Does the evolutionary science you follow actually give us facts or does it give us theories that we attempt to turn into facts by searching for parts of our reality that align with them?
The entire problem with the premise of theory becoming fact…in politics there almost universally exists the left and the right. These alignments with theories about life come from people who are essentially made up of exactly the same stuff and educated in the same types of schools under the same types of government mandated educational curriculums.
So how then do you explain that the left and right of parliaments with almost identical upbringings within a society stand opposed to each other?
So your comment T_aquaticus is problematic even within the reality that may be observed every day in our parliamentary groups.
in any case, again you continue to completely ignore a fundamental nature of humanity…the mere fact that we ask the questions in the first place. You again maintain that science drives the search for knowledge…it does not. The philosophical nature of humanity drives the search…so you cannot continue to ignore the Bible in place of science…nor can it be interpreted to agree with secular science that individuals such as Stephen Hawking claim does not include God.
In the context of the post about Psalm 90 … that it provides biblical evidence of evolutionary timeline of millions of years…it absolutely does not…as the first verses of that exact same Psalm clearly outline and now you have also agreed with.
I agree with this point Christy, however, i am not sure what you point is and how it supports the claims of the O.P?
Miracles are given for a very specific purposes and there are some tests for the authenticity of them. Such as:
Glorifies God (Acts 8:9)
Comes from a righteous source (Matthew 24:24)
Used to distinguish from The Heavenly vs Evil spirits (1Cor 12:10 and Acts 13:10)
We know the Jesus refused to perform miracles for the purposes of “providing a show”. Examples were at His hometown in Mark 6, and also for King Herod in Luke 23:8.
The interesting thing is that these miracles were witnessed by people (as you have highlighted). I wonder if we can classify creation of the universe as a miracle from a human perspective…I am yet to find passages in the bible that state humanity witnessed any of it? What i do find is that individual writers were given visions of the creation of the earth and they attest to it as a result of those visions. BTW, none of those visions appear to support the idea of millions of years…they all support a literal reading of Genesis 1. These are visions from individuals as recent as John the Revelator (thousands of years after the time of Moses and yet he remains consistent with the Mosaic timeline).
It gives us facts. In-your-face, indisputable, unambiguous and insistent facts. The heat problem alone should be sufficient to make this clear.
Science is not politics. Nobody gets to vote on Newton’s laws of motion, or the laws of thermodynamics, or the theory of relativity, or the Schrödinger equation. Nobody gets to vote on the speed of light, the distance from London to New York, or the height of Mount Everest. And in the same way, nobody gets to vote on how old the earth is, or who or what did or didn’t evolve from what. These are questions that are answered by measurement, not by referendums or legislation. Left versus right has nothing to do with it: you either accept what the evidence that we see tells us about objective reality, or else you make things up and live in a fantasy world of your own invention.
That is one of the reasons I left young earth creationism. If the universe is really only 6,000 years old, there does not seem to be any reason, scientific or theological, that it should look billions of years old. On the one hand, most “scientific” explanations from Answers in Genesis are so convoluted and require so many extra assumptions to fit the data that the only reason to accept a young earth creationist model over mainstream models if is you are already a young earth creationist. Theological explanations, like God just created the universe to look old, ultimately undermine science and a rational worldview itself since they suggest that we can come to the wrong conclusion about the history of the universe just by doing honest research.
First: evolutionary science or just science, gives us facts, lots of irrefutable facts. Theories are created as we compile and connect existing facts. Theories can be tested creating yet more facts.
Second: The education sameness/difference argument is a straw man. It has no relevance to the discussion here.
Third: I take your point that humans drive the inquiry, not science. I think the notion is that the science causes us curious humans to ask more questions. But you make an error, if I understand you correctly, that a search for knowledge is equivalent to the intellectual path of the Bible.
At $2.99 from Barnes and Noble, since the description indicates this isn’t about gap theory, I decided to grab a copy. From the other things the blurb says it isn’t, this could be interesting.
There’s a massive difference between problematic issues and blatant disregard for actual science. YECism does the latter and thus makes God out to be a liar.
Nope – false dichotomy. It’s like saying that if I tell a toddler to “Take a big step” then I am demanding that his stride is as long as my 6’6" friend’s stride.
No, it doesn’t – it only shows that murder was wrong, not that there were any given commandments, and it doesn’t show any sacrificial system in place, it only shows that the two sons brought offerings with no mention of sacrifice.
Nor can they use sloppy logic.
That’s a bit excessive since he is quite correct on his points about the 2 Peter and the Psalm passages; they have nothing to do with evolution nor the lack thereof. The 2 Peter passage is applicable to the “waters” of Genesis 1:2 and possibly to the way that rain and the resulting streams shape the Earth, but the point of comparison is the same as in Psalm 90 – how slow things seem to humans compared to how God sees them. It’s a stretch to use that to make the days of Genesis 1 longer, nor is it necessary because as ancient Hebrew scholars noted the days are “divine days” until humans are made, or at least until the “two lights” are set in the sky (and as other scholars concluded, the Hebrew indicates that the universe and the Earth are both immensely ancient).
As an almost- geology major, I affirm this: the evidence for an ancient Earth can only be denied by deliberate deception. There is no way around the fact that the Himalayas, which are a young mountain range, are at the very least hundreds of thousands of years old just based on the known mechanics of rock folding. That dating method only gives minimum ages, but methods for comparing mountains show that other ranges are tens and hundreds of times as old as the Himalayas – again at a minimum!
Heck, I ran into a dating method I hadn’t seen before (probably invented between when I graduated university and today) that involves volcanoes and the fact that the lava in subduction-fed volcanoes and that from hot spot volcanoes is different because the subduction-related volcanoes have lava that is recycled ocean crust (plus sediments) while the hot spot volcano lava is straight from the mantle. I haven’t read into it to understand it yet, but apparently it confirms what plate tectonics says, that the lava from subduction-driven volcanoes is millions of years older material as lava than that from hot spots.
Absolutely.
Historically, YECism arose from an infection that entered theology from the quite alien worldview of scientific materialism when some theologians applied that worldview’s premise that in order to be true a thing must be 100% scientifically and historically accurate. That is not a principle found anywhere in scripture, it is imported. YECism rests on a foundation taken from a worldview that is inherently atheistic. This is hardly the first time that a purely human worldviews has been forced onto the scriptures with strange results, but it may well be the worst.
Superb point. As one of my Old Testament professors noted once, even though it’s primarily in John’s Gospel that miracles are called “signs”, nevertheless all miracles are signs.
I’m aware that the theological reasoning behind harmonising the Bible with the evidence that we see in nature for an ancient earth is more nuanced than just 2 Peter 3:8 and Psalm 90:4. However, Adam isn’t just dismissing those verses; he’s insisting that the Bible can not be harmonised with the objective reality of deep geological time and biological evolution in any way, shape or form, period. The point that I am making here is that setting the Bible up against indisputable, objective reality is not an argument against indisputable, objective reality; it is an argument against the Bible, whether 2 Peter 3:8 is involved or not.
With 2 Peter 3, young earthists want to have their cake and eat it. They are happy to hammer home 2 Peter 3:4-7 as insisting on a young earth, a global Flood as the source of the fossil record, and all the rest of it, but then they will be every bit as insistent that verse 8 has nothing whatsoever to do with it, despite the fact that it’s the very next verse.
For what it’s worth, it was only after reading 2 Peter 3:8 that I abandoned the idea of a young earth. It was reading that verse that first made me realise that I could accept what the scientific evidence has to say about the age of the earth without feeling guilty about it. I also say to YECs that it may not be much to go on, but at least in terms of long ages, the Bible gives us something. The only alternative is to believe that God created evidence for 4.5 billion years of detailed history that never happened. In support of that, the Bible gives us nothing.
Which takes me back to the point I made that this wouldn’t just be a miracle, it would be a pointless miracle. Accelerated decay accompanied by the miraculous removal of the resulting heat is completely superfluous to the Flood story, and it serves no purpose whatsoever other than to make the earth look older than it really is in the most complicated and convoluted way imaginable. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: such a course of action is totally out of character for the God of the Bible.
It’s contrary to the basic concept that stimulated the scientific revolution: that God is faithful and neither deceives nor changes the rules. “Seek” and “study” and “learn” are not just admonitions that apply to scripture, they apply just as well to God’s “book of nature”.
My interest is in harmonizing theology with the text – and the text does not, cannot, support YECism. To get YECism from the Bible is impossible because it rests on a proposition the Bible knows nothing about, namely that in order to be true a thing has to be 100% scientifically and theologically accurate. No such claim is found in Genesis or in any other place in scripture. And in order to try to force it to fit, it is necessary to ignore all the research about ancient literature that God has allowed to be learned with the result that we have a treasure of knowledge of the scriptures greater than at any time before except when Jesus walked this earth – and He wasn’t exactly out to be an encyclopedia!
I don’t really care that much about an ancient Earth, I care about an ancient text that is at least three thousand years apart from the modern world, which utilizes forms of thinking and forms of literature that are deeply alien to us – and if anyone can read the Old Testament and claim it fits modern literary types in every portion, they have not understood the Old Testament but have believed an illusion.
I’m glad that science has shown us just how fitting the title “Ancient of Days” is for God by showing us just how long a period of days God spent attending to His Creation before we were even on the scene – before Earth or life were even on the scene! But I note once again that back before Galileo ever put two lenses into a tube and got a telescope there were scholars who examined Genesis 1 carefully and concluded that the universe is ancient beyond comprehension, that it began smaller than a grain of mustard and expanded incredibly rapidly to vast extent; and that the Earth also is ancient beyond human reckoning: it doesn’t require modern science to find that the universe, along with God, is “ancient of days”.
And the intriguing thing about the literary forms that the first Creation account uses is that while the details are not meant to be taken literally apart from the account, in taking them literally one can reach a understanding of the basic message – but to really grasp the ,message one has to hear it the way ancient Israelite ears would have… something YECism just closes the door on,.
No because that same heat problem exists for secular views as well.
This is a red herring and makes no difference and the reason why is because you have to choose a world view (a philosphical position). Christianity only exists because of the bible…period! The Christian bible starts with a detailed account of our origins and this theme remains consistent throughout the entire bible.
No amount of science will ever change this fact of life…the truth is, only individuals with extremely poor theological understanding have a problem withany of this…those with in depth and very sound theology do not.
So when i hear the line by Collins that people are leaving God because of the conflict caused by science…they never really had well founded and grounded faith in the first place!
The bible says we are to look to Christ…not the wisdom of men (especially secular driven wisdom). It is when parts of the bible are intentionally discounted that the alarm bells should start ringing…for example when one hears people on this forum attempt to discredit parts of the bible by claiming for example that the apostle Pauls writings are not canononical and or not inspired…because he aligns with the creation account in Genesis…that is the sort of stuff im talking about when i talk of individuals with extremely poor theology.
Im fortunate to have a parent who is educated in those areas and can read the old manuscripts we have…i can say he would dissagree with your claims. You are simply ignorant of differences in language…which still exist across the world today. One obvious difference is the sheer volume of words in the English language compared with say Greek, Aramaic etc.
I think you perhaps are trying to claim we are more intellectually capable than those in Christs time…im not one who sits in the evolutionary camp that makes such claims. Adam and Eve were far more capable in every way than we are…and the bible is very clear on this and that is where evolution and religion part ways.
One thing i note on this kind of debate…rarely do the naysayers ever bring up Strongs concordance or any other well known documentation that gives us authoritative scholarly insight into how the texts in question should be interpreted and they have no self evident biblical texts that support such positions.
If you must make tu quoque arguments (which are already bad because they only serve to try to deflect attention away when you don’t have a case to answer), please at least make sure that they have some basis in reality. There is nothing whatsoever in the whole of conventional science that comes anywhere close to having the same heat problem. There is nowhere in conventional science that demands pointless miracles that serve no purpose whatsoever other than to make reality look different from what it actually is in the most complicated and convoluted way imaginable.
If you don’t see that, then either you have misunderstood the heat problem, or else you’re making things up.
Nonsense on stilts. Neither measurement, nor mathematics, nor the laws of physics depend on anyone’s worldview. Maxwell’s Equations, special and general relativity, partial differential equations and error bars work exactly the same way whether you are a Christian or an atheist. And it is measurement, mathematics and the laws of physics that work in exactly the same way for Christians and atheists alike that tell us that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and not six thousand. Secularism, worldviews and philosophical positions have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
I am not arguing against the Bible (which has a capital B, by the way), nor am I arguing against Christianity. I am arguing against young earthism, which is a cartoon caricature of the Bible with a thick layer of science fiction slathered on top of it. There is nothing in the Bible that says a word about accelerated nuclear decay, catastrophic plate tectonics, or the miraculous removal of heat generated by those non-events.