What would the outcome be among people at this site if we were able to conduct a poll on belief in Evolution or in Creation?
What would the outcome be if at the same time we asked for religious affiliation (including formal, informal, or none)?
Doug
Doug Mason
JoinedPosts by Doug Mason
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Evolution or Creation?
by Doug Mason inwhat would the outcome be among people at this site if we were able to conduct a poll on belief in evolution or in creation?.
what would the outcome be if at the same time we asked for religious affiliation (including formal, informal, or none)?
doug.
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Doug Mason
Somewhere among thing I picked up along the highway of life is a leaflet given to me on the 1970s. A diagram showed that a destructive asteroid was imminent and there was thus the need to repent.
Nothing happened then either.
Not everyone says that Christ died on a Friday or that it took place at Passover in April, preferring the Day of Atonement (Yon Kippur) in Sept/Oct.
You are not alone in making such speculative predictions. History is strewn with unfulfilled expectations, with people famous, such as Isaac Newton, and people unknown. The list of expected imminent divine interventions run from at least as early as the 3rd century BCE, and includes writings now considered to be Scripture.
The lesson that history teaches is that people do not learn the lesson that history teaches.
Doug
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Sample from my forthcoming Critique
by Doug Mason ini am hopeful that next week i will be able to provide the second of my critiques into the brochure, "the origin of life".. in the meantime, as a sampler, here is my critique of the brochure's endnote 51.. https://jwstudies.com/sample_from_the_critique_of_using_scientists.pdf .
doug.
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Doug Mason
I am hopeful that next week I will be able to provide the second of my Critiques into the brochure, "The Origin of Life".
In the meantime, as a sampler, here is my Critique of the Brochure's Endnote 51.
https://jwstudies.com/Sample_from_the_Critique_of_USING_SCIENTISTS.pdf
Doug
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" The Origin of Life" -- Using the Bible
by Doug Mason ini am preparing three critiques on the watchtower's "the origin of life".. the first critique considers the scriptures that their brochure uses, and is available at: https://jwstudies.com/the_origin_of_life__the_bible.pdf .
i expect to finalise the next critique some time next week and i hope to complete the third critique a week or two after that.. as usual, please help me, especially with typos and grammar (australian spelling in my comments needs to be tolerated.).
doug.
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Doug Mason
No worries, Cofty.
I want to ensure these three Critiques are read in my preferred sequence. I feel that the second one, dealing with each of the brochure's 51 References, is by far the most important. I am waiting for one book, which will hopefully arrive early next week. Today i received the book listed as #51 in the WTS's brochure.
I am always open to any criticisms at any stage.
Doug
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" The Origin of Life" -- Using the Bible
by Doug Mason ini am preparing three critiques on the watchtower's "the origin of life".. the first critique considers the scriptures that their brochure uses, and is available at: https://jwstudies.com/the_origin_of_life__the_bible.pdf .
i expect to finalise the next critique some time next week and i hope to complete the third critique a week or two after that.. as usual, please help me, especially with typos and grammar (australian spelling in my comments needs to be tolerated.).
doug.
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Doug Mason
I am preparing three Critiques on the Watchtower's "The Origin of Life".
The first Critique considers the Scriptures that their brochure uses, and is available at: https://jwstudies.com/The_Origin_of_Life__The_Bible.pdf
I expect to finalise the next Critique some time next week and I hope to complete the third Critique a week or two after that.
As usual, please help me, especially with typos and grammar (Australian spelling in my comments needs to be tolerated.)
Doug
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Fossils fail to provide a connection
by Doug Mason inpage 24 of “the origin of life” cites henry gee:.
a second, more serious challenge is the lack of proof that those creatures are somehow related.
specimens placed in the series are often separated by what researchers estimate to be millions of years.
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Doug Mason
LetTheTruth,
So you believe The Epic of Gilgamesh is historically correct, do you?
Are you saying that Gilgamesh went to Cuba?
Doug
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Fossils fail to provide a connection
by Doug Mason inpage 24 of “the origin of life” cites henry gee:.
a second, more serious challenge is the lack of proof that those creatures are somehow related.
specimens placed in the series are often separated by what researchers estimate to be millions of years.
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Fossils fail to provide a connection
by Doug Mason inpage 24 of “the origin of life” cites henry gee:.
a second, more serious challenge is the lack of proof that those creatures are somehow related.
specimens placed in the series are often separated by what researchers estimate to be millions of years.
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Doug Mason
The way that the author of the "Origin of Life" brochure uses the words from Henry Gee's book, he wishes to make it look as if Gee is speaking about transitions from "fishes to amphibians" . Here is the brochure's context:
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"What, though, of the fossils that are used to show fish changing into amphibians, and reptiles into mammals? Do they provide solid proof of evolution in action? Upon closer inspection, several problems become obvious. …
"A second, more serious challenge is the lack of proof that those creatures are somehow related. Specimens placed in the series are often separated by what researchers estimate to be millions of years. Regarding the time spans that separate many of these fossils, zoologist Henry Gee says: “The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.”("The Origin of Life", page 24)
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As the passage from Gee showed, he is speaking about direct lineal ancestry of a single species separated by millions of years.Doug
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Fossils fail to provide a connection
by Doug Mason inpage 24 of “the origin of life” cites henry gee:.
a second, more serious challenge is the lack of proof that those creatures are somehow related.
specimens placed in the series are often separated by what researchers estimate to be millions of years.
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Doug Mason
Page 24 of “The Origin of Life” cites Henry Gee:
A second, more serious challenge is the lack of proof that those creatures are somehow related. Specimens placed in the series are often separated by what researchers estimate to be millions of years. Regarding the time spans that separate many of these fossils, zoologist Henry Gee says: “The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.” (Brochure’s footnote: Henry Gee does not suggest that the theory of evolution is wrong. His comments are made to show the limits of what can be learned from the fossil record.) – In Search of Deep Time—Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life, by Henry Gee, 1999, p. 23.
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The following is the immediate context of the passage.
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It has been a productive week. Nzube, Gabriel, Robert, and others on the team have unearthed hominid remains—no complete skulls or skeletons, because these are rare indeed, but evidence enough that could, after study, reveal something about the hominids that had lived in this region 3.3 million years ago.
In all, it has taken approximately 250 man-hours of work to produce enough hominid fragments to half-fill a tin box that Meave carries around on the passenger seat of her truck. Almost all the specimens were pieces of tooth. It does not sound like much, given all that effort, but it is more than most fossil hunters expect, even from a site that had already yielded a few hominid bones and had earlier been marked as promising.
Before I told everyone else about my own find, straddled on that ridge overlooking an expanse of space and, figuratively, an expanse of time, I wondered fleetingly if it might have been part of a hominid—perhaps half a tooth, like the one Gabriel found. In my mind I was already holding the fragment between finger and thumb, turning it over in the light. The question immediately presented itself: could this fossil have belonged to a creature that was my direct ancestor?
It is possible, of course, that the fossil really did belong to my lineal ancestor. Everybody has an ancestry, after all. Given what the Leakeys and others have found in East Africa, there is good reason to suspect that hominids lived in the Rift before they lived anywhere else in the world, so all modern humans must derive their ancestry, ultimately, from this spot, or somewhere near it.
It is therefore reasonable to suppose that we should all be able to trace our ancestries, in a general way, to creatures that lived in the Rift between roughly 5 and 3 million years ago. So much is true, but it is impossible to know, for certain, that the fossil I hold in my hand is my lineal ancestor. Even if it really was my ancestor, I could never know this unless every generation between the fossil and me had preserved some record of its existence and its pedigree. The fossil itself is not accompanied by a helpful label.
The truth is that my own particular ancestry—or yours—may never be recovered from the fossil record. The obstacle to this certain knowledge about lineal ancestry lies in the extreme sparseness of the fossil record. As noted above, if my mystery skull belonged to an extinct giant civet, Pseudocivetta ingens, it would be the oldest known record of this species by a million years. This means that no fossils have been found that record the existence of this species for that entire time; and yet the giant civets must have been there all along. Depending on how old giant civets had to be before they could breed (something else we can never establish, because giant civets no longer exist so that we can watch their behaviour), perhaps a hundred thousand generations lived and died between the fossil found by me at site LO5 and the next oldest specimen.
In addition, we cannot know if the fossil found at LO5 was the lineal ancestor of the specimens found at Olduvai Gorge or Koobi Fora. It might have been, but we can never know this for certain. The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent. (Gee, pages 22-23; underlining added)
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The Church Father's "70 years"
by Doug Mason inin their letter to lobsto regarding the neo-babylonian chronology, the wts wrote the following regarding the early church fathers:.
less than 200 years after josephus, several early church writers clearly accepted that the length of the desolation or exile was 70 years, and no one gives any other length for this event.
for instance, tatian the assyrian (110 to 172 c.e.
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Doug Mason
apologies peacefulpete,
I should have been more specific. Babylon was dominant for 70 years, in the way that the ancients reckoned. Some of the upper echelon were taken to Babylon at the beginning and again later, and some returned when Cyrus told them - including from other nations - to return. Many, as you point out, made a good business (Egibi Bros.) and stayed there.
The Biblical text of Cyrus' letter (not really a "decree") is not a replica of the text on the Cyrus Cylinder. It's a religious rewriting to suit the agenda of the later writers (Chronicles and Ezra).
The names of the people recorded in their Scriptures as leading the initial returnees to Yehud were likely concocted to make a link to Jehoiachin.
This marked the time when the priestly class's desire for power was able to be mounted, now that the royal household was gone. A new entity emerged and they later became known as "Jews".
There was another major change following the destruction of the second temple, although unlike the Jewry witnessed today.
Doug