Saturday 19 August 2023
Against Nincsnevem XXIII
Nincsnevem:Also, since this is relevant to the topic, I'll mention that Jehovah's Witnesses often point out that why death would be a punishment if their souls would live on in heaven. But the question is inherently flawed, since we don't say that. Even then, it wouldn't be a punishment, a shame that this hypothetical scenario has nothing to do with what we teach. Just at first glance
AservantofJEHOVAH: I Suspect that most JWS would be savvy enough to know that the souls of Adam and Eve would go in the other direction if there was such an intermediate state. What I do remember asking is why the righteous dead Having been freed from their sinful bodies and having received the post mortem evangel that they supposedly receive are not praising JEHOVAH.
Isaiah ch.38:18,19NIV"18For the grave cannot praise you,
death cannot sing your praise;
those who go down to the pit
cannot hope for your faithfulness.
19The living, the living—they praise you,
as I am doing today;
parents tell their children
about your faithfulness"
You claim that Jesus parable at Luke 16:19-31 is a literal understanding of condition of the righteous dead in their intermediate state, the word picture there is one of feasting and Joyful fellowship for the righteous so why aren't they praising JEHOVAH who has made this provision for them?
Also how could it be a kindness for Jesus to take Lazarus away from this bliss and return him to the Sinful body and world he had just escaped?
Against nincsnevem XXII
Mr.Nevem:The Satanic claim "you will not surely die" (Genesis 3:4) has nothing to do with the immortality of the soul. God proposed here that if they break His command, then "in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die." From this, it is apparent that here "you will die" did not refer to the literal, physical death, but the consequence of it, that man will die, or (his body) will return to the dust. Here, the word "death" does not refer to physical death but spiritual death, separation from God, and loss of grace.
AsservantofJEHOVAH:Typical argument by assertion The bible explains what death means
Genesis ch.3:19NIV"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou RETURN unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou RETURN."
Of course the churches of Christendom ignore the obvious meaning of RETURN the soul reverts to its pre-sin state at death and divine justice can make no further demands upon it
Romans ch.6:7NIV"For he that is dead is freed from sin."
The dead CANNOT sin only the living can sin and the punishment is death for those who do sin but sin and the penalty for sin ends at death. So to punish the dead any further would be unrighteous on JEHOVAH'S part
Nincsnevem"In the day that you sin, you will die" - When you sin, I will take away my grace, eternal life, and you will die.
When Satan says, "you will not surely die," he means, "Just go ahead and sin; God will not fulfill His threat (he's just bluffing)."
AservantofJEHOVAH: JEHOVAH calls what is not as though it is so once he has predetermined an outcome he Can speak as if it has already occurred that is why on the very day that the prospect of eternal human perfection had ended for the original human pair they could be regarded as already dead living from JEHOVAH standpoint would mean entitled to eternal human perfection any less than that would be regarded as dead.
Genesis ch.3;22,23NIV"And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: 23Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken"
From here on humanity was dead. We note that there was no tree of death in the garden. So eternal human perfection was JEHOVAH'S purpose for our race and not superhuman perfection.
Nincsnevem:Then the "dispute" with Satan was not about the immortality of the soul but whether humanity will lose God's special privilege that the human body is free from the compulsion of death. God warned Adam not to eat from 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil', or he would die on that day (Gen 2:17). Adam and Eve ate from it anyway, but did not die a biological death >on that day<, as they lived much longer (Gen 5:5). Adam, however, lost fellowship with God (he was driven out of Eden) and eternal life (he could no longer eat from the tree of life, Gen 3:23-24). Adam's (man's) death on "that day" was spiritual-religious death (cf. Eph 2:1), which led to biological death. So the "death" with which God threatens man is twofold: the death of supernatural life (i.e., loss of sanctifying grace) and [as a result] the mortal transformation of the body: before the Fall, man could have not died; since then, man cannot not die.
AservantofJEHOVAH: Just as JEHOVAH can count those he has determined to grant eternal life as already living though dead. he can count those he is determined to punish with eternal death as already dead though alive.
Luke ch.9:60NIV"Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”"
That is why Christ death can furnish a substitutionary atonement. If the wages of sin were eternal conscious torment. Then Christ would need to undergo eternal conscious torment to be a substitute for us
Nincsnevem:This of course is avoided by the Jehovah's Witnesses' interpretation, and they want to explain away the "day" here as exactly a thousand years. But why would it be a thousand years "on that day"? I know there's a biblical statement, "With the Lord, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day" (2 Peter 3:8), but that doesn't make it applicable here (this is a leap in logic), so this is entirely a leap of logic. Also, we know that this is metaphorical language, illustrating that God is outside time, and before Him, a day is not literally exactly a thousand years but eternity.
The fact of the matter is the man lost his human imperfection on that day and thus as from the divine perspective was dead on that day. Psalm ninety was written by the prophet Moses it points out that a yom from JEHOVAH'S Perspective would necessarily be very different from man's perspective does the Catholic church teach that the seven yom in which JEHOVAH Made the world are seven 24 hour yom. As I pointed out the man lost his human perfection on that 24 hour day but even from the standpoint of experiencing the consequences of losing human perfection from the divine perspective less than a day could have said to have passed .
JEHOVAH'S perspective is the only one that matters
Psalms ch.90:3,4NIV"You turn people back to dust,
saying, “Return to dust, you mortals.”
4A thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night."
Nincsnevem:The Peter's part (which I say again, they arbitrarily tie together with the Moses' part using biblical leap logic) is obviously only symbolic: especially since the context does not explain how Adam "died" >that day<, but why the Last Judgment day is delaying in human terms, the answer: because in God's view our "time" is just a moment. "A thousand years" is an ancient analogy: a very long time.
AservantofJEHOVAH:When the man was driven away from the tree of life his doom was confirmed and he lost his human perfection that is how he died that day
Genesis ch.3:22-23NIV"22And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken."
nincsnevem: and then, as I mentioned, the subject of the debate was not whether man has an immortal soul but whether he will die physically (i.e., whether God will carry out the threat, or be afraid that man has become like God, autonomous, or self-legislating).
So if we insist on taking the bodily death on that day literally, as Jehovah's Witnesses do, but rule out the false excuse, then Satan would be right: man did not die that day but lived much longer.
AservantofJEHOVAH: By stripping the man of his human perfection on that day and driving him from the tree of life JEHOVAH Fulfilled his Just punishment on the man the sentence was staggered to allow the birth of some who will show a different and thus vindicate JEHOVAH as creator. You see the real debate is whether or not man's fall was really the fault of his maker or not? If man was well made why could he not fulfill the purpose for which he was made? Those who argue that man's sin was predestined are the ones who are taking Satan's side of the debate.
Separating eggs from zeros?
Fossil Friday: Imagining Eggs in the Famous Archaeopteryx Fossils
This Fossil Friday I could not resist discussing a paper (Guimarães 2023) that I recently stumbled upon. It is still in preprint stage at bioRxiv and has not undergone peer review. I definitely hope that it will not survive peer review as it easily qualifies as the most ridiculous piece of garbage science I ever came across. The author is Portuguese computer scientist Jorge Guimarães, who apparently lacks any expertise in paleontology or geology. His paper has been heavily promoted on social media by his medical software company, ALERT Life Sciences, claiming that the “Mona Lisa of fossils was rediscovered” and promising a “paradigm shift in evolution,” “following what is arguably the biggest fossil rediscovery of all time.” The same institution also published nothing short of a three volume book by Guimarães (2018) on the “ground breaking findings.” This sounds like something really interesting and unusual.
So What Did He Find?
The author maintains that:
Since 1877, researchers have missed the fact that Archaeopteryx, the icon of evolution and the Mona Lisa of fossils, was nesting over more than one hundred jellybean-like soft eggs and hatchlings.
Following what is arguably the biggest fossil rediscovery of all time, can you imagine the day when museums around the world will make the decision to change the display position of this fossil to reflect its nesting posture?
A paradigm shift in evolution starts with the change in the display position of Archaeopteryx and extends into the evolution of reproduction in animals, the evolution of wings and flight, attention to fossil sediment instead of just bones, and new perspectives on mass extinctions, among others.
When you look carefully at the images in the preprint paper it is quite clear why scientists have “overlooked” these hundreds of eggs and hatchlings in five different fossil specimens of Archaeopteryx, including the name-giving isolated feather: there is simply nothing there at all, but just a random pattern of stone matrix. At work apparently is some kind of pareidolia effect, where people erroneously believe they see things like a human face in random places where there isn’t anything. The author also seems to be ignorant of the multiple lines of taphonomic evidence (see Arratia et al. 2015: 78–100) that strongly contradict his hypothesis that the fossil preservation of bird nests with adults still sitting in breeding position on eggs and hatchlings can be explained by the occasional flooding of colonial ground nesting sites on the shore of the Upper Jurassic Solnhofen lagoon.
Did the author find any hard evidence of egg shells apart from his Rorschach-test-like identification of alleged shapes of eggs? Something like microstructure or chemical composition of the eggshells? Nothing at all. His excuse is that the specimens were not available for such studies, because access to the original specimens was denied to him or the potentially invasive studies were not authorized by the museum curators.
This is still more problematic because there is considerable evidence that, even though the first dinosaurs had soft eggs, hard-shelled eggs belong to the ground plan of theropod dinosaurs and birds (Norell et al. 2020). The author’s claim of non-rigid eggs in Archaeopteryx would therefore strongly conflict with the consensus phylogeny. And we have not even mentioned yet that the supposed eggs are much too small and too numerous for an ancient bird of the size of Archaeopteryx, or that a preservation in nesting position is inconceivable unless you assume that the animals miraculously did not bother to make a move while being flooded.
Not a Good Combination for Science
However, neither lack of evidence nor conflicting evidence stopped the author from drawing far-reaching conclusions, based on the hypothetically assumed colonial ground nesting behavior, such as an evolution of bird flight from ground-up rather than tree-down, and an origin of wings and feathers for breeding purposes rather than locomotion. Both views may or may not be correct, but they are certainly not supported by the highly controversial evidence presented by the author. But I can hardly blame him for his act of creative imagination, because that is what much of mainstream evolutionary biology is all about anyway.
The author first presented his “sensational” results on September 18, 2019, at the annual conference of the Paläontologische Gesellschaft in Munich, Germany. I don’t know what the reaction of the experts was at this event (I would bet on embarrassed silence and some good laughs), but apparently they could not convince him to reconsider his maverick interpretation. One could easily brush aside this case as an extreme exception produced by an incompetent non-expert in a non-peer-reviewed medium. But unfortunately this case is rather symptomatic of a general trend in modern paleontology towards overinterpreting, overhyping, and overselling poor fossil evidence. The reason seems to be a combination of publish-or-perish pressure, pressure by PR departments to oversell results in pursuit of renewed public grants, and the career incentive to push evolutionary scenarios and just-so stories with fossil data as supposedly hard evidence. Not exactly a good combination for the advance of science.
References
Arratia G, Schultze HP, Tischlinger H & Viohl G (eds) 2015: Solnhofen – Ein Fenster in die Jurazeit. 2 vols. Pfeil Verlag, Munich (DE), 620 pp. https://pfeil-verlag.de/publikationen/solnhofen-ein-fenster-in-die-jurazeit/
Guimarães MJ 2023. Colonial ground nesting by Archaeopteryx suggests wing evolution in primal association with nesting and the ground up evolution of flight. bioRxiv. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.05.30.542892
Norell MA, Wiemann J, Fabbri M, Yu C, Marsicano CA, Moore-Nall A, Varricchio DJ, Pol D & Zelenitsky DK 2020. The first dinosaur egg was soft. Nature 583, 406–410. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2412-8
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