If cain feared for his life, how does a “city” protect him from such? I dare suggest that the “city” cain formed was less a populated town we call a city and more a citadel for safety for he, his immediate family and any of those who sided with him from the family. Remember he was worried for his life over the killing of Abel.
if one is so concerned to hone in on individual words in these passages in contention to bolster one’s belief in evolution, then what about respect for Noah’s ark that is written in historical narrative form. And if one wants to select a few verses to bolster their claim about cain, then respect the creationist language in early Genesis…even if one wants to consider this as poetry, then consider the truth claims within that poetry eg “Roses are red, violets are blue”
And lastly if one wants to talk theology, then go all the way and attempt to explain how theistic evolution does not obliterate the essence of sin and death and thus the truest meaning of the gospel.
Guys like Dr. Kurt Wise admits that the earth looks old but he chooses to side with the view that the earth is young. I read of book of his about 10 years ago about time…very interesting. Wise is brilliant and I would suggest very wise to boot. I have read some of what you bring to the table here yet well meaning scientists still find many problems with the earth being billions of years old. I would not be able to find my research on this quickly.
Regardless, I will never agree with the foundations of evolutionism. a Trillion years do not give naturalistic common decent evolutionism feet to stand on and we as those created in God’s image do not witness anything even resembling naturalistic evolution that creates something with design, purpose, color, function etc via nature. This circumvents all logic and all that we know and is not theologically sound by any stretch. That is why if I were convinced that the earth was really old and I was a Christian, I would lean the direction of Sailhammer and away from anything from the theistic evolutionism camp. Sailhammer allows the Biblical doctrine to remain 100% intact because he would claim that ancient history occurs only in a phase at Genesis 1:1 that could have lasted for a trillion trillion years for what he cares…then the start of human history begins at Genesis 1:2 where the “land” is a place on earth prepared for mankind to begin his journey. With this, traditional viewpoints from there on can be held in place without a whole lot of problem minus Noah which I do believe occurred as recorded by the way.
I’m no theologan, but To me themeaning of the gospel is that I have sinned, am deserving of death, and Christ died and rose on the third day to save me. Whether God used evolution to create is irrelevant to that. But it may be relevant in seeing the world in its true light.
“I take the Word of God to mean exactly what it says. Therefore, Cain had no other brothers or sisters besides those specifically mentioned in the Bible. Go ahead with your atheist-inspired heresy of other brothers and sisters, but I will stick to the Word of God, and that settles it!”
I would guess you would counter with something along the lines of “common sense dictates that there had to be other brothers and sisters.”
Do you see something of a parallel?
Your Christian brothers and sisters that accept evolution are in no way detracting from the truth of the Bible. Instead, we are following the common sense clues inherent in His creation that go beyond what is specifically contained in the Bible.
I have forwarded this 1-9 information to some very bright young earth creationist phds for a response. The ice cores seem to be grounds enough for a longer than 6000 yr earth and this info is interesting too…I feel comfortable to handle the logic and illogic of evolutionism vs creationism but this age of the earth stuff I will be very interested to learn from the phds in the fields related to dating ages of rocks.
Have you ever heard a logical explanation about finding soft tissue in a dino fossils?..I read a few things in university papers and they spoke of iron preservatives and “well soft tissue must be able to survive for 10’s of millions of years because there it is” with a period, done with comments type of response… That was not enough for me to be convinced…What do you know?
But you have them committing incest which was a really big no no. On the same order as murder. And if you want to go the “incest wasn’t forbidden until later” route, why was murder such a problem? God created man with a moral sense and that would include the prohibition against incest. Unless of course you are trying to save a literal interpretation.
Actually I refer to myself, along with many others here, as an Evolutionary Creationist. Most people don’t like the theistic evolutionist title as you have been told several times already.
God is so great he could have created the entire universe last Thursday so what’s your point?
I don’t believe I am sneering at the possibility. The problem lies in the “regardless of the way it appears!” God left very clear indications of how long it took to create the earth and life. To poof it into existence while giving it the appearance of age makes God into a deceiver. Last I heard He wasn’t the deceiver it was that other guy.
I believe you are a Christian and I believe you are my brother in Christ. But I have recognized some bad theology come out from the theistic evolution camp…I have been saying this for years: satan our enemy is attempting to destroy the essence of the gospel by destroying the essence of sin. And sin is only as bad as when we see God is GREAT and ultimate…And sin gets enflamed when eliminating Him as much as possible out of the picture…
I have family members who say they said a prayer of salvation but live as if God does not exist in their daily living. Does this make them a Christian? Not according to 1 Jn and James is doesn’t. Where creationism lessens this propensity, theistic evolutionism bolsters it because God gets placed on the back burner and believe it or not, all that it takes to make God deistic is fooling with the beginnings in the creation story.
What sentence do you think most closely approximates “Grog answering you”? I’m serious… I need to understand half the stuff he writes down, and if you, Chris (or you, @Grog) can point me to the sentence that can be reasonably interpreted to mean:
“Cain’s city was for the future kindred of Adam & Eve …”
… well, if you can … it looks like I’m going to be owing him a fortune in Klingon currency!
In post 53, you said you did answer Chris’s question.
But here we read in post 60, in response to my pinning you to the mat with your own tortured words … you had to admit that you were lying in post 53 - - you didn’t answer his question!
In fact you apparently take Pride in not answering people’s questions… When you give a defense… it’s like getting poked in the eye. And I must conclude you take pride in lying to your correspondents as well… because it’s all in the name of squashing the Evolutionist devils around you, yes?
This little test proves to me, using your very own words, that we can’t trust your descriptions of what you write,
let alone your descriptions of what anyone else is writing. Why can’t you just debate like a normal person? Over the course of several weeks, you have been self-inflicting body-blows to your own credibility … with a whopper of a coup de gras’ . right here …
@Chris_Falter, I think he owes me a lot of Klingon cash…
While it is tempting to consider this as evidence of a young-earth creation, it is important to ask if soft tissue in dinosaur fossils is evidence of a young earth, then why do so few fossils have it?
Hope you and yours are doing well this evening. I regret that I do not have the time to discuss all your interesting questions. But quickly…
You are confused about Cain. God’s mark is what protected him, not the city he built. As far as your speculation about the city size, well that’s exactly what it is: speculation. We know it wasn’t Chicago; at the same time, all the cities that go by that name in the Bible are thought to have had hundreds of inhabitants at a minimum, as seen in the Scriptures when populations are cited and the findings of Biblical archeology when they are not.
Noah: many opponents of evolution such as Hugh Ross believe that the “earth” that got flooded was a local region, not the entire globe.
As for the Genesis creation accounts, I think they are better classified as framework or exalted prose narrative rather than poetry. And even if they were poetry, that does not make them ipso facto a history in the same fashion as the gospels.
I am not trying to launch a broad debate over all of these issues. My hope is simply that you will acknowledge that I am indeed taking the Scriptures very seriously, even if you disagree with my hermeneutics.
The problem here is calling it “soft tissue” … at the molecular level this tissue has been marvelously preserved. And so it makes for an impressive artifact of fossilization.
But if such finds are evidence that Dinosaur fossils are less than 6000 years old … we would be finding lots more other tissue to go with it, right?
There would be blood and genetic material - - highly degraded - - but on par with what we find with Mammoth bodies…
In fact, the most recently living full-sized mammoths are twice as old, as the Garden of Eden!
“The woolly mammoth coexisted with early humans, who used its bones and tusks for making art, tools, and dwellings, and the species was also hunted for food. It disappeared from its mainland range at the end of the Pleistocene 10,000 years ago…”
And the smaller, isolated strain of Mammoths, are as old as all the dinosaur fossils are supposed to be!
“. . . .Isolated populations survived on St. Paul Island until 5,600 years ago and Wrangel Island until 4,000 years ago.”
And yet nowhere do we find dinosaurs, even the ones with preserved cartilage!, preserved to the degree we find in *any of the full-body finds of mammoths. Animals that have been dead and buried for a mere 4000 years are completely different from all the dinosaur finds anyone has ever found.
Just read the account of the Jarkov Mammoth (discovered in 1997, not the 1800’s)… it is believed to have died 18,000 years ago! If all the dinosaurs died 4000 years ago - - think of how many bodies of all the different dinosaur types and sizes would have been uncovered by now?!
If you want proof, @grog, there’s your proof… And, as in so many other cases like this, Creationists have zero explanation for this problem.
“It currently resides in an ice cave where over thirty-six scientists from all over the world, including Russian mammoth expert Alexei Tikhonov, study the find. The excavation and ongoing study of the Jarkov Mammoth has been recorded by the Discovery Channel. Bone marrow and Pleistocene plant samples have been removed and sent to various laboratories for analysis as the mammoth thaws.”
I would imagine that a period of a couple of thousand years should eliminate the soft tissue in whole, don’t you think? Honestly the gravity of the issue surrounding the presence of soft tissue in fossils thought to be 10’s of millions of years doesn’t not compare to the gravity found in the idea that we find it in only a few fossils because a couple of thousand years should be enough to remove most of the soft tissue in whole…
I read a bit tonight about radiometric dating…all of you Christian scientists from all angles need to meet for some brotherly, honest discourse on this issue. I read tonight from a theistic evolutionist how isochron dating is highly accurate, yet according to the RATE team, this dating method in a reliable lab, tests rocks at the top of the Grand canyon to be older than the ones at the bottom!
What is going on here?!
then I read about the presence of “lots” of Helium in Zircon crystals suggests that billions of years is out of the question when it comes to the age of the earth…
So you say one thing and the other guy says the other…Who is telling the truth and who is lying through their teeth? Or is there such a mix of results that this whole issue of the age of the earth must remain mysterious in which case best to just side with the Word of God?
I believe it would be really healthy for theistic evolutionist groups to rub shoulders with old earth creationists to discuss the topic of evolution vs creation to compare and contrast findings when it comes to the validity of evolution or not. And I believe it would be really healthy for a old earth crew to rub shoulders with a young earth crew and compare and contrast findings about age issues.
And with this, put forward honest outcomes of the science in relation to the earth’s age evolution vs creation etc…and take all of this information and go to the finest, most trusted fruit bearing theologians on the planet and filter these conclusions through the lense of good Biblical scholarship.
And from this, if the young earth crew says that despite what the findings may be put forth I still remain steadfast on the earth being young because the Bible suggests this, then extend grace to that crew and honor them for such faith. And if the old earth crew finds that there really is so much evidence that seems almost insurmountable proving that the earth is old even after considering the evidence to the contrary given by the yec crew, then the yec crew needs to extend grace to them! And all of this needs to be done in a way that honors Jesus Christ our Savior who saved us from our prideful swaggering about and who saved us from our just as much prideful sniveling to boot.
But it seems that everybody is so busy making a living on their point of view that peace gets lost. I am sure not perfect in helping keep the peace! I am finding myself in between groups who have polar opposite ideas who claim to have the correct science and that is frustrating.
The enemy is satan and the world and sin, not those who claim to know our Savior and not those who claim to reverence the Word of God. I believe that the other enemy is capitalism too…very sorry. But some groups take a stance and gain a following and money trail based on that stance and heaven forbid if anyone gives a snivel of disagreement that may disrupt a good living…ugh.
Why on earth would you write this: [quote=“grog, post:77, topic:35775”]
And all of this needs to be done in a way that honors Jesus Christ our Savior who saved us from our prideful swaggering
[/quote]
And follow it up with this:[quote=“grog, post:77, topic:35775”]
But some groups take a stance and gain a following and money trail based on that stance and heaven forbid if anyone gives a snivel of disagreement that may disrupt a good living…ugh.
[/quote]
Why do you insist ruining a very good and inspiring point, by doing a 180 mid-post and start accusing people of sticking to their views for monetary reasons? That’s very unfair regardless of who your target is.
I have read a number of accounts by great theologians who suggest that Cain, a sinner regardless of the mark pursue protection from what he potentially believed to be the wrath from family members against his for the death blow to his brother. I do stuff like this all of the time. I know that God has my back but I worry anyway. That is what many believe is going on with Cain when building a “city”
