5 ways to keep a Scientist out of our Church.

[Stan]

Make sure he/she must be convinced by a non-scientist that he/she must believe in a 6 or 7 day creation before he reads anything else in the Bible. ESPECIALLY things spoken by Jesus.

Mock and laugh at anything he says that seems logical to him/her.

Make sure you tell him/her that if they only had faith they would not believe in silly things they have researched.

Be very sarcastic.

Let them know Science was founded by the Devil.

[phkrause]

Hey Stan did you just make those up or get them from a website?

pk

[Stan]

nah they are mine... there is some duplication now that I reread that...

[Stan]

FWIW I am convinced of a 7 day creation.

[phkrause]

OK we'll let you slide Stan.

pk

[Dr. Shane]

I think I am with Clifford Goldstien on this one.

[Bravus]

What, that Adventism doesn't need any or many scientists? That's definitely the logical conclusion of Goldstein's position...

[Stan]

perhaps others could help in this area...

1 - How to keep the Youth out of our Church (There is a lot of success here)

2 - How to make Catholics not want to join us.

3 - Professionals, yeah 5 easy steps to block them from coming ever again.

4 - Protestants, rather those who have joined with Babylon, 5 steps to keep them away.

5 - 5th Generation Adventists? Yeah there are ways of turning them away..

6 - Undocumented? Yeah those are easy targets

SOmeone care to create these?

Have seen many a Church succeed at all of the above...

[Tom Wetmore]

...and then declare that many are called but few are chosen... and rest satisfied that the few, the remaining (remnant) are the chosen.

[Guest]

Make sure he/she must be convinced by a non-scientist that he/she must believe in a 6 or 7 day creation before he reads anything else in the Bible. ESPECIALLY things spoken by Jesus.

Mock and laugh at anything he says that seems logical to him/her.

Make sure you tell him/her that if they only had faith they would not believe in silly things they have researched.

Be very sarcastic.

Let them know Science was founded by the Devil.

Why not just let the air out of their tires and put shaving cream all over their car while they sit through the service? That's the way we do it.

[Stan]

Sometimes I wonder, if I was not the admin of this board, if my sarcasm would be tolerated or if I would get the boot.

[Stan]

Why not just let the air out of their tires and put shaving cream all over their car while they sit through the service? That's the way we do it.

I am sure that would work, how creative!

[Guest]

Works every time. We haven't seen a scientist in years.

[Twilight]

Is it the case that a lack of personal spiritual reformation in our lives will create the conditions above?

Did Paul not say:

"Ye are yet carnal..."

Would that be the reason?

Mark :-)

[olger]

I was in the Ohio State championship for the Science fair in 1974. God saved me from a life of science, and possibly a life of systematic unbelief in April of 1974.

Praise Him,

oG

[bonnie]

I was in the Ohio State championship for the Science fair in 1974. God saved me from a life of science, and possibly a life of systematic unbelief in April of 1974.

Praise Him,

oG

With the church filled with such people it is a wonder that there is a denomination left

[Dr. Shane]

There are certain belief systems that serve as stumbling blocks. For some scientists, their education really serves as a stumbling block. This isn't much different than trying to reach Mormons, Scientologists, or Jehovah Witnesses. They get a belief system so burned into their minds that they cannot see things from another perspective.

[bonnie]

There are certain belief systems that serve as stumbling blocks. For some scientists, their education really serves as a stumbling block. This isn't much different than trying to reach Mormons, Scientologists, or Jehovah Witnesses. They get a belief system so burned into their minds that they cannot see things from another perspective.

If I have read correctly over time here,we have a very high number of stumbling blocks that cause people to rush out the door. Very litte is actually mentioned that would be a incentive for any to join and to make any visit very brief

[GreatLakesGramma]

Science and Christianity are not incompatible.

[bonnie]

Science and Christianity are not incompatible.

I for one never believed the two were incompatible. But when science disputes what the bible says it does become incompatible.

When I read the other day that remains of a 44 million year old "possible missing link", it is more than incompatible.

I thought this was more about how bad scientists are treated by the church members.

[bonnie]

The profession that would expect you(general) to believe this is also the profession that would like you to believe the global warming nonsense. I happen to believe God created us in his image,not an image that needed to evolve over million of years

Oldest Skeleton of Human Ancestor Found

Jamie Shreeve

Science editor, National Geographic magazine

Updated 6:44 p.m. ET, October 1, 2009

Move over, Lucy. And kiss the missing link goodbye.

Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago.

Oldest human skeleton ardi missing link chimps ardipithecus ramidus picture

Enlarge Photo

man Genome Shows Proof of Recent Evolution, Was Darwin Wrong? (National Geographic Magazine)

The centerpiece of a treasure trove of new fossils, the skeleton—assigned to a species called Ardipithecus ramidus—belonged to a small-brained, 110-pound (50-kilogram) female nicknamed "Ardi." (See pictures of Ardipithecus ramidus.)

The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings.

(Interactive time line: how the Ardipithecus ramidus discovery changes human evolutionary theory.)

Ardi instead shows an unexpected mix of advanced characteristics and of primitive traits seen in much older apes that were unlike chimps or gorillas (interactive: Ardi's key features). As such, the skeleton offers a window on what the last common ancestor of humans and living apes might have been like.

Announced at joint press conferences in Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the analysis of the Ardipithecus ramidus bones will be published in a collection of papers tomorrow in a special edition of the journal Science, along with an avalanche of supporting materials published online.

"This find is far more important than Lucy," said Alan Walker, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the research. "It shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn't look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between." (Related: "Oldest Homo Sapiens Fossils Found, Experts Say" [June 11, 2003].)

Ardi Surrounded by Family

The Ardipithecus ramidus fossils were discovered in Ethiopia's harsh Afar desert at a site called Aramis in the Middle Awash region, just 46 miles (74 kilometers) from where Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, was found in 1974. Radiometric dating of two layers of volcanic ash that tightly sandwiched the fossil deposits revealed that Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago.

Older hominid fossils have been uncovered, including a skull from Chad at least six million years old and some more fragmentary, slightly younger remains from Kenya and nearby in the Middle Awash.

While important, however, none of those earlier fossils are nearly as revealing as the newly announced remains, which in addition to Ardi's partial skeleton include bones representing at least 36 other individuals.

"All of a sudden you've got fingers and toes and arms and legs and heads and teeth," said Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, who co-directed the work with Berhane Asfaw, a paleoanthropologist and former director of the National Museum of Ethiopia, and Giday WoldeGabriel, a geologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

"That allows you to do something you can't do with isolated specimens," White said. "It allows you to do biology."

(Related: Rediscover the earliest Ardipithecus.)

Ardi's Weird Way of Moving

The biggest surprise about Ardipithecus's biology is its bizarre means of moving about.

All previously known hominids—members of our ancestral lineage—walked upright on two legs, like us. But Ardi's feet, pelvis, legs, and hands suggest she was a biped on the ground but a quadruped when moving about in the trees.

Her big toe, for instance, splays out from her foot like an ape's, the better to grasp tree limbs. Unlike a chimpanzee foot, however, Ardipithecus's contains a special small bone inside a tendon, passed down from more primitive ancestors, that keeps the divergent toe more rigid. Combined with modifications to the other toes, the bone would have helped Ardi walk bipedally on the ground, though less efficiently than later hominids like Lucy. The bone was lost in the lineages of chimps and gorillas.

According to the researchers, the pelvis shows a similar mosaic of traits. The large flaring bones of the upper pelvis were positioned so that Ardi could walk on two legs without lurching from side to side like a chimp. But the lower pelvis was built like an ape's, to accommodate huge hind limb muscles used in climbing.

Even in the trees, Ardi was nothing like a modern ape, the researchers say.

Modern chimps and gorillas have evolved limb anatomy specialized to climbing vertically up tree trunks, hanging and swinging from branches, and knuckle-walking on the ground.

While these behaviors require very rigid wrist bones, for instance, the wrists and finger joints of Ardipithecus were highly flexible. As a result Ardi would have walked on her palms as she moved about in the trees—more like some primitive fossil apes than like chimps and gorillas.

"What Ardi tells us is there was this vast intermediate stage in our evolution that nobody knew about," said Owen Lovejoy, an anatomist at Kent State University in Ohio, who analyzed Ardi's bones below the neck. "It changes everything."

Against All Odds, Ardi Emerges

The first, fragmentary specimens of Ardipithecus were found at Aramis in 1992 and published in 1994. The skeleton announced today was discovered that same year and excavated with the bones of the other individuals over the next three field seasons. But it took 15 years before the research team could fully analyze and publish the skeleton, because the fossils were in such bad shape.

After Ardi died, her remains apparently were trampled down into mud by hippos and other passing herbivores. Millions of years later, erosion brought the badly crushed and distorted bones back to the surface.

They were so fragile they would turn to dust at a touch. To save the precious fragments, White and colleagues removed the fossils along with their surrounding rock. Then, in a lab in Addis, the researchers carefully tweaked out the bones from the rocky matrix using a needle under a microscope, proceeding "millimeter by submillimeter," as the team puts it in Science. This process alone took several years.

Pieces of the crushed skull were then CT-scanned and digitally fit back together by Gen Suwa, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tokyo.

In the end, the research team recovered more than 125 pieces of the skeleton, including much of the feet and virtually all of the hands—an extreme rarity among hominid fossils of any age, let alone one so very ancient.

"Finding this skeleton was more than luck," said White. "It was against all odds."

[Gregory Matthews]

Science and Christianity are not incompatible.

Science and relilgion may be incompatible.

[BobRyan]

Fortunately a large % of the scientists working in our university science departments do not believe that science and Christianity are incompatible.

[Dr. Shane]

A fundamental assumption of natural science is that everything around us is a result of natural processes. That assumption is not compatible with Christianity, which believes in a Creator and Savior being actively involved in creation throughout history and still today.

There is a type of science that does not accept that assumption but it is not considered "mainstream". The US court system would not allow it to be taught in public schools. That is called creation science.

However there are many disciplines of science that are in both natural and creation science which do not need the natural-processes assumption in order to be practiced. Such sciences as chemistry, biology and physics are practiced in basically the same way by both natural and creation scientists. For example, a medical doctor that believes in Jesus Christ as his Creator and Lord practices medicine pretty much the same way as a medical doctor that is an atheist does. The atheist geologist looks for oil in the ground the same way the creationist geologist does. So in many disciplines, the practical application of the science is not impacted by the natural-processes assumption of natural science.

[phkrause]

You make some good points Shane. I think what most don't want is Religion be taught, and so they equate (sp) believing in creation as teaching religion.

pk