Even Sir Isaac Newton believed in a Young Earth yet he was in a state of denial.
He accurately (for that time) calculated the distance of Sirius and was appalled by distance of the “backdrop stars” far behind Sirius that could be Millions of lightyears. He made a comment that questioned how could the backdrop stars look so far if it was because of the parallax effect.
If a NO then you imply that Christ believed in something else than a Young Earth.
As noted by me elsewhere, its impossible to be an informed and intellectually honest yec.
The speed of light was just beginning to be measured in Newton’s day, so that would not have been a serious problem for chronology. Geological evidence began to point to an old earth in the late 1600’s and became conclusive by about 1775. The consistency of the speed of light was not realized until much later.
But, Newton did calculate the distance of Saturn and Sirius quite accurately (around 50% error but still within the same ten digits of units).
And, in 1 publication questioned how can the fixed stars / backdrop stars could be older than 6000 years old of the creation.
@Fernando: Did Jesus even care how old the earth is? Maybe the question never came up. (We’ve had numerous conversations regarding the antiquity of the earth and the cosmos – do a search on ‘antiquity’. Here’s a fairly recent one involving ‘fossilized’ teddy bears.)
My point exactly. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the places where Jesus is portrayed as espousing YEC are all off-hand throwaway comments taken out of context from situations where He was talking about completely different things. It’s eisegesis quote mining, pure and simple.
There’s a scene in The Chosen where Jesus is talking about the Pool of Bethesda with His disciples. One of them asks Him how it works, to which He simply replies: “I’m sure someone will figure it out some day, and then they’ll tell everybody.” Such a comment may be a fictitious element in the dramatisation of the Gospel stories, but it’s a highly plausible response, and it’s also the most plausible thing I could imagine Him saying if anyone had asked Him how old the Earth is.
They are faithfully honest, true. They do not have our minority, privileged epistemology.
It was Sir John Flamsteed’s 1672 work on Mars that gave us the distances of Saturn. Newton used that, the inverse square law and a few other assumptions to calculate Sirius’ distance in AU. I presume you mean within the same order of magnitude.
JC was very ambiguous on this subject. Why?
Because there were far more important things for him to talk about.
Few things bore me me more than what the bible ambiuously says about the origin of earth life etc
There are enough problems of huge relevance in todays crazy world about which Jesus had a LOT to say. Lets focus on those things. And learn
Good point, Speedy! And welcome to the forum. It seems to me that a lot of effort is spent in trying to get the Bible to say what people want it to say, not only in the words of Christ but throughout the scriptures. We should spend our efforts trying to understand what God wants us to learn from it.
Exactly. And his teachings, and those of the prophets, are at odds with much of conservative Christian teaching today.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Theologically, the age of the Earth, who did or did not evolve from what, and questions along those lines, are simply not that important. The Bible is more concerned with how we live our lives in the present than with how people lived their lives in the past.
In terms of science, the problem isn’t the age of the Earth or evolution itself. The problem is when other Christians attempt to support their position on the matter with bad arguments and falsehoods, or when they view science in general with suspicion or even hostility. For many of us, science is something that we have to understand and apply correctly in order to do our jobs properly – i.e. without driving our employers out of business or killing people. This means that there are strict rules that we have to follow and standards that we have to maintain, and for those of us in such a position to be subjected to demands from our fellow Christians that we lower our standards and flout those very same rules in order to support dogmas about subjects which the Bible leaves wide open to interpretation – that’s when the sparks start to fly.
Paul’s dismissal of arguments about genealogies in I Timothy 1:4 supports the idea that the topic of ancient history was not particularly important in New Testament times.
The way that many young-earth advocates make creation science central clashes with Paul’s warnings in Galatians about adding to the gospel - creationism becomes a legalistic false gospel.
@Fernando, Welcome.
Please note that there are three Creation accounts in our Bible, Gen 1:1 -2:3. Gen 2:4 - 25, and John 1:1- 3. Please do not cheapen the Bible by ignoring its diversity. John 1:1 going much better with evolution than Gen 1 does. One cannot pick and choose which part of the Bible one believes and does not believe.
More importantly Jesus did not believe that the Bible was the literal Word of God John 5:16-18 (NIV2011)
16 So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute Him.
17 In His defense Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at His work to this very day, and I too am working.”
18 For this reason they tried all the more to kill Him; not only was He breaking the Sabbath, but He was even calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.
We do not need Jesus to teach us physics. We need Jesus to show us how to solve the human problems of this world. We know how to solve the Covid pandemic. We do not know how to overcome the distrust, fear, and lack of faith that has plaguesthe4 church and the nation. Lord Jesus, forgive and help us!
I think we need to create a post where we can discuss the other alternatives for the biblical creationism apart from the Young Earth Creationism.
As of today, I think Young Earth Creationism has a dominant place among Christians because the alternatives against Young Earth Creationism are not clearly defined so far.
There are no consensus even among Christian Theistic Evolution adherents regarding this subject.
Just like there is no consensus amount YEC adherents. They can’t even agree on where the flood is recorded in the geologic record.
I would agree, but the problem seems to be that BioLogos does not want to discuss NT creation thinking based on John 1:1-3. What do you say?
I wouldn’t say that at all!
There are indeed different approaches within YECism but they’re not so much scattered apart and they respect each other very well as long as the sub-thought believes in literal 6 x 24 hours of creation.
While us, Theistic Evolutionists, we cannot agree on whether Adam and Eve were literal persons.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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