TEists dont accept biblical history…why discredit that view by using this argument?
The photon argument from background microwave data doesnt seem to make any difference to the calculation of universe age…i dont see this as being at odds with mature creation. Its the opposite…its what we would expect for a fully functioning system.
“If scientists can estimate how far light from the CMB traveled to reach Earth, they can calculate the universe’s age” …
“scientists measure the angle in the sky between two distant objects, with Earth and the two objects forming an enormous triangle. If scientists also know the physical separation between those objects, they can use high school geometry to estimate the distance of the objects from Earth.”…
“Scientists have a strong enough understanding of the universe’s early years to know that these variations in the CMB should typically be spaced out every billion light-years for temperature, and half that for polarization.”
Humans were created mortal which means all will die at some point. Remember the Tree of Life in the Garden? Why was it there if they weren’t mortal? Spiritual death results from separation from God. A separation that is the result of your sin. The atonement is required to satisfy a just God. The mosaic sacrifices just point towards Christ’s.
T isn’t saying he find this line of reasoning compelling or logical. He’s only showing you some of the consequences we would be obliged to accept if we were to believe the universe only a few thousands of years old.
How do you theologically rationalize this blood magic theology? Do your people get physical salvation from shedding the blood of animals? Is that your blood sorcery version of medicine? Do your people get longer lives by sacrificing human beings? Do you bathe in their blood like the Countess Bathory?
I stick to the real world. No thaumaturgy deluding oneself that doing some nastiness to something similar will get you what you want. Anyway, why would God need any magic to forgive people? I don’t. No, the question is what does it does it take to get people to change from their sinful behavior. It is true some will not do that until innocent people have been hurt or even die as a result of these sins. It wasn’t God who demanded the death of Jesus but the people of Israel themselves… “crucify him” they screamed. Innocent people cannot really pay for the crimes of the guilty, not in any sane system of justice and I think God is more sane rather than less so than we are. Yes Christ died for our salvation. I do believe that. But not according to any blood magic sorcery. But simply to show us that God loves us… that it really is all about love as Jesus always taught.
And again you repeat a lie.
It gets tiresome when it is the person who regularly insists that others aren’t paying attention to the scriptures who regularly violates instructions given in the scriptures.
If the microwave background radiation is not from the Big Bang then God is a liar.
This is why so many university students raised YEC abandon the faith totally: it becomes evident very quickly that those who preached YEC to them lied, and that if YEC is true then God is a liar, so they just throw it all away.
Yup. That’s the point. That’s exactly what I said. It might be a subtle point, but it’s not at all subtle when it is contrasted with contemporary accounts in which the creator deity did emerge out of already created material.
Did you catch the oblique reference to “chaos”? Like…an actual “chaos god”? Probably not, if you haven’t come across comparable creation stories from other cultures.
Well, humanity was certainly not created to “have dominion” outside of God’s leadership…no?
Not sure whether you are agreeing or disagreeing with me on this.
“Very good” means “very good.” Not "perfect in a Platonic sense. “Good” (Hebrew: tov) is only secondarily moral in its sense, and the older the text, the more likely the word would refer to beneficial, pleasing, useful, etc. So…when I eat a really good steak, there are no moral implications to that. And even if it’s “very good,” I’m not expecting it to be absolutely perfect, morally or otherwise.
So why should we understand the “pre-Fall” Garden to be perfect because God calls it “very (even exceedingly very) good”?
If humanity has an eternal soul, why would a “Tree of Life” even exist? What’s it for? To potentially bestow eternal life on those who already have it?
And what does that have to do with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Why does it matter that I didn’t mention it? It’s irrelevant to my point. There was no reason to mention it. There were also a whole bunch of other things in the text that I didn’t mention because they also were irrelevant to my point (like the fact that there is gold in Havilah—irrelevant to my point).
Annnnd…? What does that have to do with my post?
I, for one, did not say that “Satan can’t do anything.” By the way, Job doesn’t mention a being named Satan. Job mentions the satan (the adversary, the opponent, etc.). It’s not a proper name…in Job.
Well, but again you’re arguing against what I’m not saying. I didn’t bring up science.
Maybe you need to allow scritpure to adjust your worldview instead of reading scripture through the lens of your worldview.
There is no logic to the following statement:
God said Creation is very good, thus he created everything in 6 literal days.
Also, 250 years before Christ is not as old as ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian creation myths.
Actually, some YEC have proposed God creating light in transit. I don’t know how popular it is relative to other suggestions.
A truly theistic evolutionist (not deistic) indeed accepts the principle that God can create something from nothing. Rather, the question is what the evidence indicates about what God actually did. YEC restricts God, insisting that He had to do everything within a short time frame rather than letting the physical evidence inform how to best interpret the Bible. YEC inherently claims that a supernova 168,000 years ago did not happen, but we have abundant evidence that it did happen, with neutrinos and all sorts of electromagnetic radiation showing the process. And that’s just one of countless pieces of evidence from astronomy, geology, and biology that point to a lengthy history that YEC says didn’t happen.
TE affirms that God created a functioning system. YEC and non-evolutionary ID claim that the system did not function and had to have help different from God’s normal working in the natural world.
There’s also good evidence that tov has to do with something functioning well, at least when it’s talking about something that’s a system or part of one. So your “really good steak” is tov as you said, but the accomplishments pertaining to the days in Genesis 1 are tov because they are working as intended (which is of course pleasing).
Given use of the word elsewhere in the Old Testament, tov cannot mean perfect as in “flawless”.
I think it should be pointed out that God never pronounces the Garden either “good” or “very good” – that’s part of the other Creation account.
More critically from my point of view, YEC restricts God by mangling the text via demanding that the Holy Spirit must have inspired the scriptures to conform to their modern worldview. For all the appeals to Bible verses, YEC does not respect scripture enough to treat it as what it is, ancient literature in an ancient language using ancient literary genres under ancient worldviews.
YECists here love to demand that people list scripture verses, yet they have never gone to the trouble of actually studying the text behind what they believe.
Conceivably God could have created the universe 10 minutes ago, with you with all your memories in place. Possible. Seems somewhat “deceptive.” If the “heavens declare the glory of God,” personally, I have a bit of the problem with the heavens lying about that to some extent.
It also might be worth pointing out that in the second Creation narrative, the Garden narrative, at one point God says, “It is not good…” (Genesis 2:18).
The two creation narratives in Genesis 1 and 2, and those found elsewhere in Scripture (e.g., Ps. 104, John 1) are quite different. On the other hand, the fact that Genesis 1-2:3 and the rest of ch.2 are together strongly implies that the ancient Israelites saw them as compatible. The idea that some incompetent redactor threw together incompatible accounts from separate tribes and nobody was smart enough to notice the problem until modern critics came along is not very credible. But we need to take the differences seriously and seek to understand what they tell us about the intent and meaning of the passages.