The way I debate depends on my certainty. If it's to the "outright truth" level, it usually looks as seen most often on IIN. I try to convince others of what I know for a fact.
Then there's the "strong speculation" level. For example, gravity is a function of curvature in spacetime, and mass affects said curvature. We've verified our understanding of gravity to the point of exhaustion, yet galaxies as a whole seem to behave as if they contain more mass than we visually observe.
This leaves two possibilities.
A: While we indeed 100% understand gravity locally, we've been oblivious to missing mathematical variables that only become apparent on certain scales, and gravity behaves differently in other areas.
B: There are no missing variables, gravity is behaving uniformly as we would expect, and there's actually no discrepancy as the missing mass is actually very much present but doesn't interact via the electromagnetic force. The gauge boson force carrier of this particular force is the photon (particle of light), so the missing mass is thusly visually invisible while gravitationally felt, the infamous "dark matter".
With current tech it doesn't seem we can overly decisively determine which is true for a while but there's a lot more supportive data for dark matter. So in these "strong speculation" situations I'm less attempting to convince anyone of anything so much as playing the Devil's advocate for the side I highly suspect will win out.
Then there were "guesses" (albeit educated ones). I don't even debate regarding these as they're dangerously close to the "belief" category. That said, I don't actually _believe_ my own guesses hereof so much as state that they're what I would guess if I had to. An example would be my guessing that the many worlds interpretation is correct. True randomness can't logically exist. So if wave functions are truly collapsing at apparent random and without any hidden variables to dictate the result, the likely explanation is that _all_ results happened and there was never a random _choice_ that had to be made, but there's no actual supportive data of this yet.
Then there are things I straight up don't know at all. For example, whatever the mother universe is, that which contains all budded universes and/or simulations, I have no idea if it would be digital or analogue.
I agree with much of what you've said but it isn't true that we have to verify religions in the future. Not everything is like the Book of Revelation; Christianity has already inaccurately described the past, often flying in the face of facts that fit my first, strongest category of certainty.
How has it inaccurately described the past, though? The only types of things that I've seen are like, "The armor that Goliath supposedly wore didn't actually exist at that point in history." I say, it could have existed at that point in history; you would have to have been around to know for certain.
I almost don't even know where to begin. To be honest, there's a much shorter list of events in the Bible that _were_ true or at least quite likely true. The majority, while sometimes interesting, is about like reading The Lord of the Rings or something.
The description of the creation of the Earth, the creation of humans, sexes, animals, the first civilizations, etc. is all at odds with reality. The only real escape from this is to allot so much symbolism that I could just as easily use to make any creation story true, and at that point it has nothing over any of the others or even something I made up myself.
I don't even think it's symbolic. I think that what a lot of people seem to forget about is the fact that God made the Garden of Eden on Earth. It never says in the story where He puts the animals that He created on Earth; it simply says that He created them all. It is certainly possible that every single animal variety to ever exist on Earth existed in the Garden of Eden first. We can neither prove nor disprove that theory, since humans have been banished from the Garden of Eden. How do you suggest that the order and method in which humans and genders were originally created has been proven contrary to that shown in the Bible? I ask the same question about the very first civilizations; civilizations that existed so long ago that almost every single relic we could have of them is gone.
There's oceans and mountains of evidence against it all.
The Y chromosome, which is what differentiates males from females, first showed up in placental mammals 180 million years ago. It was originally all but identical to the X chromosome but it gradually mutated, dropping the vast majority of its genes and keeping only ones that made those who inherited it quite different from their XX counterparts. While the X chromosome contains about one thousand genes, the Y chromosome went from containing about one thousand identical to genes to containing only about 20 genes, including the SRY gene which is responsible for testicular growth.
Given what we know about the formation of Earth, the notion of it being habitable within a week is absurd. It was still coalescing for millions of years.
If you take the Bible literally then you believe the Earth is somehow an infant compared to virtually any given rock on it. Radiometric dating has confirmed the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, like most of the solar system.
So, your evidence that humans are not a separate creation from animals is that some animals in the past have shared similar genes to humans? I'd say that's pretty weak evidence at best.
Something to note is the fact that this is the same book that says this:
"But this one thing be not ignorant of, my dearest, that *one day with our Lord is as a
thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." - 2 Peter 3:8
What makes you so certain that these days are human days and not God days? Even if they are not days from God's perspective, the first 3 days possessed no solar bodies in order for measurement of the length of day, so those days could be far longer than the other 3. It is only on the third "day" (or whatever arbitrary equivalence to day it was) in which God made plants, which, if I'm not mistaken, are generally thought to have come before animals.
Like I said earlier, the amount of time the first 3 days, if not the first 6, are all debatable. Another thing of note is that the Bible never mentions how long Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden. It was at least long enough for Adam to give names to all of the animals they found there.
About plants, it's a bit fuzzy. Eukaryotic cells developed about 2 billion years ago when one cell engulfed another and formed a symbiotic relationship with it instead of digesting it. This is what led to organelles (a cell's internal organs). The engulfed cell became mitochondrial in nature.
At this point, cyanobacteria already existed. They were photosynthetic and predate plants, animals, and fungi. They helped oxidize the Earth, as oxygen is the byproduct of their form of photosynthesis. This is very plant-like but they weren't plants.
About 1.5 billion years ago the previously mentioned eukaryotic cells branched out three ways so as to later form fungi, animals, and plants. The plant lineage engulfed aforementioned cyanobacteria and gained yet another new organelle: the chloroplast. This was the true birth of plants.
Technical animals, plants, and fungi were born more or less simultaneously. While they had new features from forming symbiotic relationships with engulfed cells that became organelles, they were technically single-celled at this point and didn't behave much like the animals, plants, and fungi we think of today.
About 900 million years ago, various eukaryotes of all three of these branches began to exhibit colonial behavior, eventually making the jump from close-knit colonies to true multicellular organisms. We can see this sort of jump happening again today with choanoflagellates, which are incredibly similar to early unicellular animals.
There were some important developments in all three branches after the jump to multicellular but it wasn't until around 535 million years ago that life finally went nuts; after several billion years of playing the long game and developing a foundation for this, life finally had the means to immensely diversify and something resembling the modern ecosystem began to emerge via natural selection during something known as the Cambrian Explosion. It required just 5 million more years for vertebrates to appear among countless other new body plans.
While the aforementioned three branches developed essentially simultaneously, it was 465 million years ago that plants indeed first started making a serious jump from the ocean and taking over the land before the other two branches.
440 million years ago, lobe-finned fish developed sacs that allowed them to gulp a small amount of air when oxygen levels in the water fell too low. These sacs eventually became lungs and allowed for tetrapods (four-legged animals) to live in shallow water. About 397 millions years ago they left the water altogether and later even gave rise to amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Contrary to common thought regarding animals, it was the ancestors of modern mammals, not modern reptiles, that first dominated the land. Sauropsids were the ancestors of dinosaurs and synapsids were the ancestors of mammals. Synapsids were extremely reptile-like though. About 320 millions years ago, they dominated the land as various huge creatures well before the dinosaurs did.
Then about 250 million years ago, an extinction event far worse than what later happened to the dinosaurs occurred; it wiped out 95% of life on Earth. Despite that, sauropsids survived in small numbers and gave rise to the dinosaurs that would now dominate the land. The previously ruling synapsids survived only as small, nocturnal creatures that would give rise to modern mammals.
Well, just when dinosaurs were getting cocky, SMASH! They had a good run, but as we all know well, 65 million years ago they suffered an extinction event when an impact offered an Uno reverse card on top of that last extinction event. This event wasn't as bad as the aforementioned one overall but it spelled the end for dinosaurs and mammals took over.
6 million years ago the ancestors of modern day humans branched away from chimpanzees and bonobos.
There's little hope of rectifying the Bible with all this. As I have said, to even attempt to you have to jump through some serious hoops and there's zero hope of condensing it into seven literal, modern days.
This is far from the first time I've encountered the possibility that we're using YHWH's thousand-year days. All the same, Earth spent its first 7,000 years with a lava ocean for a surface, so that's not looking good. In fact, I can even offer a handicap and allot YHWH million-year days. All the same, those first 7,000,000 years Earth was a hellhole daily experiencing bombardment as it coalesced, impacts worse than what would later be rare extinction events.
So I suppose we can allow YHWH to cheat just to _really_ play the Devil's advocate here because it's the only way. We can ignore the fact that the solar system formed simultaneously from a solar nebula and that we've confirmed Earth and the moon are the same age via radiometric dating. We can pretend the sun illogically didn't yet exist until the fourth day and allow him to use whatever duration he wanted before that point so as to ensure the Earth isn't a horrible hellhole at the point that he supposedly makes oceans, land, and plants such as trees.
Well we immediately run into some serious trouble. Most obviously, we're using units of many millions of years, so plants are expected to have survived this without the sun. This is ignoring the millions of years it required for plants to evolve and that the necessary cyanobacteria, as photosynthetic organisms, could never have thrived without the sun. This is all ignoring that the Earth would be frozen without the sun, but again, we're throwing logic in the garbage left and right to make this work. Frankly, you have to have the sun in place.
So when YHWH creates the sun, he also creates the moon. As the moon has a powerful tidal effect on the planet, its sudden introduction would have absolutely _shit-wrecked_ the land until things stabilized, ruining all the previous progress there.
So on the fifth day YHWH makes creatures of the sea. It's nice that he creates them before creatures of the land. It's not so nice that he creates them after flowering plants which didn't exist until _billions_ of years after creatures of the sea. He also creates flying creatures before creatures of the land, which didn't happen that way.
There's simply no reconciliation here. To even _speculate_ that this is true, one has to perform Olympian level mental gymnastics and certainly resort to so much symbolism and "because magic" arguments that one can just as readily argue the credibility of any book of the fantasy genre.
Thoughts on cancel culture
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The way I debate depends on my certainty. If it's to the "outright truth" level, it usually looks as seen most often on IIN. I try to convince others of what I know for a fact.
Then there's the "strong speculation" level. For example, gravity is a function of curvature in spacetime, and mass affects said curvature. We've verified our understanding of gravity to the point of exhaustion, yet galaxies as a whole seem to behave as if they contain more mass than we visually observe.
This leaves two possibilities.
A: While we indeed 100% understand gravity locally, we've been oblivious to missing mathematical variables that only become apparent on certain scales, and gravity behaves differently in other areas.
B: There are no missing variables, gravity is behaving uniformly as we would expect, and there's actually no discrepancy as the missing mass is actually very much present but doesn't interact via the electromagnetic force. The gauge boson force carrier of this particular force is the photon (particle of light), so the missing mass is thusly visually invisible while gravitationally felt, the infamous "dark matter".
With current tech it doesn't seem we can overly decisively determine which is true for a while but there's a lot more supportive data for dark matter. So in these "strong speculation" situations I'm less attempting to convince anyone of anything so much as playing the Devil's advocate for the side I highly suspect will win out.
Then there were "guesses" (albeit educated ones). I don't even debate regarding these as they're dangerously close to the "belief" category. That said, I don't actually _believe_ my own guesses hereof so much as state that they're what I would guess if I had to. An example would be my guessing that the many worlds interpretation is correct. True randomness can't logically exist. So if wave functions are truly collapsing at apparent random and without any hidden variables to dictate the result, the likely explanation is that _all_ results happened and there was never a random _choice_ that had to be made, but there's no actual supportive data of this yet.
Then there are things I straight up don't know at all. For example, whatever the mother universe is, that which contains all budded universes and/or simulations, I have no idea if it would be digital or analogue.
I agree with much of what you've said but it isn't true that we have to verify religions in the future. Not everything is like the Book of Revelation; Christianity has already inaccurately described the past, often flying in the face of facts that fit my first, strongest category of certainty.
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Clunk42
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How has it inaccurately described the past, though? The only types of things that I've seen are like, "The armor that Goliath supposedly wore didn't actually exist at that point in history." I say, it could have existed at that point in history; you would have to have been around to know for certain.
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I almost don't even know where to begin. To be honest, there's a much shorter list of events in the Bible that _were_ true or at least quite likely true. The majority, while sometimes interesting, is about like reading The Lord of the Rings or something.
The description of the creation of the Earth, the creation of humans, sexes, animals, the first civilizations, etc. is all at odds with reality. The only real escape from this is to allot so much symbolism that I could just as easily use to make any creation story true, and at that point it has nothing over any of the others or even something I made up myself.
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Clunk42
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I don't even think it's symbolic. I think that what a lot of people seem to forget about is the fact that God made the Garden of Eden on Earth. It never says in the story where He puts the animals that He created on Earth; it simply says that He created them all. It is certainly possible that every single animal variety to ever exist on Earth existed in the Garden of Eden first. We can neither prove nor disprove that theory, since humans have been banished from the Garden of Eden. How do you suggest that the order and method in which humans and genders were originally created has been proven contrary to that shown in the Bible? I ask the same question about the very first civilizations; civilizations that existed so long ago that almost every single relic we could have of them is gone.
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There's oceans and mountains of evidence against it all.
The Y chromosome, which is what differentiates males from females, first showed up in placental mammals 180 million years ago. It was originally all but identical to the X chromosome but it gradually mutated, dropping the vast majority of its genes and keeping only ones that made those who inherited it quite different from their XX counterparts. While the X chromosome contains about one thousand genes, the Y chromosome went from containing about one thousand identical to genes to containing only about 20 genes, including the SRY gene which is responsible for testicular growth.
Given what we know about the formation of Earth, the notion of it being habitable within a week is absurd. It was still coalescing for millions of years.
If you take the Bible literally then you believe the Earth is somehow an infant compared to virtually any given rock on it. Radiometric dating has confirmed the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, like most of the solar system.
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Clunk42
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So, your evidence that humans are not a separate creation from animals is that some animals in the past have shared similar genes to humans? I'd say that's pretty weak evidence at best.
Something to note is the fact that this is the same book that says this:
"But this one thing be not ignorant of, my dearest, that *one day with our Lord is as a
thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." - 2 Peter 3:8
What makes you so certain that these days are human days and not God days? Even if they are not days from God's perspective, the first 3 days possessed no solar bodies in order for measurement of the length of day, so those days could be far longer than the other 3. It is only on the third "day" (or whatever arbitrary equivalence to day it was) in which God made plants, which, if I'm not mistaken, are generally thought to have come before animals.
Like I said earlier, the amount of time the first 3 days, if not the first 6, are all debatable. Another thing of note is that the Bible never mentions how long Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden. It was at least long enough for Adam to give names to all of the animals they found there.
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About plants, it's a bit fuzzy. Eukaryotic cells developed about 2 billion years ago when one cell engulfed another and formed a symbiotic relationship with it instead of digesting it. This is what led to organelles (a cell's internal organs). The engulfed cell became mitochondrial in nature.
At this point, cyanobacteria already existed. They were photosynthetic and predate plants, animals, and fungi. They helped oxidize the Earth, as oxygen is the byproduct of their form of photosynthesis. This is very plant-like but they weren't plants.
About 1.5 billion years ago the previously mentioned eukaryotic cells branched out three ways so as to later form fungi, animals, and plants. The plant lineage engulfed aforementioned cyanobacteria and gained yet another new organelle: the chloroplast. This was the true birth of plants.
Technical animals, plants, and fungi were born more or less simultaneously. While they had new features from forming symbiotic relationships with engulfed cells that became organelles, they were technically single-celled at this point and didn't behave much like the animals, plants, and fungi we think of today.
About 900 million years ago, various eukaryotes of all three of these branches began to exhibit colonial behavior, eventually making the jump from close-knit colonies to true multicellular organisms. We can see this sort of jump happening again today with choanoflagellates, which are incredibly similar to early unicellular animals.
There were some important developments in all three branches after the jump to multicellular but it wasn't until around 535 million years ago that life finally went nuts; after several billion years of playing the long game and developing a foundation for this, life finally had the means to immensely diversify and something resembling the modern ecosystem began to emerge via natural selection during something known as the Cambrian Explosion. It required just 5 million more years for vertebrates to appear among countless other new body plans.
While the aforementioned three branches developed essentially simultaneously, it was 465 million years ago that plants indeed first started making a serious jump from the ocean and taking over the land before the other two branches.
440 million years ago, lobe-finned fish developed sacs that allowed them to gulp a small amount of air when oxygen levels in the water fell too low. These sacs eventually became lungs and allowed for tetrapods (four-legged animals) to live in shallow water. About 397 millions years ago they left the water altogether and later even gave rise to amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Contrary to common thought regarding animals, it was the ancestors of modern mammals, not modern reptiles, that first dominated the land. Sauropsids were the ancestors of dinosaurs and synapsids were the ancestors of mammals. Synapsids were extremely reptile-like though. About 320 millions years ago, they dominated the land as various huge creatures well before the dinosaurs did.
Then about 250 million years ago, an extinction event far worse than what later happened to the dinosaurs occurred; it wiped out 95% of life on Earth. Despite that, sauropsids survived in small numbers and gave rise to the dinosaurs that would now dominate the land. The previously ruling synapsids survived only as small, nocturnal creatures that would give rise to modern mammals.
Well, just when dinosaurs were getting cocky, SMASH! They had a good run, but as we all know well, 65 million years ago they suffered an extinction event when an impact offered an Uno reverse card on top of that last extinction event. This event wasn't as bad as the aforementioned one overall but it spelled the end for dinosaurs and mammals took over.
6 million years ago the ancestors of modern day humans branched away from chimpanzees and bonobos.
There's little hope of rectifying the Bible with all this. As I have said, to even attempt to you have to jump through some serious hoops and there's zero hope of condensing it into seven literal, modern days.
This is far from the first time I've encountered the possibility that we're using YHWH's thousand-year days. All the same, Earth spent its first 7,000 years with a lava ocean for a surface, so that's not looking good. In fact, I can even offer a handicap and allot YHWH million-year days. All the same, those first 7,000,000 years Earth was a hellhole daily experiencing bombardment as it coalesced, impacts worse than what would later be rare extinction events.
So I suppose we can allow YHWH to cheat just to _really_ play the Devil's advocate here because it's the only way. We can ignore the fact that the solar system formed simultaneously from a solar nebula and that we've confirmed Earth and the moon are the same age via radiometric dating. We can pretend the sun illogically didn't yet exist until the fourth day and allow him to use whatever duration he wanted before that point so as to ensure the Earth isn't a horrible hellhole at the point that he supposedly makes oceans, land, and plants such as trees.
Well we immediately run into some serious trouble. Most obviously, we're using units of many millions of years, so plants are expected to have survived this without the sun. This is ignoring the millions of years it required for plants to evolve and that the necessary cyanobacteria, as photosynthetic organisms, could never have thrived without the sun. This is all ignoring that the Earth would be frozen without the sun, but again, we're throwing logic in the garbage left and right to make this work. Frankly, you have to have the sun in place.
So when YHWH creates the sun, he also creates the moon. As the moon has a powerful tidal effect on the planet, its sudden introduction would have absolutely _shit-wrecked_ the land until things stabilized, ruining all the previous progress there.
So on the fifth day YHWH makes creatures of the sea. It's nice that he creates them before creatures of the land. It's not so nice that he creates them after flowering plants which didn't exist until _billions_ of years after creatures of the sea. He also creates flying creatures before creatures of the land, which didn't happen that way.
There's simply no reconciliation here. To even _speculate_ that this is true, one has to perform Olympian level mental gymnastics and certainly resort to so much symbolism and "because magic" arguments that one can just as readily argue the credibility of any book of the fantasy genre.