I haven't been keeping up on what's been happening here for the
last month, but I happened to read your message and I thought I'd reply.
I guess my point is an idea I've been thinking about for a
while. This idea is about impressions. I think as anybody researches a
certain topic there are three levels of impressions. The first level is
the impression you have of the topic before you start researching, just
what you know from hearsay. The second level is the impression you get
after doing a little bit of general research and hearing a lot of
opinions, facts from secondary sources, and very general arguments (often
very bias). The third level is the impression, or here the word
"understanding" might be better, that you get after you have extensively
reseached the topic, have heard arguments from both sides, have given it
quite a bit of time and thought, have asked questions, and dealt with
primary (or other unbiased, or less bias) sources.
From my research this pattern seemed to emerge. This was
especially clear when I reseached the topic of the Flood. By the way,
these impression call all be different, or they can all be the same, it
doesn't matter. But when I was researching the Flood my first
impression was that there had been a global flood because that's what
the Bible said and that's what I had been taught all my life by my
parents and other christians. My second impression, after I had
watched some ICR videos, talked to some people, and read the passages,
was a greater confiction that there had to have been a global flood. My
third impression, after studying geology, physics, biology,
anthropology, and astronomy (all in varying degrees); reading and
watching material from both sides, reading the passages, looking up the
original words in a lexicon, reading commentaries, and talking to lots of
people about it, was that there was no way that there had been a global
flood.
It was the more fundamental understanding that made things a lot
more clear to me. And when you get that you begin to see that people who
really understand, and have a lot of knowledge, agree with you in many
ways. You also begin to see that the other people that you disagree with
don't have the kind of fundamental understanding that you do. That seems
very egotistical or bias, but that's the impression that I've always
gotten and other people that I've talked to as well.
There might also be a fourth level of impression, that is at an
even greater level of understanding of the topic, maybe similar to that
of Ph.D. level. Where they deal with almost always the orignial sources,
and do very extensive research. I haven't gotten to that point yet, but
I think there might be this other level.
All of these levels are important, I think, because each
impression is acquired by thinking through the material that you have
obtained, and doing that is good. Also each impression leads to a new
and better (more true) one. But knowing that this happens might
help us not to trust our sense of understanding too much, and might put a
little bit of reverence for people who know more and understand more than
we do in our minds.
From reading your letter and having gone through many stages in
my search to understand the flood I think you're at the second level of
impression. Because it seems to me that you don't have a good
understanding of geology, physics, meteorology and other sciences, that
you haven't read very much about the topic (from both sides), and that
your arguments are very emotional (that also seems to be a characteristic
of earlier levels of impressions, because the deep understanding is not
there).
I don't mean to demean you. We are all at certain levels of
learning and developing, I am too. I'm not perfect. But one thing I've
learned is that there are people that know more, a lot more, than I do
and I can't just go around criticizing what they say without really
knowing what they're talking about. That's all, I guess. And I think
Glenn Morton knows quite a bit more on this topic than you do and
probably more than I do. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be asking
questions, discussing problems, and exclaiming what you think is wrong,
because that's all a part of discussion and how we learn. Just don't
start putting down people. That's what started me on this whole I think.
Well, I had good intentions, and I hope I didn't hurt anybody.
Please continue.
David