Dear Jon,
Two quick lanes: (1) what the biblical writers meant by “raqia/firmament,” “circle,” and Job 26:7; (2) why the “101 evidences” page doesn’t do what you think it does.
1) What ANE people—and Israel—thought the sky/earth were like
-
Rāqîaʿ (רָקִיעַ) in Genesis was understood across the ANE as a solid sky-vault (hence the Greek stereōma “solid structure” in the Septuagint and the Latin firmamentum). This isn’t a modern “TEC dogma”; it’s standard philology and cultural history. Even John Walton, who is cautious on details, affirms that “virtually everyone in the ancient world believed in a solid firmament.” (The BioLogos Forum)
-
Isaiah 40:22 says God sits above the ḥūg (“circle/compass”) of the earth. In ANE usage that points to a disk, not a scientific claim about sphericity. Reading “sphere” into ḥūg is anachronistic. (Crivoice)
-
Job 26:7 (“hangs the earth on nothing”) is exalted poetry about God’s unmatched power, not a physics lesson. It doesn’t show Israel had Newtonian gravitation; it celebrates God’s upholding of creation using everyday metaphor. (Walking With Giants)
So no one is “forcing a metal dome onto the text.” We’re just letting the Hebrew terms and ANE context speak in their own voice.
2) About “101 evidences for a young earth” (creation.com)
That page is from 2009 and recycles claims that have been investigated many times. A few illustrative examples (I’m happy to go point-by-point if you like):
-
“Soft tissues” in dinosaurs ⇒ therefore thousands of years
The most-cited work (Schweitzer et al.) does not show fresh, undecayed tissue; it shows cross-linked, chemically stabilized remnants (e.g., iron-mediated bonds) that can persist under exceptional conditions. Multiple studies detail preservation chemistry (iron/Fenton reactions, glycation) consistent with deep time. (PMC) -
Carbon-14 in coal/diamonds ⇒ therefore thousands of years
At the detection limits of AMS, backgrounds and contamination pathways dominate signal; RATE’s own procedures likely introduced C-14, and “intrinsic C-14 in diamonds” hasn’t withstood independent replication under stringent blanks. This is well-documented in technical critiques. (TalkOrigins) -
Helium in zircons (RATE) ⇒ accelerated nuclear decay
The helium-diffusion argument hinges on diffusion coefficients and sample histories. Independent analyses showed RATE overestimated diffusion, misfit the temperature history, and ignored alternate pathways—removing the “young” signal. (Asa3) -
Saturn’s rings “must be young”
Even within mainstream literature the ring age is an open research problem—with recent peer-reviewed work arguing they could be ancient due to “dirt-resistance” rather than youth. In other words, the science is active; it’s not an argument for a 6,000-year cosmos. (AP News)
These are representative. The broader pattern is the same: the page strings together argument-from-anomaly items, often from old papers, while overlooking follow-up research that resolved the anomaly within standard geology/astronomy.
Bottom line
-
Reading Genesis as ancient cosmology doesn’t “distort” Scripture; it honors the text God gave us in the language and worldview of its first audience.
-
The “101 evidences” list doesn’t overturn the consilience of radiometric dating, stratigraphy, plate tectonics, stellar evolution, and cosmology. Its headline examples have ordinary scientific explanations in the literature.
If you want, I can walk through any five entries on that list that Kai chooses and show exactly where they rely on outdated data, misapplied methods, or have been answered in more recent peer-reviewed work.
—Terry