicine that make possible our present, high life expectancy. Without the advances in agriculture, food production, refrigeration and food preservation techniques made since Biblical times, the World would only be able to support a small fraction of its present population.
The painstakingly worked out and discovered scientific theories that inform our present understanding of the size and age of the Universe and how it works, are the same theories that make much of the advanced technology we now rely on so heavily work for us. The simple, undeniable fact that we are able to design and build advanced devices using these theories that then proceed to work as predicted by them is the strongest evidence we can possibly have that those theories are essentially correct. The very computer you are using to access this forum is compelling evidence that modern scientists' understanding of The Universe and how it works is essentially correct. Are these theories incapable of still further improvement as we gain ever more knowledge? Probably not, but it is certain that the additional knowledge needed to further refine them will not come from reading the Bible! Even as they now stand, they are very good indeed! Modern Quantum Theory and General and Special Relativity theories have been experimentally verified to at least a dozen or so decimal places. Because of this, it is simply neither reasonable nor honest for anyone who knows and understands them to doubt what they tell us about the size and age of The Universe. If you think the Bible tells you differently, then either the Bible is in error, or you are misinterpreting what it says. There is simply no other viable alternative.
I believe that God has encouraged research and fostered human creativity. I feel strongly that as man moves towards God, society profits, and education becomes interestingly fun and provocative. I also firmly believe that as man moves away from God, education becomes a drudge and society flounders in its own excrement. Seeing investigation as its own ends but not for the betterment of man as its intent, the pockets of a select few are filled. Such come to believe that they are above morality ---- in fact they believe they have the right to design ethics to suit their own pleasures, and the welfare of the public be damned or controlled/manipulated. The fact is, I see prophetically from the Bible, the beginning of a one world government under an Anti-Christ, controlled by a police state, where humanism reigns as the "new" religious order (do as I command and not as I do).
