From: julian@fraser.sfu.ca (Julian Shillcock)
Subject: Re: Try the Bible (Re: Calling Young-earth Creationists)
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 20:27:08 GMT

swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen) writes:

>In article <1992Aug4.065537.21319@sdf.lonestar.org> thyat@sdf.lonestar.org (Tom Hyatt) writes:
>|In article <salem.712392603@pangea.Stanford.EDU> salem@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Bruce Salem) writes:
>|

>Unfortunately, there are no such aboslutes to be found, so they have to
>clutch madly at thier imagined absolutes.
>-- 
>sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
>  or
>Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.co
Hmmm, I am not sure what "no such" means but it is not obvious to me
that there can be no absolutes in our unverse. Pi is a transcendental
number seems a pretty absolute statement: or is it false for some
other (arbitrarily different) life form somewhere.
The disucssion should be on whether calimed absolutes are such within 
some realm of discussion. Certainloy science does not claim to discover
absolutes but the results of science might point to absolute quantities 
in nature even if we only interact with them in some "relativistic" way.
Within general relativity the interval between two events is an "absolute"
quantity that is agreed upon by all observers. So here a scientific theory
postulates the existence of an absolute.
Vis a vis the debate about Genesis whether God did or did not create
the universe seems to me to be an absolute assertion that can neither
be proved or disproved as no evidence one way or the other is sufficient
to establish it, but how He created it is open for discussion as we can
examine the evidence in geology etc. Here science attempts to 
provide a model of the beginning and evolution of the world which is 
quite comprhensive and encompasses most (if not all) of the observational
data we have). Any data that disagree with the standard model can then be used
to alter it or try a new one. this is how science works. But none of
these models claim to be absolute, they are more or less accurate that
is all. I think creationsists (at least thoise that I have read) confuse
absolute staements (like God said "Let there be .. and there was") with
physical statements that are relative to us as observers. If they really 
claim that Genesis is observer independent then it would seem that it must
be irrelevant to human beings, as something that applies to many classes
of beings cannot be used to distinguish between those classes. On the
other hand if Genesis is written by (or through if you prefer) humans
for humans then it is subject to all the peculiarites that make up 
human beings, including being seen through human eyes. 
Personally, I think Genesis is an account given through human eyes of
the cataclysmic events that make up the origin of our species: it is
remarkable that anything can be said about such things, but don't try to
elevate human understanding to God's understanding (My thoughts are not
your thoughts!).
julian
       

Talking about creation is like a dog walking on its hind legs:
it is not so much that it does it badly as that it can be done at
all.
(Apologies to Johnson)