Thanks for that reference. Hart’s article “Traditio Deformis” does really open the eyes to how deep the pedigree of this misunderstanding of Romans is. I don’t think I had ever read Hart before (to my recent recollections anyway), so I owe you and @DavidS a debt of gratitude for your fruitful exchanges.
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This is the real crux of the problem. Because the whole issue with the scientific evidence is completely misunderstood. It is not about proof. It is about what is reasonable to believe. One can suppose that the universe was created this morning with all our memories and the evidence as they are and there is no way to prove this is not the case. You just have to be willing to disregard all of what our memories and the evidence says. Evolution is no different.
So like I said the real issue here is the so called incompatibility with the Christian faith and that is biggest lie you are being sold. I would not be a Christian if it were not for evolution. I cannot believe in the demonic god of the creationists – I would not and I will not. It is indistinguishable from the god of this world and I will oppose that monster with everything that I am. For one thing, it is frankly NOT the God of Jesus and the Bible but the god of the Deists – the watchmaker god who makes nothing but machines because like the god of this world, power and control is all that he cares about.
I believe in the God who chose love and freedom over power and control and that is why He created the self-organizing process of life. It is question of whether you want tools to use made for an end or you want a relationship with children who are end in themselves. Because life serves no purpose whatsoever when all you want is tools. And that is why the Bible describes God as a shepherd rather than a watchmaker because He is not a designer of machines but a someone seeking a relationship of love with beings who have a life of their own making their own choices.
If it is a choice between science and Christianity then Christianity is going to win hands down. No doubt about it. Science is just an activity, but Christianity is life itself. But… there is big problem here… science may be far far less important but it is solid ground – the evidence only gives one answer. But Christianity on the other hand is a very wide spectrum (the majority of which accepts evolution). And I think the real danger here of closing yourself off from God and making a version of Christianity built on such a growing pyramid of lies that it becomes a thing of terrible evil. It should be very clear from history that people are quite capable of turning Christianity to something very evil indeed.
The evidence is overwhelming. All the data God sending us from the Earth and sky agrees on a picture of the development of the universe over 13.8 billion years with life developming on the Earth over the last 4.5 billion years. The only question is whether you care enough about what God is telling us or you are so attached to certain rhetorical notions that you are going to close your eyes and ears and refuse to see and listen (Matthew 13)
This is total nonsense since the philosophy of naturalism came after Charles Darwin not before. It largely came about because of the collapse of materialism from the discovery that matter is not the fundamental building block of the physical universe – that would be energy.
LOL The Bible doesn’t even agree with this notion of a global flood. Nowhere in the Bible is the earth described as globe or planet. It is always described as a table… which is the shape you get if you only take a small portion of the planet.
I would. It is called lying for Jesus. But this isn’t really good thing at all. That would be replacing Jesus with the father of lies.
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carry on to believe in a God that is dead. God has created a process to share his life as he is life.
like this as you got it : “have a life of their own”
I like your separation of global from world wide, considering the scientific viewpoint prevailing at the time. To some people the world still ends at the tip of their nose or toe 
welcome to the forum.
To start with a very basic question, what’s wrong with physical death and why do you suffer death? On the other hand, what could be wrong with wanting to be an eternal physical self?
Why would one think evolution has no purpose. I see it as a way to generate structures of higher and higher complexity eventually leading to a reality that is in complete harmony. As the regulatory element of evolution is survival fitness, which is the ability to love thy neighbour like thyselves, evolution will ultimately result in the love that created it.
Talking of total nonsense, energy is material.
Cc: @DavidS
This is an important point. One of the more interesting examples is Adam Sedgwick. He was a staunch supporter of the Noah’s flood narrative for many years, but the evidence just kept piling up against it. Upon leaving the chair of the Royal Society (the leading scientific institute of the time) in 1831 (well before Charles Darwin pubished)
The evidence against YEC was so strong by the early 1800’s that even those who did believe in YEC were starting to abandon it. It wasn’t as if an ancient Earth was conjured up to support Darwin’s theories. Rather, Darwin’s theory came about after the ancient age of the Earth was obvious to most of the scientific community.
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I have always found this to be a telling statement. What it tells us is that if we do follow the evidence in the present that it will lead to the current scientific consensus. This is why creationism fights so hard to convince people not to look at the evidence. If the evidence really did support YEC then YEC’s would be tripping over themselves presenting that evidence. They aren’t.
None of those are assumed.
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We can observe that rocks such as zircons exclude Pb. This is due to fundamental physical laws. Therefore, the only way for Pb to appear in zircons is by the decay of other elements, such as U.
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Radioactive decay is measured just like every other physical thing in the universe. Radioactive decay is a product of the fundamental nuclear forces (strong and weak). In order for decay rates to change you would have to change the most fundamental constants in the universe. If such constants have changed then we would see that outcome in distant stars and galaxies, and no such observations are made.
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Again, we can see rocks forming now and the physical processes that exclude daughter isotopes, not to mention isochron methods that measure initial daughter isotope concentrations in other systems.
The one common theme is that you would have to change the most fundamental constants and forces of nature in order for your arguments to have any weight. As above, this is a tacit admission that the evidence supports an Old Earth. If you have to change the laws of physics in order for YEC to be true then YEC just isn’t going to work.
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Uh, a great example of the “genetic fallacy.”
Here is another example of the genetic fallacy. The devil said, “Two plus two is four.” The devil is a horrible person. Since he is horrible, everything he says must be false. Therefore, two plus two must not be four.
Regardless of whose “history” is correct, the origin of a particular belief doesn’t tell us much about whether it is true or not. So who Charles Darwin was, and what his beliefs on faith or race or anything else neither confirm or disprove anything about evolution. If it really did, goodbye evolution.
Here are some examples of using the genetic fallacy: Wow, Darwin was a kindly racist, so he and his theory should be dismissed by the woke generation. No.
Darwin believed in embryonic recapitulation and knew nothing about modern genetics, so this theory is wrong. No.
But I keep reading the genetic fallacy through the BL forum. Why is it so frequently used? Is it because there are no better arguments?
I think sometimes people don’t know the difference between ad hominin and genetic fallacies and evaluating sources. Fallacies apply to logic and formal arguments. But not everything we do is evaluating the logic of an argument, sometimes we evaluate the validity of a source.
It’s fine to evaluate sources. It’s fine to say, I don’t trust a source because they lack credentials or they have a track record of dishonesty. When you do that, you aren’t committing a genetic fallacy, you are just refusing to examine the logic of the argument at all. That’s allowed. It’s also allowed to say, I trust this source because they have excellent credentials. Or I trust this source because they are confirmed by the consensus of their peers. That isn’t “an appeal to authority.”
If you are analyzing the logic of an argument, and you say it has to be logical because the source is smart, that is not valid. But most of us do not have the requisite expertise to actually evaluate arguments in science, philosophy, or even theology. We depend on other scholars to do that, so figuring out who we can trust is important.
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Well yes, it is a genetic argument, and as such it doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not the theory of evolution is factually correct or not. But it is not the only argument that you find on this forum. There are plenty of other arguments that approach the subject by addressing the questions: (a) what evidence actually exists? and (b) which interpretations of the evidence are legitimate and which are not, and why?
In any case, Christy’s argument may be a genetic one, but it is usually made in response to people who believe that genetic arguments actually have some weight. It is also generally made in response to people whose own genetic arguments are factually untrue.
I was right there with you until this. Cannot “complete harmony” nonetheless be a dynamic harmony?
I am joining this thread a bit late (I don’t check it daily). DavidS - your questions and struggles cover a breadth of issues that really need a book-length answer. I don’t jump in often to suggest my own, but it so happens I wrote Friend of Science, Friend of Faith with fellow Christians like you in mind. It starts with the authority of Scripture, first working through apparent conflicts raised by scientific observations, before working through the history and strength of evidence for deep time and evolution. Critically for your interest, it finishes with an in-depth assessment of YEC methods of debate and their drift from biblical orthodoxy. You can check out a summary and endorsements (including several BioLogos folks) at GreggDavidson.net
I appreciate that BioLogos gives us a forum that allows us to discuss various viewpoints in the evolution/creation debate. Here is my response to David and Christy’s comments:
I have identified David’s comments (David), Christy’s response (Christy), and mine (Craig)
CRAIG Before I address some of the specific issues and answers in this post, I will make some general observations.
For context, there are three basic theistic viewpoints about creation: YEC (young earth creationism); OEC (old earth creationism); and EC (evolutionary creationism.)
There are some tacit assumptions in these posts which I wish to unmask. The first is that if a viewpoint can explain particular data or evidence, that is proof for that viewpoint. But wait a minute—not necessarily so. That data may be explained as well or better by other viewpoints, and may count as evidence for them as well.
Next, it is assumed that if there is evidence that cannot currently be explained by a particular viewpoint, that position is falsified. If that is the correct standard, then all the above positions are false. Evolutionists are very certain that their position is well supported, but even for evolution there are many evidentiary challenges. So just because there is a question that cannot be yet answered does not mean that position has been falsified. It simply means that we are not yet omniscient-surprise surprise.
Finally, evolutionists sometimes exhibit the hubris (and don’t we all) that they have authority behind them, so we should believe them above all others—the benefit of the doubt always goes to evolutionism. This appeal to authority (“look how many scientists are evolutionists”, for example) is a frequently used and well worn fallacy, particularly in the evolutionary toolkit.
If we really want to find the truth, we will find that looking for the b-e-s-t explanation that fits the commonly accessible evidence, along with a cumulative case argument, will often serve us well. Fitting data into a viewpoint is good, but to really make a case, the data must be explained better by that viewpoint than its competitors.
DAVID Nobody knows what happened in the remote past. The past is, by definition, unrepeatable and unobservable.
CHRISTY The past leaves an observable record, so it is a fallacy to claim we cannot reliably infer what happened in the past because no one was there to observe it.
CRAIG Absolutely, there is an observable record, but with lots of gaps and missing data, open to a lot of contrary interpretations. So the sketchy data must then be filtered through a worldview. “Reliable?” Not even close. For example, a materialist would infer that life arose out of a probiotic pond. But there is almost nothing in the “observable record” that would justify that inference or conclusion. As Dr. James Tour says (one of those eminent evolution denying scientists whose some claim don’t exist), there is no naturalistic explanation for first life—“nobody knows.” And so David is correct that the past IS unrepeatable and unobservable. And any inferences from the remaining data are often questionable and not reliable, particularly when one assumption is built upon a series of other questionable assumptions. “Reliable”—hardly.
DAVID All dating methods rely on unprovable assumptions, even those favored by YECs (ocean salinity, for example).
CHRISTY This is a highly disputable claim. YECs have never successfully contested the reliability of radiometric dating. See the RATE project debacle where they were forced to admit it after spending quite a bit of money to undermine the data.
CRAIG Of course, everything is disputable. And deep time advocates have multiple undeclared assumptions behind radiometric dating. What are some of these? Deep time advocate claims to know what the starting percentages of parent and daughter elements are. They claim to know, over millions and billions of years, whether there is contamination or leakage. They claim that decay rates have remained constant. In reality, they reliably know none of these things.
We know this because there are many anomalies in radiometric dating. Isn’t it strange that when we know the actual age of rocks, radiometric dating is more often faulty than not, often by orders of magnitude (and of course, we “can explain” why)? But when the date given for rocks in the inaccessible past, we “know” that the dates are correct. See any problems here? Research the data on Novarupta, which erupted 100 years ago. Fresh rocks date at hundreds of thousands of years old—and there are many more examples of similar anomalies.
And why do we find fossils in rocks dated millions of years old that still have intact soft tissues and even fragmentary DNA? Of course, that shouldn’t happen. But as it turns out, evolutionist claim to “explain” that too, although I find the explanations completely unsatisfactory—they are more like rescue mechanisms. Look at the latest work of miscoscopist Mark Armitage which pretty much completely discredits Mary Schweitzer’s explanations. His videos need to be on the list of stuff not to view if you don’t want your “evolutionary faith” damaged.
DAVID I found that creation scientists have satisfactory answers for present-day observations that seem to support evolution, like: the fossil record, homology, and radioactive dating.
CHRISTY They aren’t satisfactory to a single person I know with an actual background in science. I agree they can make arguments that sound convincing to people not equipped to challenge their misuse of primary sources or their fundamental misunderstandings of things like genetics.
Ouch. Then there are apparently a lot of people with advanced science degrees (i.e., actual backgrounds in science) that you don’t know—actually thousands. I know some of them personally and have even studied under some. And I have read their books.
Anyone that wants to understand both sides of this debate need to read the work of Douglas Axe and Ann Gauger on genetics, or at least watch some YouTube videos. It is inaccurate to say that these people “misuse primary sources” or have “fundamental misunderstanding of things like genetics.” Get over it and quit misrepresenting this. And there are many other qualified scientists that disagree on other issues you bring up.
Evolutionists have some serious problems with genetics that they haven’t adequately to addressed—genetic entropy, orphan genes, unselectable mutations, multiple concurrent mutations needed for selectiblity, and Paul Nelson’s study that demonstrates macro mutations needed for new body plans are almost always fatal and as far as we know are always detrimental. And then we also understand that natural selection has no creative power.
And as far as homology goes–“homology recapitulates ontology”—that is thoroughly discredited although sometimes still taught to the unsuspecting ill informed. And of course we know, and evolutionists agree, that we now know that homologous structures often arise from entirely unrelated genetic sources.
DAVID Most importantly, I realized that the scientists who first developed the theory of evolution (both biological evolution and modern geology) were committed naturalists.
CHRISTY They were committed to methodological naturalism in science. That doesn’t mean they would assert that the natural world is all of reality or that science is capable of investigating all of reality. Regardless, the theory has been tested for a hundred years, held up remarkably well in its main ideas, and been significantly refined to account for new data and observations. 99% of scientists today, including the Christian ones who affirm there is a supernatural reality that science can’t study, accept the evolutionary model.
CRAIG Science is not about consensus. It only takes one person (Galileo for example) to be right even when the rest of the scientific community opposed him. (Oh yes, the church followed the scientific consensus, to its regret.)
It seems that somehow that we should find it significant that 99% of those trained to be evolutionists embrace evolutionism. Why should that be surprising? And of course, if you wish to remain employed as an instructor of evolutionism, you can’t reject it—you will lose your job and respectability in the evolution community.
DAVID All modern scientists, except creation scientists (who presuppose the truth of Scripture) employ methodologies that exclude divine creation from the outset (methodological naturalism, uniformitarianism, etc).
CHRISTY That’s not a denial of a Creator, that’s just playing science by the rules of the game. Science does not have the tools to investigate God. Presenting a natural explanation of something in no way entails “therefore God wasn’t involved.”
CRAIG “Playing science by the rules of the game.” I believe this is the most significant of all the issues in this post. What are the rules, and whose rules are these? Well, they are rules imposed on science by naturalists. And why should we accept their rules? Is there some sort of cosmic “ministry of truth” that certifies naturalists as the keepers of truth? As Dallas Willard insightfully asks, one of the major questions in our society today is, “Who gets to decide what is knowledge?” Materialists and naturalists insist they are the gatekeepers for knowledge—and as a society, we tragically allow them to play that role. And we are reaping the consequences.
In the past, before Darwin, the rule was that science was a search for truth about nature. But now it is not just about “presenting a natural explanation of something.” It goes much farther: accepting only naturalistic explanations and rejecting any explanations involving agency—intelligence and design. So even if the best explanation for evidence and data is intelligence or design, it is rejected because it is not a naturalistic explanation. So “science” is no longer a search for truth, but a search for naturalistic explanations only.
One of the major arguments for excluding agency as an explanation is that it is argued that appeals to intelligence or design are “god of the gaps” arguments. A god of the gaps argument is basically—“we don’t understand this, so God must have done it.” But when a scientist concludes that the code or instructions for life and the design of the micro miniature machines in each cell are best explained by an intelligent agent, it is deceptive and devious to call that a “god of the gaps” argument. It is a simple but profound observation that this kind of information and design, when we trace this information back to its origin, always arises from intelligence. Information always comes from mind, not matter. Always.
And this puts to the lie the assertion that science cannot say anything about “super-nature”—that which is above nature. It just has, by identifying the unmistakable signs of intelligence. If science cannot do this, we couldn’t do archaeology or forensic sciences.
Imagine a forensic scientist or detective, which both depend on evidence from the past. Now imagine this conversation. “This person is dead. There is a knife in their chest. But science can tell us nothing about agency, so it is inadmissible to infer that the knife was wielded by a person, or even that the knife is designed. So we must conclude that a naturally occurring object, looking much like a knife, somehow naturally entered this person and resulted in their death, without any person involved.” Absurd, you say. Well, that is exactly the point. It is absurd to assert that scientific evidence cannot tell us anything about that which is above nature, including agency or God.
DAVID These methodologies, which even Christian scientists hold to, preclude them a priori from viewing the evidence we see as support for recent creation and a Global Flood.
CHRISTY If there had been a global flood, it would have left evidence in the natural world that could be investigated using the tools of science. Based on what we know about how water and rocks work, we can make predictions about what we would likely see if a global flood had occurred in relatively recent history. None of those predicted observations pan out. Flood geology comes up with ad hoc explanations of what is seen. They have been incapable of coming up with a model that is actually predictive of what will be found. Not to mention that there are piles of evidence that explicitly disconfirm the model. That makes it a bad hypothesis. Whether or not God caused the hypothesized flood is irrelevant.
CRAIG You want predictions of what we would see if the history recorded in the Bible of the global flood of Noah’s time was true? Okay. Here are just a few examples: What would we expect to see if there was a cataclysmic worldwide flood? First of all, billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. Does that prediction by those who believe Genesis is history fit what we find? Yep. What are the conditions necessary for the preservation of organisms as fossils? Rapid burial and the exclusion of oxygen. We don’t generally see fossils forming today, and certainly not huge fossil graveyards. But a worldwide flood would provide those conditions.
Just here all across the Pacific Northwest we see lots of evidence. You don’t even need to be a PhD to access it. You just need to go on a road trip and open your eyes and you can do the primary research yourself. How were quartzite rocks in the road cutout in the Columbia Gorge transported from their nearest source in the Rocky Mountains transported and deposited there? And this is seen throughout the Northwest from at least the northern border of Washington to the southern border of Oregon and all the way to the coast? They were transported by rapidly moving water. That would have been one huge catastrophic flood of a magnitude exponentially greater than any we see occurring today. Is there any historical account of such a flood? Absolutely. In Genesis. And now uniformitarian geologists are forced to admit that there have been catastrophic events as biblical geologists predicted, not just gradual events.
Very near these quartzite rocks, in rock layers supposedly millions of year old, we also found petrified wood, and some of it was not permineralized. Why because it was buried relatively recently, just as we would expect from a worldwide flood a few thousand years ago, but not what we would find if this had been buried for millions of years. Of course, I am not a PhD geologist, but I can see the primary evidence with my own eyes, and so can you.
How was the Columbia Gorge created? Clearly not by the worldwide flood, but certainly by an end of the ice age flood of cataclysmic proportions. How were many of the other huge canyons formed? We now know almost certainly that it was not by millions of years by the tiny rivers at the bottom. The best explanation—catastrophic runoff in the recessive stages of the worldwide flood.
What would we expect to see if most of the sedimentary rock layers were laid down rapidly in a worldwide flood? Very little erosion between layers, and very little detritus. And that is what we often find.
Prediction. Since the flood is worldwide, there would be sedimentary layers covering large areas. Why are there sedimentary layers that are continent wide, and in many cases, the boundaries between them are basically flat with no accumulated debris between them? How did the top of these layers become flat? Explained best by a worldwide flood. Where did the millions of years of debris and erosion go? Well, there never were the millions of years. Deep time geology simply cannot do much more than “just so” storytelling to explain how there are continent wide sedimentary layers—continents rising, then falling, multiple times over millions of years.
Unfortunately for deep time geologists, many of their assumptions were undermined during the eruption of Mount Saint Helens where we live. Multiple sedimentary layers were laid down in hours, and significant erosion and canyon formation was done in hours and days. I am not a PhD geologist, but I can go and see what actually took place, and recorded history tells me the timeframe of day and even hours that it took for these layers and gorges to form. But if there had been no observers or historical records, deep time evolutionists coming 60 years later would have woven tales about tens of thousands and millions of years for these formations. One can make up any story they want if it is hidden in the far distant inaccessible past.
What of all the watergaps throughout the world? YEC geologists believe they were formed from the runoff as the flood abated, and the present rivers follow the canyons that were carved at that time. Deep time folks? Well, the mountain range rose very slowly, and the river that was already there continued to carve out the water gap through the mountains. Global flood scientists can easily explain these features. Uniformitarian geologists don’t have a very plausible account.
Prediction—What of polystrate fossils penetrating sedimentary layers? That supports rapidly forming sedimentary layers, as young earth geologists would predict. How can a fossil be preserved for thousands or millions of years while the sediment gradually builds up around it?
What do you need for an ice age? Hundreds of years of warm oceans and cold landmasses. Why warm oceans? Because a lot of snow is needed to form the ice, but there is not much snow at lower temperatures. Why cold landmasses? Because the landmass has to stay below 20 degrees for the snow to holdover to the next year. Flood geology can reasonably explain this. A worldwide flood with rapid plate techtonics and significant volcanism to heat the water, and significant airborne debris from volcanism to both reduce the solar energy reaching the earth and to put ash on top of the snow to insulate it from freezing. Deep time hypotheses have never adequately addressed the conditions necessary for an ice age. Hypotheses abound, but they don’t account for warm oceans and cold landmasses concurrently.
I am deeply disturbed by the handwaving dismissiveness about YEC explanations of the evidence. You may disagree with the conclusions, but to say that the conclusions have no basis in evidence or are ad hoc is simply not true.
DAVID What struck me is this: It isn’t that there is an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence for evolution / long ages. Rather, it only suffices as good evidence if one already believes in the evolutionary paradigm.
CHRISTY That is the Kool-Aid the creation scientists want you to drink. It’s not an accurate assessment of reality though.
CRAIG Sorry, an appeal to “Kool-aid” is not an argument.
DAVID Thus, the creation/evolution debate is not a scientific debate. It is a philosophical one.
CHRISTY No, the philosophical debate is over a Creator vs. naturalism. There is no real scientific debate over creationism vs. evolution, because science disproves creationist claims about the age of the earth, the flood, and things like rapid speciation or artificial “kinds” boundaries. Creationists know they can’t win a scientific debate, so they intentionally try to frame evolution as a worldview or a religion or a belief system. This is a disingenuous rhetorical move. The whole point of the scientific method is to remove bias that comes from the worldview or religion of the scientists. That’s why Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, atheist scientists can all verify one another’s conclusions.
CRAIG We agree that there is a philosophic debate. I would frame it this way: The ultimate debate is not between the Bible and science. It is a philosophical debate between the theistic and naturalistic worldview—versus “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” and “The Cosmos is all there is or was or ever will be.” That is not a “disingenuous rhetorical move” to identify this.
But in respect to the scientific debate—between intelligent design and evolution, the evidence is hand’s down intelligent design. No, the argument isn’t won yet, but it is not for lack of evidence. It is because of the persistence of the current accepted paradigm, which the atheistic or naturalistic worldview must preserve at all costs.
All life is information based. And whenever we trace that type of information back to its source, we always find mind, not matter. Matter in motion never creates the kind of information that codes for life. And in addition to the information of life contained in every cell, there is the information processing function in every cell. And these cells maintain themselves and reproduce themselves. That kind of functionality has never been known to arise from material processes. How does the information for life arise by natural mechanisms? It doesn’t, and it can’t.
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“Just go to the grand canyon and look at all the non-conformities in its highly visible, exposed layers that show many discrete periods of marine environment interspersed with periods of dry land environment complete with surface erosion, caves, animal life cycles, etc.”
This is debatable. First, the marine fossils are not discrete periods of marine environment, but the sequence of the burial of fossils during the flood.
In respect to interspersed periods of dry land, I think you may be referring to Tapeat Sandstone, which has been posited to have been laid down as dry sand dunes. But the angle of repose of the dunes mimics that of sand laid down under water, not dry. Also, in examining the sand itself, it has the characteristics of water borne sand, not wind borne.
Which raises the question, “Which scholars?” For example, I read “The Lost World of Genesis One” by John Walton, PhD and then I read “Seven Days That Divide the World” by John Lennox, PhD; PhD. Lennox disagrees with Walton in two areas. First, he will grant that Genesis one at one level may speak of a cosmic temple inauguration, but not “only” that.
Walton the theologian says that the Bible has nothing at all to say about science, and Lennox the scientist strongly disagrees with that. Which expert to follow? And then this, which I also noted along with Lennox–a philosopher of science–and marveled at: Walton takes a foray into the philosophy of science in about the last third of the book, an area in which he has no expertise, and that is embarrassingly apparent. So I don’t have a PhD in Hebrew or OT studies.
So whose view of Genesis one should we embrace? There are scholars on both sides of the issue. Because of this, at some point it is incumbent on an individual to assess both sides of the argument, and decide which one is most likely valid.
A second related issue is this: no discipline is in a vacuum. It must take into account related disciplines. But no one can be the “expert” or “scholar” in at most more than a few of these. So how do we integrate all the disciplines involved in creating a complete cohesive worldview, particularly as we have an explosion of knowledge? What kind of preparation can we make to equip us to assess the various competing arguments from the “experts?”
What do you think of this?: Eminent USC philosopher Dallas Willard states that “Jesus is the smartest man that ever lived.” So if we want to know about plumbing, Jesus knows more about plumbing than anyone. If we want to know about childcare, consult Jesus. If we want to know about genetics, or mathematics or physics or biology, Jesus is the best informed on all of these. Consult Him by asking Him for wisdom on the matter. Taken in the spirit in which his advice is given, he is simply saying that Jesus is the source of all knowledge, not that I can become an expert in all those areas through spiritual meditation. But it does mean that we can access wisdom and knowledge by applying the principles of scripture–God’s Word.
Not a geologist either, but familiar a bit with quartzite as it makes great countertops. I might ask, how did your flood born quartzite form? It is a metamorphic rock, formed when quartz sand is buried and compressed deep within the earth where the heat and pressure fuses it into a very hard smooth grained material. Erosion of the thousands of feet of sediment it was buried under occurs, usually after it is has been lifted by tectonic forces. In short, requires the grinding of mountains of granite to sand, deep burial by yet more grinding of mountains, then exposure to the surface by wearing away those thousands of feet of covering rock. Tough to find the time to do that in a year of flood.
You make a lot of assertions based on your pre-conceptions without objective evidence. While intelligent design is a nice philosophy, and while I believe it is true, that belief is not based on material evidence but rather on faith of God as creator.
While your arguments have been refuted elsewhere to my satisfaction and I have not the energy to respond, I would like to respond to one that seems very wrong:
If there were a singular year long flood, we would see something much different than what we find. You would see one layer of sediment worldwide, with all fossils of all animals including humans in the same layer. There would not be discrete layers of limestone, sandstone, shale etc representing different long ages of changing water depth, cut across by dikes of intrusive igneous rock that later pushed into cracks, and caves that eroded in that limestone after it was formed, and stalactites deposited by groundwater dissolving the limestone and grown over yet more ages. But you are right about one thing:
How about during the years of crustal movement as the continents moved and the mountains were raised? Peleg was not named because of language confusion.
It’s a big world. Why would you expect the same thing in Europe as Asia, much less as in Africa or America? There would be currents, just as there are today in the oceans. And most fossils are found in huge dumping grounds, as if they had been transported and deposited there by water. We already know that barring catastrophic burial, most animals never fossilize. The scavengers and decomposition forces take care of that. Yet fossils are worldwide, as you would expect in a global flood.
You expect to find a coffee pot in a bank also, but if your goal is determine what happens there, it does not help you much.
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When it comes to interpreting the Bible, I’d go with a Bible scholar’s expertise over a scientist’s. But it’s not about what one individual says vs what another individual says. Consensus matters to me.
I find the repetition of the tired creationists arguments a little exhausting. None of them are compelling to me. If you are happy and at peace, more power to you.
I don’t accept that. I think Jesus had a normal human brain and only knew what he was taught or what was revealed to him by the Holy Spirit.
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The nearest native source of this quartzite is the Rocky Mountains. It is not indigenous to the areas where the quartzite rock is found–dozens of sites with round quartzite rocks have been identified and documented throughout Washington and Oregon. The most reasonable explanation is that they were transported by a singular event. Otherwise, there would have to have been multiple narrowly channeled water transport events that carried them at different times from the Rocky Mountains, dropping them off at various points and all the way to the coast and perhaps beyond. And obviously, somehow everything on top of the quartzite was eroded away, and the quartzite was then at a low enough elevation that it could be broken up and transported by rapidly flowing water so that they could end up where they are.
These rocks have clearly been transported by water–they are rounded, and are included in a large grain sand sediment about 15 feet deep. Quartzite is one of the hardest rocks, so they ended up as intact rocks. The other rocks transported with them by water ended up as the sand that is mixed in.
I am not a geologist, but there are calculations that the geologists who have studied this have made that can tell us approximately how deep and how fast the water would need to be flowing to transport rocks of this size this distance.
So for the sake of argument we grant that the rest of your narrative is correct, how could the dispersion of these rocks over such a wide and long area occur? At least that part requires a catastrophic water event that likely impacts the entire area.
And now we know that the formation of some minerals that we are told need lots of time don’t.