Posted on 06/05/2015 10:43:48 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
In a speech at his granddaughter's high school graduation Thursday, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia hinted that he may believe some tenets of creationism.
"Class of 2015, you should not leave Stone Ridge High School thinking that you face challenges that are at all, in any important sense, unprecedented," Scalia said during the speech. "Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so, and I doubt that the basic challenges as confronted are any worse now, or alas even much different, from what they ever were."
ThinkProgress notes that Scalia's statement is a bit odd, since the earliest Homo sapiens lived in Africa about 100,000 years ago, and evidence of human culture, such as cave painting, dates back at least 50,000 years. ThinkProgress' Ian Millhiser points out that Scalia may have been denoting a core belief of young earth creationists, who think the planet is only several thousand years old.
While it's unclear whether Scalia intended to promote a creationist belief — the speech was at a Catholic high school, but creationism isn't a part of Catholicism — it's not the first time Scalia has made a polarizing remark about religion. In a 2013 interview, ThinkProgress notes, Scalia said he believes the devil is a "real person."
5000-6000 years ago is roughly when recorded history began. i take his comments to refer to that.
Just being on the safe side. If it’s true that we’ve been around for 100,000 years, then it’s also true that we’ve been around for 5,000 years.
Either God created the earth in 7 days around 6,000 years ago....
or...
A universe in complete chaos order itself into precision, establishing a myriad of laws of physics, with no lawgiver at all, just chance.
I look at the universe and I see the former.
He used the word “humanity”....which tends to mean a guy with a thought process, priorities, and reasoning potential. ‘Benno’, the cave dude from 60,000 years ago....didn’t have much in the way of humanity existing. He was a hunter and tended to move from valley to valley. When civilization came around 6,000 years ago...that’s when society changed and we became something more than a hunter.
You mean a conservative Catholic admits to believing in God? Imagine that!
Ultimately there’s a need for God, unless you honestly can reconcile the Big Bang happening ex nihilo.
YMMV on how literal Genesis is with the concept of the seven days of creation.
That's the way I read it, too.
Sure there may have been humanoids, or even humans as we know them today, 100,000 years ago.
But they were very primitive.
They didn't have the luxury of time to build a functioning society, with rules and laws.
They were too busy hunting and gathering food, and dying at 30.
Not much free time to develop astronomy or mathematics or philosophy.
And even THEN, "creationists" put the age of earth around 6000-7000 years.
Scalia isn't stupid enough to make a mistake like that.
He was clearly speaking of civilization.
5000 years is about right.
“the speech was at a Catholic high school, but creationism isn’t a part of Catholicism —”
Uh. . . http://www.amazon.com/The-Doctrines-Genesis-1-11-Traditional/dp/0595452434
I think your comment is accurate and not too hard to understand.
Lefty journalists would rather distort and smear.
Well, consider Genesis 1:2 for a second. It’s usually translated “And the earth was without form and void”, from Hebrew “V’Haaretz hayatah tohu va bohu”. The word “hayatah” can be translated “became”, as it is in Genesis 19:26 (“and she [Lot’s wife] became a pillar of salt”).
DeMaria citing StinkProgress as a factual source? Really? Phew.
This dichotomy is so rigid and arbitrary as to be actually comical. LOL. Sounds like Monty Python.
Thats how I’d take it too.
Which is what he meant. Everything before that is prehistory. As for Creationist, the word basically means anyone who believes in a Creator God, and not just the “Young Earth” people. Ninety-nine, point ninety-nine Percent. of what we know about human beings dates after that time.
Or God in the later. ‘Seems quite clear.
Actually, we have hints that mankind were far from primitive much earlier than that. The great temple in temple being unearthed in Turkey; the cave paintings in Spain and France show great sophistication. But “world history” in any meaningful sense does not date back much before 3000 BC.
The first experience I had of this was the discovery of the "nitrogen geysers" of Triton, a moon of Neptune. I searched on images of these, but was swamped by artistic interpretations, and it occured to me that the image I had in my mind was actually one of these. Here is the actual acquired image that is interpreted as evidence for this process:
Those black streaks are the fallen plumes of these geysers, if this interpretation is correct. Well, something's going on there. Nietzsche wrote, in the voice of Zarathustra, "Oh great star, what would be your fate if you had no one to shine upon?" My reaction to these presumed geysers is along those lines. "What's the point?"
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