What I’ve been most curious to understand is what evidence convinces you that your more literal reading of the Bible is correct. If the Bible were a straight transcription of God’s words intended to provide man with lots of empirical facts so that he would never need to develop science, then it is extremely disappointing.
2 Likes
I’m afraid your sources have misled you about the situation. The original assumption of evolutionary biologists was that essentially the whole genome was functional; it was only when evidence began to mount (at least as early as the 1960s) that substantial parts of the (human) genome were likely vestigial and lacked function that the idea began to take hold. It was never the case that all noncoding DNA was thought to be nonfunctional – functional noncoding DNA has been known for more than 50 years. So the idea (which seems to be widely shared) that discovering a function for a bit of noncoding DNA disproves the idea of junk DNA is just confused. All such discoveries tell us is exactly what the function is of some of the functional bits – they don’t change the conclusion (or the evidence) that most of it is nonfunctional.
As for the ID prediction… Yes, ID proponents have indeed made a prediction, which is that junk DNA basically doesn’t exist – that nearly all of the human genome is functional. I give them credit for making an actual prediction. The problem is that the prediction was wrong: there is precisely zero evidence that most of the genome is functional, and the best evidence we have for the functional component puts it right around 10% of the total.
2 Likes
Tree ring chronologies around the world extend well past six thousand years, and 12,000 years in for the German Oak chronology.
No scientific problem that needs solving.
Carbon-14 dating by accelerator mass spectroscopy yields measurements as far back as 50,000 years.
No scientific problem here that needs solving either.
The Lake Suigetsu Varve record goes back 60,000 years.
Sure, no scientific problem.
Antarctic ice cores over a million years old.
No science harmed here either.
Distant starlight requires billions of years to arrive at earth.
No laws of physics broken here either, no problem.
It has nothing to do with scientists, secular or Christian, being blinded by methodological naturalism. It has to do with their making an observation, and simple accepting this is how nature works.
YEC, on the other hand, is constantly inventing problems which do not exist. Why should counting tree rings be a problem? Seriously, if you did not come into it with all this baggage, what would even be the issue? YEC has no concern with these same dating techniques up to three thousand years or so, but as soon as the results come in extending past the YEC flood or creation dates, all of a sudden the special pleading starts.
If the YEC invented problems are not scientific in nature, then their solutions cannot be scientific in nature either. That is why scientific creationism is an oxymoron, because one cannot solve non-scientific problems with scientific answers. YEC is theology, not science.
2 Likes
Thank you for your thoughtful answer. While I think many of the examples you give have been throughly debunked, you can certainly invoke miraculous events to explain them. Your candle story is basically the same story as gap theology, which some hold but is not a popular position. The light travel problem seems to be only imaginative thinking and science fiction, and does not adequately explain how you can look at a galactic collision with effects (gas jets etc.) that can be measured to have been taken place hundreds of thousands of years ago, and then the light has taken more hundreds of thousands or millions of years to get here from there. (I would have to do more research than am willing to find the exact numbers, just know they are a lot longer than 6000)
In the end, it doesn’t really address adequately the issue of how to handle the holiness and goodness of God. As you said, “I think the world looks old…” and why would God make it look that way, and throw a stumbling block in the way of belief? Why would there be false history in the cosmos and in the earth:
Psalm 19 1
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.
1 Like
Except we have seen canyons that are known to have been carved by a lot of water over a short period of time and they bear no resemblance to the canyons carved by a little water over a long period of time.
2 Likes
Hi Ron, thanks for the reply.
Tree rings don’t prove long ages, since we know that up to five rings per year can be produced and extra rings are often indistinguishable, even under the microscope, from annual rings.
Carbon-14 dating, like all radiometric dating methods, relies on unprovable assumptions about the past. Some common assumptions involved in radiometric dating are the following: 1) The initial ratio of parent and daughter isotopes in the sample, 2) The assumption that the sample is a closed system, and 3) That the decay rate has been constant. None of those assumptions are provable. Carbon-14 dating actually lends support to creationism, since we find carbon-14 in diamonds and in ancient dinosaur fossils. Carbon-14 has a very short half life, so if these diamonds and dinosaur fossils were as old as secular scientists say, there shouldn’t be any carbon-14 left. But there is.
Ice cores don’t provide evidence for an old earth. As Dr. Larry Vardiman argues, ice cores support the creationist model of there being a single post-Flood ice age. Here’s an article if you’re interested.
Distant starlight doesn’t require billions of years. Dr. Jason Lisle explains how God could have brought starlight to Earth quickly, based on principles of GR. There are other theories, like Dr. Russel Humphrey’s theory. Personally, I believe the 6-days of creation were miraculous. Therefore, we ought not probe into it scientifically. It would be like trying to understand how Christ turned water into wine. I’m happy to think God miraculously accelerated the speed of light on day four. This isn’t deceptive. The only reason you think the light must have taken billions of years to arrive at Earth is because you’re: 1) Disregarding the Scriptures (which tell us the world is only about six or seven thousand years old), and 2) Applying a uniformitarian assumption about the speed of light.
In short, these evidences only demonstrate an old Earth if we assume uniformitarianism. Remember, age isn’t measured directly (not from C14, varves, ice cores, or anything else). You can measure weight and volume, but you can’t directly measure age. In all of these dating methodologies, ages are calculated based on a number of unprovable assumptions (one of which is uniformitarianism).
No, this is where you’re wrong. Uniformitarianism is basically the idea that present-day processes can be extrapolated back into the distant past (“the present is the key to the past”). This assumes that rates of various phenomena are the same as they have always been. It must be noted that this is an unprovable assumption. But also, it contradicts Scripture, since the Bible tells us that God supernaturally created everything in six-days. Even if you disagree with me on my Biblical interpretation, that’s fine. The point is, uniformitarianism rules out supernatural creation a priori. In other words, if God did create the world in six-days, uniformitarianism would rule it out as a possible explanation. Since we don’t see God creating worlds ex-nihilo in the present (we only see slow, gradual, natural phenomena in the present), it can’t be used as an explanation for the past. The Bible discusses God’s many other interventions into the created world. All of these supernatural acts contradict uniformitarianism. As you can see, uniformitarianism and methodological naturalism are twins. They go hand in hand. They are both unprovable assumptions about the past, which are based on godless principles. Remember, we can’t observe long-ages. This is based on atheistic assumptions.
Evolutionists engage in special pleading too. Soft tissue in dinosaur bones can miraculously be preserved for 75 million years? That’s a massive stretch. Seems a lot simpler just to believe that dinosaur didn’t die 75 million years ago. Or what about the idea that first life miraculously assembled from non-living chemicals. That’s a miracle if I’ve ever heard one. We have absolutely no evidence that life can come from non-living chemicals. If abiogenesis is impossible, then evolution is dead in the water. There’s a massive weak-link in your worldview.
Evolution is a materialistic philosophy of origins, which masquerades as science. Evolution is an atheistic hypothesis about the past which seeks to explain the world without God. It always was and it always will be. Thus, evolution isn’t any more or less scientific than creation-science. Both sides come at the question with unprovable pre-existing worldview assumptions. The difference between me and an evolutionist is that I presuppose the truth of Scripture, rather than the truth of naturalism.
This is a strawman. Next…
Because you talk about magnetic fields of planets as a strength of YEC, this also lets me know that you are lacking the relevant physics background and a lot more knowledge from various subfields like paleomagnetics. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.
First, do you trust the ICR article you linked? Let’s walk through a few of its claims one by one and see how it stacks up to scientific literature…
What did “evolutionists predict” about Uranus’ magnetic field?"
First of all, evolutionists didn’t predict anything about the magnetic field of Uranus because evolutionists don’t work on planetary geophysics. None-the-less, the ICR articles states:
In contrast, many evolutionists had predicted that Uranus would have a much smaller field, or none at all.7
Here, the ICR article references one paper as to what “many evolutionists” predicted about the field. Let’s look at that paper… the reference they list is:
Dessler, A.J. “Does Uranus have a magnetic field?” Nature, 316 (16 January 1986), 174-175. Rossbacher, L. “Voyager II encounters Uranus,” Episodes, 9 (March 1986), 17-21.
It turns out that we have open-access to a PDF of this particular article. Keep in mind, this article was cited 4 times and is a bit of a strange one to cite. It’s sort of an overview article of some of the calculations of Uranus’ magnetic field. It turns out, that there was an active debate in the scientific community over how strong Uranus’ magnetic field was based upon a number of different potential models.
First, we have a number of models that predicted a magnetic field of 4-13 Gauss, with a minimum magnetic field of 0.6 Gauss. Some other scientists tried to argue that the magnetic field is 0.01 Gauss if Uranus’ magnetic field originates in an “Earth-sized core.”
It turns out the actual strength of Uranus’ magnetic field varies between 0.1 and 1.1 Gauss. So that is very consistent with papers written before we measured it like this one:
So it is inherently dishonest and mistaken to say that “evolutionists” predicted the magnetic field of Uranus would be basically zero. Sure, some astrophysicists made that argument, but most argued for a stronger magnetic field like here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/310755a0
So how did Russ Humphrey’s “predict” his magnetic field?
Well, it’s pretty simple really. He just took data from the other planets, and extrapolated that to “predict” what the value of Uranus’ magnetic field would be. So basically, he was just data fitting. There was no fundamentally young earth creationist “prediction” that was actually made. And the astrophysical literature is ripe with a number of predictions that were much more specific than Russ Humphreys who “predicted” "the magnetic moments would be between 1 x 10^23 and 1 x 10^25 A m^2.
First of all, how do his units compare to what “evolutionists” were predicting? Well, they were writing their magnetic moments in Tm^3 which are different units than Humphreys who write his in Am^2. It’s not weird to write a magnetic moment like Humphreys because the first formula that physics students learn for the magnetic moment of current flowing around a loop is:
m=iA
It’s a little bit of a pain to convert between the two units, but you can use the relation:
m=\frac{1}{\mu_0} BV
In other words, to go from the units that astrophysicists use Tm^3 to Humphreys, you need to divide the value in astrophysical literature by \mu_0 which is the permeability of free space.
Essentially what you can do also, is convert Humphrey’s prediction of the magnetic moment into a prediction of the average strength of the magnetic field which gives you Humphreys predicted the magnetic field would be between (by data fitting mind you, not some YEC special model): 0.075G-7.5 G (where G is the units of Gauss). The actual value of the magnetic field is 0.23G. His prediction… was okay by data fitting, but the thing is that astrophysicists were also close to this value.
In conclusion
It is a lie to say that “evolutionists” predicted a very small magnetic field. They did not, and the paper that is linked at ICR even says there are many predictions that have larger magnetic fields! Their predictions were based upon actual models, instead of data fitting. To understand why Humphreys was just data fitting, that requires a much longer post.
I hope that is enough, for now, to help you understand why its not a good argument to say that “young-earth creationists” have made accurate predictions about Uranus and that “secular scientists” were wrong.
4 Likes
They aren’t unprovable. You can look into the night sky and prove them. If physical laws and constants were different in the past then we would see those differences in starlight. Stars would have different ratios of mass to energy output. Absorbance and emission spectra would be different. Type Ia supernovae would have different rates of brightening and fading. None of this is seen. Throughout the universe and time we see the same laws and constants.
They do have isotopes, and they are objectively measured.
Evolution doesn’t predict how long tissue can be preserved. That’s ridiculous. You also act as if humans are somehow infallible, as if our subjective credulity is a valid measure of how long soft tissue can be preserved for. Here is the evidence that soft tissue can be preserved for those time periods, and you just refuse to accept it.
So you are saying that Noah’s flood produced all of the world’s fossils 6 weeks ago?
That’s just your opinion. You have no evidence to back it.
Thank you for admitting that you reject scientific conclusions based on religious belief and not on evidence.
Sorry, but that’s just false.
2 Likes
Hi Christy, thanks for the reply.
Deep-time doesn’t necessarily imply atheism. There are plenty of good Christians who think the Earth is old. I was using the term “godless” loosely. What I meant to say is that deep-time contradicts the traditional interpretation of a recent six-day creation, and it was invoked by men (mostly deists and atheists) who sought to explain the world apart from God. Deep time is required to gradually create the geological features we see today, in accordance with the secular principles of uniformitarianism and methodological naturalism. It is required if we want nature to create itself.
Species do change over time. Everyone knows that species change over time. The thesis that “species change over time” isn’t atheistic - it’s just a fact. Evolution is not merely the thesis that “species change over time.” Evolution is the thesis of universal common ancestry, via random mutation and natural selection. Evolution is inherently godless, since even the omnipotent God can’t guide an unguided process. That doesn’t stop many good Christians from trying to reconcile this atheistic philosophy with their Christian beliefs. But it’s a futile attempt.
Yes I do know this, since it’s literally the definition of methodological naturalism. If an explanation invokes supernatural causes, it is ruled out as an explanation. It’s not just me who says this either. Here’s a quote from Dr. Scott Todd, an evolutionist from Kansas State University:
Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.
He’s talking about ID, but the same applies to creationism (only more so). Do you see the problem here? Even if all the evidence pointed to six-day creation, it would be ruled out a priori.
You make the point that “there is absolutely no evidence at all that points to a recent six-day creation.” I’m not here to debate the evidence, so I don’t really care if you think there’s no evidence for six-day creation. The point is, even if six day creation were true, and even if all the evidence supported it, evolutionists still wouldn’t accept six-day creation, and they would still say there’s no evidence for it. How can evolution be called scientific (interested in the truth about the natural world) if it rules out competing explanations from the start? This proves my point: The evolution / creation debate is fundamentally a controversy over philosophical presuppositions (naturalism vs. Christianity) - not a debate about the science.
Uniformitarianism precludes catastrophes on the scale of the Global Flood of Genesis.
Sure, but even this is a far cry from the Global Flood. The asteroid hypothesis doesn’t require a total rethinking of evolution and long-ages. The Global Flood, if true, does. Therefore, the Global Flood contradicts uniformitarian assumptions, and it also contradicts the evolutionary paradigm. It is not an acceptable hypothesis for secular scientists, in spite of the evidence that supports it.
You’re wrong. There is plenty of evidence for a Global Flood. Please watch this hour long video from Dr. Kurt Wise that will go into great depth. Having said that, the primary evidence for the Global Flood is in Genesis. I trust God over naturalistic scientists. Revelation is more trustworthy than our fallible human speculations about the past.
Uniformitarianism has become just a placeholder word YEC uses for we have to invent a problem here.
I listed off five accessible evidences for an old earth, but there are hundreds more where those come from. All the arguments you have raised against these dating inferences have been refuted, but that is not the point, that being the results of tree ring analysis, radiometric dating, ice cores, and astronomy, all fit perfectly fine with science. There is no difficulty to begin with. If the outcome is thousands, or millions, or billions of years, so what? That is not a problem for science. So what exactly are you solving?
Hi Phil, thanks for the reply.
I wasn’t endorsing any particular theology with my candle thought-experiment. My only point is that we should trust what God says about the origins of the world, rather than relying on naturalistic and uniformitarian assumptions. If the world “looks old” when we disregard Scripture and assume naturalism, that isn’t God’s fault for being deceptive. It’s our fault for starting with bad assumptions and not trusting what God told us.
I think you’re taking me out of context here. The Earth doesn’t look any age. After all, we don’t see age. I said the world looks old, only if we make certain naturalistic assumptions about the past that contradict the Bible. Essentially I am saying that the world can be as old as we want it to be. Naturalists need an extraordinarily old earth, so they “see” deep-time. They didn’t observe it directly. They calculated it, based on their naturalistic presuppositions. God isn’t deceiving them. They are deceiving themselves.
If you are going to invest a lot of time debating people, you need to start being more careful about how you use words. Stuff like this just makes you look silly. The secular/sacred distinction doesn’t apply to discussing things like uniformitarianism or catastrophism. The godless/godly distinction doesn’t apply to radiometric dating. You just sound like you are parroting creationist propaganda. That impresses no one here.
When science says evolution is unguided, it is an assertion that there is no natural agent guiding it. Science cannot exclude or include the supernatural so it is not at all saying God can’t guide a natural process.
Repetition doesn’t make this a stronger point. It’s not true. If all the scientific evidence pointed to a six-day creation, it would be accepted by scientists. But in reality, where we all live, none of the evidence does, so how imaginary scientists behave in your imaginary world is completely and utterly irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Because frankly, your Creation science explanation isn’t a competing explanation. It can’t compete. It has zero explanatory power. The only “problem” it solves is the problem of a literal interpretation of the Bible matching natural history, but it doesn’t solve that problem without introducing other theological issues (Why is there so much evidence of a different reality unless God is intentionally deceptive? Why did God recreate the world from a bunch of peaceful vegetarians free from disease and disaster to the world we see now just because humans disobeyed? Isn’t that God creating evil?)
6 Likes
But an omnipotent God could create a process that results in exactly what He desires even if it does appear to be unguided to us.
2 Likes
David, you’ve made this point several times and I appreciate that it’s the central point that you’re trying to argue. But the problem is that it’s easy to come up with some examples of things that would point to a recent six-day creation about 6,000 years ago.
For example, what if we could not see stars more than six thousand light years away? What if, furthermore, we found that new stars were appearing all the time, with the maximum visible distance expanding outwards at a rate of one light-year per year? Do you think “secular scientists” would deny that was evidence for a recent six-day creation?
Or what if levels of radiocarbon in ancient coals and diamonds were consistently above 40% of modern carbon, rather than at levels indistinguishable from contamination? Do you think that “secular scientists” would ignore that?
Or what if we actually found whole T-Rex carcasses in the permafrost in the Arctic, in a similar state of preservation to the woolly mammoths, rather than just rare, tiny, hard-to-extract scraps of soft tissue remnants in only the best-preserved large fossil bones? What if we had sequenced the entire T-Rex genome by now? Do you think that “secular scientists” would ignore that?
Or what if we never found lead in zircon crystals at levels above one part in 12 million? Do you think “secular scientists” would ignore that?
Or what if there were oil companies who were actually using Flood Geology as a model with which to find oil, and had a competitive advantage as a result? Do you think “secular scientists” would ignore that?
Or what if we found no coherent order to the fossil record? What if we found rabbits in Precambrian strata, trilobites in the Pleistocene, diatoms and flowering plants in every layer, and T-Rex fossils with remains of modern-day cats, dogs, and perhaps even humans in their stomachs? Do you think that “secular scientists” would ignore that?
Just another point here. If you want to cite a video for us to consider, please summarise it and provide timestamps to the key points. Expecting us all to spend an entire hour watching a video is not being considerate towards anyone’s time. In any case, when a video is an hour long, I can tell from that fact alone that it is either a Gish Gallop, or it takes far too long to get to the point, or it covers material that is too complex to be treated properly in video format anyway.
8 Likes
Not to be repetitive, but here are some more pieces of evidence for the earth being greater than 10,000 years old (which I posted a while ago in this forum):
One type of geologic formation that seems odd to find under a single, global flood deposition system is one with indications of repeated significant changes in sea level. Such a set of formations is abundantly clear from the marine faunas of the southeastern United States.
The specific points of evidence for repeated changes in sea level are the fact that most of the formations, or subunits of them, have indurated (turned to limestone) or leached (certain minerals removed) upper sections (or are completely indurated or leached). Induration and leaching both require at minimum a few decades of fresh groundwater percolating through the layer (or compression, which is implausible given how shallow these deposits are, and that the limestone is intermittent). Thus, we can observe a sequence of layers that require many changes from above sea level to significantly below and back. In addition, each layer must have lasted long enough for large bivalves and corals to grow, and then their shells/skeletons to sit on the ocean floor with other things living on them (at minimum, about a century, given the lifespans of the organisms involved).
The Waccamaw Formation (which is among the shorter-duration ones) alone gives an absolute minimum total depositional time of about a thousand years, given the four separate indurated layers (ignoring sedimentation and erosion rates). This estimate makes some rather unrealistically high assumptions about how densely you could pack the organisms in life, thus the actual time is much longer.
Given the abrupt faunal changes, like Ecphora and Chesapecten disappearing between immediately overlying formations (most sites have significant unconformities, though), there is very little mixing of the formations, and, if the timescale is only a few thousand years, unreasonably rapid faunal turnover (i.e. a typical species goes extinct within 50 generations, and in many cases within 10).
The deposits are also very definitely not sorted, as one would get with current action: you can find 150 mm Mercenaria campechiensis shells alongside 2 mm tornids. Strong current action is also implausible given how fragile many of the shells are: Spisula shells are about as strong as a thick eggshell, pteropods will shatter if you set a small coin on them.
There is also the problem of globally equivalent planktonic microfossil sequences, and globally equivalent stable isotope ratio sequences . Both require a few thousand years, at absolute minimum, to equalize around the globe.
3 Likes
I can’t help but fear some may not know the difference between the greater than and less than sign. I honestly still meet adults who don’t know the difference or believes it’s written backwards.
1 Like
Amen to that! Much smarter than all of us and clearer, more on topic, less ambiguous, less circular…
It is saying why go there? It is saying that proposing traceless, utterly undetectable divine guidance in nature that looks at every level as if it is unguided is completely absurd, totally meaningless.
A feature or a bug, depending on the day.
3 Likes