Then what is the objection to using “modern synthesis”? Is there some bogyman value in Darwinian?
I dunno, it wasn’t me who brought up the idea that its not the prevalent model nowadays…a new name has emerged called modern synthesis. There must have been a change of government recently, a new name to old things???
Politicians are great ones at changing the names of things…a personal legacy i suppose. Or is it, the old one (Darwinian) was so flawed we had to come up with a new one?
The new name was necessitated by new concepts which were an extension of the previous theory.
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Interesting graph…and from a Christian perspective, the rise in dark green line (agnosticism/atheism) is sad.
I do note is that the grey line is on the up from 2017 onwards…interesting that it also illustrates a sharp decline in TEism over the same period.
My understanding from bible prophecy is that there will be a decline in Christianity in the last days.
i assume the Gallup poll here is sampling the “general population”?
One thing i think that we can both agree on, the dark green line is most concerning. I know that our two world views fundamentally disagree, and that mine claims yours cannot be saved due to your rejection of the basis for our need of salvation (ie that sin and death physically and spiritually entered this world through rebellion of both Lucifer and also of Adam and Eve). However, even your world view must be alarmed at the rise in belief in the view of the dark green line (that God plays no part in our origins or evolution)?
I accept that position no problem, however, if you are allowed to take on new concepts that are an “extension of the previous theory” that originated roughly180 years ago, why then are YEC’ers not allowed to use those same modern sciences to promote a theory that has remained unchanged for thousands of years?
Lets face it, science has really exploded over the last few decades, it should come as no surprise that very intelligent YECer’s are equally as interested in using that expansion in knowledge in their efforts to study our existence. what i do see here is that TE’sm has simply figured (and that is about the extent of what they have done) “lets join Darwinian theory with Christianity”. I see the error here as fundamentally at odds with the Old Testament narrative. There were numerous movements around a few decades back who would refuse to study Old Testament writings…only the New. It seems to me that the reason for doing this was due to a large quantity of very self-evident OT passages of scripture discrediting some very dubious doctrines! The rejection of the Seventh Day Sabbath is an example here, the O/T fully supports the Seventh Day Sabbath beginning with the creation story…that is one very significant reason why creation so important to the biblical narrative, and that is also why i cannot ever discount the literal creation account.
It is my position that without a solid belief in a literal 7 day creation, we destroy the very foundation of all Christianity…the Sabbath. People from many other denominations often condemn Seventh Day Adventists for taking such a strong view on the Sabbath. Here is why we take such a strong position. It is our belief that the Sabbath and Jesus are synonymous, they are a unified doctrine…one cannot exist without the other…to deny one is to deny the other…and to do that is to deny salvation!
Out of the two world views, YEC has the historical evidence, the written record, and now the science that when used in a manner whereby its assumptions start from a position “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them” our whole theology is harmonious…it does not conflict with itself in any way.
I don’t disagree with the claim that the are issues in YECism’s science, however, i genuinely believe that if an error is to be made, it’s better that the error is made in favor of biblical narrative and theology than to go the other way and elevate science above the bible account.
I do not see any evidence where God would condemn us because we get our science wrong, but based on a very deep study of the bible I am confident we most definitely will be condemned if our theology is wrong!
Work on the Modern Synthesis started in the 1920’s and was largely finished by the 1940’s. It’s hardly a new name.
I am still curious to hear what you think the Darwinian model is.
All theories are flawed, and are refined over time. That’s what science is. Unlike religious dogma, scientific theories are held tentatively, are open to challenges, and are expected to be refined.
However, flawed doesn’t mean wrong. Newtonian gravity was replaced by Relativity, but Newton still got a lot of things right and his equations are still used to guide spacecraft to this day.
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YEC’s are fully allowed to use the scientific method. The problem is they don’t.
When you reject evidence because it leads to a conclusion you don’t like, you aren’t doing science.
They are joining reality with Christianity. If reality is at odds with your interpretation of Genesis, it isn’t reality that is wrong.
You stop doing science when you start with the conclusion.
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Absolutely. And Biologos is actually part of the response to that, in that in the traditional young earth view voiced by AIG and the like, it forces youth and those who are interested in the sciences into abandoning faith with positions like,”If Genesis is not historically and scientifically true, then the whole Bible is false.” Unfortunately, many people have agreed with AIG on that and rejected the Bible. Of course, your proposal and AIGs is to prove that it is indeed scientifically accurate, but in doing so, have made the situation even worse by having outlandish just-so explanations that are laughable when examined, and having no coherent alternative to mainstream science findings.
So, yes, it is a problem to see the rise of atheism, but we see the cause as being the adherence to a woefully poor interpretation of the Bible. EC integrates faith with our knowledge of how reality works to allow a rational basis for faith to exist.
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Could you elaborate on that? My reading of the Bible plainly states Jesus is the foundation. It appears from your word choices, you are coming from a SDA viewpoint, and I respect the SDA church for their many good attributes, though my church meets on Sunday, and I have not problem if you wish to meet on Saturday… Who knows if the calendar is consistent since the first day of creation, so what does it matter.
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On what basis is the historical-grammatical method the way to interpret Scripture. Please demonstrate this biblically from Jesus to all NT authors; otherwise, your foundation is anti-biblical and merely man’s interpretation.
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You may want to check this essay out:
I have also found the YEC Todd Wood to be a breath of fresh air.
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All three of the above statements are exactly why it is that i said TE’s just got the idea lets just join Evolution with Christianity.
Unfortunately, the above statements maintain the view that evolution and the secular scientific model are truth…they are most definitely not and are at complete odds with the biblical account! That is an irrefutable fact and it is not possible to reconcile this difference.
Creation Science first says, the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and fully explains the origin of our existence.
The issue with secular science, it has intentionally started with the claim that there is no God! I dont know why TE’s attempt to argue the opposite to this when the very science they continue to be proponents of discredits the bible account of our origins. The scientists themselves laugh in the face of God!
i go back again to the first statement in Genesis… “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them”!
It doees not say, in the beginning God created the mechanism (science)…it very specifically states, “he spoke and it was so”…and he created “all that is in them” [the heavens and the earth].
the creation account is a very personal and very intimate action from God…and very personal statements such as “moulded him from the dust of the earth” and “breathed the breath of life into Adams nostrils”…is grammatically stupid to attempt to claim that these statements can be taken any other way other than exactly the way they are worded…they are very self evident texts and so simple that even a young child understands what they mean!
In addition to the above, Mose describes the flood in a very detailed manner, the reason why it was it occured…although perhaps scientific in the physcial event, there was nothing scientific about the reason why the flood came…it was for philosophical reasons. He (Moses) describes the construction of the ark and how long it took, the animal types and numbers that entered the ark, the fountains of the deep bursting forth, the number days of rain, how high above the mountains the water level rose, exactly how long it took for the water levels to subside, the rainbow in the sky, the sacrifices Noah offered…these are all very specific statements that clearly describe what is going on.
Unless we truly understand the theology of the bible…the overriding theme, it is not possible to appreciate the importance of Creation and the flood and the salvation Jesus offers us. One cannot enter into Jesus rest (the promised land) if one does not believe in the Seventh Day Sabbath, one cannot believe in the Seventh Day Sabbath if one does not believe in the literal 7 day Creation account because this account explains the importance of the Sabbath and why we were given it as a day of worshiping the Creator!
My apologies, Phil. I understand.
@adamjedgar I am happy to continue the conversation if you want, but I do expect you to respond to me in good faith. That means (a) no accusations of heresy, no questioning my faith (or anyone else’s), and no personal attacks or insults, and (b) an agreement that honesty and factual accuracy are non-negotiable.
For what it’s worth, I’ve watched some of your video, in particular the section on radiometric dating starting at about 50 minutes into the video. There’s something very important that you need to understand here: if you want to challenge a scientific theory, you must challenge what real scientists do about it in reality. Your video does not do this.
It claims that radiometric dating makes blind assumptions about the original quantities of parent and daughter isotopes. This is for the most part untrue. Most modern radiometric techniques do not make this assumption, but have found ways of working round it. Read up about isochron dating for starters. The few radiometric techniques that do make this assumption only do so because there are rock-solid physical, chemical and crystallographic reasons to do so – for example, zircon crystals can contain uranium when they first form but they strongly reject lead, and so their lead content can give us a lower limit on their age.
It claims that nuclear decay rates could have varied in the past under different Earth conditions. This is science fiction. Nuclear decay rates depend entirely on the laws of physics and could only have been different if the four fundamental forces of physics had been different in the past. If that had been the case, then elements heavier than hydrogen would not have been able to exist. In any case, if radioactive decay rates had ever been high enough to squeeze the evidence into six thousand years, they would have released enough heat to vaporise the Earth – and that was the YECs’ own admission.
It claims that the Mount St Helens dacite proves that radiometric dating is “unreliable.” This demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of how unreliability works. It only indicates that the error in K-Ar dating of dacite, when carried out by young earth creationist researchers trying to discredit radiometric dating in the first place, could be 2.8 million years. For rocks that are four billion years old, that is an error of just 0.07%. That falls far, far, far, far short of demonstrating that all radiometric techniques could be so completely out of whack that they consistently fail to distinguish between thousands and billions. It’s like having a set of bathroom scales that has a zero error showing 0.3 kg when you’re not standing on them, and then when you stand on a different set of scales and see a reading of 85kg, claiming that you weigh nothing.
Look, Adam, by all means preach that Jesus is Lord. By all means call people to repentance. But whatever you do, please do not package up your Gospel message and call to repentance in falsehood and misinformation such as this. Because in so doing, you are not upholding the Bible as the Word of God; on the contrary, you are undermining it.
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No YEC’s do not all make this claim and their answers to such questions are not just left there…that is just as much a white lie as what you claim we do to your view.
I have never subscribed to this belief and have made that known on these forums in the past. I am a mature earth creationist. You may have trouble reconciling YEC and mature earth…however, it really isnt an issue.
God created a mature ecosystem, a mature man and women, mature animals, mature plants…why on earth would he therefore suddenly create an immature object in terms of its radiometric dating decay rates?
Has the flood influenced those rates…well considering what is glaringly obvious from the mount St Hellens volcanic eruption, very definitely yes!
To go further, is evolution a complete fallacy? Absolutely not when considered from the creation and flood account of the bible. They are in perfect harmony with evolution…just not in the way secularism claims…and this is because millions of years ignores God and seeks to reconcile evolution with the big bang. All TE’s have done is substitute the big bang vacuum with God and claim that is the solution!
Adam, where do we start…
What is truth? (Reference Pilate)Actually, science (and evolution as a subset under that) does not claim truth. It just strives to provide the best supported explanation for the data presented. It is not only subject to change and modification, change is intrinsic to the scientific method. Ultimate truth is something religion strives for appropriately.
Well, a big chunk of the Christian world disagree with that. Though, it may be unreconcilable with your opinion. That, I can agree with. Which puts you in a precarious position.
I would agree conditionally, though we would disagree on what inerrant means, and how it explains the origin of our existence. It does not speak to the mechanism of origins of human existence or the mechanism of how hurricanes form, or what kidney’s do, or if bats are birds or birds are dinosaurs.
Absolutely. And we should not try to make it seem to do so.
Children can get understanding from the text but that does not mean it is simple. There is a time to move from milk to meat, If it were self evident, there would be no need for commentary, no need for study, no need for the Spirit to lead.
A fair statement, so long as you realize the theology of the Bible centers on Jesus, and creation as well as the flood point toward him.
A rather arbitrary thing to hang your faith on, but perhaps this is not the forum for that discussion.
a big chunk of Chistians…what percentage would that big chunk be exactly because when i look at the statistics of Evangelicals for example, only 24% agree that evolution has any place at all in the theology of Christianity!
And of that 24^ i would be interested in also seeing how many actually believe evolution is responsible for our evolving from apes…i think i would probably be more likely to find that its that most of that 24% believe that evolutionary processes are responsible for current mutations that we observe in our reality right now (at rates that critics claim far exceed the traditional evolutionary model i might add)
I’m sorry, Adam, but YECs most definitely DO make those claims. Your video makes those claims for starters. The RATE project makes those claims.
OK I got you. So you believe that God created evidence for 4.5 billion years of history that never happened, is that right?
I thought you just said that you don’t claim that nuclear decay rates could have varied. Do you or don’t you?
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ok so lets play a game here…why dont you, as a person who apparently is as well instructed in SDA church beliefs as I am in your beliefs (seeing as i put up with so much of it here)…how about you tell me what the 27 million SDA worldwide believe about the mature earth view?
I don’t know the exact percentage, but evangelicals are not a dominant group except in the good ol’USA. Even here, a majority of Catholics and Orthodox accept evolution, as does pretty high percentages of other groups. Worldwide, Catholics and Anglicans are predominantly accepting of evolution. Religious Differences on the Question of Evolution | Pew Research Center
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yes that i would have to agree with. I suppose the position i am arguing is from within the evangelical community. I accept that perhaps i have inadvertantly and without thinking carefully, placed the Biologos theology within the evangelical movement because its modern…that may be mistaken of me.
I suppose now i should clarify, do biologos members consider themselves:
Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed (Adventist/Methodist/Baptist), Anglican, or Restorationist (Pentecostal)?