"CONFLICT between science and religion is an old story."
Nope. The only conflict is between competing beliefs.
"Up till the 16th century the accepted religious dogma was that the sun and the planets all revolved around the earth."
Noooo, geocentrism was the officially accepted correct cosmology up until that time. It was not merely 'religious dogma'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model
"In astronomy, the geocentric model (also known as geocentrism, or the Ptolemaic system), is a description of the cosmos where Earth is at the orbital center of all celestial bodies. This model served as the predominant cosmological system in many ancient civilizations such as ancient Greece. As such, they assumed that the Sun, Moon, stars, and naked eye planets circled Earth, including the noteworthy systems of Aristotle (see Aristotelian physics) and Ptolemy.[1]"
"Until the 18th century, Western religions held that the earth had been created a mere 6,000 years ago. Hutton in 1785 proposed the theory of uniformitarianism, which demanded far longer periods of time for geological changes. Again religious controversy was raised for some 50 years, but Lyell’s field work and systematization of geologic strata finally won common agreement to the idea of a much older earth."
Nooo, this is still a matter of contention, there is good evidence that the earth is very old and equally good evidence that the Earth is quite young. Google is your friend.
"In the most recent legal skirmish, a federal judge decided that “creation science” as defined in an Arkansas law did not qualify on an equal basis with evolution."
Now lets have some theological experts make decisions in court cases, just to be fair you know? Judges are not qualified to decide such things.
"An informed Bible student would answer, No. While the Bible clearly states that the heavens and the earth and everything in them were created by God, it does not say when those things were created. Most of the defense witnesses were shackled by the religious dogma that the six creative days in Genesis were all encompassed in a period of 144 hours. This harks back to an erroneous fundamentalist teaching that was not challenged by the science of the 17th century, but that is no longer tenable in the light of present knowledge. The Bible itself does not set any such time limit on the days of creation."
Orly?
Even you JW translation clearly states that the days of Genesis were literal 24 hour days.
"The first verse of Genesis simply says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” If we take this to mean the creation of the starry heavens, the galaxies, and the solar system of which the earth is a part, we are talking about events that preceded the first creative day. "
Nooo, that stuff didn't precede the first day, it WAS the first day. (Again using the NKT)
" In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.+ 2 Now the earth was formless and desolate,* and there was darkness upon the surface of the watery deep,*+ and God’s active force*+ was moving about over the surface of the waters.+ 3 And God said: “Let there be light.” Then there was light.+ 4 After that God saw that the light was good, and God began to divide the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, but the darkness he called Night.+ And there was evening and there was morning, a first day."
"So no matter how long the days might prove to be, verses 1 and 2 describe things already accomplished, and they fall outside any time frame encompassing the creative days. "
Merely a statement of opinion with no evidence or argument to back it up.
"The next point to note is that the word “day” is used in many different senses in the Bible. It does not always mean a 24-hour period. Sometimes it means only the hours of sunlight, that is, 12, more or less. Sometimes it stands for a year. Sometimes it means the years during a certain generation. In several references a day is 1,000 years, and in some even longer. No doubt the days in Genesis chapter 1 were very much longer. But the Bible does not there say how long they were."
grrrrrrrr!
Except the Bible DOES say how long they were!!!!
"And there was evening and there was morning, a first day." "And there was evening and there was morning, a second day." "And there was evening and there was morning, a third day." "And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day." "And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day." "And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day."
Random periods of time do not have an 'evening' and a 'morning'. only 24 hour solar days have those.
" Regarding the word ‘yôm’ in Genesis 1:1–2:4, it is apparent that there are three different uses of the term in the passage. In 1:5a it denotes ‘daylight’ as opposed to ‘night’. In 1:5b it denotes the combination of the two. The word ‘echad’ is most probably to be read as a cardinal number (‘one’) as opposed to an ordinal (’first’) in contrast to many translations. Thus it appears that the text is in fact defining what a ‘day’ is in the rest of the Creation Week. Finally in Genesis 2:4, yôm is part of an anarthrous6 prepositional compound beyôm meaning not ‘in the day’ but simply ’when’.
The fact that for the bulk of the passage, the word yôm is accompanied by sequential numerical denotation and the language of ‘evening and morning’ gives a prima facie case that regular 24-hour days are in view.
Concerning the use of the cardinal as opposed to the ordinal in 1:5b, it will be helpful to examine this a little further. For a more detailed examination of echad in Genesis 1:5, the definitive study is that of Andrew Steinmann.7 After examining echad as an ordinal number in numbering units of time he concludes that it may be used in place of the ordinal r’ishon in only two idioms: namely to ‘designate the day of a month, the other the year of a reign of a king’.8
In addition, in a non temporal sense, the cardinal can stand for the ordinal when dealing with a small number of ‘countable’ items.9
In contrast it has sometimes (often) been claimed that when a list of ordinal numbers is given, the cardinal form ‘echad’ is to be rendered as an ordinal (‘first’).10 BDB under usage #7 states ‘as ordinal, first … ’11 and then cites Genesis 1:5, 2:11; Exodus 39:10; Ezekiel 10:14; Job 42:14 and then adds references to the first day of a month or first in a verbally compound ordinal number (thirty first … ).
This claim, as noted in the preceding comments, can be challenged. The word echad occurs 960 times in the Hebrew Old Testament.12 In the AV it is rendered by the English ‘first’ a total of 32 times. The majority of these cases are part of a formulaic expression ‘day one of the nth month’. Another cluster of ordinal renderings of echad is found in compound numbers, e.g., ‘thirty-first year of Asa’ (1 Kings 16:23) (lit. ‘in year of thirty and one of year’). These two clusters of citations are the very exceptions noted by Steinmann."
Cotd at link.
"First, the Bible says that God is the source of life. (Ps. 36:9) Life did not arise and cannot arise spontaneously from lifeless material. This is in complete agreement with scientific laws and experimental tests. The laws of statistics, the law of entropy, calculations from thermodynamics and kinetics all converge on the conclusion that spontaneous generation of life cannot occur."
Agreed.
"The theory of evolution is directly contrary to the Bible. It has failed to give a satisfactory explanation of the facts of paleontology and biology."
Agreed.
"The Bible does not set the time of creation of “the heavens and the earth.” The creationists’ position on this is not supported by the Bible, and their theories conflict with the facts of astronomy, physics and geology."
Not necessarily.
http://www.icr.org/article/446/
So I guess we're in general agreement though the article writer should have done his homework on the points I've raised at least acknowledging that contention still exists and there are many things accepted as 'scientific fact' that really aren't.
