Does Christian apologetics encourage people to be dishonest ?

[RedTagAlan]

I think it does, certainly the US version anyway.

Apologetics trains people to ignore scientific evidence presented to them. To handwave it away, and to make contorted non logical arguments in support of their belief in the Bible. Because the Bible can't be wrong.

An example here.

Global Evidences of the Genesis Flood | Answers in Genesis

"Fossils are one of the best evidences of a global flood, especially where many fossils are found. For example, we don’t find marine creatures, such as fish, clams, and corals, buried and fossilized on the sea floor where they once lived. Instead, we find most of them buried in sedimentary rocks on the continents, even on high mountains. For that to happen, the ocean waters had to totally flood the continents. And that’s exactly what the Bible describes during the global flood."

The above quote from that site was written by a Dr Andrew Snelling. Who has a PHD in..... geology. Please read the article to get the full gist. Almost every logical fallacy is in there, including outright dishonesty.

This is a big industry, with colleges and university courses etc, and I think that ironically, teaching people to ignore evidence, and to use dishonest debate methods, is destructive to society. Because it teaches people to lie in support of their theology, and perhaps more importantly, it teaches them to ignore political lies at election time, and to vote for the candidate who says "God".

What do folk think ? Agree or disagree?

Learning the correct use of capital letters and elementary spelling is a good start on the road to learning. HTH.

The bible says the water covered "every mountaintop" (Gen 7:20). That would include Mount Everest, which is 8000 meters above sea level so impossible that there was that amount of water.

Oh OP, you are about 15 years out of date! The absolute evidence free nonsense that is gender ideology, which requires people to be dishonest about the evidence of their eyes, billions of years of evolution which means they can’t help but see someone’s sex, all science and evidence and factsand common sense, makes rather redundant arguments likes yours which try to present Christian’s as requiring people to be dishonest.

As a matter of interest, do you know who William Lane Graig is ? Have you watched him debate ?

This is important, because the " better knowledge and understand" in a debate like this can be subjective at times.

And talking of time, not everything needs to be done in minutes. I would say understanding what one is posting is massively more important than speed. Indeed, if one does not understand what one is posting, what is the point in posting at all ?

That's why I look up any Bible verses quoted in discussions like this. Because they do not always say what a poster claims.

This has been covered multiple times in this thread and its predecessors. Yes, the receding ice sheets caused floods over much of the world. They didn't happen all at once. It was not a one-off event: receding and re-freezing ice caused many dramatic landscape changes, including to the courses of rivers which frequently inundated human settlements.

Virtually all cultures have a flood tradition, because no part of the world has been unaffected by flooding while humans existed.

Yes, the Mediterranean/Black Sea overflow is a widely accepted theory. FWIW, there was an Atlantic/Mediterranean overflow event before that. The Minoan eruption in 1600 BC devastated Thera (Santorini) causing massive repercussions to Mediterranean civilisations and beyond.

The world's coastlines and lakes have been massively changed by the last glacial period and earlier Quaternary glaciations. We're still in a thaw cycle, which is the best reason for humans to try not speeding it up. Sea levels in the last warm period, 120,000 years ago, were 5m higher than today. Before glaciation, the sea was 120m higher than now.

Ballard said some 12,000 years ago, much of the world was covered in ice.
Depends on your definition of 'much'. Here's a picture of the maximum Quaternary glaciation in the Northern hemisphere. The ice is coloured black. It's a lot of ice (it was 3km thick) and still nowhere near global.

There has been no global flood for 3 billion years. There have been many floods that were catastrophic for human life and, to a lesser extent, animals and vegetation. They will continue.

From the article, the first paragraph:

"Dec. 10, 2012— -- The story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood is one of the most famous from the Bible, and now an acclaimed underwater archaeologist thinks he has found proof that the biblical flood was actually based on real events."

For sure, the story as told in the Bible, and in other cultures could be based on ancient folklore, handed down in stories and song. But the article, and Ballard, are talking about a local flood. Not a global flood as the Bible says, and the apologists claim.

The Black Sea is an enclosed sea, and it has long been thought it might have flooded quickly in a catastrophic manner. As opposed to places such as dogger bank in the North Sea, that was land and from archeological evidence trawled by fishing boats, we know it was inhabited. But it flooded slowly as the last ice age melted. A quick flooding area might produce tales that are passed down. A slow flooding area not so much, because the people there would have just moved over many generations.

Local floods are not global floods.

"Local floods are not global floods."

I never said they were.

The flood occurred in the known world at the time. The writer of the account saw this as an universal flood because of their limited knowledge of geography.

Fair enough. You posted " Try this". and I did.

If you click the link in my OP, you will see the Christian Apologetics we are talking about. If you skim that, and say if you think it is honest or not, and of course, is it teaching dishonesty.

Still on cultural memories of historic flooding (sorry) - the Australian First Peoples have told of 'sea country', and maintain song lines detailing routes on foot to South-East Asia and to Tasmania. There are floods in these 'dreamings', both slow floods that cut travellers off from their homelands and flash floods, replacing familiar lands with water and marine life.

It wasn't until the late 20th century that modern researchers realised the stories are true. https://thelandbridge.au/introduction/

It's interesting - to me, anyway - that song lines are experienced as fundamental to the religion(s) and presented as spiritual. Yet they're deliberately factual: the narratives are verbal maps, set into stories and song because that's easier to remember, and learned without change by hundreds of generations.

It's very different from the religions more familiar to us, which go heavy on reputation management (of gods and kings) but light on specific tangibles. Where the bible details places it's usually reliable, but it rarely does detail them. It's 'a rock', 'a stony place' and 'a sea of weeds' (not 'the Red Sea'). When it tells of wars - so very many wars - all the emphasis is on the awesome power of the king and his god. We get no reliable information on where these occurred and how they played out.

Just this because a PP prompted me to brush up on Hezekiah. According to the bible, Sennacherib laid waste to all of Judah - with no pushback from its king, though the Assyrians were so ferocious that his passivity may have been wise. Once the Assyrians got to Jerusalem, however, God fixed Hezekiah's problem by murdering all Sennacherib's generals in the night. That did not happen, but it did enhance both Hezekiah's and God's reputations. What did happen? Assyrian records detail the enormous payment Hezekiah gave them to go away.

It pisses me off that this supposedly marvellous king didn't give enough of a shit about his towns and villages to pay Sennacherib's protection money before his own neck was on the block, but that's not the point. The bible's information about the pool, aqueduct and wall reinforcements he built is accurate. But, flippin' heck, there's so much Glorious Leader bullshit and precious few facts!

... Apologise Hezekiah, apologists, if you dare 😉

The Catholic church does not have an official statement on the evolution theory. They do though not object to the work of science and do not view theistic evolution as inconsistent with the Catholic faith. They concentrate more on theology. Their members are free to believe in theistic evolution or a more traditional view if they want as adults.

The Catholic church also do not have an official statement when the world was created.
“Much less has been defined as to when the universe, life, and man appeared. The Church has infallibly determined that the universe is of finite age—that it has not existed from all eternity—but it has not infallibly defined whether the world was created only a few thousand years ago or whether it was created several billion years ago.
Catholics should weigh the evidence for the universe’s age by examining biblical and scientific evidence".

“The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that the findings of modern science

“Have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers (283).”

https://www.catholic.com/qa/catholicism-has-no-teaching-on-the-earths-age

https://www.catholic.com/tract/adam-eve-and-evolution

https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/partone/sectiontwo/chapterone/article1/paragraph4thecreator.html

The Catholic Church doesn’t understand science.

I think they do and that is why they can't/ won't commit. They know the science is true.... but they can't admit it.

For example, and this is from memory so there will be mistakes.

Few years back, I was "researching" Exodus. And I was getting all the usual biblical evangelical dross, so I switched to Mt Sinai. And there is a mountain, a volcano in Saudi Arabia down by the Red Sea (quite a few actually) that fits the bill.

So, Moses had a step father, so the book says. Jethro, a Midianite Priest. And the area where the Midianites lived is in Saudi Arabia, by the Red sea, where the Volcanos are.

I found a superb archeological paper, by an Argentinian Priest/ archeologist, where he studied Midianite pottery. They were good at pottery it appears, and the guy studied the distribution of this pottery. And the dates he got for finds of Middianite pottery from other digs. He mapped the spread of this pottery, and it went up the Red Sea, into Cannanite territory, Egypt, and as far as the Babylon area I think.

And what goes with trade ? Stories and myths. So a Volcano God in Saudi Arabia might have made its way up the Red Sea, at the same time as Judaism was starting to appear in Cannan.

I need to find that paper again.

So yes, the Catholic Church do take science seriously. They do proper archeology. But unfortunately it is washed out by US evangelicals.

They know it’s true because science is the evidence but won’t admit as it would throw out the virgin birth and resurrection for starters.

I am undecided on the "evidence" conspiracies on the Catholic Church.

Do they have original codex, the bones of Jesus etc. They sure do seem to have destroyed stuff back in the day. What ya reckon ?