Did a man or the Self-Existing God create the Universe ?

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_Themis
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Re: Did a man or the Self-Existing God create the Universe ?

Post by _Themis »

The CCC wrote:Nope. The Book of Mormon references a story told by a single person about a previous group of immigrants.


So you agree that it references the flood. That's only the beginning of the problem.

There is no young earth in the Book of Mormon. It must be read into it.
SEE http://en.fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_ ... _the_Earth


Sorry but the natural reading of the text is a young earth and global flood. This explains why no one is there when each group arrives. The text explains that all other nations were kept from knowledge of the land.

The Book of Mormon itself refers to others being there.
SEE https://www.LDS.org/topics/book-of-morm ... s?lang=eng


CFR. Where in the Book of Mormon does it refer to others? I have been around and never seen any text that even suggests other groups then the ones from the three migrant groups.
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_huckelberry
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Re: Did a man or the Self-Existing God create the Universe ?

Post by _huckelberry »

spotlight wrote:..................
So consistent with the idea that the LDS God cannot create ex nihilo and in consideration of the law of entropy increase we arrive at a time when it is no longer possible to extract useful work from the heat energy of the universe which is referred to as the heat death of the universe. At this point in time the LDS God becomes powerless to do anything. Organizing elements requires work.

Spotlight , your comment has already been copied once so I only repeated the summary.

I thought you did a good job of sharpening your point.

I am one who believes that something at least very close to creation ex nilo is directly implied by the very idea of God. (and eternal life should there be such a thing)

I think you have presented a good argument. didn't I read a good discussion from you about biomass present in fossil form on earth? I do not remember which thread.
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Re: Did a man or the Self-Existing God create the Universe ?

Post by _huckelberry »

LittleNipper wrote:
huckelberry wrote:
Suppose you were driving down a two lane country rode, windows rolled down doing about 55 and upon topping a rise you see a group of five cows standing in the road. Do you observe that God is technically in control and not us and take no self centered action like applying the breaks? You could choose to trust the cows to move aside enough for you to pass.

It sounds like this is the sort of trust you are recommending for our approach to climate change.



Bad things NOW occur because there is sin throughout the world. God does turn bad into good for those who He has a personal relationship with (saved individuals). This however, does not mean that disappointments, sorrow and calamity will not come their way. It means that God will use these things to shape the believer into something better. Yes, we will still reap what we sow. And this is a learning process that causes the believer to realize that God and not ourselves know what is the best course of action.

The driver in the car should follow the speed limit. The driver could then safely slow down to a stop, beep the horn and very slowly proceed among the cows. They will move. God has given us authorities who install signage. Unless that signage is contrary to God's Holy Word, there is no honest reason we should not abide by the regulations.


Little Nipper, perhaps we are in agreement then that the driver should take individual responsibility and apply the breaks to slow enough not to collide with a cow. Perhaps similarly we should slow our carbon dioxide production to avoid running into heat getting too concentrated .

I do not think the speed limit is important here. I admit roads where you are most likely to encounter a cow have slower speed limits but there are two lane roads out in the country with 55 mile speed limits. Folks with cows are normally pretty careful with the fences near such roads but cows can get determined to wander. It is possible to be following the rules and still have a dangerous encounter with an animal wandering onto the road.
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Re: Did a man or the Self-Existing God create the Universe ?

Post by _spotlight »

huckelberry wrote:didn't I read a good discussion from you about biomass present in fossil form on earth? I do not remember which thread.


The thread is "Adam, first man circa 4,000 bc....?"
Not my work personally, if you need the author I'll dig through my notes and see if I can find it. My area is nuclear physics.
Kolob’s set time is “one thousand years according to the time appointed unto that whereon thou standest” (Abraham 3:4). I take this as a round number. - Gee
_subgenius
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Re: Did a man or the Self-Existing God create the Universe ?

Post by _subgenius »

The CCC wrote:
subgenius wrote:sez you.
The Bible may well have the details not to your liking, but it is impossible for you to prove that a biblical flood never happened or how it may have happened.


The devil is in the details.
SEE http://talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html

thanks for the link, but it is primarily based upon speculation and conjecture, ergo easily dismissed as well (see also "details not to your liking).
As for your "idiom", i believe you will find that you are using it in the wrong circumstance. As an architect i prefer the Mies van der Rohe' quote of "God is in the details" which is an idiom about how important the details are...whereas your idiom is more akin to "ah, but there is a catch". Hopefully you can discern the difference in their application...as well as their applicability here....and ironically, i believe you meant Rohe version.

The CCC wrote:The whole story can be dismissed as a series of supernatural miracles. There is no way to contradict such an argument. However, one must wonder about a God who reportedly does one thing and then arranges every bit of evidence to make it look like something else happened. It's entirely possible that a global flood occurred 4000 years ago or even last Thursday, and that God subsequently erased all the evidence, including our memories of it. But even if such stories are true, what's the point?

The "what's the point" is irrelevant on this matter. God's motive or lack of motive does not influence your claim towards being confirmed nor denied.
However, you negate your own argument by the quoted statement you provided from your link -- "It's entirely possible" is what you have written here and that in and of itself contradicts your narrow claim of "never happened".

But, it is also worth noting that a God capable of flooding the earth is also capable of creating circumstances where the Ark existed, etc.
And it may be worth noting that the Scriptures likely did not intend to provide literal plans for constructing an ark, but rather just a depiction - - think about it this way...when the Scriptures speak about "7 fold" or "70 virgins" in the Koran, it is a cultural "idiom" of sorts...like how today we say "hundreds of" ...its an abstraction of quantity that "makes the point"....simple? (see how i ended with the whole idiom subtlety thing there?)

(footnote, your citation was kind enough to post its own rebuttal http://www.trueorigin.org/arkdefen.php further illuminating the un-provability of your position....but hey, that's just a matter of opinion, ain't it?)
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_The CCC
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Re: Did a man or the Self-Existing God create the Universe ?

Post by _The CCC »

What speculations would that be?

I changed the idiom on purpose to show the utter nonsense of claims to a Global Flood during the times of Noah. by the way I'm perfectly content to posit Noah as a Prophet of God accurately recording what he actually saw. A massive albeit regional flood.

Sure a God that is omnipotent can do anything he/she/it wants. Including removing memories, changing physical evidences, rewriting histories. Surely, God could have caused birds to fly with their bones made of solid gold, with their veins full of quicksilver, with their flesh heavier than lead, and with their wings exceedingly small. He did not, and that ought to show something. It is only in order to shield your ignorance that you put the Lord at every turn to the refuge of a miracle.
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/1072023

Try jumping off of a high building sans parachute if you believe gravity is just an opinion.
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Re: Did a man or the Self-Existing God create the Universe ?

Post by _spotlight »

subgenius wrote: (footnote, your citation was kind enough to post its own rebuttal http://www.trueorigin.org/arkdefen.php


I realize you are busy in conversation with the CCC but there is a lot of low hanging fruit in this link of which this one, for obvious reasons, caught my attention.

Schadewald on the Karroo Formation

Schadewald, cited by Isaak with approval: “Robert E. Sloan, a paleontologist at the University of Minnesota, has studied the Karroo Formation. He asserts that the animals fossilized there range from the size of a small lizard to the size of a cow, with the average animal perhaps the size of a fox. A minute’s work with a calculator shows that, if the 800 billion animals in the Karroo formation could be resurrected, there would be twenty-one of them for every acre of land on earth. Suppose we assume (conservatively, I think) that the Karroo Formation contains 1 percent of the vertebrate fossils on earth. Then when the Flood began, there must have been at least 2100 living animals per acre, ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs. To a noncreationist mind, that seems a bit crowded.”

Answer: Actually, Schadewald, who (like Isaak himself) lacks scientific qualifications as far as we know, is the pseudoscientist. John Woodmorappe, in Studies in Flood Geology, shows that a population density of 800 animals per hectare results if the supposed 800 billion Karroo vertebrates are evenly spread over Africa south of the Equator (10 million km2). But studies of present habitats over wide areas show that iguanid lizards can live at 889 animals per hectare, anoles up to 110,000, Manchuria island pit viper 10,000, Colorado rattlesnakes 1235. Also concentration of fossils can occur through massive flooding washing organisms into a basin, as shown by Dr Tas Walker, Geology and the Young Earth, Creation 21(4):16–20, September–November 1999. So there was nothing “unanswerable” about Schadewald’s argument, despite his arrogant claim.


And yet this does not answer Schadewald's argument at all!

It is conservatively estimated that the number of fossils in the Karoo formation represent 1% of all fossils on earth. (In other words more likely the number found there represents far less than 1% of all fossils on earth.)

Then he calculates the animal density from the Karoo formation alone at a higher number yet! If we now add the detail about the Karoo formation representing 1% of all fossils on earth we arrive at 80,000 animals per hectare!

And nice stats on snakes and lizards by the way. If we consider fly populations those numbers could be jacked up even higher.
But the average size animal in the Karroo Formation is estimated to be the size of a fox.



Notes:
Land area of earth is 57,268,900 square miles or 3.6652x10^10 acres

So 800 billion divided by this number of acres is indeed 21 animals per acre. Actually 21.83 which when converted to Hectares is 54 animals per hectare.

And

800 billion divided by 10 million km^2 is 80,000 animals per sq km. which is 800 animals to Hectare or 324 per acre.

So the math is correct as far as that goes for both parties.

I suspect the new calculation is a distraction intended to make the reader forget that the fossils of the Karoo formation are only 1% of all fossils to be considered in the calculation and that the average size animal is that of a fox rather than a lizard.
Kolob’s set time is “one thousand years according to the time appointed unto that whereon thou standest” (Abraham 3:4). I take this as a round number. - Gee
_Themis
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Re: Did a man or the Self-Existing God create the Universe ?

Post by _Themis »

Themis wrote:
The CCC

The Book of Mormon itself refers to others being there.
SEE https://www.LDS.org/topics/book-of-morm ... s?lang=eng


CFR. Where in the Book of Mormon does it refer to others? I have been around and never seen any text that even suggests other groups then the ones from the three migrant groups.


I would think a believer who favors LGT would jump all over a simple request for where the Book of Mormon mentions other groups not from the 3 migrant groups in the story. The reason is the Book of Mormon never mentions any such thing. In fact, it does the opposite. It explains why there are no other groups.
https://www.LDS.org/scriptures/Book of Mormon/2-ne/1.15?lang=eng

Those who created the Book of Mormon believed in a global flood. This would mean that after the flood the Americas would be devoid of human life. This was an interesting topic for 19th century Christians who speculated a number of possibilities for why people were here, including migrations of Israelites. Funny that the Book of Mormon arrives to explain this. A couple of centuries after Noah a group of people around an obvious fictional tower of Babel(huge problem for the Book of Mormon) migrated to the America's, and then two more groups from Israel around 600 BC.

The problem is that many nations of people have occupied the Americas from the far south to the far north long before Adam and Eve were supposed to be the first people on Earth. Funny that they were supposed to live right where Joseph Smith happened to be. Does this sound like a guy who might be making things up as he goes? :wink:

How about Zelph the white lamanite. I'm sure that must be true. :razz:
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_The CCC
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Re: Did a man or the Self-Existing God create the Universe ?

Post by _The CCC »

SEE http://publications.mi.BYU.edu/fullscre ... 78&index=2

SEE https://www.google.com/search?q=Ziggara ... =Ziggurats

I don't have a problem with Adam and Eve. The myths that have grown up around them is another matter.

Campfire tails don't impress me.
_Themis
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Re: Did a man or the Self-Existing God create the Universe ?

Post by _Themis »



They don't mention others groups. Just a bunch of made up assumptions due to the major problems Joseph and others were not aware of when they made it up. They don't even really deal with Lehi's statement about no other nations. I take this is all we are going to get out of you is references to poor articles. I suspect you don't know much about the issues.



So? The problem with the story is not that towers were built, or that ancient people might be stupid/ignorant enough to think this is reasonable. The problem is more why God would be upset and magically make everyone speak different languages. It's obvious myth to explain why different groups spoke differently, and authors of the Book of Mormon thought it was real so they attached the Book of Mormon to the literalness of the story. Opps

I don't have a problem with Adam and Eve. The myths that have grown up around them is another matter.

Campfire tails don't impress me.


Joseph claimed revelation from God like all his other claims that they were real and that they lived in the mid-west US. Again Opps :lol:
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