At UD, vjtorley has posted a bizarre, 5,000-word “rebuttal” of Jerry Coyne. It begins:
Over on his Why Evolution Is True Website, Professor Jerry Coyne has posted a short passage on the papal condemnation of Galileo, excerpted from Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom(New York, NY: D. Appleton and Company, 1896). However, all the passage proves is that neither White nor Coyne understand the theological doctrine which they are attacking: they are all at sea about the dogma at which they are aiming their barbs.
One slight problem: Coyne isn’t attacking anything. VJ Torley is tilting at windmills.
Coyne doesn’t express agreement or disagreement with the passage. He merely points out a funny proofreading edit pencilled into his copy of the book by a previous, seemingly obsessive reader:
Now I don’t even know if that correction is grammatically necessary, but I had to smile at the anonymous reader who got annoyed and took the trouble to add the proofreader’s transposition symbol.
VJ is evidently so sensitive to any attack on Catholic doctrine, real or imagined, that he’ll fire off a 5,000+ word “rebuttal” without even reading the post he’s responding to!
coldcoffee,
I admit, I find this counterintuitive too. Essentially we are talking of (to overtop Mt Ararat) an inch of rain every 20 seconds. It’s easy to imagine being in a chamber with a sprinkler system that’s pumping out drops at a sufficient rate, and you wouldn’t imagine it getting hot.
There’s a bit of heat generated on impact, but because it’s falling through the atmosphere, it will reach terminal velocity. The drops will hit the ground as hard as they do now – just more of ’em per minute. But to be at terminal velocity, the atmosphere must absorb some of the energy of fall – if there was no atmosphere, the drops would be whacking you with palpable force – “ouch! stoppit! yaroo!” etc. The first droplets warm the atmosphere a tiny bit, the next a bit more, the next a bit more … Since this goes on at a good rate for 40 days & nights, it soon gets too hot for liquid water to actually fall to earth, so it’s self-limiting. I don’t think it would melt quartz personally. But nor could it go on for 40 days, and things would at least get close to boiling point at the surface.
The other thing I struggle to get my head round is … snow. An inch of rain is 10 inches of snow. In fact most rain at temperate latitudes starts out as snow. It’s falling as rain over most of the globe, but at the poles it must accumulate to a decent depth. There must be some kind of boundary – a gradient between ocean surface and the top of the pure snow. 16,000 feet of rain is 160,000 feet of snow – one heck of a black run down to the ocean. And you’d think there’d be some trace of this event. (Or maybe not, since snow would heat up the atmosphere too).
From: http://www.gotquestions.org/God-killing.html#ixzz2tJOOutky :
Compared to God’s holiness, there is no such thing as an “innocent” person. All have sinned (Romans 3:23), and the penalty for sin is death (Romans 6:23a). God has “just cause” to wipe us all out; the fact that He doesn’t is proof of His mercy.
When God chose to destroy all mankind in the Flood, He was totally justified in doing so: “Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5)
You’re supporting my point CC. Unless one is facing the same kind of hurdle, the literalness of a given moral story is irrelevant. The moral is the relevant point, not the supposed incident.
This of course is the whole reason that so much of the bible is inconsistent. Was there a violent earthquake before the tomb was open? Did an angel roll back the stone or was the tomb opening without witness? Was there a single man in the tomb or two men in the tomb? Was Jesus’ body in the tomb or not? Did one woman go to the tomb, two, or three?
Seemingly the facts don’t matter, which then presents the question of whether the event in question matters. The answer is no…the story is irrelevant as told. The importance of the bible – assuming there is one – is in the metaphorical and moral framework and guidance it implies. The stories themselves are myths and legends to help make the metaphors and morals interesting.
Was He totally justified in destroying even unborn, viable children still in the womb?
coldcoffee,
the penalty for everything appears to be death
What, all of ’em? What happened to mercy on that occasion? He doesn’t come out of this story in a good light.
“I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures, and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.” – JS Mill
That’s a bit too low. Creation models typically deal with vapor canopies going up to 50 or 100 km. After all, you need a lot of vapor if the flood were to cover the tallest mountains. A 100 km vapor canopy will not even yield 1 km worth of water. More like 100 m.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc that relies on question begging. Oh boy…
So let me see if I have grasped your thinking here. You think that a God, who supposedly has infinite time, infinite power, infinite knowledge, and infinite mercy, is “justified” in wiping out significantly weaker, less knowledgeable, and fallible folks with a limited time here who committed finite transgressions like fornication, adultery, lying, and stealing? So, no actual infinite mercy or even rehabilitation…just death? Mkay.
Personally, I’m rather glad we aren’t subject to such barbaric thinking anymore…
It was those stories that horrified me as a child. Fortunately, although I was raised as a churchgoer and confirmed, I was not taught to believe them as actual history.
I think they are interesting as examples of moral evolution. Analogous to the evolution of language, as Old English to modern.
Let Gregory rant against seeing evolution in everything, but it happens.
No, it’s not proof of mercy; that’s just something torturers tell people.
“This could be worse, so much worse. I can make you hurt in ways you can’t even imagine. Or I can make this easy for you. A|| you have to do is give me the answer I’m looking for. Say it. I can be merciful.”
Yeah, pretty sick really. The whole deal. Very twisted. I pity the people brought up in an environment where this is fervently believed.
Presumably the fludde was proof that he really fucking means it, alright?
Nope, it has the temperature of its surroundings.
For the water in the atmosphere version, you need to start with how much water is in the atmosphere as vapor or clouds. Al that water retains its weight so it increases the pressure at the surface of the earth required to hold up the water. We have really good data on the properties of liquid water and vapor, and if you have more water in the atmosphere and more pressure at the Earth’s surface you also have higher temperature at the Earth’s surface to maintain that water in the atmosphere. So start by specifying an amount of water vapor or clouds that doesn’t kill everyone by heat and pressure to begin with, and specify the temperature and pressure at the Earth’s surface that is compatible with that amount of water.
Next you need to calculate the heat released by condensing the vapor to water, and the heat released by dropping that water to the Earth’s surface and calculate the temperature rise. This has been done by creationists and scientists and all of them have concluded that no significant amount of water could be held in the atmosphere. At the link I gave earlier, a committed creationist calculates that if all sorts of parameters were optimized to maximize the water in the atmosphere (such as reducing the solar constant by 50%, which is pretty dangerous for life on Earth) perhaps 1-2 meters of water could be transported form the atmosphere to cover the Earth’s surface. Pretty piddlin’ fludde.
On the other hand, if you want the water to be in orbit as vapor or ice, it gets much worse. there you have to account for any heat released or absorbed by a phase change, the heat released by loss of potential energy (moving from up here to down here) and the heat released by slowing it from orbital speed to zero relative to Earth’s surface. Guess what! This doesn’t work either! For example, at Did a Water Canopy Surround the Earth and Contribute to the Flood? Walt Brown, a PhD ME from MIT and such a loon that even the loony creationists think he’s a loony creationist, calculates that dropping a water or ice canopy large enough to cover the Earth with 40 feet of water, starting at absolute zero, from orbit would raise the atmosphere’s temperature by 5,700 C. French-fried Noah!
He also has a lot to say about the vapor canopy, too.
As far as I can tell, jesus makes a lot less sense as a god.
It’s even worse than that, when you consider that this omni-everything God created those weaker/less-knowledgeable/fallible folks in the first place. Everything about them is exactly what this God wanted, because if this God didn’t want them to have Quality X, this God wouldn’t have built Quality X into them. So this God isn’t just wiping out a bunch of helpless victims… this God is wiping out a bunch of helpless victims for the ‘crime’ of doing exactly and precisely what this God designed and constructed them to do.
Yeah, I passed on that element because I didn’t feel like piling on and because I felt that was in excess of what CC was focused on. But you’re right, at least from an implication standpoint:
If God is eternal, then these plans were formed before all creation. Thus, yes, that would include all who have sinned in this time line on which we exist. So God is the author of all sins and, quite frankly, created sinners – many for the expressed purpose of torment in hell.
Not exactly the kind of guy I’m inclined to worship or follow…