Mr. Campbell is Back

HGL's F.B. writings: Debate on Geology · Creation vs. Evolution: 4.5 Billion Years Worth of Nuclear Decay, Before the End of Day Three? · Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl: Continuing debate with David C. Campbell on YEC, OE, Palaeontology · Continued Debate with David C. Campbell · Mr. Campbell is Back

LD 14:56

13.X.2024

David C. Campbell

Think carefully about the theological, logical, and scientific content of what you write. You aren’t asking “is this a good argument?” but rather are trying to find whatever seems to support a young-earth position. Thinking up excuses is not the thinking that I am trying to encourage you to do. Are you thinking carefully about whether this is a good idea when you “publish” something without asking first? I am answering questions based on what I know; I do not have the time to research additional examples, to organize everything into well-crafted paragraphs, nor to address everything you bring up when you aren’t working to improve your arguments based on what I have already pointed out.

I do not know what, if any, scholastic thinking on the nature of our spiritual nature has been officially endorsed as Roman Catholic doctrine; naturally, as a Protestant, I am not personally concerned to follow something that is not specifically based on Scripture. Certainly scholastic thought developed many valuable insights, but it also had its own faults, as any human effort does. But it is curious that you are promoting young-earth creationism, which markets itself as purely biblical, while criticizing me for relying just on the Bible for information about spiritual questions. Also, some scholastic thinkers regarded an ancient earth as a credible possibility, yet you aren’t following them on that point. (In reality, modern young-earth creationism is not biblical in multiple senses. First, it is doubtful that one can claim to provide a “biblical” model for forming the Grand Canyon or ice ages when the Bible doesn’t mention either one. Second, the interpretation of Genesis 1, 5 and 11 as strict modernistic chronology is not soundly based on Scripture nor history; modernistic chronology did not develop as a style until much more recently. The lack of attention to sequence in other references to creation (e.g., Ps. 104) and the existence of Sabbath years and Sabbath of Sabbath years (jubilee) do not support the idea that Genesis 1 is intended to be chronological. Most seriously, modern young-earth creationism does not carefully examine itself to see if it is upholding biblical principles such as “You shall not bear false witness”; it has fallen into the Machiavellian error of thinking that the end of advancing young-earth creationism justifies the means of arguments aimed for persuasiveness rather than truthfulness.)

Again, the Bible is clear that we do have some sort of spiritual nature that survives beyond death. Association of that spirit with some sort of body is important, given the strong NT emphasis on physical resurrection both of Jesus and of believers, directly clashing with most Greek thought that saw the body as a prison of the soul. Yet at the same time our spiritual nature is not destroyed by damage to the physical body. But just how God gives each individual human our spiritual nature is not addressed in Scripture; we know the practically necessary information that everyone has it and is in need of salvation, but not all about it that we might speculate on. Given that, there is no justification for asserting that God could not have used a particular method of endowing humanity with a spiritual nature. We are not told in the Bible how He did so, nor does being spiritual make a mark on skeletons for paleoanthropologists to look for. We might identify certain behaviors as seeming to indicate a spiritual nature, but determining why someone in the distant past did something is quite challenging; it’s hard enough to figure out for someone alive right now. For example, some Neanderthals buried their dead. Did this reflect religious belief, or just preventing the bodies from stinking up the cave? Genesis 1-3 tells us that humans uniquely reflect God’s image, with the associated responsibilities and privileges, but our revolt against Him has left that image marred. Jesus serves as a new and better Adam. His work is applied to us, not by physical descent, but by the work of the Spirit. Thus, it is theologically highly imprudent to claim that Adam could not have been a representative out of an existing population of physically human-like individuals. Nor is it a good idea to deny God’s ability to apply a spiritual status to people who are not physically descended from a representative. Scholastic thought was a good academic effort, but they did not have the data that is currently available from biology, paleontology, etc. (Note, however, that many recent claims peddle naive philosophical speculations as being proven by neurological studies; I doubt that the scholastics would have been fooled.) If we are to take on the issue of the processes involved in the origins of human spirituality, we must do our best to take into account all that is known today, while also acknowledging all that remains unknown. You may notice that I am not claiming to have it figured out, merely that there are many possibilities and that the scientific data do not inherently clash with a biblical understanding.

How do geologists know that there were multiple advances and retreats of the glaciers during the Pleistocene ice age? Of course, it’s obvious that the many pre-Pleistocene glaciations were separate events from the geologically recent ice age featuring lots of big furry mammals. Multiple glacial intervals can be observed in the distant geologic past, which are ignored by creation science. But within the Pleistocene, the earliest clue to multiple ice ages (once Agassiz and others realized that many geological features matched the effects of glaciers, at a large scale) was the fact that there are glacial deposits separated from each other by non-glacial deposits. For example, the Boxgrove fauna in England represents a warmer interval between glacial pulses. In the Caribbean, the warmer intervals between the glaciers are represented by fossil reefs above modern sea level. How long did it take each of those coral reefs to grow? The older reefs are capped by pinkish deposits of ancient soil, deposited during the glacial intervals, when sea level dropped by as much as 200 m (because so much water was in glacier ice instead of in the ocean). The pink color comes from windblown dust from the Sahara. Some land vertebrate fossils, and a lot of land snail fossils, are found in those old soil layers. A long sequence of alternating reefs and land soil can be documented around the region. In places, newer glacial features cut off older ones. Some of the older glacial features (such as terminal moraines) reach beyond some of the newer ones. Each of those features takes some time to form. There are also changes in the types of fossils found. For example, many of the early Ice Age fossils I collected yesterday are extinct, whereas marine fossils associated with younger Ice Age deposits are generally still living. More recently, measurements of stable isotope ratios (especially oxygen-18) has traced the ups and downs of temperature and ice volume through the whole ice age. The patterns of advance and retreat of the glaciers closely correlates with the pattern of Milankovitch cycles, which are long-term wobbles in the earth’s orbit. The earth’s axial tilt and the exact shape of the orbit (more circular versus more elliptical) slowly vary, with cycles ranging from almost 26,000 years to about 100,000 years to complete a cycle. In turn, these affect exactly what part of the earth gets how much sunshine when, and that drives the seasons and climate (along with other factors such as amounts of greenhouse gases). Dozens of these cycles can be counted backwards from the present. Layers can be counted in glaciers and in lake deposits (varves). Additional indications of the different ages of different glacial deposits come from sources such as carbon-14 dating (even if we ignore the many serious problems with speeding up radiometric decay, including the fact that data from tree rings, lake varves, cave deposits, and the like provide a record of changes in 14C, things deposited at the same time with similar sources of carbon ought to have matching 14C values), magnetic reversals, amino acid racemization ratios, the degree of weathering on rocks deposited by the glaciers, thermoluminescence, and amounts of cosmogenic atoms all show that the various glacial deposits represent multiple cycles of glacial advance and retreat throughout the Pleistocene. To claim that they all formed in a single brief event is not merely ignoring the data, but also slandering all the hard work of many geologists, including many Christians. But giving a reasonable amount of time for dozens of continent-scale glaciers to advance and retreat, corals to grow and then be buried, etc. requires far more time than young-earthers admit. And that’s just the most recent sliver of geological time. Each older layer, each variation in stable and radioactive isotopes, each change in the types of living things, each variation in the magnetic field, each rearrangement of the continents through plate tectonics takes time. Creation science has no honest answer to these. Making things faster takes energy; the second law of thermodynamics tells us that more energy is going to give more waste heat. The only way that creation science can possibly find explanations is to honestly admit that none of its current ideas work and that the evidence clearly points to an ancient earth from all that we can tell. Repenting of all the dishonest claims is the only way that creation science can possibly make progress in developing better ones.

Human language does evolve. We have French and Spanish and Romanian and Italian and Catalan and numerous other languages deriving from spoken Latin, for example. Modern language families can be traced back to ancestral forms. Could languages have developed gradually from simpler communication, like that of animals? Yes; there is nothing impossible in the idea of languages getting more complex over time. But we simply don't have the data to know what God's process of creating them was. They could have originated with humans being endowed with a soul; they could have been a more gradual development. There are ongoing debates as to whether Neanderthals and others who were not quite the same as modern humans had the physical and mental capacity to talk like we do. Certainly they would have sounded and thought differently, but whether that would be more like a foreign language or substantially less developed is unknown. SImilarly, we don't have a good understanding of how modern language families came to exist relative to prior languages. Although some have claimed that they all originated at Babel, the Bible does not make such a claim. You are the one who asserted that language could not possibly have been created gradually, without providing evidence.

LD 19:28

13.X.2024

Vous avez envoyé

"You aren’t asking “is this a good argument?” but rather are trying to find whatever seems to support a young-earth position."

They tend to coincide.

"Thinking up excuses is not the thinking that I am trying to encourage you to do."

Are you so debilitated by Alzheimer that you have once again forgotten, I am NOT taking you for a mentor?

You aren't supposed to encourage or discourage me to anything, you are supposed to answer my arguments as best as you can, and to argue so I'll answer as best as I can.

"Are you thinking carefully about whether this is a good idea when you “publish” something without asking first?"

It certainly beats allowing YOU to "take me aside" and "tell me how it is" and then no one but you (who are deaf) will have heard my answer.

"I am answering questions based on what I know ...when you aren’t working to improve your arguments based on what I have already pointed out."

Your "improve your arguments" = bow down before yours.

You are in fact telling me lots of times you know things and then refusing me the details when I press you.

"I do not know what, if any, scholastic thinking on the nature of our spiritual nature has been officially endorsed as Roman Catholic doctrine; naturally, as a Protestant, I am not personally concerned to follow something that is not specifically based on Scripture."

You are doing lots of half hearted Scholasticism.

"But it is curious that you are promoting young-earth creationism, which markets itself as purely biblical, while criticizing me for relying just on the Bible for information about spiritual questions."

You are NOT relying just on the Bible, you are relying on lots of false science, what your "just the Bible" actually refers to is its being the sole RELIGIOUS authority to curb your secularism.

My Young Earth Creationism, as being Roman Catholic, obviously is marketted by me as being:

• Biblical
• Patristic
• Scholastic
• and at least indirectly through implications magisterial too.

"Also, some scholastic thinkers regarded an ancient earth as a credible possibility, yet you aren’t following them on that point."

Well, no, not any you have shown me, and not any I know of. You are still relying on that book Ivano Dal Prete’s On the Edge of Eternity. The Antiquity of the Earth in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Oxford University Press, 2022. You are still not giving actual citations from what Ivano Dal Prete actually found in some.

"First, it is doubtful that one can claim to provide a “biblical” model for forming the Grand Canyon or ice ages when the Bible doesn’t mention either one."

Therein, it is fairly akin to Scholastic models. They are Biblical in the sense of Bible compatible, not necessarily in the sense of Bible endorsed. And they are Bible compatible compared to the alternative, for instance Averroism in the time of St. Thomas Aquinas and Old Earth now.

"Second, the interpretation of Genesis 1, 5 and 11 as strict modernistic chronology is not soundly based on Scripture nor history;"

Genesis 5 and 11 are very clearly chronological, do you pretend Moses considered past events as "dream time" in some unchronological sense? That's absurd. You are mixing reasonable knowledge and guesses about older conventions differring with some very wild guesses about Israelite conventions here coinciding with Assyrian conventions.

"The lack of attention to sequence in other references to creation (e.g., Ps. 104)"

Psalm 103 (as it is in our Bibles) is not a creation account. It refers to the now already standing and established reality of created things.

"and the existence of Sabbath years and Sabbath of Sabbath years (jubilee) do not support the idea that Genesis 1 is intended to be chronological."

Weak.

"Most seriously, modern young-earth creationism does not carefully examine itself to see if it is upholding biblical principles such as “You shall not bear false witness”;"

Either you are a liar yourself, or you are sorely misled about the veracity of the people on Young Earth sites. You are at best judging them carelessly, which is already against Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy NEIGHBOUR.

"But just how God gives each individual human our spiritual nature is not addressed in Scripture; we know the practically necessary information that everyone has it and is in need of salvation, but not all about it that we might speculate on."

There is however something called natural theology, a k a philosophy.

This means, we have natural reasons to totally exclude certain models of the mind. It's being an epiphenomenon of the body or being gradual compared with the moods of beasts, those are two non-options. Scholasticism deals with this.

"Given that, there is no justification for asserting that God could not have used a particular method of endowing humanity with a spiritual nature."

Exactly my point about your tendency. If sth in traditional Christian thought clearly jars with the model you propose for reasons you purport to be natural, you are ready to throw it out if you can't directly find it in the Bible, precisely as the Deformers did with so much other things. Meanwhile St. Thomas et al. had really solid reasons for their view of human nature.

"nor does being spiritual make a mark on skeletons for paleoanthropologists to look for."

Only spiritual beings have human language. Every being with human hearing range (which can be determined from the ear shape), human hyoids (without hooks for airsacks), human brain with Broca's area (leaves a mark on the inside of the skulls) and human FOXP2 gene is spiritual. Every being without these is not. There is in fact no clear intermediate. There are some skulls so broken one cannot see on which side they fall.

"Did this reflect religious belief, or just preventing the bodies from stinking up the cave?"

1) If they had been beasts, they could have looked for another cave;
2) There is plenty of evidence the caves were only visited intermittently, for what could well be spiritual reasons, I don't find any contemporary specialist who thinks cave dwelling was a continuous life, rather than caves being visited;
3) I'm not even sure if the burials given could have prevented the corpses from stinking.

"Genesis 1-3 tells us that humans uniquely reflect God’s image, with the associated responsibilities and privileges, but our revolt against Him has left that image marred. Jesus serves as a new and better Adam. His work is applied to us, not by physical descent, but by the work of the Spirit. Thus, it is theologically highly imprudent to claim that Adam could not have been a representative out of an existing population of physically human-like individuals."

Ouch.

Jesus is a New Adam for regenerate man.

Adam was constituted a man and constituted in grace. He only lost sanctifying grace, not manhood.

The image is not so marred that it's not solidly tied to human biology.

"Nor is it a good idea to deny God’s ability to apply a spiritual status to people who are not physically descended from a representative."

Manhood is precisely not just a spiritual status.

"Scholastic thought was a good academic effort, but they did not have the data that is currently available from biology, paleontology, etc."

Those that access both do not necessarily consider them as inadequate.

"(Note, however, that many recent claims peddle naive philosophical speculations as being proven by neurological studies; I doubt that the scholastics would have been fooled.)"

Thank you very much.

"If we are to take on the issue of the processes involved in the origins of human spirituality,"

Human spirituality as the souls being also spirits, endowed with faculties of knowledge and will is not processual.

"Human language does evolve."

Since only man [human] is rational.
And no woman is a man [male].
Therefore, no woman is rational.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation

What you are going to take up, and what you are trying to prove are very, very different things. And as a more or less linguist, I happen to know that.

"We have French and Spanish and Romanian and Italian and Catalan and numerous other languages deriving from spoken Latin, for example."

Yes. French is human. Spanish is human. Romanian is human unless you attend too much to the vampires. Italian is human unless you get the fauns involved. Catalan is human despite being abused by Revolutionaries. Latin is human despite being spoken by Nero and Agrippina. In other words, a human language has in each of these cases evolved into a slightly different human language.

"Modern language families can be traced back to ancestral forms."

Reconstructing and tracing back is not always the same thing.

"Could languages have developed gradually from simpler communication, like that of animals?"

None of the examples so far involve any increase in complexity. Animal communications are not simply simpler. They are used for a simpler purpose, involving no satisfaction of curiosity via someone else's words. An ape cannot say "I had a banana for breakfast this morning" ...

"Yes; there is nothing impossible in the idea of languages getting more complex over time."

Try tracing a Latin word into French or Spanish, as you chose. Then try tracing a series of emoticons or traffic signs into sentences expressed in words that carry notional meanings.

I'll give an example of the former, which we agree is possible. Ursum => Ursu => Orso => Oso. In each step, what means bear is sufficiently different from all other words that sound remotely similar, and in each step, it is basically a morpheme (originally two morphemes, one means "bear" and one means "accusative singular"), and in each step it will be used along other morphemes to express phrases, like "video ursum" or "yo veo el oso" = "I see the bear" ...

"There are ongoing debates as to whether Neanderthals and others who were not quite the same as modern humans had the physical and mental capacity to talk like we do."

There is no good reason to deny it.

"but whether that would be more like a foreign language or substantially less developed is unknown."

There is no good reason for anything other than "a foreign language" ...

"You are the one who asserted that language could not possibly have been created gradually, without providing evidence."

You didn't challenge me specifically individually on this item. I offered a few then and there unsupported, but sensible, claims. I was waiting to hear which one you will challenge.

I think I have started to support this one.

Let me go a bit further.

In beasts, "language" (including gestures) functions as a series of emotica, or traffic signs. They have pragmatic purpose. Beasts encourage or discourage each other to do things, whether eating or sleeping or fleeing from enemies or attacking prey or attacking an isolated predator, which the flock can deal with. In each such thing, basically one letter functions as the global sign for everything at once.

"how are you?"
"tell me how you are!"
"shall I comfort or rejoice with you?"

EACH of these things is a thing a beast can communicate, and there is basically ONE letter to say this. Perhaps repeated, perhaps prolonged, but certainly not an alternating sequence of different letters, let alone in different words.

Technically, phoneme = morpheme = phrase. Phrase = pragmatic. Phrase =/= notional.

In human phoneme + phoneme = morpheme. Morpheme + morpheme = phrase. Phoneme =/= pragmatic / notional. Morpheme / phrase = pragmatic / notional.

You have a very perfect case of irreducible complexity.

The three tier system of vocal communication cannot catch on if it does not serve notional communications (which suffice, even without religiosity, to prove spiritual nature). On the other hand, the notional communications cannot function without a three tier system.

Adding one tier without adding both, gives a skewed, incomplete and overclumsy system.

Phrases from one-phoneme morphemes only could not serve a notional purpose, because there would be too few of them.

Multi-phoneme morphemes in single-morpheme phrases, similarily.

Adding both differences at once defies graduality, which your theory posits.

There is a similar conundrum between all of this and human / non-human physiology. Broca's and Wernicke's areas, FOXP2-gene, human ear, human hyoid are all of them not much obvious use to someone who does not have a three tier system of phoneme // morpheme // phrase, and does not use notional communication, but only satisfies curiosity by verification.

A three tier system and using notional communication so that curiosity can also be verified by someone's words is not possible for a being in flesh and blood without these physiological traits.

"Of course, it’s obvious that the many pre-Pleistocene glaciations were separate events from the geologically recent ice age featuring lots of big furry mammals."

W a i t ... I have a gut feeling you will say that the ice that buried a mammoth cannot be the same ice that buried a Biarmosuchian? To be fair, frozen mammoths have been found and frozen Biarmosuchians haven't. It would be a great day for single ice age young earth creationist geology to find a frozen Biarmosuchian. If not in South Africa, at least in Perm, Russia.

"Multiple glacial intervals can be observed in the distant geologic past, which are ignored by creation science."

I get a very distinct feeling the "distant geologic past" as in for instance Permian has the chronological label because of the Permian fauna ...

"But within the Pleistocene, the earliest clue to multiple ice ages (once Agassiz and others realized that many geological features matched the effects of glaciers, at a large scale) was the fact that there are glacial deposits separated from each other by non-glacial deposits. For example, the Boxgrove fauna in England represents a warmer interval between glacial pulses."

Boxgrove fauna. If it involves, besides roe deer, rhinoceros (Stephanorhinus) and horse, and besides Ursus Deningen, Hippopotamus, Praemegaceros, which is a giant deer, on top of that some Homo Heidelbergenses, my reply would be it's pre-Flood and therefore pre-Ice Age.

How would you prove there was an Ice Age before it?

"In the Caribbean, the warmer intervals between the glaciers are represented by fossil reefs above modern sea level. How long did it take each of those coral reefs to grow? The older reefs are capped by pinkish deposits of ancient soil, deposited during the glacial intervals, when sea level dropped by as much as 200 m (because so much water was in glacier ice instead of in the ocean). The pink color comes from windblown dust from the Sahara. Some land vertebrate fossils, and a lot of land snail fossils, are found in those old soil layers. A long sequence of alternating reefs and land soil can be documented around the region."

Since the Caribbean is in the Americas, and since I hold these were in post-Flood times drifting westward, I would suggest that the tectonic plate lowered and raised the sea bottom that the reef was forming on, much faster than any glaciation or deglaciation could happen.

"In places, newer glacial features cut off older ones. Some of the older glacial features (such as terminal moraines) reach beyond some of the newer ones. Each of those features takes some time to form."

Depending on violence of ice movements, it could be short time, and therefore fall within a single post-Flood ice age.

"There are also changes in the types of fossils found. For example, many of the early Ice Age fossils I collected yesterday are extinct, whereas marine fossils associated with younger Ice Age deposits are generally still living."

So, if you had found a fossil from "younger Ice Age" (still around) you would have reevaluated the place as belonging to the younger Ice Age rather than the early Ice Age?

"More recently, measurements of stable isotope ratios (especially oxygen-18) has traced the ups and downs of temperature and ice volume through the whole ice age."

But not the time scale?

"The patterns of advance and retreat of the glaciers closely correlates with the pattern of Milankovitch cycles, which are long-term wobbles in the earth’s orbit. The earth’s axial tilt and the exact shape of the orbit (more circular versus more elliptical) slowly vary, with cycles ranging from almost 26,000 years to about 100,000 years to complete a cycle."

Here I would say, this is pure speculation. Especially as Heliocentrism is false.

"Layers can be counted in glaciers and in lake deposits (varves)."

Varves I happen to know as able to form faster than usually considered. Varves in ice could reflect weather on week or two week scales rather than the seasons of a year (credit to CMI).

Varves in sediment can very easily form instantaneously as it deposits from supersaturated mud-water flowing at high speed, which would reflect conditions during the Flood (credit to flume experiments by Guy Berthault).

"Additional indications of the different ages of different glacial deposits come from sources such as carbon-14 dating (even if we ignore the many serious problems with speeding up radiometric decay, including the fact that data from tree rings, lake varves, cave deposits, and the like provide a record of changes in 14C, things deposited at the same time with similar sources of carbon ought to have matching 14C values),"

I would say anything within the post-Flood ice age should have radiocarbon ages between 39 000 BP and 9700 BC, also known as real years 2957 BC (Flood of Noah) and one of the years between 2633 and 2607 BC, the latter being the death of Noah and beginning of Babel.

"magnetic reversals, amino acid racemization ratios, the degree of weathering on rocks deposited by the glaciers, thermoluminescence, and amounts of cosmogenic atoms all show that the various glacial deposits represent multiple cycles of glacial advance and retreat throughout the Pleistocene."

I would say most of these methods are overrated. I'll grant that things from the same age should have the same carbon age (except that with a rising carbon 14 level the reservoir effect would be much more radical). I'll not grant that things with same thermoluminiscence age should have same age or things with different racemisation ratios very different ages.

"To claim that they all formed in a single brief event is not merely ignoring the data, but also slandering all the hard work of many geologists, including many Christians."

It's not slander to say that hard work can be misused on the wrong tracks.

"But giving a reasonable amount of time for dozens of continent-scale glaciers to advance and retreat,"

Reasonable with or without the effect of radically more radioactivity and ionising particles in between 2957 and 2607 BC?

"Each older layer, each variation in stable and radioactive isotopes, each change in the types of living things, each variation in the magnetic field, each rearrangement of the continents through plate tectonics takes time."

Unless some variations are simply variations, for instance in something else.

I'll give you an example.

If lava cools rapidly, argon will be trapped. The more rapidly it cools, the more of it will be trapped. That's how I explain the different K-Ar ages at Laetoli, where each successive lava layer is younger as it gets higher, K-Ar ages. The ones deposited later in the flood were washed by shallower flood waters and therefore less cooled.

"Creation science has no honest answer to these."

How is this not a rash judgement (I'm not going as drastic as slander) on the hard work of the RATE project (for non-carbon methods) or of myself (for radiocarbon)?

"Making things faster takes energy; the second law of thermodynamics tells us that more energy is going to give more waste heat."

I think you are alluding to the Heat Problem:

Is the Heat-Problem REALLY the Death of Creation Science? Responding to Gutsick Gibbon
Standing For Truth | 5—6.IX.2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r08o4TQIOJE

"The only way that creation science can possibly find explanations is to honestly admit that none of its current ideas work and that the evidence clearly points to an ancient earth from all that we can tell. Repenting of all the dishonest claims is the only way that creation science can possibly make progress in developing better ones."

You have dared to disagree with me, repent! I spent so much time on my pilpuls, you need to bow down to them!

DO call me your father, even as I am a man on earth!

Or, perhaps rather, don't. Think Our Lord had sth to say about calling someone one's mentor for non-religious reasons.

Monday 09:36

14.X.2024

Vous avez envoyé

For the idea of Neanderthals not being the image of God, I think this video should clear that up:

How Smart Were Neanderthals? Extinct Humans
History with Kayleigh | 29 Dec. 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELSEd_SpO9c

Fri 23:54

St. Luke Evangelist

18.X.2024

David C. Campbell

Interpreting the traces of behavior is not easy. The claim that a Neanderthal was buried with flowers was based on the presence of pollen, but there were rodent burrows and the pollen likely came from the plants the rodents brought in to eat. Similar challenges of interpretation apply to other evidence of Neanderthal behaviors. We don't have the data to be certain one way or the other. Some people who have researched in detail argue strongly for Neanderthals being spiritually human; others are doubtful. As an added complication, what might they have done in imitation of modern-type humans that they encountered? We don't have Neanderthals around to ask them, nor are there Scriptural references that clearly talk about them. Interesting topic for speculation, but caution is prudent about affirming one way or the other.

Facebook doesn't seem to be giving clear notices of messages, and I have a lot of work to do, so I'm not sure how long it will be before I can address problems. But there is also little incentive to address things, when your goal seems to be to argue for creation science rather than to listen and consider problems that creation science needs to address if it is going to become a viable option. If you want to actually understand a topic, you need to focus on one thing, rather than tossing out a horde of arguments. I have seen too many creation science claims to be interested in wasting time finding all the errors in a long video.

Saturday 13:08

19.X.2024

Vous avez envoyé

"The claim that a Neanderthal was buried with flowers was based on the presence of pollen, but there were rodent burrows and the pollen likely came from the plants the rodents brought in to eat."

A more wide claim is they were being buried in red ochre (my bad memory, see below). An iron ore that has the colour of blood. In fetal position.

I don't think rodents can have brought iron ore to cover a whole body.

PNAS: Use of red ochre by early Neandertals
Wil Roebroeks et al. January 23, 2012 | 109 (6) 1889-1894
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1112261109

Citing:

This is a nonlocal material that was imported to the site, possibly over dozens of kilometers. Identification of the Maastricht-Belvédère finds as hematite pushes the use of red ochre by (early) Neandertals back in time significantly, to minimally 200–250 kya (i.e., to the same time range as the early ochre use in the African record).

Especially, rodents could not have brought red ochres from over dozens of kilometers away.

My bad memory, by the way.

Neanderthals have used red ochre, check. Red ochre has been used for burials, check.
Neanderthals have used red ochre in burials, no check.

The use of manganese and iron oxides by late Neandertals is well documented in Europe, especially for the period 60–40 kya. Such finds often have been interpreted as pigments even though their exact function is largely unknown.

...

From the Upper Paleolithic record, red ochre is indeed well known for its use in cave paintings and in ritual burial contexts. More “mundane” or “domestic” uses of red ochre (derived from hematite, Fe2O3) are known from the ethnographic record of modern hunter-gatherers, for instance, as (internal and external) medication, as a food preservative, in tanning of hides, and as insect repellent (3–9). Archeological studies have identified ochre powder as an ingredient in the manufacture of compound adhesives (10). Thus, the use of iron oxides for “symbolic” purposes should be viewed as a hypothesis that needs to be tested, rather than simply assumed.

But even without burial, this use of chemistry and not as a byproduct of alimentation is already human and not bestial.

And symbolic behaviour is documented in the use of crow feathers.

Similar challenges of interpretation apply to other evidence of Neanderthal behaviors.

"Some people who have researched in detail argue strongly for Neanderthals being spiritually human; others are doubtful. As an added complication, what might they have done in imitation of modern-type humans that they encountered?"

The clincher is presence of Neanderthal alleles in anatomically modern men. We have made children with Neanderthals, back then, and we are now children of Neanderthals too.

Or the complete set of anatomy and genes necessary for talking and the Kebara 2 hyoid found to have been used like the hyoid of a modern human, who is using the hyoid in a high degree while talking.

"so I'm not sure how long it will be before I can address problems."

You seem to be under the delusion that I am proposing and you are adressing problems. That I am an enquirer and you are the undisputed expert, whom I am just waiting for the right cues in order to wholeheartedly believe.

Note, I am not saying you are mad. There are such things as cultural delusions.

You seem to share one.

"and consider problems that creation science needs to address if it is going to become a viable option."

It is already a viable option in the mind of other people than the culture whose delusions you share.

And I am considering and adressing problems at the rhythm of you proposing them.

If in some cases I seem to be doing a hasty job, it may be because I have adressed the exact same problem several times before, over the years. I'm into defending creation science online since 2001.

"If you want to actually understand a topic, you need to focus on one thing, rather than tossing out a horde of arguments."

You are the one tossing a hoard of arguments, I only appear to do so because I'm adressing each one of them.

I may give ONE argument, and you will find FIVE objections, or maybe THREE. By the time I have answered yours, this has branched out to FIVE or even TEN arguments.

My understanding very much does not begin with you telling me things. I am covering ground I have covered before, most of the time.

If you were under the opposite impression, is that only due to your cultural delusion of grandeur you share in prejudices against Creationists, or did someone actually tell you how to treat me, and you are obfuscated because I'm not acting the role a third party gave me behind my back?

"I have seen too many creation science claims to be interested in wasting time finding all the errors in a long video."

Both videos were short, and the one on Neanderthals was definitely not by a Creation Scientist. I value History with Kayleigh, DESPITE her belief in Evolution, not BECAUSE she supposedly somehow were Creationist. Her video is under 23 minutes. The experts YOU hanker back to on Neanderthals would probably be a generation older, if not two, than those she is citing. The other video, on the heat problem, is indeed from Creationists, and from a channel well known for very long videos, this one is no exception, and it treats the heat problem. If you have no time to watch what I refer to, I'll evidently not find it congenial of you to bring it up again. I'm on my part at least taking glances at what you refer to, to see if there is some new and unforeseen problem, there usually isn't, and sometimes there is even a point in support of my views.

Especially as you withold information on what you refer to. The book by Ivano Dal Prete, for pre-modern non-literalists, does it refer to Boethius of Dacia? Because he (apparently) argued for an eternal world, in accordance with Aristotle and Averroes, and his book was condemned by bishop Tempier for that. And he totally did not take his cues primarily from the Bible. And to you as a Protestant, it may be no big deal to be condemned in a Roman Catholic trial, but I am a Catholic, I live in the diocese, since then archdiocese of Tempier. If Boethius of Dacia was Bo of Skenninge, I'm very sure he didn't repeat things from De Eternitate Mundi in his pastoral once he was back in Sweden. Links are more helpful, I can look myself.

4 minutes later

"Both videos were short"

My bad, the short one from same channel is another video, here:

Accelerated Nuclear Decay, RATE Project, Heat "Problem", and Noah's Flood with Dr. Jason Lisle
Standing For Truth | 26 Nov. 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19pQhbXksLw

LD 18:32

19.X.2024

Vous avez envoyé

As you pretend I do not engage with your input, I actually do so more than I immediately show here.

Two examples of myself going over things again are in fact still pretty detailed, compared to what I answer you off the cuff.

Creation vs. Evolution: Archibald Sayce, a Bad Guide to Biblical Genealogies
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2024/09/archibald-sayce-bad-guide-to-biblical.html

Creation vs. Evolution: How do Old-Earthers Take Historic Christianity?
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2024/10/how-do-old-earthers-take-historic.html

FB will probably block you from going to them by a click, you'll have to copy and paste to another window.