“I don’t know their religion. Most are probably evangelicals, but that doesn’t matter. You’re moving the goalposts. You just asked for a list of PhD scientists who believe in six-day creation. I gave you a list.”
It would seem they’re all evangelical Protestants, from Weiland til today You’re right that you answered my question directly, with a list of CMI staff. That did answer the question, indeed, DavidS. Thanks!
Um, well, mainly just for Fr. Seraphim Rose and his followers. Most Orthodox reject “creationism” while accepting “Divine Creation”. The Orthodox teaching on the “compatibility” of science, philosophy, theology is more unifying than the Protestant (7th Day Adventist) teachings on Creation, which creates schisms and divisiveness. This is exactly why it’s within Protestantism, not within Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy where “creationism” has caused the most damage via “creation wars” in the past 100 years.
We accept Divine Creation because that is both written in Scripture and taught in the Church. “Young humans” differs from “young earth”. You’d do better focusing on where we agree re: “young humans”, for which you will find many people in agreement here, than pushing YECism.
But ideological “creationism” is nowhere present in the Bible, in the teaching of the Desert Fathers, or in the Orthodox catechism. It’s not a YECist, catechism, DavidS, but rather a “real historical Adam and Eve” catechism, which of couse, focuses on Jesus Christ.
It sounds like you went through a crisis a year ago, DavidS, as you mentioned being a “TEist” recently. Wishing you a healthy recovery from ideological creationism (now that it appears you’ve healed well from “theistic evolutionism”), so that you may more fully and deeply discover the beauty and wonder of Creation!
What you are actually saying is that you would need to change all of the universal constants and physical laws in order for YEC to be true. The only assumption being used in radiometric dating is the constancy of physical laws.
Your worldview invents ad hoc changes to physical laws because you don’t like the results of scientific measurements. The scientific view does not change physical laws to get old ages. Those are the two worldviews.
The ancient age of the Earth was already established before Evolution was proposed.
We have already established that the rocks scientists are dating formed naturally. Species also reproduce naturally, and we can determine if they naturally descend from a common ancestor. Your claim about the supernatural just doesn’t apply here.
That’s false. You are throwing out radiometric dating from the get go. You are throwing out all of the evidence for common ancestry and evolution from the get go because it contradicts your religious beliefs. We aren’t dealing with the same evidence.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
169
Like physicsism, chemistryism, biologyism in general? What about mathism? Medicinism? Surgeryism? Adult social carism?
First of all, there is no need to refer to them as “secular scientists.” There are reasons why mainstream scientists accept long ages that have nothing to do with secularism or a rejection of miracles.
Secondly, you’re right that long ages do not rely on radiometric dating. It’s just that radiometric dating removes any last trace of reasonable doubt, or any last suggestion that long ages could have any kind of “secular” motivation.
Thirdly, “the hypothesis precedes the data” is how every branch of science is supposed to work. You come up with your hypothesis, consider what you would expect to see if it were true, and then, and only then, look at the data to see whether you actually see it in reality. It’s called “making testable predictions.”
Yes you are wrong about this. Here’s an example where Ar-Ar dating was used to confirm the date of the eruption of Vesuvius to within just seven years
The numbers you have quoted are also out by a factor of a thousand. Andrew Snelling’s paper says two hundred thousand to 3.9 million years. That is less than 0.1% of the age of the Earth.
That only tells us that K-Ar dating can be out in some cases by up to 3.9 million years if you use a low-end lab. It doesn’t tell us that it is consistently out by up to a billion if you use a high-end lab. In any case, even if we do accept your higher figures, you have only established that it doesn’t always work. You have not established that it never works, nor have you even attempted to consider the methods that real geochronologists use to identify the (well understood) situations where it might not work.
I’m sorry, but in order to demonstrate that radiometric dating is so unreliable that it can’t distinguish between thousands and billions, you have to do better than “frequently.” What you need to show is that radiometric dates consistently disagree with each other by multiple orders of magnitude. Anything less is blowing the extent and significance of discrepancies and discordances out of all proportion and attaching a significance to them far beyond anything that is warranted.
As far as I have been able to ascertain, radiometric ages only disagree with each other about 5-10% of the time, and usually for reasons that are obvious and well understood. The highest figure I have heard to date was a figure of about 20%, in a discussion between a couple of young-earth creationists and geology professor Joe Meert. Even if this higher figure is correct, it still falls far, far, far, far short of making the leap from “doesn’t always work” to “never works.” You must account for the 80% or more of cases where there is no disagreement.
Seriously? All assumptions? What about the fundamental laws and constants of physics?
It is totally unreasonable to suggest that the speed of light in a vacuum, the fine structure constant, Planck’s constant, the mass of the electron, proton and neutron, the strengths of the strong and weak nuclear forces, the Boltzmann constant and the like could have varied by more than a tiny amount at any time in Earth’s history. It is totally unrealistic to suggest that Maxwell’s equations, the laws of thermodynamics, special and general relativity, or the Pauli exclusion principle could have been different at any time in the past 4.5 billion years.
Why? Because these laws and constants are fundamental to everything in nature. If you changed any one of these things, even by a small amount, it would have a knock-on effect on everything else. The chemical properties of the elements – everything from their melting points and their boiling points to their crystalline structures, their phase transitions and their abilities to form compounds with other elements – would have changed drastically. Life on Earth would not have been possible. In any case, we would see evidence of such changes in distant starlight. We do not.
As I said, this is where YECs’ rejection of “uniformitarianism” degenerates into fantasy. Once you start suggesting that the fundamental laws and constants of physics could have been different in the past, all bets are off. You’re basically demanding the right to make things up and invent your own alternative reality. Once you get to that point, you could just as credibly claim that the Earth was originally flat and covered by a solid dome, only acquiring its modern spherical shape during Noah’s Flood.
God is not deceptive. All he does is true and honest. For the YEC position to be true, it would seem that would not be the case. He made heaven and earth and the realities of creation to help us understand him and it sometimes even gives us insight to help us understand and interpret the written word. All truth is God’s truth. If it were not so, one might translate the verse, “The Heavens do not declare the glory of God”.
I don’t agree that the YEC-OEC is not about facts.
If one is not open for possible insight from others, why ask your question?
The Bible is true, but our interpretations are often wrong. If there were no such possibilities, why do we have so many denominations? We often don’t understand the times, culture or language of the people it was written to.
Many solid conservative believer scientists are on record that the YEC position is not credible. My current reading of a Christian authored books state that there is not ONE geological fact to support YEC. The books, Creation in the Crossfire: A Study of the Genesis Debate in the Church by Hawes and Canceled Science by Eric Hedin are good reads.
In the book The Heretic and The Fool a Christian college professor who supports the YEC position admits that the facts supporting evolution are over-whelming, but he refuses to change and hopes that someday facts will support the YEC position.
The clear facts that indicate the earth is billions of years old are many and powerful according to many Christian scientists. The are not naturalists. They believe God created in some way.
Barna surveys have shown that when our young people come from a science-sheltered YEC position and are confronted by the evidence 40+% leave the faith.
The YEC position is dangerous to the church. The way Ken Ham and others like him come across, it is like a cult. “Believe my interpretation or you are not a true believer.” That is the way cult leaders respond to those who don’t believe as they do. I have collected lots of stories of folks who have been so treated. Many have left the church; some have left the faith; most are afraid to let others know. I personally know some who are afraid to even tell their family members for fear of ostrazatation by YEC zealots.
So why bother with science then, if it is irrelevant to your faith? Nothing in scripture mandates you to dwell upon radiometric decay, or distant starlight, or the chalk Cliffs of Dover, or anything in geology, astronomy, or biology. You can just dispense with making excuses for tree rings and varves and such. Most of what is written in the name of creationism is nowhere to be found in the Bible anyways.
The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it! - in itself is an honest enough position. It is bunk that scientific evidence is just a matter of interpretation and philosophical presuppositions that is disingenuous.
In addition to trusting in a plain reading of Scripture I think he believes that the great commission obliges him to stint at nothing in getting everyone else to do the same. Pretty screwed up.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Missed this! You are saying that despite the fact that no purpose can possibly ever be scientifically discerned in evolution, i.e. life, in any meaningful (aka philosophical) way, only in poetic, figurative, subjective ways, it says nothing about purpose and that I am making a category error between the rationally seamless garments of science and philosophy, the former being the empirical tool of the latter.
Is that right?
Because dysteological evolution is a scientific but not a philosophic, metaphysical fact, not true, if God?
Thanks Christy for the reference here. I even looked for, and found, the 19th century books that hold the Seventh Day Adventist prophetesses’ vision (think the books — they were ancient —came from 19th century.) Intriguing reading! Did the canon close with the writings known as the canonical Scriptures? or is God still giving revelation? That is the question that came to mind when I read the writings you referred to. I appreciate the whole debate on this particular link and must look up the RATE thing that some have referred to. THANKS AGAIN to all contributors here!!
One is free to believe in long-ages, but I don’t appreciate when people pretend like it’s based on an objective assessment of the scientific evidence. There is no amount of scientific evidence I could present an evolutionist for him/her to doubt long-ages / evolution. For example, how do you explain soft tissue in dinosaur fossils, allegedly 65 million years old? That’s a smoking gun if I’ve ever heard one. That evidence seems to fly in the face of long-ages / evolution, since soft tissue shouldn’t be preserved for any longer than a million years - even under the best circumstances. But a committed evolutionist will bring in a rescuing device in order to save his prior beliefs. The scientist who discovered this soft tissue, Mary Schweitzer, said the soft tissue was preserved in an excess of iron. This might convince the true believer, but I recognize it as a desperate, ad-hoc attempt to maintain the paradigm.
But don’t get me wrong - I don’t blame evolutionists for clinging to their beliefs in spite of contrary evidence. The truth is: we all do this. Because nobody is a totally rational, objective observer who develops their beliefs strictly based off the evidence. Nobody is like that, because the evidence doesn’t speak for itself. It must be interpreted. And that is my point. Just as there is no scientific evidence that could convince Schweitzer of YEC, there is no scientific evidence that could convince me of long-ages / evolution.
At bottom, this is a debate about philosophies / worldviews. Not science. I reject evolution because I reject the secular creation myth. Rather, I choose to believe what God says in Genesis. It’s that simple. And by the way, as I indicated above, I used to believe in evolution, until I realized it’s only a godless philosophy, masquerading as science.
Again, I define “creationism” as the belief in six-day creation about 6 or 7 thousand years ago and the Global Flood. This is not just the view of Fr. Seraphim Rose. It is the view of all the Saints, all the Church Fathers, our hymnology, etc. It is the way Genesis was understood by nearly all Christians for about 1800 years. The Byzantine (and later, Russian) Imperial calendar says we are currently in the year 7529 since the creation of Adam. Creationism is literally all over our Holy Tradition. That’s what I mean when I say “creationism is very Orthodox.” I’m not referring to modern creation-science, which is mostly done by evangelicals.
I’ve made this distinction between “creationism” and “creation-science” many times. You either haven’t been listening, or you’ve been deliberately conflating the two. Yes, I understand that the Church Fathers weren’t building life-size arks in Kentucky and talking about dinosaurs living with people. But they were absolutely six-day creationists. There is no doubt about that.
If you believe in evolution, then I challenge you. In what way can God be said to be our Creator? Evolution depends upon random mutation and natural selection. These mechanisms are inherently purposeless. If you want to say God guided the process, then how did he guide it? Seriously, how? As far as I’m concerned, even the omnipotent God cannot guide an unguided process.
All the Church Fathers were creationists. Read “Genesis, Creation and Early Man” by Fr. Seraphim Rose. Even a “real historical Adam and Eve” is difficult to reconcile with evolution. If you believe they existed, they were in-no-way our first parents - which is what the Scriptures and the Fathers affirm. They do not merely affirm that Adam and Eve existed, but that they were our universal first parents.
Actually, I’ve never been more liberated than when I became a creationist. It felt like a conversion experience, since I no longer saw the purposelessness in nature. I no longer believed in a God who would create the world 14 billion years ago and only create mankind in the last moment, after billions of years of death and extinctions. That’s a deistic God. That’s not the God of Christianity.
I no longer saw nature “red in tooth and claw.” I had more appreciation for God’s creative power and goodness. It was like taking off blinders. Everything was more beautiful and vivid.
By invoking their magic wand of let’s just imagine something else that will remove this difficulty. In this case being “catastrophic plate tectonics” for which there is no evidence it happened and again some basic physics that says it can’t.
And then there is the usual creationists ploy of playing with the numbers.
Even a factor of 10 doesn’t get you down to young earth time spans but that doesn’t seem to be an issue.
Yes there is. If she had actually found DNA that would probably do it. But she, or anybody else for that matter, has ever found dino DNA despite what the movie said.
No at the bottom it really is about the science and who has to twist reality to fit their preconceived, human, fallible interpretation of Scripture.
That’s because scientists already have mountains of independent evidence for what they think. You don’t - so when you do come up with something that is allegedly a problem, it takes more than that to get everyone else to drop (or radically re-interpret somehow) the mountains of evidence already there against you. It’s far more likely that the “problem” you bring up really isn’t a problem at all - and in deed that’s what happens nearly all the time. The things that you do bring, once explained, turn out to not be evidence in your favor at all - or at best perhaps remain unexplained things; which still aren’t going to come close to making everybody ignore the mountains of evidence already there.
It isn’t an “even battle”. It’s comparable to a flat-earther wanting everybody else to reevaluate everything about the round earth because they allegedly “know something that doesn’t fit.” Sorry - but reality just isn’t on your side here.
Nobody is “pretending” that long ages are based on an objective assessment of the scientific evidence. They are stating it as a fact.
Look, if you are going to attempt to debunk established science, you need to debunk what real scientists do in reality, and not just throw around cheap shots laden with unsubstantiated accusations of “pretending.” The age of the Earth is determined by measuring things and making testable predictions. “Pretending” has nothing whatsoever to do with it.
That’s because there isn’t any scientific evidence that calls long ages/evolution into question.
Once again, if you are going to claim to have evidence, you have to make sure that you’re describing the evidence accurately and that it really does support what you claim that it supports. YECs repeatedly blow their much hyped findings of soft tissue remnants completely out of proportion, presenting them as if they were far more extensive and far better preserved than they really are. Look, we know what soft tissue looks like when it is a few thousand years old. It consists of whole carcasses with fully preserved muscles, skin, bones, internal organs and the like. It consists of vast quantities of fully sequenceable DNA. That is a far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far cry from the tiny, rare, badly degraded, partially mineralised, difficult to extract samples of soft tissue remnants that are occasionally found in dinosaur bones. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if the Earth really were six thousand years old, we would have fully sequenced the T-Rex genome by now. Why haven’t we?
Rubbish. It’s nothing whatsoever to do with “rescuing devices.” It’s a matter of getting your facts straight. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you want to see what a “rescuing device” really looks like, take a look at the RATE project. Nuclear decay accelerated a billion fold by some new mechanism hitherto unknown to science? That is a rescuing device. Made-up new dimensions of space to try and hand-wave away where the 22,000°C of resulting heat could have gone? That is a rescuing device.
The so-called “rescuing devices” that you are accusing so-called “evolutionists” of coming up with are all perfectly reasonable explanations fully consistent with known laws of science, careful measurement, and rigorous cross-checking. The rescuing devices that YECs come up with, on the other hand, consist of absurd new laws of fantasy physics that would have vaporised the Earth if they had any basis in reality, supported by nothing more than tiny samples with huge error bars at best.
Nonsense. At bottom it’s about making sure that your facts are straight.
At the end of the day, I take my position on creation and evolution from the Bible. Specifically from Deuteronomy 25:13-16:
¹³Do not have two differing weights in your bag — one heavy, one light. ¹⁴Do not have two differing measures in your house — one large, one small. ¹⁵You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lᴏʀᴅ your God is giving you. ¹⁶For the Lᴏʀᴅ your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.
That’s how long those samples can be preserved. Where’s the problem?
All you have is an ad hoc and subjective claim that these structures shouldn’t last for that long. You have no evidence to support your claims.
Did you know that Schweitzer was a YEC when she started her education in the sciences?
It is about science, and your inability to use the scientific method. Instead, you reject conclusions based on their fit with your pre-existing religious beliefs, not because of their scientific validity.