Thanks for the shout-out Laura. It’s good to know that my blog posts are still providing value six years later. I’m increasingly trying to take a back seat in discussions about creation and evolution these days, mainly because I want to focus my attention science-wise on more practical, hands-on activities. That being the case, I’ve increasingly been thinking I’ve taken my contributions to the debate as far as I can, and it’s time to leave it to people who have more experience in the relevant areas than I do.
Although my review of Answers in Genesis’s top ten is useful I don’t consider it the most important thing I’ve had to say in the debate. Instead, the most important thing that I can see is the need to establish an understanding of the basic rules and principles about what does or does not constitute a legitimate argument against a scientific theory such as deep geological time or evolution. That’s why I’d instead recommend my three-part series on how to challenge a scientific theory as a starting point.
The problem with young earth claims is that they do not acknowledge the rules, let alone stick to them. In fact they view the rules as if they were some sort of “stacking the deck” against them. My objective here has been to show that even if that is true of some of the rules, there are other rules that they can’t fob off in that way if they want to be considered honest. That’s why I make such a big deal of the need for accurate measurement: besides being straight out of the Bible, it’s something that everyone should be able to agree on, in principle at least, if they’re approaching these discussions with any integrity.
It’s also why I tend to steer clear of discussions about methodological naturalism and advise others to do the same. Even if YECs do misunderstand what methodological naturalism actually is, there’s still a lot of room for disagreement and misunderstanding there, and I think it’s best to focus on rules and principles where we should be able to expect a consensus (with honest people at least) before attempting to tackle ones that are less clear-cut.
Well now - this thread is turning into a gold mine! Thanks for the links. I know it isn’t the first time we’ve done this, but it’s valuable to have ‘resource threads’ sprinkled through our history here I think. Thank you, and @jammycakes both!
Indeed, most of the scientists initially recognizing the evidence for the vast age of the earth in the latest 1600’s to 1700’s were Christian. Sadly, the teachings of creation science function as a legalistic false gospel, which turns people away from Christ to arguing about genealogies, and so their teachings are not Christian. People from various religious views promote young-earth and antievolutionary views.
And therein lies the contradiction even in your own belief. A natural reading of language says you dont believe the bible.
You should avoid claiming YEC are dishonest…i can theologically prove your christianity is dishonest using the same level of academic argument you can against me. The difference being im using the moral standard…the bible whereas you follow secular science interpretations that follow uniformatarianism (which i think is unbiblical)
At least YEC are maintaining allegience to the entirety of the bible and ALL of its themes. YOU PICK AND CHOOSE ONLY THOSE PASSAGES THAT SUIT YOURSELF.
SDAs have tended to believe we are a christian group that follow the entire bible as written. Im not aware of any other denomination who do that.
Can science reconcile a devil?
Can science reconcile immauclate conception…the incarnation?
Can science reconcile annihilatioism because of sin (read daniel and revelation)?
Can science explain how dead bodies, including those who’ve been eaten by animals over the millenia, will rise up out of the ground to meet a man in the sky?
When you are on top of a high hill or mountain looking at the horizon, do you honestly believe that scientifically a man who apparently ascended into heaven is coming back in clouds on that horizon and that every eye will see him?
The YEC is unscientific and they are dishonest argument is bull and i find it a trivial copout to be honest. Christianity isnt logical for atheism or secular scientific interpretations. Atheists dont consider Christianity to be telling the truth and you are throwing a secular argument into a Christian environment citing that as evidence YECism is wrong…that is pointless among Christians.
As an example, ask Bart Erhman why he left the faith…ive not once heard him use the argument people here try to use. He left the entire faith because of textual criticism… not science.
People leave Christianity because of unbelief. Unbelief is the absence of faith. (That is 100% biblical btw)
You are claiming faith requires science!
Oservational science never saw the earth before the flood…or immediately after creation. Even in your model, a large asteroid hit the earth and was likely a catastrophic event causing massive global tidal waves and dust clouds!
Observational science does not really consider faith,.
To believe that a man rose into heaven and is coming back again in the clouds to redeem us back unto God and to restore that which sin has corrupted… to create a new heaven and a new earth ( Rev21), requires faith. You cant prove or even show scientifically God, creation from nothing, the devil, salvation, or restoration.
Conversely, some level of uniformitarian assumptions are required to say anything at all about the past, like “properties of matter do not change abruptly and undetectably”.
Of course science does not explain everything. But the creation science movement makes dishonest claims about science, and dishonesty is not compatible with Christianity. (None of us perfectly live up to Christianity, but we should be seeking to turn from sin.) Not one of the purported scientific arguments for a young earth that you have asked about has been honestly based on the actual data, for example. Old-earth views were developed mainly by Christians in light of the geological evidence observed in the late 1600’s to 1700’s; young-earth claims (and many atheistic ones) routinely misrepresent this history. God does work miraculously, but that is no reason to be gullible about claims that a particular event was miraculous. On the contrary, we should be especially critical of our own claims. Jesus commissioned the disciples to be His witnesses, not his PR agents. We should be careful to stick with the truth (see, for example, Paul’s concern about the possibility of being a false witness “for” God in I Cor. 15). Anyone who wants to truly promote a young-earth position as a Christian option should welcome finding out what arguments are not good, so as not to use them.
But the problem that I actually brought up is that creation science is used as a substitute for the gospel, like the legalistic claims of the Galatian judaizers. The message is that faith in Christ is not enough; you also have to accept everything claimed by AiG or CMI or other young-earth sources. As Paul strongly asserts in Galatians, that is salvation by works and is not good news at all.
I’m sorry Adam, but honesty has rules, and if YECs don’t want to be called dishonest then they need to make sure they’re sticking to them.
What I am calling for is simply to establish what the rules are and to challenge young earthists to justify their claims in terms of sticking to them. If they really are being honest as you claim, then you shouldn’t have a problem with that, and you should be able to provide such a justification when challenged. You shouldn’t need to resort to diversionary tactics such as tu quoque arguments, insults, and accusations of secularism and “not believing the bible (sic)”.
I think every item in his list has been debunked here multiple times, but I don’t even feel the urge to dredge up earlier ones. I might be motivated if we had someone here seeming at risk of falling for the unfounded mistreatment of the scriptures by YECists, but other wise, not really.
Exactly. And that can only be done with the first Creation account by totally disrespecting both the writers and the Holy Spirit Who chose them.
That is correct. It’s like reading a friend’s mail that came from Germany: in order to understand it, you have to know German language, German literature, and German culture.,
That’s not remotely the case.
You don’t know what a natural reading of the text is unless you read it the way the original audience would have understood it.
Cross referencing is to theology as splashing one’s feet in a centimeter of water in a kiddie pool is to competitive surfing.
You should stop pretending that all animals were once herbivores – that’s not in the text anywhere, it’s introduced from outside.
They deal with the scriptures the very same way. They claim to be literalists but violate that repeatedly, and they claim to be able to read ancient literature without having to actually study first.
I can’t testify as to now, but when I was doing student teaching of high school students I checked the biology book to be sure it had none, and there weren’t.
No, that requires a warped reading of language: the Old Testament was not written in English and the opening of Genesis was not historical narrative since the genre didn’t exist yet.
We have to remember that we’re reading other people’s mail, and that requires knowing the language they wrote in, the type of literature they chose, and the worldview they held. It doesn’t matter if it’s 17th-century German, 18th-century Spanish, 4th-century Latin, or 15th-century BC Hebrew, that’s how human writing works.
And you’re back to lying again. Please stop.
That’s because atheists by and large read the Bible the way YECists do – like it was literal.
That’s not the whole story: he left the faith because he had been brought up YEC and followed the YEC logic that if there are errors then it can’t be true.
And the vast majority of young people for the last forth years have lost their faith because they believed YEC logic, a logic which told them to leave the faith.
Yes a great support for the global flood…a single catastrophic event that is claimed wiped out tbe dinosaurs and formed sedimentary deposits that rapidly achieved the task. Im suprised you dont see how it actually supports the flood account.
Btw, can you prove the asteroid wasnt ejected from the earth when the “fountains of the deep broke up” and then was pulled by the earths gravity back into the atmosphere again? Who is to say that wasnt what happened?
Not really. The traces of the impact are in a very thin layer of sediment. Like 1/4" not thousands of feet. And it took quite a while to wipe out the dinosaurs.
Simple physics should show how much force was required to eject the mass (without destroying the mass), high enough to generate the required forced on it’s return, but not so high it is ejected into space.
Actually, the impact evidence is totally incompatible with the claims of flood geology. One problem is that the iridium layer, microtektites, tsunamis, etc. are a tiny slice of a huge sequence of events all recorded in the geological record. It is a single catastrophic, devastating event, but it only accounts for a few layers out of millions. Flood geology claims that a single catastrophic event produced the entire geologic column, but honest geology finds evidence for countless events, most ordinary but occasionally catastrophic. Another problem is that, in order to have the geologic column produced within the one-year timeframe invented by flood geology, the effects of an individual impact would be completely mixed in with all the hyperrapid deposition and extreme currents required by the model - no distinct layers would be detected, especially not of fine-grained material that had to be able to sink to the bottom of the ocean or pile on the land without getting mixed in with everything else to the point of not being noticeable.
The asteroid came in at an angle of about 40-60 degrees, which is not compatible with the up and down suggestion. The composition of the impactor also is not compatible with coming from the earth. Given that current flood geology models would destroy the planet (and the ark), one might suggest that large chunks of the earth could be flung up by the process, but given that the planet was not destroyed by the flood, there seems to be little point in speculation on the sizes of chunks that would have been produced as the earth started to vaporize in a flood geology model.
The scientific claim is that this event caused the mass extinction of 75% of all life on Earth within 10 years…not millions of years. That is not “a long while” as you claim!
Chixculub Crater
The date of the impact coincides with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (commonly known as the K–Pg or K–T boundary). It is now widely accepted that the devastation and climate disruption resulting from the impact was the primary cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction of 75% of plant and animal species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs
The Alvarezes, joined by Frank Asaro and Helen Michel from University of California, Berkeley, published their paper on the iridium anomaly in Science in June 1980.[8] Their paper was followed by other reports of similar iridium spikes at the K–Pg boundary across the globe, and sparked wide interest in the cause of the K–Pg extinction; over 2,000 papers were published in the 1980s on the topic.[10]: 82 [11] There were no known impact craters that were the right age and size, spurring a search for a suitable candidate
also, your “thin” sedimentary deposit depth is debatable…
That debris landed within minutes in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean region. Depending on distance from the impact site, the debris was rocky rubble, impact melted spherules, or mixtures of both. Life on the continental landscape and marine seafloor was buried beneath impact ejecta that was several hundred meters thick near the impact site and decreased with radial distance. Along the Campeche bank, 350 to 600 kilometers from Chicxulub, impact deposits of ~50 to ~300 meters have been logged in boreholes.https://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/kring/Chicxulub/regional-effects/
The point is, the above quote does not consider tidal waves caused by such a massive impact. I would argue that tidal waves from that impact would have easily traversed the globe via both the Atlantic and the Pacific given the narrow land size btween the gulf of Mexico and the west coast. So sedimentary deposits from these tidal waves would have been quite widespread.