In the flour sack instance, they’re not fossilized/petrified. The flour is still there with calcium carbonate in the spaces between the flour. Not at all the same thing, though both result in hard objects.
The boot is dealt with well in Randy’s link. I’d be very skeptical of someone unwilling to allow others to examine supposed evidence.
I wasn’t making any insinuations here, @Scbuck. I just wanted to know how well you understand these things, so I can pitch my responses accordingly. I don’t want to dumb things down too much for you on the one hand, but on the other hand, I don’t want to say things that will fly over the top of your head.
The problem with young-earth arguments can be summed up simply by giving you an example. One commonly cited YEC argument is the claim that there isn’t enough salt in the oceans – the amount that’s there supposedly places a limit of about 42 million years on their age. However, this calculation relies on quantities that are extremely difficult to estimate accurately, with huge uncertainties, and rates of change that nobody expects to have been constant historically. It’s also extremely difficult to be sure that all possible inputs and outputs have even been fully identified, and when you take all these factors into account and consider the latest, most up to date data, it simply isn’t possible to conclude anything at all about the age of the earth from the amount of salt in the oceans.
Another serious problem was the RATE project. This was a young-earth research project from 1997 to 2005 that sought to debunk radiometric dating once and for all. However, they ended up admitting that they couldn’t get past the fact that billions of years’ worth of radioactive decay really had happened since Creation, and so they had to propose that nuclear decay rates had been much faster in the past – notably, during Noah’s Flood. How much faster, you may ask? Fast enough, by their own admission, to release enough heat to raise the temperature of the Earth’s surface to 22,000°C. I’m sorry, but that kind of admission is simply game over for a young earth.
In a nutshell, young-earth “evidence” is, from end to end, a collection of tiny samples with huge error bars being cited in support of bizarre new laws of fantasy physics that would have vaporised the Earth if they had any basis in reality. But then again, they’re trying to squeeze 4.5 billion years’ worth of evidence into just six thousand, so what do you expect?
Absolutely I don’t mean to be rude I just seem to be getting a lot of people acting as if I’m claiming to be a genius with the final word on this stuff. These are just the conclusions I am personally coming to. Those two items are commonly referenced by many creation scientists and I have yet to see a solid rebuttal. So maybe it’s bogus but I just want to know what makes it so. The reason I came heresies that I believe in creation and I can’t find a logical alternative anywhere.
I appreciate that brother but that doesn’t help me understand. Those seem to be generalizations, I am the type of person that can’t accept something I don’t understand. So you may be correct I don’t know.
Between this and the change of speed of light in a vacuum in order to see super novae that are too far away to have existed within 6000 years, YECs seem to kill their best argument for the existence of God - the fine tuning of the universe. If the speed of light changes, all sorts of crazy stuff happens. If radioactive decay rates change, that affects other things. It just doesn’t make any scientific sense to me. So on one side they say, “The universe is finely tuned to support life, and any change in any of these constants would make it not support life,” and on the other hand they say, “These constants changed during the flood.” (With no reason given as to how or why a global flood would affect such things in the first place).
Good wishes; I don’t think you have been rude. Thank you for your discussion. Please note that if you want to respond to a given person, it helps to highlight what you’re responding to. I think you meant to respond to @jammycakes here. No problem, though!
Of note, we all come from different backgrounds. Many were originally young earth, though not all. I’m more of a layperson, not a scientist; though some do come here. Many of us are not Christian. It is a good place to respectfully discuss things with each other, recognizing our good intentions. Thank you for your participation and good thoughts!
My problem is that they seem to claim it took billions of years for something to come from nothing but can’t explain how that something came from nothing. So if it’s that God created everything and evolution is part of the process maybe I can see that but when a the theory starts with an inexplicable basis I have a hard time going further into a theory that is illogical in the first place. I’m not saying it’s all wrong but if the the initial explanation is a Big Bang I just don’t grasp that. Also they do make some assumptions with radioactive decay like how do they get such astronomical numbers. Six thousand years does seem a little short but 15 billion seems ridiculous.
Ah so it knows about how in English you are supposed to capitalize proper names. “Big Bang” is the proper name of a scientific theory.
Science does explain how something can come from nothing. First it shows that everything is energy, both thing and action, thus we can convert the energy of motion into new particles in a particle accelerator. That provides an easy explanation of the traditional idea of creation ex-nihilo by God, where it isn’t actually a creation from absolutely nothing for there is God and His action of creation.
Though with typical hypocrisy theists often demand more from others than they do from their own theology.
But science can even explain a creation of energy itself from nothing. This is the phenomenon called vacuum fluctuations and the explanation comes from the time-energy uncertainty principle. Thus Stephen Hawking suggested that the universe itself and the Big Bang could have been the result of a quantum fluctuation. This cannot be proven, of course. Science follows the diverse evidence that provides an increasingly precise calculation of the age of the universe and that includes the beginning of the very measures of space and time which make science possible. But obviously it is impossible for there to be evidence of what came before such measures and thus there can be no evidence of anything which caused the universe including space-time – certainly not in the time-ordered sense of causality pursued by science.
I think Scbuck’s problem is that he equates science with atheism, which is absurd. Because science has found a way to get at the truth of some things independent of what you may believe, this is something that people from all different religions and beliefs can participate in. But if you are going to insist on beliefs which anyone can see is wrong: believing the Earth is flat like a table, or that the Moon is made of cheese, then your problems are crossing the borders of sanity itself. Science extends sight with written procedures anyone can follow to get the same results. The result is that reasonable people adjust their beliefs to fit what can be seen in this manner.
The Big Bang is just a description of what happened 13.8 billion years ago. That is all. There is no scientific explanation for why it happened, and I don’t think there ever could be. That is simply something everyone is free to speculate upon. The belief by us theists that God made this happen is just as valid as speculation by others about quantum fluctuations, string collisions, and a multiverse.
Actually when you consider everything that had to happen, even 13.8 billion years seems a little short. Life took at least 3.5 billion years to develop and the earth took at least a billion years to form before that. But before that could happen all the material the earth is made of came from stellar explosions, novae or supernovae where stars grew old and died explosively. This is because the normal nucleosynthesis that happens in stars can only produce elements as heavy as iron and that is it. But the earth has lots of heavier elements like gold, lead, Copper, Silver, Zinc, Mercury,… So the earth had to come from a gathering of the debris left over from stellar explosions which went before and some think it may even have require material from more rare events like the collisions of neutron stars.
Hi @Scbuck -
Welcome to the forum! If there’s a particular piece of evidence that catches your fancy at this creationist site, I encourage you to bring it here to the forum for a second opinion.
The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him. - Proverbs 18:17
There are limits to what we know about the very beginning of the Big Bang, but as Christians, we know that no matter how it happened or what exactly happened, God did it. Having a natural explanation doesn’t mean God isn’t involved.
As far as billions of years go, yes, it’s difficult for humans to grasp the enormity of deep time. I likewise have trouble imagining the enormity of the US national debt or the amount of bacteria living on/in the human body. They are still true though. The age of the earth and universe are measurements.
Can you explain this? What assumptions, and which numbers are to talking about?
I have wondered for many years why science and religion instructors do not do a better job at teaching students to think critically by teaching them how to recognize different worldviews.
For example, Richard Dawkins has been quoted as saying
“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
It is clear from this statement that Dawkins does not believe in God and Dawkins believes that religious people are not interested in understanding the world. Because he has such a biased view of religion, I would not trust his statements claiming that science disproves the existence of God. Clearly Dawkins is mistaken in his beliefs and he misapplies his science. Dawkins’ statements are examples of “scientism,” which we should fight against. But we can, in fact, learn much about the world from BOTH science and religion.
Science and religion do not need to be at odds with each other. Although many scientists are atheists, many other scientists are also faithful Christians.
Early scientists, such as Gregor Mendel (a monk), were motivated to study God’s creation as a form of worship. They believed that learning more about God’s creation would help them learn more about God. Early scientists believed that they could learn about the world, because God was a God of order, who created an ordered universe with understandable laws and patterns that could be deciphered using rigorous study
And generally speaking, we learn different things from science and from religion, because they ask different questions. Religion asks: why do we exist? and points us to our loving creator. Science asks: what is the world made of and how do things in the world work?
The Bible is not a science textbook, but it tells us profound truths about who created us (a loving God). The Bible tells us that God made us to be in relationship with Him, that we are all sinners separated from God because of our failures to live up to His perfect plans for us, and that the only way we can be reconciled to Him is by believing that He sent His Son, Jesus, to die to redeem us from our sins.
God also gave us minds to reason, and God allows us to use science as a tool to understand His creation. If we cannot currently understand how the Bible and our scientific data fit together, it is due to our current limited abilities. But when we get to heaven, it will all be clear. In the meantime, we should be humble about what we know and what we do not know about how God created.
God was fully able to create the universe in 6 days, 6 thousand years, or 14 billion years.
The truth is that God created. But exactly how God created will not be proven by science. Nor is the Bible meant to be a science textbook. God does not seem to want us to definitively prove His existence. Instead, God seems to want us to look at awe on His creation, faithfully trust His revealed Word, and believe that Christ’s work on the cross is sufficient for our salvation.
From my perspective, it also seems very dangerous for us to teach our children to generally distrust science and to rely fully on a faith that requires belief in a 6-day creation. When our children encounter evidence to the contrary, will their faith falter?
As for capitalizing a scientific theory I find it laughable that it is an accepted scientific theory wise guy also the typing the words big bang isn’t necessarily a direct reference to the theory. You can type it in any context and it capitalizes so auto correct is incorrect! As far as your references to theoretical assertions that’s some excellent proof for something comes from nothing wow! It should be obvious to anyone who thinks for two seconds that this existence cannot be a coincidence. There is thought behind this existence and to say you’ve offered proof to the counter is ridiculous. A creator is the only logical explanation for complex life coming into existence. How can coded instruction for DNA come from random chaos and all the elements that have to be present for life to exist. So make fun of me if you want but you are also relying on blind faith in theories from people you do not know offering no real evidence. If life was created than I’m sorry sir that is science it’s just science you refuse to believe. All that man has invented , built etc was obviously designed. Do you need to know the designer to believe that or can you just look at the evidence and conclude it must have a designer. Anyway this is a waste of time because I’m sure you’ll cite some other absurd theory as evidence that there need not be a designer of something so much more complex than anything man has built.
Do you mind giving a link to this please? I am quite interested in this claim and wish to research it myself and see what comes up. Thanks and God bless.
Are you sure you haven’t already made up your mind? @jammycakes gave you some solid problems in the YEC worldview and you just shrugged them off.
The matter of ex nihil nihilo fit youd find that we agree. Its nonsense to believe such a thing. And to say science has a way around it is even more absurd. However evolution has nothing to do with this. So i wouldn’t know why you aren’t giving the problems given any thought!
But clearly it isn’t. Because there are many of atheists who do genuinely seek God and cannot come to finding him. This itself is evidence to the contrary of your claim.
DNA is not a book like it’s commonly thought. And personal incredulity isn’t really a good basis for argumentation. There’s a good amount of posts about DNA on biologos too!
But it seems your kind of evidence is near impossible to find? What kind of evidence are you looking for?
If you feel that way then in my honest opinion you’re not looking for truth here. You’ve already made up your mind.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you evidently have little interest in what anybody on this blog has to say. Mitchell never said he proved anything. Rather he explicitly stated, “This cannot be proven, of course.”
Nobody made fun of you. Disagreeing with you is not some form of mocking or persecution.
We capitalize Proper names in the English language as a matter of clarity and communication like distinguishing the planet Earth from other meanings of the word earth. For a lot of scientific theories this isn’t needed most of the time. But in the case of the Big Bang we have another situation where the words have other meanings. The Big Bang is in fact not a big bang at all. It was not an explosion of material out into empty space but an expansion of space itself which initially didn’t even have any material. The theory is given this name because of some superficial similarities like an initially very hot beginning cooling down as it expands. It is the same situation with “God” and “god,” where we capitalize the one as a proper name to distinguish the singular God of monotheism, creator of all, from the species “god” referring to the many kinds of deities and spirits believed in by people around the world. In correct English this has nothing whatsoever to do with respect or worship but with clarity of meaning.
Clearly what is “obvious” to you is far from obvious to many many other people and that kind of makes the use of the word “obvious” a little inappropriate in this context. The fact is that you have no proof and no reasonable expectation that others should agree with you. Even talking to me who actually believes the same thing, that God created the universe, I do not see how it is obvious or that there is any proof. In your case it may simply be that you were raised to presume God existence as a foundation of how your mind works, but in my case it is a choice of faith which I make.
I have little doubt however that there are some fundamental differences between your thinking and mine despite this one commonality. For example while you may think that the universe and living things were made as a means to an end (with a purpose) like a bunch of dead tools, I believe that the universe and especially living things were made as an end in themselves motivated by love. So this is a case where I not only dispute that what you claim is not obvious but also that is just plain wrong.
Well I certainly believe there is thought behind this existence but what I claim is not that there is proof to the contrary but that there is no proof that this belief I happen to share with you is correct. Just because something is true doesn’t mean any half-baked argument for that truth is in any way consistent, sound or correct. This is easily demonstrated.
This is demonstrably incorrect. Explanations have been given which are not only quite logical but which have a very large quantity and variety of objective evidence to support it. Now I happen to think there is a God involved in all that as well, but there is no objective evidence for that belief whatsoever.
But this has been demonstrated quite conclusively. We can set up an evolutionary algorithm using random search methods to find designs for things which result in designs far superior to anything that human designers have ever come up with. The truth is that even though the universe is fundamentally random at its particulate base, there is a loose overarching order on top of that. Now for ME this points to a creator God who values love and freedom over power and control, but for others this points to a non-personal inanimate order which they call natural law as the origin of everything.
Because of Poe’s law I don’t think I could make fun of you even if I tried and some will think there is little difference between your sincerity and someone trying to make fun of you. That is what happens when you are determined to ignore the objective evidence because of what you have decided is “obvious.”
I certainly rely on faith but I do not rely on others with regards to thought without the test of considerable skepticism and that means I criticize everyone, even those I agree with most. Faith is the foundation of all knowledge for the simple fact of logic is that all conclusions rest upon premises accepted on faith. Thus I have explained numerous times that science certainly requires faith and that in modern times scientists are the best examples of faith to be found while religious people are generally of rather mediocre faith and unreliable by comparison. Blind faith which is rooted largely in fear and willful ignorance, is better described by Jesus’ words in Matthew 13 about those who close their eyes and ears refusing to see and hear, because blind faith is defined by the failure to acknowledge the objective evidence which anyone can verify by following the written procedures of science which give the same result no matter what you believe.
Life was created as life is always created which is by providing the right environment for growth and learning and not as machines with no life are created, by design and construction. What I refuse to believe in are the theologians who push a god of power and control creating a clockwork mechanism with no life so that they can turn religion into a tool of power and manipulation.
Yes all the things with no life which men have created are designed, but there are also farmers, shepherds, teachers, and parents who create living things which are not by design. Crops, livestock, graduating students, and children growing to adulthood would not exist without the work of those farmers, shepherds, teachers and parents but they were not designed by them. That is the difference between living and non-living things.
The evidence shows that living things are not designed but are a product of billions of years of learning. This is the ONLY reason that I can believe in God. For otherwise we are left with the conclusion that the creator is a inept bumbling incompetent guilty of a malevolent degree of neglegence.
Correct. The evidence exists for anyone to read about, but this will do no good if you simply refuse to see, hear, or read what you choose not to understand.
So in conclusion… what is the most essential difference here… we believe a few of the very same things regarding God having a role in the existence of the universe and living things even if we do not come to the belief in the same way. I think the difference is the intolerance of people who happen to believe differently than you and I. I know that both theists and atheists can be and often are very rational, thoughtful and morally motivated people even if they aren’t always so. And the difference is a matter of choice and faith as long as we keep away the intolerant who would push their way of thinking on others by force of law and violence (something we can find examples of among both Christians and atheists).
I once heard a YEC from Australia present “evidence” that the earth was young. The man was quite knowledgeable regarding geology and cogently (and correctly) described physical processes such as erosion and petrification in the textbook manner.
Erosion occurs relative to the velocity of the water and is caused by vacuum, not by pressure. He described how a creek near his visitor center had flooded and washed out some trails just above the normal waterline. He described how the velocity of the water had increased after a sever rainstorm, causing vacuum, which pulled the soil away from the banks. As the water rose above that point, to the elevation of the surrounding land, because the width of the waterway had increased tenfold. Once the water level returned to normal, one could barely tell where the high water mark had been, because there had been very little vacuum and almost nothing was disturbed.
Similarly, he spoke of petrified forests, explaining how this phenomenon occurred. That fallen trees would become impacted by water pressure at one end due to the flow of a stream or river. These trees, now heavier at one end vs. the other would gather in a location such as the base of a waterfall, sink, become covered in silt, and, finally, petrify.
Yet, when he spoke of the flood and evidence for it being global, his points regarding erosion and petrification were entirely contrary to the physical properties of erosion and petrification that he had described earlier. It seemed to me that, while it should be obvious to everyone in attendance, almost no one was seeing that the processes were working entirely differently in the flood narrative vs. the real world. Despite the dissonance that I experienced, most of those in attendance followed right along without missing a beat. As I surveyed the crowd, I could tell that some others were experiencing the same symptoms as I.
@scbuck When you state that you have a feeling that professionals have made statements that support their positions and may not be factual, that is a very frustrating thing. That said, I have seen it occur, first hand, by creationists, in order to support their own positions. God does not need our help, especially through lies. We, of all people, should be simply pursuing truth, not trying to establish truth. We are NOT the keepers of the truth, we should, instead, be the discoverers of it. Seek the truth, the information is all out there.
Hello Scbuck…and sorry about your IPhone!! Maybe others can see how their phones autocorrect that term. (I still have a flip phone — do not laugh.)
I like your honesty and your desire to engage in a conversation of sorts here. Many of us have, or do, struggle with the desire to “square” the findings (or purported findings) of science with the biblical text…or what we perceive to be the teachings of the biblical text.
I too started out as a young earth person and did not give much thought to anything else. At some point I reached a fork in the road. I seemed to like it when science declares things that prove a biblical detail…but then I do not like science when it seems to say something else.
When it comes to “the Big Bang” or the beginning, I can think of (at least) one physicist who noted that, as he put it, from the time of Aristotle up to the late 20th century, no one held that there had been a beginning to all of this. Stuff just got recycled. The Bible alone maintained that “In the beginning all was …” you read the rest. Now you can say that he did not prove anything. Rather, this physicist simply pointed out that the Bible had taken a stance that no one else had taken ---- and, he noted, the reason many in the scientific community were reluctant to accept the idea of a Big Bang was because it, in fact, affirmed the universe had a beginning…which rather complicated things for them philosophically.
On another issue we could review the struggles of Augustine with the same initial chapters of the Bible because, as he noted, it is hard to ascribe a literal 24-hour “day” to periods of creation (as mentioned in the biblical text) when there was not yet a sun, earth, and solar system by which such hours would be counted.
There are other issues – such as whether the genealogies in the biblical texts skip generations and thus are not useful as calculations of periods of time…
I just came back from vacationing in a region of the country where – in one museum at least — it was noted that bits of flesh were found in a fossilized creature from long ago. I asked the museum staff how flesh could have survived the millennia intact. I know that creationist people seize that sort of data as proof that these creatures could not have been so ancient. Well…that does sound like a possible conclusion. But what was the response of these museum people? The response – in two separate conversations – was that the preservation of fossilized bones with skin, or bits of tissue, intact was very rare and simply a consequence of the conditions under which the bone-and-tissue had been preserved in situ.
I told them, and myself, that either explanation could be reasonable — that is, 1) it was a recent (relatively) fossil, and not so ancient as supposed, or 2) it really was just a fluke that had survived the millennia?
I suppose that, in that case, it is a draw…believe what you want and either case may be true. But people here on this site — and you and others — draw on a wealth of other information for their beliefs.
Good luck and enjoy the various conversations.
“Are you saying creation science isn’t legitimate? If so I’m going to need some actual reasons. They are refuting science with geological discoveries and have credible scientific backgrounds.”
I’ll say it. Creation science isn’t legitimate. The actual biologists and geologists see a mile off that they don’t know what they are talking about, so the Young Earth Creationists go straight to the average person in the pews who knows very little about science, and convince them that the real biologists and geologists are fundamentally wrong about biology and geology.
If YEC geologists have the correct history of how the oil, gas, coal and minerals were formed, why don’t they have better success at finding oil than old Earth geologists? In fact, name us a single successful YEC flood geology based oil exploration company.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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