No. There are always assumptions, I have come to accept. Some assumptions have a reasonable foundation that is generally accepted, some do not. I am not a philosopher nor physicist, but assumptions applied to things like the Big Bang probably include such things that reality is observable, observations have meaning, and that the laws of the universe are stable under normal circumstances, just to rattle a few off from the top of my head. I am sure others have compiled a much more accurate and complete list.
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No. It is based on simple geometry. The age is a result and not a presupposition. YEC starts with the presupposition that the universe is 6,000 years old and then tries to force the data to fit.
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YEC starts with the presupposition that the word of God tell us the universe is roughly 6000 years old.
Haha. No, you have no idea where I am coming from. Sorry, I actually thought you were asking an honest question.
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No. YEC starts with a particular fallible human interpretation that results in 6000 years. And if you start with the age is it any surprise that is what you get?
2 posts were split to a new topic: Do modern scientific discoveries impact EC/OEC interpretations of Genesis?
No sir, it starts with Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Neil, itās very easy to say things like that if you arenāt fully aware of all the different tests and measurements that are carried out, how they are all cross-checked with each other, the level of precision in the measurements, and what underlying physical processes and mathematical theorems they are based on. However, when you actually drill down into the details, a very different picture arises. You have come up with a plausible mechanism, for example, of how radiometric dating could give results in the Hawaiian Islands that increase linearly with distance from the main hotspot ā at exactly the same rate as direct measurements from GPS readings ā if the assumptions on which it were based really were so unreliable that they couldnāt distinguish between thousands and billions. You have to explain how millisecond pulsars could be stable to within one part in a billion if the speed of light had been different at any time in the past six thousand years. And so on and so forth.
Hereās the thing. Thereās a tendency among YECs to view the concepts of āassumptionsā or āpresuppositionsā as if they were some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card ā a kind of catch-all refutation to any argument that you canāt get round. It isnāt like that at all. The fact remains that the assumptions that scientists use are all based on extensive cross-checks, careful measurements, strong empirical evidence, and mathematical equations. In order to dismiss something as ājust an assumptionā or ājust a presupposition,ā you need to give a plausible mechanism by which they could be mistaken. Furthermore, your mechanism needs to be mathematically precise enough to account for the error bars in the end results. And in order to do that, you have to drill down into the details.
In other words, you need to know what you are talking about. Crying āassumptionā or āpresuppositionā or āwere you there?ā simply doesnāt cut it in that respect.
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The Bible history from Adam to today is a little over 6000 years. Adam was created on the 6th day of creation.
There has been some very convincing scholarship into the meaning of the numbers in the genealogies. Note, the motivation was not to ādisproveā Scripture, it was to better understand the text in its ancient context. https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2003/PSCF12-03Hill.pdf
āAmong the greatest stumbling blocks to faith in the Bible are the incredibly long ages of the patriarchs and the chronologies of Genesis 5 and 11 that seem to place the age of the
Earth at about 6,000 years ago. The key to understanding the numbers in Genesis is that, in the Mesopotamian world view, numbers could have both real (numerical) and sacred (numerological or symbolic) meaning. The Mesopotamians used a sexagesimal (base 60) system of numbers, and the patriarchal ages in Genesis revolve around the sacred numbers 60 and 7. In addition to Mesopotamian sacred numbers, the preferred numbers 3, 7, 12, and 40 are used in both the Old and New Testaments. To take numbers figuratively does not mean that the Bible is not to be taken literally. It just means that the biblical writer was trying to impart a spiritual or historical truth to the textāone that surpassed the meaning of purely rational numbers.ā
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Can the same be said for those who believe in the naturalistic theory of the Big Bang? I am not a scientist. I really do not know all about science. But I have a mind, and I can rationalize. When someone in a science text book tells me the universe is 13 point some billions years old, I immediately think how can this be determined when nobody was around 13 point some billions years ago? It takes a great deal of faith to trust the scientist who writes paper after paper on how he or she believes that certain elements came together out of nothing and created something. And by the way, where did the elements come from?
Sorry, none of these can prove something came out of nothing.
It is determined by measuring things.
https://biologos.org/resources/infographics/how-do-we-know-the-earth-is-old
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Are you suggesting that the Holy Spirit is not capable of guiding us to the correct conclusion on the genealogies from the English text in our Bible?
I think the Holy Spiritās job is to convict us of sin, open our hearts to grace, teach us wisdom, and develop in us the kind of character traits that resemble Christ as we read the Bible.
I think it is Bible scholars, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic experts, linguists, translators, and historians who help us understand what the words of an ancient text mean in our context. Conclusions about genealogies have nothing to do with our salvation, sanctification, or future hope in Christ.
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Assuming the speed of light was constant all throughout history of course? Right?
This takes me back to my point about millisecond pulsars. How could their frequencies possibly be so stable (better than atomic clocks, which themselves are stable to within one part in 1017) if the speed of light hadnāt been constant throughout history?
Again, itās measurement. Not assumption. Itās as simple as that.
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There is evidence the speed of light was indeed constant throughout history and no Creationist model has been successful in modeling a different explanation of the measurements we can make without proposing ridiculous things, things that would release so much energy it would burn off the oceans, for example.
Proposing ad hoc miracles or explanations that havenāt been discovered yet to account for numbers that donāt add up or models that violate known laws of physics is shoddy science. @jammycakes could maybe direct you to some good resources for reading up on how the CRI funded RATE project failed. Here is one put out by the ASA: Assessing the RATE Project
The Big Bang violates the law of physics.
You donāt need to prove something came out of nothing in order to measure age. Most of the people on this forum are Christians who believe God created all that is, on heaven and on earth, seen and unseen, like the Creed says.
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I understand. But using the naturalistic model requires the Big Bang, and in another post you used the law of physics to defend the naturalistic scientific method.