Lookin' better every day!

Hazaar!
Turns out that the lecture this week is titled "Is the bible true?" which was very exciting given my last post... not that I was saying I didn't know if it was true or not, I know it is, I just would like to fit things together a bit more.
I feel like life is one big massive, gigantic puzzle, and I just don't know where all the pieces fit, and I know they do fit, but I just kindof had to stop staring at it and put together what I can and then kind of smoosh the rest is and hope that someday I'll be able to put it together properly.
Anyway, some interesting things were said, such as; Charles Wooly excavated Ur - the city which Abraham came from and he found ten feet of clay! That means ten feet of evidence of a darn big flood! Which is cool, I wasn't aware that there was any, it's nice to know that not only was there a very large flood around 4000BC but that hey - the city where Abraham came from is real and has been explored.
So it's looking more likley (in my mind) that Abraham is real, which may fall back to Noah is real and Adam is real... but I will come back to this more later, stay tuned!

Are you saying my grandma was a monkey!?!

After looking at the model of evolution in biology for the HSC and also now in university biology, I've come to think of this model and the theories in it as a reasonable interpretation of the evidence that has been discovered and uncovered... and while I'm certain that what the Bible teaches is true, and I have no substantial reason to not believe the things commonly recognised as good long standing theories. I'm still having trouble reconciling the two. It can be difficult to know what in the Bible is real in the way we think of things real, the kind of things we see and know are tangible, and what is story, where the main message is not knowledge of the world but knowledge of God.
Specifically Genesis, the stor(y/ies) of Adam and Eve can more easily taken as allegory in respect to the creation of the world, man and man's disobedience towards God than other stories like Noah and the Ark, or Abraham, but I suspect that because of the way the New Testament refers to Genesis - in Romans, Paul talks about Abraham, as does James in his letter to other Christians and also in the genealogies found in Matthew 1 and Luke 3 and I'm sure there are many other references - this language would suggest that they believed these people to be real people and their stories to be real also...
So why is it that there seems to be no evidence of a world wide flood as in the story of Noah? What archaeological evidence might a flood leave anyway? Would many fossils of dead animals be the only tell-tale sign? There are periods in fossil records where there appears to be an influx of fossil life - however these are generally considered to be pre-human evolution, as far as I know.
So I don't know - when a friend said to me that she thinks the answer to whether Adam and Eve existed, is the same as the answer to whether Noah existed, I didn't think so at all, but now I think that she is correct, and that it makes perfect sense that they be the same answers, but what is the answer?
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Just as a note - I hate when ignorant people, just to be a pain in the bum during a discussion say "so, are you trying to tell me that my granparents, or my parents were gorillas?"
The answer is "no, stupid! did it sound like that was what I was saying?!"
I do like the situation that was described in one of the Gens lectures though...

"The famous encounter happened on 30 June 1860 when, during an address to the British Association, the Bishop asked Thomas Huxley whether he thought of himself as having descended from an ape on his grandfather’s or on his grandmother’s side. Huxley’s reply that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop was so shocking that it is reported that one lady fainted and had to be carried out."

Galileo, Galileo, Galileo Figaro...

Heh, in one of the lectures for this course there was another quote that I think is the bomb - as in it goes off!

“The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes”.

I think this is so cool! It works both ways too - obviously Galileo was down with the idea that science has its purpose and faith and religion have their other purpose - we can know why because of God, and we can know how because of science. Naturally we won't ever have all the answers to how or why but we can get some and it's up to our own powers of discernment to know which of each is correct ie which religion and which theories or models in science... or maybe it's not our own powers of discernment but those of the Holy Spirit as Galileo says.

what is a blik?

While not being an actual dictionary definition of the word - or even being an actual word for that matter - a blik is an idea that was introduced by the Science & Religion lectures;

“A blik is a theory grown arrogant which cannot be altered by experience.”

'bout time!

So it's week 3 and I've finally got around to starting my "journal" for Gens4010 Science and Religion. Being the non-computer geek that I am, this seemed like a spiffy way to go about it.

The first thing I wanted to say something about was a quote that was brought up in a biology lecture, philosopher Karl Popper said that the thing that distinguishes scientific thought from all other kind of thought is "Falsifiablilty - the capacity for an idea to be shown wrong." I love the way he puts it! It's a fantastic idea because I've encountered so many people that say that they are "too scientifically minded" to believe in the possibility of certain things - such as God, or anything else non-physical. It seems to me that they are not so scientifically minded if they have an inability to embrace the scientific method, that an observation is made, a hypothesis is formed, a theory is tested and if it's not supported then you go back and theorise again - if when a theory, even if it has been held up by evidence for a long period of time, is shown to possibly not be true, or not apply in a certain situation, if it cannot be reviewed again, then science, and those who think themselves to be scientifically minded, become "bliks", they hold onto what they want to believe whether the evidence supports it or not, they become the kind of stubborn people that the world hates because they are not open to suggestion, they make science something it was never meant to be - a man-made religion rather than a search for knowledge.

Science doesn't oppose religion, nor should it become the religion.

That's my piece for today =)