Dear Ron,
thank you for your thoughts, I have read them, but do not see any reason why the claims you are making, in any way are faithful and true.
Yet, the Holy Bible is faithful and True and He that sits on the throne in Heaven is faithful and True.
You claim by inference that the Earth has orbited the sun billions of times, that therefore it is billions of years old, in contradiction of common sense and the Holy Scriptures.
Do you believe that the Holy Bible is the infallible Word of God?
Do you believe that Adam and Eve were real people that were created directly by God?
Do you believe that ‘evolution’ is how life came to be as it is on Earth?
Yes, of course the majority of the world has overwhelmingly agreed that ‘deep time’ is real and evolution is real, but that is hardly surprising, given that the world hates the Truth. Most of the mass media and most of academia perpetuate these two myths.
The reality is that ‘deep time’ is a tragic myth that has blinded millions of people and caused good people to fall away from the faith in droves, as churches compromise to the teachings of the inevitable, ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’ that abound in places such as this Biologos website.
All over the planet there are enormous fossil graveyards where many different types of animal remains have been washed away from disparate ecosystems and buried together in mass fossil graveyards, where terrestrial plants and animals and marine creatures have been rapidly buried together, I say ‘rapidly’ only because of the exquisite preservation of detail in the fossil remains.
If the burial wasn’t rapid, then decay, from bacterial and fungal action and oxidation and of course scavenging would have utterly destroyed the remains leaving nothing, but the reality is that even jellyfish and skin textures are beautifully preserved in the fossils, thus a very rapid sediment laden watery burial is a rational explanation as to why billions of fossils are so sharply defined in the field, and this is no surprise for a Christian who accepts the Holy Bible as the inerrant Word of God, teaching us Truth about the catastrophic Global flood in Noah’s day.
The remnants of soft tissue and actual bones of dinosaurs that have been discovered sticking out of the surface of the ground in locations where the mean temperatures often exceed 25 degrees C, and not been mineralised, and contain osteocytes, blood vessel structures and proteins including DNA fragments of a few linked base pairs, demonstrate very clearly the blatant lie of ‘deep time’. More and more dinosaur soft tissue is being added to the literature every year.
What we find all over the Earth are billions upon billions of exquisitely preserved fossils, which is exactly what we would expect to find if the whole planet was submerged under water as faithfully and accurately described in the Holy Bible.
REAL examples that demonstrate this reality are not hard to find.
For example:
In a location within Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, Horner and his coworkers found 67 dinosaur skeletons in just one week!
Researchers will be digging up dinosaur fossils for years in a rich, newly discovered dinosaur graveyard in Wyoming, USA.‘The place is just crawling with bones’, said Smithsonian palaeontologist Michael Brett-Surman, who led a dig at the site.
The newly found fossil field may prove to have more dinosaur bones than Utah’s famous Dinosaur National Monument, or any other fossil prospecting area in North America. Billings Gazette (Montana), August 2, 1994 (p. 1).
Fossil dinosaur graveyards are clear evidence that some catastrophe, such as Noah’s Flood, overwhelmed the area. Bones don’t just sit around waiting to fossilize—they rot, unless buried quickly.
Researchers studying the fossil remains of duckbill dinosaurs have found a vast array of dinosaur ‘soft tissue’ within the bones. This latest find includes bone cells, blood vessels and fibrous collagen-like structures. They also made the first-ever discovery of osteocytes and blood vessels from a dinosaur backbone and its bony (ossified) tendons.
Scientists examined 17 unfossilized (i.e. not permineralized) dinosaur bones of various types from a mass mortality bonebed (‘graveyard’). Every bone sample contained osteocytes, described as ‘abundant’ in 10 of them, and another five as ‘frequent’. 16 of these 17 samples contained blood vessels, some of which were described as hollow and even “slightly pliable upon manipulation”. In addition, 14 of the bones were found to contain a fibrous collagenous matrix. Contrary to the old idea that it is impossible to find dinosaur soft tissue, the researchers wrote that “recent investigations have found such remarkable preservation to be quite common”.
Dinosaur fossil ‘graveyards’ have been found at many places around the world. One such ‘mass fossil graveyard’ in Patagonia, South America, has yielded a great many dinosaur fossils. Some of the fossils are of quite large creatures indeed, such as the T. rex-like Giganotosaurus (Greek gigas [giant] and notos [south]), measuring up to 14 m (47 ft) long. Many small dinosaurs are found there, too. But whether big or small, the excellent preservation of these fossils is consistent with the animals having perished and been covered over during the Flood of Noah’s day.
Michael J Oard reliably informs us that Dinosaurs are often found in large bone-beds or dinosaur graveyards, where many dinosaur bones are packed together. This provides evidence for at least catastrophic local floods. A few of these bone-beds contain thousands of dinosaurs and indicate catastrophic action. Probably the largest bone-bed in the world is located in north-central Montana, USA. Based on outcrops, an extrapolated estimate was made for 10,000 duckbill dinosaurs entombed in a thin layer measuring 2 km east-west and 0.5 km north-south. The bones are disarticulated and disassociated, and are orientated east-west. However, a few bones were standing upright, indicating some type of debris flow. Moreover, there are no young juveniles or babies in this bone-bed, and the bones are all from one species of dinosaur. Horner and Gorman describe the bone-bed as follows: “How could any mud slide, no matter how catastrophic, have the force to take a two- or three-ton animal that had just died and smash it around so much that its femur—still embedded in the flesh of its thigh—split lengthwise?” A cataclysmic event obviously is implied.
Another bone-bed containing thousands of duckbill dinosaurs, mostly in a single layer, is found in north-eastern Wyoming.
If you want to read about any more evidence of mass fossil graveyards of dinosaur and other animal fossils from disparate environmental niches, I recommend you read the article at:
Oard, M., The extinction of the dinosaurs, J. Creation 11(2):137–154, 1997; creation.com/the-extinction-of-the-dinosaurs.
The evidence is both massive and very clear for anyone with a Biblical worldview to see.
I am honestly quite amazed that for those souls that have imbibed the ‘deep time’ - ‘evolution’ worldview and allowed it to be thoroughly instilled in their brains as fact, the profoundly obvious REALITY remains invisible.
The distant starlight/time question remains unsolved though there are several theories in progress that resolve this, though none are proven at this point in time. The one that I very much think has promise is that from the results of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey or SDSS that’s *a major multi-spectral imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey of one third of the visible night sky, it appears that our galaxy may well be near the centre of a series of ‘onion shells’ as it were of galaxy concentrations. If we weren’t near the centre of this mapped structure, we would not be able to see these shells centred on our location at the apex of the survey map.
If it turns out that our location is somewhere in the general vicinity of the centre of mass of the universe, then it is quite rational that we would therefore be in an intense gravity well relative to locations far out at the extreme furthest location we can see. Now consistent with Einsteinian Relativity, it is well known through both theory and empirical measurement that time travels at different rates according to the gravity at the location of the observer. For example if this reality was not factored into the GPS system, the gravity at the satellite and the gravity at our location would not measure our coordinates accurately on our GPS devices would rapidly drift if not corrected for time contraction relative to the Earth’s surface where gravity is stronger.
Anyway the upshot of this real phenomena is that it is entirely possible that billions of years has transpired way out in the farthest reaches of space in the same time that a few normal Earth days or weeks or years have passed here on Earth. This is but one possible explanation for the starlight time travel problem. I don’t know what new discoveries will uncover in the future, but I see no reason to abandon the Authority of the Holy Bible in favour of ‘Deep Time’ or ‘Evolution’ for that matter, as they are clearly in error as far as I am concerned.
There are a lot of very intelligent Christian men and women working in a broad range of scientific endeavour who would disagree with your statements. Yes, you have the numbers on your side, but this is not about the most popular belief, it is about the TRUTH.
As Jesus said, 12 Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets. 13 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: 14 Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. Matthew 7:12-14
If you disagree, then so be it, that is your right and your choice.
God Bless,
jon