An interesting turn of phrase.
Is the challenge to show that I speak the truth in regard to what I believe?
If so, I merely return the challenge. Show me that you speak the truth when you say you believe that "matter acting according to its properties" is sufficient to explain microbes becoming abstract-thinking men.
I will courteously allow you to go first.
If the challenge is to show that what I believe is true:
I am satisfied that's precisely what I've been doing.
If my argument is not sufficient, nor satisfying to you -- so be it.
I have the same attitude towards yours, Dan's, et. al. So we're even.
As I have repeated, the evidence is the same for everyone -- Creationist; m2m evolutionist; vague and disinterested Whateverist.
The interpretation of that evidence will either lead in the direction of truth, or error.
That interpretation will be predicated on one's
a priori beliefs -- one's worldview, based (knowingly or not) in one's epistemology; what one accepts as the scope and limits of knowledge (I'm repeating myself, I know. This is a radical concept, for those who have unquestioningly accepted the propaganda that "the universe is all that ever is, was, or will be").
One need not be aware of their epistemological stance. It may be -- and usually is -- latent. One is trained in the thinking that the Bible is a Bronze Age document, full of fables made up by men; themselves the product of "changes in an allele" from more primitive organisms in the distant past; and as such has no interest or usefulness, beyond its being a curious expression of how people thought in the past.
But not so fast.
That book has some unique properties, and makes some unique claims.
It claims to provide a history of the Creator of our universe, and of His relationship with both it, and the people that He created as its crowning achievement. Its unlikely history as the record of an otherwise historically insignificant ethnic group, who are extant to this day, primarily as a result of their attachment to its text (where are the Hittites today? Why is there no "Debating Hittite Paganism" website?
), and of their reestablishment in their ancestral land, in fulfillment of promises laid out in the book 2,500 years earlier, certainly merits an objective look at it, on its own.
But then, you must account for the much greater impact that has arisen from its claims: that one of those ethnic people, a Jew who worked as a craftsman, and never wrote a sentence or led an army or ruled a kingdom (of this earth
) has become the most well-known person who ever lived; due to His claims to be the very Creator spoken of in the Hebrew texts, come to earth as a man in order to rectify the human condition of sin and spiritual death, which is empirically verified by a brief perusal of each day's newspaper headlines and news channels.
And the question, then, becomes:
can we believe any of the claims made in this collection of texts, which we call the Bible? And, due to its unique characteristic of being an integrated package of information which is thematically and idiomatically consistent across its entire "bandwidth"; replete with macro-coding (e.g., Numbers 21:4-9 ---> John 3:15) and embedded microcoding within the text itself -- can we (and must we, if we are serious about the pursuit of truth), believe all of them?
And the answer to that question is predicated on one central issue:
Was the Man who He said He was? Did He achieve victory over death, and defeat the spiritual enemy and accuser of man, by rising from the grave into an eternal hyperdimensionality, so that we may do the same through our faith in Him?
That is the choice you have before you. That is the claim that has spread through the entire world, from the most humble of beginnings (a rag-tag group of followers of a disgraced and ignominiously executed itinerant preacher), to inform the (first) Western world, and in our time is spreading throughout the entire world -- again, in fulfillment of its claims.
And you want me to... let's see... "show you speak truth in this regard"?.
Okay.
I submit that if that central fact is true -- the Man is the King of the Jews, and King and Creator of the Universe, who now sits on the "throne of God" --
then that is sufficient to validate all other claims in the Biblical text.
So let's take the first one.
The Bible claims that God created the earth in six "ordinary" days. Careful exegesis of the genealogies puts this occurrence at about 6,000 years ago.
True? Or not?
You'll want evidence.
But wait -- this claim seems absurd, on the face of it. The speed of light has been measured, verified, and well established. And we can infer that there are distant objects in the universe whose light would've required billions of years to reach us, at the established rate of light travel. We can therefore infer that the universe is, at a minimum, billions of years old.
Cased closed. Whatever value the creation account has as a truth claim, must be considered symbolic and allegorical, if not void. And if it's merely symbolical there, there is no reason to believe its central claims, in regard to Jesus Christ, are not also of a symbolic, allegorical nature.
I'm sure we're together so far.
But wait:
If you examine the evidence in light of a serious consideration of the Biblical account being a true one, you reach a different conclusion. If you consider that God, in formulating our space-time reality, first created the mass of the earth, then hydrogen and oxygen (waters), and then light -- then you have a very interesting gravitational situation. Add in the "stretching" of the "firmament" that separated the "waters" that were "above" and "below" it -- when you factor in those possibilities, and our understanding of time as a physical property, which is subject to dilation by gravitational and other forces, then you arrive at a very different cosmology. One that explains what we observe, as satisfactorily (if not more so) than the agnostic Big Bang cosmologies -- and with no more attendant problems, if not less (i.e., all BB models have their own "light transit" problems, which require their own
ad hoc solutions)
To sum up: if the Bible is true, we may safely conclude that galaxies at the far end of our observable universe (which we appear to be near the center of -- another BB problem) are separated from us by
distance -- but not
time, in the sense of our mundane, uniformitarian understanding of it.
We could turn here, in our quest to demonstrate the 'speaking of truth', to the differing accounts between the m2m proposals regarding the depositions of the geologic and fossil records, and the Biblical one.
But look at me! I've typed on and on here -- and I don't want to be a bandwith hog.
Let me offer you your turn.
Here's a subject that I would enjoy your "speaking truth" in regard to.
IF human beings are, as you say, the result of "matter acting according to its properties", by first assembling chemicals into a "simple" living organism (a cell -- a simple one, no more complex than, say, the infrastructure of NYC) and then being acted on by -- gravity? electricity? some other force or forces? Oh yes: "matter's properties" -- so that it went through subsequent increases in information, and changes in phyum and what have you, until it became a mammal, and then an ape-like creature, and then the ape known as "Man":
On what basis, if that is true, is a human being of any more value or worth than a chicken, pig, or sponge?
Please provide the scientific evidence that supports that one human should treat another any differently than they would treat, say, a fungus?
If you would provide that evidence, and demonstrate that you "speak truth in that regard"...
I sure would appreciate it.
."
