I distinguish between “creation science” and “creationism.”
Creationism is the belief in recent six-day creation and the Global Flood of Noah. It is the belief that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are historical. This is the traditional interpretation of Genesis 1-11. This is the way the Church Fathers understood Genesis. And this is what virtually all Christians believed for more than 1800 years.
Creation science began with 7th Day Adventists, as you point out. Some of them are untrustworthy, others are good - it’s a mixed bag. While they might have a few bizarre ideas, they are right about the historicity of Genesis and their rejection of evolution.
It’s fallacious to discredit an idea, like creationism, based on the bad origins of creation science. I don’t care if some random SDA prophetess was a creationist. On the issue of creation, Ellen G. White was in concord with the ancient Church and it’s interpretation of Genesis.
Also, I am neither a Protestant, nor an Evangelical Protestant. I’m not a Seventh Day Adventist. I’m also not a Biblical literalist (such a massive strawman). I’m an Eastern Orthodox Christian. I believe in recent six-day creation, because this is undeniably the view of the ancient Church. Nobody believed Genesis was non-historical until a couple hundred years ago. You cannot marry a godless worldview (evolution) with the Christian worldview. It is impossible.
I give BioLogos absolutely no positive credit - because they are trying to marry a godless worldview with Christianity. This is an impossible task. Allegorizing Genesis is problematic, at best. You run into all sorts of intractable theological errors. All in service of “science” - so called.
Of course they’re agenda driven. Creationists are absolutely agenda driven. I don’t know why everyone thinks this is some kind of bombshell revelation. They admit it themselves. I admit it too. I believe in the Bible first and foremost. There is no alleged scientific evidence that could persuade me to believe in evolution because I presuppose the truth of recent six-day creation, as in Genesis.
What continues to amaze me is how so few people recognize the agenda of the evolutionists. To be clear, I am not alleging a conspiracy theory. I think most scientists are good people with good intentions. But scientists are people too. They have biases, and worldviews. They are mostly atheists. Those who aren’t atheists choose to function as atheists in the lab (methodological naturalism). The point is, nobody is truly objective. It’s a myth that scientists are these objective robots that have no worldview of their own, no axe to grind, no beliefs. Just as there is no evidence that would convince me, the same is true of evolutionists. Methodological naturalism prohibits scientists from coming to the conclusion that God supernaturally created the world in six days, even if all the evidence pointed to such a conclusion.
This is a debate about starting presuppositions. Not evidence. Everyone is agenda driven.
Rather, Biologos is trying to bring Christians back to reality. It would be the denialists and anti-evolutionary ideologues who are trying to marry Christianity to known falsehoods - the fruit of which is already being revealed. Even if you could succeed in silencing all your skeptics, you would still have a reality problem. God’s creation doesn’t change to suit your favored ideology. If we were silent about the truth, the rocks themselves are still crying out. Truth can be buried, but it cannot be undone.
Truth comes from reality – the truth that comes from the reality of the data that God has revealed in the Bible and the truth that comes from the reality of data that God has revealed in creation. They do not and cannot conflict. If they appear to, then our interpretation of one or the other or both is flawed.
I don’t know how many times I’ve got to say it. All dating methods calculate age, based on a number of unproveable assumptions about the past. Age is not measured objectively. The rocks aren’t screaming “I’m 2.63 billion years old!” That’s the interpretation of a scientist, based on his naturalistic assumptions. I would rather trust what God says. God says the world is about 7,500 years old (using the Septuagint chronology). I’ll believe God over men and their godless philosophies.
I agree with this. True science can never contradict true theology. But why are you so confident that evolution is true, while the traditional reading of Genesis is mistaken? The theistic evolutionists are so quick to throw out a traditional view of Genesis, when maybe it’s the godless philosophy of evolutionary naturalism that needs to be thrown out.
Fine. But I don’t care about the rules of the scientific establishment. I care about what’s actually true.
There was once a time when a consensus of scientists were geo-centrists. That doesn’t mean there was a time when geo-centrism was true. Even if all the scientists believed in evolution, that wouldn’t make it true. They can consider it true all they want, but truth isn’t a popularity contest.
Yet it was the faith in the consensus among the most learned in each discipline which has led us beyond geocentrism. Creation science, so long as it will not publish in the big-boy pool of science review, just isn’t relevant.
You can keep repeating this to yourselves as long as you want, but it is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “la la la la”, while the rest of us actually attend to all of what is really there to be seen. @jammycakes and others have repeatedly shown how and why the presuppositional assumptions you so badly want to take refuge in - those have all been soundly addressed. There is just too much other stuff that is explained, independently confirming, and consistent with the now well-measured deep-time. The vast majority cannot and will not just pretend none of that exists.
You’re moving the goalposts. I didn’t say anything about the relevancy or legitimacy of creation science. I just made the obvious point that six-day creation could be true, even if nobody believed it. Whether it’s true or not has absolutely nothing to do with the scientific consensus.
In fact, as I’ve said over and over again, the secular scientists are unable to conclude six-day creation because methodological naturalism forbids supernatural creation by God. Even if all the evidence supported six-day creation, the secular scientists would still believe in evolution. It’s not as if the scientists looked at the evidence and found creationism wanting, it’s that they never considered it in the first place, and they never could consider it. This isn’t a “fair fight.”
No I wasn’t making that accusation and I did not intend to imply that you were on a par with somebody who denies that one plus one equals two. That completely misses the point that I was making. The point was simply that when you are dealing with facts or calculations, they do NOT depend on your worldview.
Not true. There is a test that can distinguish between isochron lines and mixing lines. Plot a second graph of \frac {^{87}\text{Sr}} {^{86}\text{Sr}} against \frac 1 {^{87}\text{Sr} + ^{86}\text{Sr}}. Mixing will give a straight line; true isochrons will not.
Besides, if mixing really were a legitimate explanation we would see as many samples giving negative isochrons as positive ones. We do not.
You need to realise a few things here:
There is a difference between “doesn’t always work” and “never works.”
There is a difference between “doesn’t work when you do it wrong” and “doesn’t work when you do it right.”
There is a difference between “occasionally out by a few percent” and “consistently out by a factor of a million or more.”
There is a difference between “doesn’t work at the limits of detection” and “doesn’t work anywhere at all.”
The fact remains that these anomalous results are very much in the minority. And in most cases, they are not as anomalous as YECs make them out to be. 270,000 to 3.5 million years is not a big deal for K-Ar dates when you consider that the half life of 40K is 1.25 billion years – a thousand times as much – and to get that level of sensitivity you need to use a high-end radiometric lab with state-of-the-art equipment that charges a lot more for the more advanced processing that’s needed.
In any case, there is a simple way to determine when isochron dating works and when it doesn’t: use multiple different methods whose assumptions are independent of each other. If radiometric methods really were so unreliable that they couldn’t tell the difference between thousands and billions, the different results would be wildly different. Every. Single. Time. Without. Exception. Yet in the majority of cases, they agree with each other to within a few percent.
So no, I’m sorry, the assumptions are not as unprovable as you think they are. And they are not just “naturalistic assumptions” either. Cross-checks such as these are how measurement works in every area of science. “Naturalism” or “worldviews” have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
But every form of measurement works by calculating things, and every form of measurement makes assumptions that could, at a stretch, be claimed to be unprovable. The distance from London to New York works by calculating things and assuming that the speed of light is the same today as it was yesterday. Police speed cameras work by measuring Doppler shift and assuming that they’ve been calibrated correctly and that the driver of the oncoming car isn’t operating some kind of jammer of other.
I’m sorry, but you can’t just cry “unprovable assumptions” as a magic shibboleth to challenge every kind of measurement that you don’t like. There are some assumptions that it simply isn’t reasonable to challenge.
No I wasn’t implying that all creationists are stupid people who don’t understand science and who don’t get degrees. That is a straw man mischaracterisation of what I said. My comment was referring to the kind of people who you yourself described as “lay creationists” who are “the low hanging fruit.” Besides, I was making the specific point that books and YouTube videos are not a substitute for hands-on experience.
Besides, I’ve also addressed the issue of “many eminent scientists who believe in six-day creation.” As I said, very few of the signatories of the Scientific Dissent from Darwin were YECs.
If God was the creator of the cosmos then you are right, no scientist -whether Christian or secular- will ever uncover evidence of that through research. Because science studies what is and where possible what proximal causes led to what we find. We are only ever able to follow those proximal causes back so far. Science, so far as I can tell, is not interested in ultimate causes, though some may opine on occasion.
There isn’t any fight going on in science except on occasion between entrenched anti-theists and creation scientists. Regular science is not part of the fray.
Well, we are in agreement if you make a more reasonable claim. Theistic evolutionism is an impossible task. It is nonsense ideology from the start. I fully agree about that.
But “mere theistic evolution” isn’t as demonic as you make it. And “old earth” isn’t such a “devil” as Fr. Seraphim Rose made it sound, in the shadow of “nihilism”. His disciples on this topic are marginal among Orthodox Christians.
Theistic evolutionists are simply lost because the evangelical Protestant tradition has betrayed them. Notice that born again Protestant Phillip Johnson wrote the Foreword to Rose’s posthumously published main text on this topic? Many of these evangelical ex-YECists used to be biblical literalists, and now they seem to have over-shot the other side.
I’m thankful just to watch and not to get stuck in that wrestling match.
All the Saints of are Church rejected evolution. Even the modern ones, who lived during / after Darwin’s time. How can you say Rose’s view is marginal, if it’s the authentic Orthodox position? The Scriptures, the Church Fathers, the Saints, the hymnology, the iconography. It’s all in conflict with evolution and long ages.
If Rose is wrong, I’d like you to point out where he’s wrong. It isn’t enough to simply point out that a Protestant wrote his introduction. So what? What difference does any of that make? Rose cites hundreds of passages from the Church Fathers in defense of his thesis.
You aren’t a theistic evolutionist? Then what are you? What do you believe?
“Most Recent Common Ancestor” (MRCA) is a common concept in genealogy that refers to the most recent individual that a specified group of persons have in common. I assume that Creationists would say that Adam is the MRCA of all males living today. So what is the currently estimated, maximum number of generations between Adam and the average male living today?
My understanding of the 23rd chromosome of a male (i.e. Y-DNA), is that it undergoes slow mutation over the generations. ’ As of 2015, estimates of the age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans." Y-chromosomal Adam.
How do Creationists reconcile their currently estimated, maximum number of generations with the Y-MRCA range of years between males living today and a Y-chromosal Adam?
This is how "jammycakes responded to my suggestion that she take a look at what Douglas Axe and Ann Gauger have to say:
Jammy Cakes,
You really need to stop writing before you dig yourself into a deeper hole. This post seems really bizarre.
Ann Gauger received her Bachelor’s degree from MIT and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington Department of Zoology. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, where her work was on the molecular motor kinesin.
Douglas Axe is a Professor of Molecular Biology at Biola University and received his PhD at Caltech. He held postdoctoral and research scientist positions at the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Medical Research Council Centre. So yes, reading their books and watching their videos is a reasonable way to learn about genetics since we can’t all go get doctoral degrees in this subject and every other subject that is discussed in this forum.
Are these the people you think are brainwashed wannable experts that haven’t set a foot in a laboratory since they finished compulsory science education at age sixteen? In reality, these are the folks you need to interact with through their writings and videos, unless of course, you only want to mock and don’t want to expose yourself to differing points of view.
And just a word of advice. If you want to show the strength of your position, don’t shoot down the weakest of your opponent’s and their weakest arguments. Don’t think for a second that you have made an argument against creationism by refuting someone so ignorant as to say that evolutionists believe that cats evolved into dogs. Rather refute a creationist that is so ignorant as to say that evolutionists believe that hippos and whales evolved from four-legged, even-toed, hoofed (ungulate) ancestors that lived on land about 50 million years ago. Oops, that really is what evolutionists say.
Engage with the ideas from the best informed of your opponents, and either refute them or join them.
