I would note that TECC seems to be a term with a pejorative intent. Whereas YEC is a fairly well- defined term with no attached judgement on the people’s character – appropriate for one’s godly grandmother who finds comfort in that view, and for a zealot who attacks people of good faith.
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Except the frictional heating is great enough to have melted the solid continents!! And no, no YEC has yet come up with a way around this heat problem. Which, BTW is only one of several heat problems that prevent the science fiction known as Noah’s Flood.
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There is a word for people who not only refuse to stick to the rules of scientific rigour and factual accuracy but denounce those who call them on it as “compromisers.”
The word in question is “cult.”
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Yes - rather silly. “Compromising” is obviously judgemental, but in keeping with the attitude displayed throughout.
YEC stands for
Young
Earth
Creationism
Which of those words, I wonder, is supposed to be so objectionable? YEC may be associated with massive disinformation, but the term itself is neutral enough.
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The biblical scriptures need interpretation, otherwise the words are just ink on papyrus or dark bits on screen. Some claim to stick to the ‘plain reading’ of the Bible but that expression is very misleading. We always interpret what we read and the interpretation is based on our worldview.
A few examples from the creation story of Genesis:
What was before Genesis 1:2?
What is the ‘deep’ (t’hom) in Genesis 1:2?
What is the firmament or vault (raqia) in Genesis 1:6?
What does it mean when God sees that what He created was good (Genesis 1)?
What does it mean when God rested from all His work (Genesis 2:2)?
I could continue but the questions above are examples of points where the original receivers of the message (creation story) would probably have understood the story in a different way than an average person raised in a modern western society, like USA or Australia. Which one of the interpretations (‘plain readings’) is closer to the message that the author, inspired by the Spirit of God, was telling through this story?
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Dear Andy,
fair call!
I honestly believe that many Churches, people and Theistic Evolutionists have compromised the straightforward message of scripture, but I see that could be taken as derogatory, thus taking on board what you have said and in the interest of simplicity I will amend the term to just Theistic Evolution Christians (TEC) or TEC’s in the plural from now on.
Thanks for your sincere input.
God Bless,
jon
This is one of the lies you are parroting.
Coelacanths are not unchanged from 340mya.
Quoting Wikipedia:
Paleozoic coelacanths are generally small (~30–40 cm or 12–16 in in length), while Mesozoic forms were larger. Several specimens belonging to the Jurassic and Cretaceous mawsoniid coelacanth genera Trachymetopon and Mawsonia likely reached or exceeded 5 metres (16 feet) in length, making them amongst the largest known fishes of the Mesozoic, and amongst the largest bony fishes of all time.
Coelacanths of genus Latimeria are large, plump, lobe-finned fish that can grow to more than 2 m (6.6 ft) and weigh around 90 kg (200 lb).
Anything that was originally less than 2ft long, became 16ft long and is now 6ft long is clearly not unchanged. It’s not even necessary to compare the specific features that differentiate coelacanth species - the size differences alone are enough to show that coelacanths have changed.
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Dear Kai,
thanks for your thoughts, and of course you are 100% correct, a person’s axioms, presuppositions and overall worldview will to a large degree influence how they interpret or understand anything.
Thus, recognising that we all have a worldview that affects how we understand things, a bias if you like, its vitally important that we make certain that we are biased by the best bias that we can be biased by.
Our Holy, Righteous, Creative God, gave us the Books of the Holy Bible Old Testament, through the hands of inspired authors under the constraints of human language, in this case Hebrew, and consequently I honestly believe that there are no errors as some here on this website often like to claim, I believe primarily in order to add to the text, ideologies and dogma that are NOT in the Scriptures.
That said, as a Christian, I do not believe for a nanosecond that our Loving, Brilliant Creator caused anything to be written down except precisely what He wanted ALL peoples of all ages to know in the Holy Scriptures, I am certain that the Holy Bible in its original texts is inerrant in every respect.
To at least provide you with what I think the selected parts of Genesis mean, here goes:
A.) What was before Genesis 1:2?
I don’t know except that the One, and Only Living Eternal God existed.
B.) What is the ‘deep’ (t’hom) in Genesis 1:2?
I have always believed the ‘deep’ to mean the depths of water that was the Earth at that point in time.
C.) What is the firmament or vault (raqia) in Genesis 1:6?
I have never been overly sure about räqiy that means firmament or expanse as far as I can determine.
Verse 7 goes on to tell us that the firmament (or expanse) divides the water under from the waters above.
Given that the Earth was formless and void and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, I think it’s possible that the expanse is precisely what we see today above the surface of the earth, both the seas and the land that was created on Day 9.
As with all the Holy Bible, the first Bible Chapter, Genesis 1:6-8 is brilliantly designed to only enable interpretation that is thoroughly consistent with fact. This is clearly the case as far as I’m concerned, because the text does not state anything except that God created the sky, that is, its constituent element’s but is absolutely silent with respect to providing any further detail about those elements.
Furthermore, in Genesis 1:8, the text clearly tells us that the räqiy has the name shamayim (heaven/s) in an exact one to one equivalence. There is no reason whatsoever, to interpret any broader meaning of shamayim other than an exact equation with räqiy.
D.) What does it mean when God sees that what He created was good (Genesis 1)?
I have always believed that our Holy, Triune Lord God is Good, meaning He is the embodiment of all that is kind, all that is pure, all that is Holy, all that is gentle, all that is full of grace, all that is joyous, all that is as God originally intended the Creation to be, thus when God saw that it was good, we should make no mistake whatsoever THAT IT WAS GOOD.
E.) What does it mean when God rested from all His work (Genesis 2:2)?
Well this is precisely as it states in Genesis 2:1-3
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made. 3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made.
To me at least, it is crystal clear that God created in the first six days and on the seventh day He rested.
I really don’t think anyone should have any problem whatsoever in understanding Genesis 2:1-3, unless their underlying beliefs, add to the text dogma that simply isn’t in the text.
I don’t believe the original receivers of the message (creation story) would have understood the creation account in a different way than an average person raised in a modern western society, like USA or Australia.
It seems to me that far too much is made of assumptions about what people in the Holy Land thought about four thousand years ago, that seeks to add a foreign ideology to the text, an ideology of ‘deep time’ and ‘evolution’ that is external to the Holy Bible, though some on this site argue that deep time is taught in the Holy Scriptures, (but conveniently refuse to provide the Bible references) that is, their TEC worldview seeks to add to the text of the Word of God; a slippery slope indeed.
God Bless,
jon
Dear Roy,
you are welcome to believe Wikipedia if you think that is a reliable source, but I don’t trust it one little bit. It can be accurate and it can be so far off the mark, as to be irrelevant.
Coelacanths may have varied a little, but have always been Coelacanths.
Rather than reading Wikipedia, I encourage you to read the informative article titled: Coelacanth: The transitional fossil that wasn’t
at:
God Bless,
jon
Then show us how YEC can be falsified.
What features would a geologic formation need in order to falsify a young Earth and/or a recent global flood?
What features would a fossil need in order to falsify the claim of separate creation of kinds?
What genetic features in the genome of different species would falsify separate creation of kinds?
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So go to the sources they cite. Though I suspect you wouldn’t trust Historical Biology, National Geographic or Scientific Reports either.
Going from 2ft long to 16ft long is not varying ‘a little’. Nor does that include the other changes observable in fossils and living creatures:
Note the changes in head and snout shape, head vs body proportions, dorsal fin extent and shape, and the tapering of the tail.
I encourage you to ignore creation.com’s spin, and instead look at the evidence itself - and withdraw your claim that coelacanths haven’t changed.
Though I suspect you will hide behind your Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic lenses instead.
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If you really accepted a literal, plain reading, of Genesis and the firmament, you would join the flat earthers who align with ancient near eastern cosmology placing a solid dome over the plane of the Earth. Yet you accept the scientific spacial understanding of cosmology, but reject the temporal, which is just as certain.
The Firmament of Genesis 1 is Solid but That’s Not the Point
Let me summarize some of the general arguments for why raqia is understood by contemporary biblical scholars as a solid structure:1
The other cosmologies from the ancient world depict some solid structure in the sky. The most natural explanation of the raqia is that it also reflects this understanding. There is no indication that Genesis is a novel description of the sky.
Virtually every description of raqia from antiquity to the Renaissance depicts it as solid. The non-solid interpretation of raqia is a novelty.
According to the flood story in Gen 7:11 and 8:2, the waters above were held back only to be released through the “floodgates of the heavens” (literally, “lattice windows”).
Other Old Testament passages are consistent with the raqia being solid (Ezekiel 1:22; Job 37:18; Psalm 148:4).
According to Genesis 1:20, the birds fly in front of the raqia (in the air), not in the raqia.
The noun raqia is derived from the verb that means to beat out or stamp out, as in hammering metal into thin plates (Exodus 39:3). This suggests that the noun form is likewise related to something solid.
Speaking of the sky as being stretched out like a canopy/tent (Isaiah 40:22) or that it will roll up like a scroll (34:4) are clearly similes and do not support the view that raqia in Genesis 1 is non-solid.
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Wikipedia is uneven, but the Coeleacanths article is well supported with over fifty references. CMI articles, however, generally present misinformation and the one you reference is choke full of it. That all fossil specimens are identical to the modern species is flat out wrong. Not only are living Coeleacanth different from fossil specimens, but …
No fossil is available either for extant coelacanth species or for the genus Latimeria itself
Why coelacanths are not ‘living fossils’
This suggests that palaeontologists – even those that are convinced that coelacanths are ‘living fossils’ – have considered morphological differences between extant and fossil coelacanths to be so extensive that they should be grouped in separate genera 41. In fact, coelacanth body shapes are much more diverse than is generally thought (Fig. 1). The vertebral column of coelacanth genera shows considerable variation in the number of neural and haemal arches, as well as in the spacing throughout the abdominal and caudal regions, suggesting that they probably had diverse modes of locomotion
There is variation in size, but also anatomy, bone structure and morphology. Once again, the evidence actually points in the direction of evolution. The simple reason is that is what happened.
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First, I want to thank you for your answer.
What we call the ‘creation story’ is claimed to belong to an ancient literature type describing how gods established their temples. In those type of stories, the establishment proceeds stepwise. As the last step, the image of the god is put into the temple. After that, the temple is ready and the god settles into the temple and starts to rule the territory from his/her temple.
If we think of the ‘creation story’ from this ancient viewpoint, then the whole creation can be pictured as the temple of God. The image of God is man (humans, men and women). When everything is ready, God settles into (rests in) His temple and starts to rule from there.
This sounds logical in the sense that God resting and sleeping on a couch after a hard work week sounds a bit strange. There is included the message of a resting day at the end of the week but that message starts from the idea that God rules and takes care of everything needed, not from the idea that God is tired and needs to have a nap.
Although we do not know certainly what the original receivers were thinking, it is logical to assume that their thinking was affected by what they had seen and heard during their lives - the same as with the people of all ages, including us. As they had heard stories about how gods established their temples, the ANE people would probably relate the new story to what they had learned earlier: God settling into His temple, to rule from that place.
Although this is logical, I do not think that an average person from modern western societies would think like the ANE people because what we have seen, what has been told to us and how we use language is different. If we take what has been written literarily, read and interpreted through the frame of a modern worldview, the scripture seems to tell that God needed to rest after a hard work week - anything else would be adding to the text.
This is just a minor detail but demonstrates how the differing worldviews may affect how we understand the story. We all may have differing ‘plain reading’, depending on our worldviews.
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Wikipedia has many features or policies that allow you to assess how reliable (or otherwise) an article is.
For starters, every page has a complete audit trail of its editing history and a talk page where the article’s contents can be discussed and questions about its accuracy raised. The talk page itself also contains an audit trail of its editing history. Furthermore, Wikipedians are expected to cite their sources and many Wikipedia pages are monitored both by subject matter experts and regular editors to ensure that this is being done.
This being the case, if you disagree with a statement on Wikipedia, you need to do better than just hand-wave it away as “I don’t trust it.” You need to give specific reasons, such as pointing out that the claim in question is not supported by the sources on which it is based, or that the article doesn’t cite any source for the statement at all, or that it is the subject of a long-running edit war, or that there is a discussion on the talk page calling its veracity into question.
I do not see anything about the Coelacanth article to call into question the statement that @Roy cited. The article is an uncontentious one, with little or no evidence in the page history of vandalism or edit warring. It is regularly edited with 50 edits since March and 500 edits since 2019, so it is well patrolled and kept up to date by those with an interest in the subject. There is little or no discussion of Roy’s particular point on the talk page, which appears to be adequately supported by the references cited in support of it. Nor is it the kind of claim that you would expect to be particularly contentious. Fossils of a certain type of fish are one size in one layer and a completely different size in another. These things are measurable, operational science with no incentive whatsoever to falsify the data.
This being the case, I can only conclude that the modern-day coelacanth really is significantly different from its ancient relatives, to an extent that is fully consistent with a timeline of about 400 million years, while retaining sufficient similarities in patterns consistent with a nested hierarchy that would be expected of evolutionary relationships between the species throughout that time. I can also only conclude that Jon’s assertion that the coelacanth has changed little if at all is categorically false.
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When a creature is adapted to an ocean/coastal environment with plentiful food that hardly changes over time, it’s not surprising that the creature would experience incremental changes due to genetic drift, but the overall body plan remains the same. Alligators and crocodiles are similar examples.
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Dear Kai, thank you for your detailed response, it does shed some light on why some people here say and obviously believe what they do.
From my reading of the Holy Bible, and my internal relationship with the Lord God, I personally do not believe that the pagan beliefs of ANE cultures are in any way relevant, to what and how the One and Only Living God of Creation, informs us how He made the Heavens and the Earth and all life.
The LORD God is not inept, nor is He incapable of communicating with All people accurately. Indeed He is the absolute Master of Communication, creating the most advanced information storage system in the universe, that mankind has but scratched the surface in understanding the intricacies of the multiple overlapping codes for genes that regulate, prescribe, assemble, check, and actively change according to need in our DNA.
There is absolutely no need that I can see, nor any justification whatsoever, to think that God was limited, and not able to effectively communicate plainly to anyone except the original audience about four thousand years ago.
From the short time that I spent here on these forums, I understand to some degree that this belief about the original authors and original audience is utilised to insert ‘deep time’ and ‘evolution’ into the Holy Scriptures. The LORD God that I know, is far more intelligent than I think some TEC’s give Him credit for. If ‘deep time’ and ‘evolution’ were real and how God created, I have absolutely zero doubt whatsoever that He is infinitely more than capable of communicating that to us.
Please remember, that He commanded and from eternity that He resides in, time came into existence, all the Trillions of stars came into existence, His wisdom is what caused every one of us to be knit together in our mothers wombs, and He knows every hair on our heads, I dare say that he knows every atom that He has made, that is, that exists only because He made them all.
The Lord God that I know Who has such incomprehensibly immense power and knowledge and wisdom, would never have His wonderfully profound message of instruction to ALL generations of mankind, written according to pagan ANE false beliefs that are anathema to Him; indeed even to assert that seems to me to err in a very big way, and unfortunately without a skerrick of justification.
I realise that there are people who have made it their life’s work to cultivate just such a belief, and have no doubt that many have numerous degrees, doctorates etc… to give them credibility in the eyes of other people, but I do not accept such a belief is even remotely true, it is a false teaching that forces itself onto the Holy Scriptures, and to add insult to injury, it then falsely claims that Bible believing Christians who accept God’s written Word for what it clearly is, are deceived and in error.
Whereas in all Truth, the Holy Bible is the blessed communication from the One and Only Living God, full of instruction, wisdom and profound Truth with Grace, to us All, whether we lived around about 4,000 years ago, or around about 2,000 years ago, or around about the present time in the history of the creation, the incredible thing about the Holy Bible is that God speaks to our hearts through it.
Equally just as relevant is the deep spiritual dimension that appears to be completely ignored by those that choose to deliberately force the ANE cultural story of Pagan beliefs onto God’s profound word to ALL of humanity. Such an important omission of real spiritual insight speaks volumes.
I have no doubt whatsoever that God could have commanded everything that has been made, that is, the entire creation in far less than a nanosecond, that is instantly, but He chose not to do that.
I agree with you here Kai, that God certainly would not have needed to rest, but I see this deliberate act by God as a purposeful blueprint for how He wants us to order our seven day week, we work on six and rest on the seventh day, as He has commanded we do.
Just as He created the components of the creation in six normal days as we know them to be, so He wants us all to have a six normal day working week, with a rest on the seventh that is Holy to the Lord God.
God Bless,
jon
That’s an interesting comparison. The Bible says that it is God that knits us together in the womb. We also know that embryonic development is the product of our DNA and natural processes. So do you believe that embryonic development is both a natural process and a God guided process? If so, then you are adopting the same position as Evolutionary Creationists here at BioLogos.
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Dear Ron,
what complete nonsense. What you are stating as fact actually isn’t.
There is absolutely nothing in the Holy Bible that supports the heavily worldview influenced interpretation of the Holy Bible, of the expanse being anything other than what we see in reality today. A deep blue sky that at night reveals the stars that separates the waters below from the waters above, that rain falls from, that we call clouds, that consists 100% of water.
This continual nod to what is believed, or at least promoted to be ANE cultural beliefs is both unnecessary and contrived to bring TEC dogma into the historical account of the creation by God.
As I have already stated:
I have never been overly sure about räqiy that means firmament or expanse as far as I can determine.
Verse 7 goes on to tell us that the firmament (or expanse) divides the water under from the waters above.
Given that the Earth was formless and void and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, I think it’s possible that the expanse is precisely what we see today above the surface of the earth, both the seas and the land that was created on Day 9.
As with all the Holy Bible, the first Bible Chapter, Genesis 1:6-8 is brilliantly designed to only enable interpretation that is thoroughly consistent with fact. This is clearly the case as far as I’m concerned, because the text does not state anything except that God created the sky, that is, its constituent element’s but is absolutely silent with respect to providing any further detail about those elements.
God Bless,
jon
Dear T_aquaticus,
of course ultimately it is God Who causes us to be knit together.
If it weren’t for the LORD God holding all of Creation in existence right now, then there would be no way that anything could occur that presently occurs in time and space.
He is RIGHT NOW holding the creation in existence.
1 God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, 2 Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; 3 Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;
4 Being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. 5 For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee? And again, I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son? Hebrews 1:1-5
God Bless,
jon