It doesn’t account for the correlation between distance and radiometric measurements, nor the fact that the correlation matches direct GPS measurements of modern day continental drift.
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Dear knor, as I have stated previously we will have to agree to disagree. The general thrust of the old age deep time arguments, for me at least are not credible at any level. We obviously see the world we live in very differently.
An article at Biologos age earth that was published by CMI over a decade ago describes the ‘deep time’ position that’s evidently still supported by the Biologos organisation from what I have seen thus far as a newcomer to the Biologos forum site.
BioLogos and the age of the earth: Pushing an anti-biblical doctrine
by Shaun Doyle and Tas Walker
It’s abundantly clear to me that there is considerable hostility towards Christians who adhere to the straightforward correct Biblical teaching of the creation having occurred around about six thousand years ago. I see little to be gained by continuing wresting and fending off the preconceived stereotype into which I have immediately be thrown by some on this site. i am thick skinned and it doesn’t worry me, but I do worry about the millions in the valley of decision. As Christians we need to consider the lost and be faithful to the clear record of scripture.
Ultimately, all will know the truth regarding when and how God created everything that has been made including time.
All the best,
jon
- Either believing Genesis is history, by the Bible’s standards, isn’t necessary to be a genuine Christian or it is not.
- According to Creation Ministries International, It is not; however, according to the same source, it is integral to the Gospel and Jesus is literally irrelevant if you don’t believe Genesis is history.
- Conclusion: Believing Genesis is history is and is not necessary to salvation, according to Creation Ministries International.
[Source: Do I have to believe in a historical Genesis to be saved?]
Dear Terry, regarding your post:
I think that you may have not understood the thrust of the article.
The relevant summary is:
“Simply put, believing Genesis is history, by the Bible’s standards, isn’t necessary to be a genuine Christian.”
The Good News of Salvation or if you prefer, the Gospel is about Jesus the Son, paying the price required by Gods Holy nature for us through His great Love for us all, the wages of sin is death, to reinstate mankind’s original position with God from the fallen state that we presently find ourselves in, being all related across every nation on this planet to the federal head of mankind “the first Adam” who rebelled against God in the real Garden of Eden that was a very good creation, completely devoid of the death of ‘nephesh’ animals.
People who believe that evolution is how the diversity of animals came to exist such as those I have encountered on this Biologos website, through belief in the alleged Evolutionary mechanism, are by default believers in death before sin as the survival of the fittest via natural selection supposedly played itself out over eons of time until we reach humanity. That belief system is not only faulty, it is not Biblical at every level, and it ultimately causes problems in the attempt to make sense of why Jesus came incarnate to Earth as a man to be our kinsman redeemer.
The vast majority of Hebrew scholars both secular and Jew and Christian all have stated that the text in Genesis 1 - 11 is historical narrative; to say otherwise not only denies the consensus view of Hebrew historians, but also denies plain common sense when anyone from a child to an elderly average person reads the text, it is plainly informing us what happened. It IS HISTORY!
You can read the article that you referenced again below:
Do I have to believe in a historical Genesis to be saved?
by Shaun Doyle
Flickr: Ian B-M
Do we have to believe Genesis is reliable history to be saved?
The Bible lays out some basic truths we have to believe to be saved:
- There is one true God.
- He sent Jesus to die for our sins.
- He raised Jesus from the dead.
- Jesus is fully God and fully man.
That there is one true god is integral to the whole Bible. It was Israel’s main confession: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4). God’s first command to them was “you shall have no other gods before me” (Exo. 20:3). But while belief in the one true God is necessary, it’s not sufficient.
Jesus Christ sets Christian faith apart from any other ‘one god’ religion. God sent his Son (John 3:16) to die for our sins (1 Cor. 15:3). God’s Son is Jesus Christ, and he is truly a man (1 Tim. 2:5). But God also raised Jesus from the dead (Rom. 10:9). The Gospel is how God fully reveals Himself (Heb. 1:1–4) and saves us (Rom. 4:25). These are necessary, but still not sufficient.
The last factor is that Jesus is “Lord” (Rom. 10:9). In Rom. 10:8–13 Paul says that calling Jesus “Lord” is the same as calling him by the name for Israel’s God—YHWH. In Romans 10:13, Paul, talking about Jesus, quotes Joel 2:32. In the original Hebrew, “Lord” in Joel 2:32 is “YHWH”. So Paul calls Jesus “YHWH”—Israel’s God! Therefore, Paul says that confessing “Jesus is YHWH” is necessary for salvation.
Simply put, believing Genesis is history, by the Bible’s standards, isn’t necessary to be a genuine Christian.
Turning from our sin and personally trusting in this God, this Christ, and this death and resurrection is how we are saved. But I didn’t once need to reference believing that Genesis is history. Simply put, believing Genesis is history, by the Bible’s standards, isn’t necessary to be a genuine Christian.
But there is a very important “but”. The history of Genesis is integral to the Gospel. If there was no literal Adam and Eve in a literal garden with a literal tree and a literal deceiver, and there wasn’t a literal Fall—then Jesus is literally irrelevant. So, someone who believes the above but doesn’t believe that Genesis records literal history is a Christian, but they are an inconsistent Christian.
We all have an amazing capacity to live with inconsistency. We may think we’re right in what we believe, but we’re not always right. So, we should treat all who confess those essential truths as family. However, inconsistency on something so integral to the gospel can lead (and has led) many away from the faith. So we also need to lovingly correct them because they are walking a dangerous path.
First published: 7 November 2013
Re-featured on homepage: 27 September 2022
Best Regards,
jon
We agree that we disagree.
By the way, did you note that you listed quite many methods that can be used in the dating of past history? You copied YEC texts from elsewhere to show that these methods may contain errors but did you think why all these methods point to the same direction, that the world is older than what YEC claims?
If there are ten or more witnesses telling crudely the same thing, we usually believe that they tell of a real event even if any one of the witnesses may have misunderstood some detail. You listed at least the following witnesses:
- radioactive dating methods (several independent methods [witnesses])
- tree rings
- varves
- ice cores
- speleothems (cave formations)
- corals
- thermoluminescence
- electron spin resonance
- cosmic ray exposure
Instead of these witnesses, you suggest “There is only one way to reliably know the age of anything and that is by eyewitness testimony, on the basis of their written records.”. This is a desperate attempt when we are speaking of something that happened long before written history.
Who were the eyewitnesses when God created the Earth? Who made written records of how the creation happened? In what language were these records written?
The ANE world was a world of speaking, not writing. Stories were told from mouth to ear, they were memorized and repeated but rarely written anywhere. For example, Moses could not have written the Hebrew texts we read in the Torah because Moses lived before the modern Hebrew language formed. It is very possible, even likely, that Moses wrote something but the stories were mainly passed orally and those telling needed to present the stories so that new generations could understand, for example translate from older languages to following ones. We do not know if Moses wrote the first chapters of Genesis, if he collected older oral stories about creation, or was the authoritative person whose name was put on older stories told by others. Yet, we do know something about the way the ANE people understood such stories and how the original listeners were likely to understand what was told. It is evident that they understood the Genesis stories in a very different way than a person educated and living in a modern world.
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None of the layers preserved in the geologic column are compatible with a single completely global flood:
Milankovitch Cycles superimposed on longer-term cycles in sea level (which describes pretty much all Neogene shallow marine deposits) do not fit with a single global flood. Each one requires at least a century or so the form, given the directly measured lifespans of the organisms in the layers, and the fact that the sediment has not been transported: one can find exposed Crepidula in stacks, fragile shells the size of my hand, and mud that takes a week to fall out of still water all in the same deposit.
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There’s something you need to understand here.
The hostility isn’t towards Christians who adhere to a particular approach to the Genesis creation narrative. The hostility is towards Christians who make claims in support of their approach that are factually untrue, misleading, conspiratorial, or antagonistic towards science.
It’s as simple as this. If you are going to critique scientific discoveries, you MUST make sure that you are getting your facts straight. Claiming that scientists make assumptions that they do not is lying. Claiming that the assumptions that they do make are not testable when in fact they are is lying. Claiming that assumptions are a get-out-of-jail-free card when they are not is lying. Claiming that reasoning is circular when it is not is lying. Claiming that outliers are representative of the entire body of evidence is lying. Claiming that new, improved techniques must be unreliable because their older, more rudimentary predecessors are unreliable is lying. Exaggerating the extent and significance of unreliability in those techniques is lying. Fudging measurements is lying. Quote mining is lying. And repeating falsehoods after having been told that they are falsehoods is lying.
I for one don’t have any objection to the possibility of the Earth being just six thousand years old. But I do have a problem with bad arguments, falsehoods and conspiracy theories being presented in support of such a possibility. I have a problem with antagonistic or denialist attitudes towards honest science in the Church. I have a problem when people with science degrees make arguments that fail GCSE mathematics or demonstrate an ignorance or denial of basic measurement or laboratory techniques. And I have a problem with demands that I lower my standards of rigour and attention to detail in order to accommodate doctrines that are nothing more than a cartoon caricature of the Bible with a thick layer of science fiction slathered on top of it. Such things are bad for science, bad for society, bad for our young people, and bad for the witness of the Body of Christ to the world.
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Shaun Doyle and Tas Walker do not address the elephant in the room here: that radiometric ages in places such as the Hawaiian islands increase linearly with distance. This is not an assumption of constant rates over millions of years; it is a test of the assumption of constant rates over millions of years. This is because we are talking about the ratio of two independent rates: radiometric decay and continental drift. If these had varied in the past within a young earth timescale, these would have to have varied by a factor of many millions in complete lock-step with each other. Besides the fact that both accelerated nuclear decay and catastrophic plate tectonics are complete science fiction, and would have vaporised the Earth’s crust many times over if they had any basis in reality, the changes in the respective rates would have become non-linear looooooooooong before they reached that point. Accelerating two independent rates such as these in complete lock-step with each other by that kind of magnitude is not even remotely plausible.
As for sources, @Joel_Duff provides these in his blog post on the subject:
So no, it is not an unsubstantiated assertion.
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- I think you take me for a brain-dead fool and that hurts my feelings, annoys the bejeezus out of me, and–surprise! surprise!–evokes some hostility in me.
- Thanks, but no thanks! You’re failing to point out that what you call “the relevant summary” of the article that I’ve read and have a link to, … the article which you repeat, word for word, in your post, doesn’t just say:
- It also says:
- Come again??? What kind of Gospel are you trying to pass off as The Gospel?
- You (and the article that you quote, ad nauseum) start with “Simply put” and then you add
- I don’t know where you learned English, but I learned English here in the U.S. Where I come from: Simply put means “This and no “buts”, and yet you, the article, and all of Young Earth Creationism say: But there is a very important “but”. And I holler: "Foul!, you added a ‘but’ to the Gospel which has no ‘buts’.” And where I come from, we call that “preaching another Gospel”!!!
- At the risk of “beating a dead horse” with no constructive result, I’m going to try to point out to you exactly where you go wrong.
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- First, you (et al.) speak of “the Gospel” and then immediately rush headlong into your “creed”. Your problem, as I see it, is that you have equated “the Gospel” with “your creed” and, in doing so, you’ve ceased to bear witness to the Gospel and are bearing witness to your creed.
- What, then, should you be doing? IMO, understanding the difference between “the Gospel” and “your creed”. And I say: that starts when you understand that absolutely nothing changes Jesus’ relevance. Jesus was, is, and always will be relevant.
- Saying that Jesus ceases to be relevant when a person fails to acknowledge the historicity of every sentence in Genesis is either ignorant or willful bibliolatry.
- In what world can a person be a genuine Christian AND make Jesus irrelevant???
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That’s good, because you are unable to realize that you and your tribe are in a rut so deep you cannot see out of it and that it blinds you to the rest of the wonderful reality that God has created and the remarkable processes he used. That you apparently still want to believe in the magic flood that can generate girdled rocks in one place on earth is your blinkered and foolish prerogative, detrimental to the Gospel, repellent to those “in the valley of decision” and dishonoring to God.1
Remarkably, Augustine, nearly two millennia ago, has you and yours nailed:
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It also references a possible mechanism that would actually render the volcanism moot because it would end up with the entire tectonic plate molten.
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The Bible teaches no such thing.
Which isn’t possible so long as a modern worldview is forced into the scriptures.
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Which is why so many YECist university students abandon the faith: they’re just following what they were taught.
And meanwhile atheist and agnostic students studying evolution conclude that there is a Designer and many end up becoming Christians.
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Dear Dale,
the eyewitness was God Himself, Jesus the Son who was there.
The Bible records His eyewitness account.
Regards,
jon
I don’t know to whom that was really addressed, @knor or myself, but as usual, you are mistaken that the account imposes a modern scientific view and 24-hour days.
And again you ignore the magic that you want so-called ‘Flood geology’ to perform.
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I lost track of which post a reference to tree rings may have been in … but somewhere I recall you suggested that tree rings could not be trusted because they might have multiple rings per year. If you read the short response here, you’ll see that the slight problems tree rings have actually go the wrong way for young-earthers, and are easily corrected for by cross-calibrating them with other independent sources.
Getting this stuff right (and understanding scriptures rightly) is important to all of us Christians here. It’s why we care so much about it all. We believe that Christianity should be about truth and illumination. Not lies, distortion, and dishonoring the scriptural testimonies by distorting to make them teach what they don’t teach. We’re glad you’re here, where all of this stuff you’ve been immersed in can be exposed and brought out into the light for examination.
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That’s not in the text.
Except it doesn’t if you actually understand the scriptures.
In fact the Old Testament isn’t even necessary to “make sense of why Jesus became incarnate as a man” – most people will admit that they are broken, and broken people need a Savior.
Plain common sense when reading ancient literature in translation is pretty much guaranteed to get it wrong. Believing that it works requires assuming that the scriptures were meant to be read in English from a modern worldview and weren’t actually written for the people at the times they were set down in ink.
Not true – that actually comes from a misunderstanding of what scripture is, namely treating it as a philosophical treatise where the main point fails if some former point is elided. Jesus is relevant because people are broken.
And in fact when doing evangelism on a university campus, people who quoted the Old Testament got few listeners while those who led people to see that they are broken got not just more listeners but actual commitments.
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And an extremely important aspect of this is that intelligent people in the world recognize when Christians are engaging in all this lying.
And a lot of people recognize this, too.
And that.
For some reason YECists manage to talk about the need to spread the Gospel but seem to manage to remain oblivious to the fact that non-Christians are quite good at seeing the lying, the distortion of the Gospel, and the inconsistency that puts a certain view of Genesis above Jesus. It is not attractive.
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This also is not in the text.
Once again I see that YEC cannot help but add to the text.
Those other sources include multiple tree cores from the same forest, more from surrounding forests, and others from forests a thousand or more kilometers away. We looked at such cores in botany class and managed to get them aligned using sequences of rings that were plain in most of the cores, and then cross-checked against snowfall and drought records obtained from other sources.
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