WillKill4Food
New member
That makes sense.Moedred said:...The villain believed it could resurrect...
Didn't your story have the Nazis in possesion of the Shroud? I thought that the Shroud had been in the same place for ages.Moedred said:...The tale does not interfere with history as we know it...
In regards to religious discussion, I'll only say this.
I am a Christian.
But realize that you don't have to read the Creation story as literal to have faith in Christ.
In my mind, the Creation story is allegorical, and that's about the only way you can interpret it without suspending your credibility.
Evolution, the Big Bang, and the whole of science don't necessarily contradict the Bible, unless you make them. Attribute the metaphorical "Let there be light" to the Big Bang, the order of Creation to evolution, etc., etc., and you don't have a problem.
Besides, given the age of the text, you have to consider that the Bible we read is most likely not a perfect translation, and thus many of the more trifling discussions over wording are irrelevant.
Now, sure, the Bible uses the word "created" instead of "evolved," but think about it this way: When you "create" a figurine, a statue, or whatever out of wood or clay, what do you do? Do you just blink, and, suddenly, it's there - perfect?
No, of course not.
You shape it, with a knife, your hands, or what have you. The Bible that many of you so admire says that we were made in His image. If that is true (and, obviously, "His image" means "like him" or "in a similar fashion to Him," as I doubt that God has much need for a nose, eyes, ears or face), then, in the same way, I think that evolution (change over time) is God's way of fashioning life on Earth such that He is the intelligent designer.
Well, at least, that is my view.
Of course, the order of Creation given in the Bible has birds being created (or, depending on your view, evolved) before other land animals. Wait! Didn't the dinosaurs and other reptiles and sauropods populate the planet before birds? Well, yes. But, there are two ways that the Christian can excuse this.
As we have established, even if you believe the Bible to be the divine Word of God, you have to consider that surely some things have been lost in translation. So, we can't be at all sure that the original text had birds being created earlier than other land animals.
But, the second way to think about this considers scientific evidence. Many paleontologists agree that it appears that the dinosaurs were the ancestors of - guess what! - birds. This has been further validated by the finding of stems of feathers in small predatory dinosaurs and the skeletal systems of certain dinosaurs. It also appears that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, unlike reptiles. This gives a strong case for dinosaurs (who were the earliest land animals along with amphibians) being the birds that were created (or, in my view, evolved) directly succeeding the creation (or evolution) of sea creatures. So, the sea creatures include fish, single-celled organisms, etc., etc., on down the evolutionary timeline, along with the amphibians who first crawled on land. These amphibians would have evolved into dinosaurs, who then evolved into birds, meaning that, if God did indeed give man the Word of Genesis and the Creation, the dinosaurs were simply birds. This explanation, though completely my own and I have not seen it anywhere else, period, shows that evolution and science do not contradict the Bible.
One thing though, I seem to remember birds being described as "the fowl of the air" in the KJV Bible. But, this does not serve to mean that this creation simply refers birds with the ability to fly. Given the flourish-filled style of English prose at the time of the translation, it is highly likely that the original text, whether in Latin, or before that Greek, or before that Hebrew, indicated simply "birds" in general. And, of course, anything related to a bird can be included as a bird, and thus the above explanation is not implausible.
Nevertheless, between science and blind religion, I think that science is the more credible of the two, as, excepting certain theories, science is purely empirical (and thus palpable and provable) as opposed to the transcendence of God, whose existence cannot be proven or disproven.
By the way,
should be "a lot."allot