Intelligent design (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, November 13, 2011, 19:14 (4737 days ago) @ Abel

ABEL (26 Oct. at 23.40): The Old Testament, I believe, is primarily myth passed down by word of mouth over hundreds of years […] But still that legend possesses a few kernels of truth.

Dhw (12 November at 12.12.): You have singled out the Old Testament as being a collection of myths (apart from those sections which you know to be true), which implies that the New Testament is a true account.

ABEL: (13 November at 02.09): As a student I know I should take careful notes while a speaker is talking. Taking notes after class from “memory” certainly would not be an option.

As someone (a) who has a bad memory, and (b) whose university teaching career
spanned well over 30 years, I have long since learned to make sure of my sources. If I extrapolated a false conclusion from your initial statement, I apologize, but I am still at a loss as to why you should have singled out the OT and not referred to the whole bible. You go on to attack my attempts to “paraphrase” your message as significant distortions. Your posts are sometimes extremely long and far from simple. On 5 November at 15.54,
I tried to condense them into a plain narrative “based on your posts and incorporating some of the apparent anomalies”. At the end, I wrote: “Sorry about all the parentheses, please correct my mistakes, and once more forgive my obtuseness.” One of the lessons I tried to instil into my examination candidates was the imperative need to answer questions directly. Perhaps if you had responded directly to my request for corrections, we could both have been saved a great deal of time. Instead, the welter of digressions have thrown up their own apparent inconsistencies and new sets of questions, all of which are based on what you have written. Would you please therefore identify what
significant distortions you are referring to.

You talk of my “thinly-veiled derision”. This is a term I would never associate with myself. Perhaps you are confusing my posts with someone else’s. I will certainly own to a pronounced degree of scepticism (for instance, concerning abiogenesis and unguided evolution into gods), and of course there is absolutely no reason why I should take any of your personal claims on trust. You have acknowledged (28 October at 01.35) that in our position you would think yourself insane, and have often considered the possibility that your experience was “a full-blown hallucination”, except that you have
evidence to prove its reality. Your readers do not have that evidence. And so all we can do is question whatever statements and claims you make, and form our own judgement. If you do not wish to be questioned, or prefer to dismiss difficult questions as significant distortions, there is little point in continuing the discussion.

I shall need time to consider your last set of answers, not least because you have suddenly brought yet another new figure into the reckoning: namely, Satan.
Perhaps it's his minions who have caused chaos to the lay-out of this post!