There is one especially noisy YEC around here that says it absolutely is.
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Dear Knor, thank you for your post, I must agree that it is strange that we have both arrived at different conclusions from the same data, this is really another case in point about how one’s worldview will define what one interprets and concludes from any given set of data.
Thankfully our Lord and Saviour loves us all regardless of our belief about the age of the creation and how the diversity of life was created.
I would be most grateful if you would please, provide specific examples of the:
“YEC books were full of misleading and false interpretations about scientific observations.”
“YEC interpretations about scientific observations and biblical scriptures are simply not credible”
as I would very much like to make my own mind up about the veracity of these disturbing claims that you have made as it is not at all my experience in any of the books or reference to scripture that I have read.
Regards,
jon
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Dear Dale, as you have not provided any examples or references to support the spurious claim that
I am unable to test the veracity of your statement. If you wish to make accusations, please support them with references and solid undisputed evidence.
With regard to the document you provided:
I’ve taken a cursory look at it and see that it supports an old ‘deep time’ creation that is clearly the product of the worldview of the two authors but I find it difficult to understand how two well meaning good Christian men are content to champion a position that is not consistent with scripture.
There are many eminent scientists who are Christians and who believe that the earth is young as clearly laid out in the genealogies provided in Genesis.
With regard to the document you provided:
Although the Atacama Desert is presently inland in Chile as a plateau of the Andes mountain range and about 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean, it was not always that way. The global flood of Noah is a much more likely cause of the rounding of the boulders than the tenuous claim that earthquakes just happened to smooth and round them all. The fact that fossilised whale skeletons are also found in the Atacama Desert should give cause to first consider the obvious before stretching credulity to breaking point.
With regard to:
so what is this new evidence?
All the best,
jon
Except it’s the wrong kinds of literature for that – neither of the two genres employed intends to be telling history.
Enns is correct; the Bible nowhere claims to say anything about science. The idea that that makes the Bible “wrong” is actually wrong because it requires insisting that the Bible conforms to a modern materialistic worldview rather than speaking to the original audiences from within their worldviews.
Of course we should assume that! The scriptures weren’t dictated and God didn’t take over the minds of the writers (that’s something demons do, not God), He let them write with the understanding of things they shared with the cultures they were writing for.
Untrue. In my university days we had an informal intelligent design club (back before the young-earth creationists hijacked the term) primarily made up of former atheist and agnostic students who due to their study of science had concluded there must be a Designer. The subject that the largest group of these students were studying was evolution – it was those studies that led them to conclude there was a Designer. Most of them ended up Christians – while students raised YEC were abandoning the faith in droves as the logical conclusion to what they’d been taught, namely that if there are any errors in the Bible then the whole thing is wrong.
The reason that YEC students’ faith failed was that they had been taught what I just said instead of being taught that Jesus is the center. Something they didn’t know and very few YECists I’ve ever met have known, and that is where the idea that in order to be true something has to be 100% scientifically and historically correct comes from: it’s not from the scriptures, it’s from a human philosophy called scientific materialism – which is at root atheistic. So it turns out that YEC is based on an atheistic foundation!
I oppose a literal reading of Genesis 1-11 because none of it is literature that was meant to be taken literally. The opening Creation account manages to fit two literary genres at the same time (brilliant writer!) and neither one is intended to be taken literally in the details, only in the primary message. As for the Virgin Birth, that is in a literary genre that is meant to be taken as what we call history, so Biologos is actually consistent in its position even if it didn’t get there by tackling the text: their view honors the work of the Holy Spirit through human writers who chose literary genres they knew within the worldview they held because that was what would communicate to their audience(s).
No one is denying the Bible, however they got to their position/belief – they’re actually taking it as its authors and the Holy Spirit intended, as addressed to the ancient audiences it was written for.
And from my university experience I can say that I saw more than a few students who acknowledged evolution as the prevailing theory come to Jesus, but I never saw a single one come to Jesus by looking at YEC – mostly that view made them laugh and turn away.
To understand the Bible it is first necessary to recognize that in studying it we are reading someone else’s mail: it was not written to us, it was written to different audiences down through the millennia. And it was written as human literature, using forms and understandings that would communicate to its intended audiences. It was indeed written for us, but just as to understand the work of Cervantes one has to know both old Spanish and the culture Cervantes was writing in, so also to understand these other people’s mail we have to read it in the contect of its language(s) and culture(s). Doing that is necessary to honor how the Spirit moved writers to write to their people (not to us).
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Hi Merv, thank you for you thoughtful response, it’s much appreciated!
I must assure you that I too believe our God is a God of truth; not lies and deliberate omissions.
It is interesting that we both have world experience that has led us to vastly different conclusions about the origins controversy with regard to age of the Earth and evolution.
I think perhaps you may have misunderstood the thrust of what I said. It is certainly not that the scientists doing the analysis are thinking in terms of supporting the deep time evolutionary worldview, that to them is a given, it is the mechanics of the method that result in that being the case anyway, whether it is consciously known or not is to all intents and purposes irrelevant. The fact that all mineral samples are ALWAYS dated with their relative ground location in mind to refer against the ‘Index’ fossils for a ballpark age date, or at the very least, a maximum and minimum age, that ensures the old age paradigm boat is not rocked too violently.
For me the evidence for the veracity of the Biblical account in Genesis is overwhelming, finds such as:
Bird’s oil gland preserved for ’48 million years’
123rf.com/Polina Pomortseva
The discovery of a preserved oil gland from a fossilized bird supposedly 48 million years old adds to the growing number of soft tissue finds. (See also “Turtle soft tissue find” below and creation.com/dinosaur-soft-tissue)
Researchers studying a bird from the fossil-rich Messel Pit in Germany concluded from tests on its uropygial gland—which provides oil for preening—that it was “an example of soft tissue surviving over the course of millions of years”. One of the team said:
“The discovery is one of the most astonishing examples of soft part preservation in animals. It is extremely rare for something like this to be preserved for such a long time.”
Based on their organic geochemical investigations, the researchers also encouraged others to likewise investigate fossils for soft tissues. Soft-tissue finds are exciting—and not unexpected—for creationists because such preservation better fits in with a world-wide catastrophic event such as Noah’s Flood about 4,500 years ago. On the other hand, evolutionists have not yet presented a plausible explanation for soft tissues surviving for their alleged millions of years.
- O’Reilly, S. et al., Preservation of uropygial gland lipids in a 48-million-year-old bird, Proc.R.Soc.B. 284(1865):20171050, 2017 | doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.1050.
AND
Turtle soft tissue find
Dr Mary Schweitzer has again been involved with a fossil soft-tissue find. Traces of pigment, beta-keratin, and muscle proteins have been found in a sea turtle ‘dated’ at 54 million years old. Schweitzer was the first to report soft tissues in dinosaur fossils (For more on that, see creation.com/dino-disquiet).
Dr Schweitzer was part of a team headed by paleontologist Johan Lindgren of Lund University (Sweden) that investigated a tiny 74-mm (3-inch) fossilized hatchling turtle from Jutland, Denmark. She said:
“The presence of eukaryotic melanin within a melanosome embedded in a keratin matrix rules out contamination by microbes, because microbes cannot make eukaryotic melanin or keratin. So we know that these hatchlings had the dark coloration common to modern sea turtles.”
Shell colour is vital for cold-blooded turtles as it allows them to absorb heat from sunlight. Compared with today’s hatchlings, there is no hint of significant change (‘evolution’) over the alleged millions of years since the fossil was formed.
- Lindgren, J. et al., Biochemistry and adaptive colouration of an exceptionally preserved juvenile fossil sea turtle, Scientific Reports 7:13324 | doi:10.1038/s41598-017-13187-5.
- Peake, T., Keratin, pigment, proteins from 54 million-year-old sea turtle show survival trait evolution, news.ncsu.edu, October 2017.
to name just two of the many new finds of soft tissue inside bones claimed to have been reliably dated at tens to hundreds of millions of years is what I find difficult to comprehend how smart people who have scientific training can just dismiss these finds out of hand, disregarding the true and honest fact that empirical,reproducible, operational science clearly shows that preservation of the range of proteins found is not possible under any circumstances whatsoever. All proteins would be long gone in a tiny fraction of the time claimed, yet that glaring FACT is somehow ignored as being an inconvenient truth. The only obvious solution, (using Ockhams razor) is that the proteins are not very old, several thousand years , perhaps ten thousand years at most, but tens to hundreds of millions is frankly, beyond the pail.
Thank you for the link to one of our brothers in our Lord Jesus Christ, past posts, I’ll take a look at it when I get some spare time. I’m flat out at present trying to fireproof my wife and my little cabin in the bush of Eastern Australia before summer arrives on the 1st December.
When I was young, nearly everybody in the community was a Christian, and on Sunday mornings, it was hard to find a park near a Church in the morning, Unfortunately, things have drastically changed since the 1950’s, and now Churches are increasingly filled with little old men and women, some Pentecostal Churches have more youth in their congregations, but overall the trend is downhill. This situation has occurred simultaneously with the onslaught of evolutionary, deep time dogma that dominates the media, academia and most educational institutions. I know from watching this happen that it is the belief in evolution that has brought many to distrust the truth of the Bible, they obviously think, if Genesis can’t be trusted, what else can’t be trusted, the slippery slope to atheism is there and millions are sliding down it.
I pray that the body of Christ be united in this battle for the hearts and minds of the lost.
Best wishes in Christ our Lord,
jon
I don’t know if you realise this, but every form of measurement works like that.
- If I want to measure the width of a piece of wire, I will use a micrometer.
- If I want to measure the distance from London to Aberdeen, I will use a GPS device, or the odometer in my car.
- If I want to measure the size of a bacterium, I will use an electron microscope.
- If I want to measure the size of my desk, I will use a tape measure.
- If I want to measure the size of my bedroom, I need to have some idea whether a 3 metre tape measure will suffice or whether I should spend extra on a 5 metre or 10 metre one.
Of course you need to start off with a ball park estimate of size in mind when you measure things! This isn’t circular reasoning at all; it’s iterative reasoning. It’s narrowing things down. It’s going from “about two metres” to “150 centimetres ± 1 millimetre.” In the same way, radiometric dating is simply a case of going from “somewhere in the Cretaceous” to “74.85 ±0.13 million years precisely.” It’s about reducing the likelihood that you’ll end up with over-range or under-range errors on your equipment and have to re-do the measurement, possibly at the cost of several hundred dollars. Radiometric dating, as I said, is expensive.
By young earthist logic, the fact that I am using a tape measure rather than an electron microscope to measure the size of my desk is “circular reasoning” and “thinking in terms of supporting the deep time evolutionary worldview.”
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Having nearly gotten a degree in geology I have to disagree. The Himalayas alone make that impossible. It is known from laboratory work how fast rocks and the minerals that make them up can bend/deform without breaking, and by those measures the Himalayas are at the very least hundreds of thousands of years old. The same is true of all the mountain ranges built by uplift.
No, it isn’t: The types of rock are extremely different, and what the “Little Grand Canyon” formed on the lower slopes of St. Helens actually demonstrates is that the actual Grand Canyon, if formed from swiftly-deposited sediments, should be several hundred miles wide, which it isn’t. FOr that matter, Spirit Lake and its trees show how polystrate trees actually formed: those trees settled to the lake bottom upright, and are slowly being covered by sediment, but because of the temperature and mineral content of the lake they are not decaying – they could continue that way for a few thousand years until Mt. St. Helens erupts again.
Where are all the research papers? My physics professors would have loved to have found flaws in the radiometric dating procedures – and it’s plural because it’s not just one method, it’s multiple methods that reinforce each other as well as being confirmed by other methods. If there were flaws in the difference methods there would be a flood of papers in the journals; scientists love nothing better than to point out flaws in other people’s work.
That’s also untrue. My favorite example is one I learned about in a course called “Human Ecology” long ago: A ranger in (IIRC) Colorado had as part of his job taking samples of water from a stream that had as a tributary a creek that seeped through an old gold mine, leaching arsenic and putting it into the stream. The short version is that he started with samples with bacteria that barely tolerated being in water with arsenic and ended up with bacteria that actually metabolized arsenic: that required new information or the bacteria would have been metabolizing it from the start! And that new information was the ‘culprit’ was further established when he went back to samples from before they started metabolizing it and the second time the mutation didn’t happen.
[I know I wrote a longer version of this recently but I don’t remember which thread it was in; if anyone knows or can find it, holler!]
Quite easily: there are two causes of physical death – or rather there are two causes of the condition that leads to physical death, which is mortality. The first is being created as a living creature that does not have a spirit inspired by God, and the second is being a creature with such a spirit who has fallen into sin.
He never says that. You have to distinguish between what the text actually says and what it has been treated as saying. All that Jesus’ quotes of the Old Testament do is show that He regarded them as authoritative, not that He considered them historical.
The thing is, ancient people didn’t look to historical or scientific accuracy to decide if something was true, they looked to the source. The Jews considered scripture authoritative because it came from God, regardless of whether any of it was “historically true”.
This also is incorrect: we have samples of atmosphere going back to at least 50,000 years ago from both Greenland and Antarctica.
Yes, if someone is dishonest. But there are ways of assessing leaching whether in or out, and adjusting for that. It’s done in many university geology courses as a lab exercise.
Someone else here probably knows more about it, but I believe that the Ar-Ar dating method is ‘immune’ to this problem.
You realize that you’re talking about millions of Christians in that set, right?
Also incorrect. My geology professors would have loved to find some specimen that threw accepted dates into question! (Christian and atheists both)
First, that’s not the guy’s real name; but more importantly, he’s lying. What he deliberately does not mention is that in order to have accelerated radioactive decay rates across the whole Earth the planet would have to be transformed into a dense cloud of plasma.
And he would have to show evidence for such things occurring! You don’t get to claim errors in measurement just out of the blue – in fact doing so was a quick way to an F on a paper for a geology class when I was in university courses.
And any paper claiming such would not be accepted for publishing unless he could substantiate those assumptions.
No, it hasn’t, it’s been corroborated by multiple independent methods.
It’s evident you’[re just cutting and pasting from YEC sites, so I’m not going to bother reading farther. I’ll just end by saying that any site that will cite ‘Woodmorappie’ cannot be trusted because they are citing someone known to lie.
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The girdled rocks, among others. You did not understand what is unusual about them, or did not halfway think about it, and they belie the hackneyed appeal to ‘Noah’s flood’ and a hand wave. The tumultuous global flood of YECish imagination would have rounded them all over, not just the vertical surfaces.
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Should have known you’d pounce on that one! ‘Woodmorappe’ flat out lies via cherry-picking material from his sources at a rate which if converted to rpms would rival my ceiling fan in the summer.
I’m going to try to remember this one.
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This reminds me of the time when I learned about isochron dating.
I had heard all about the Three Basic Assumptions of radiometric dating. Constant radioactive decay rates may have seemed solid enough to me, but not knowing the initial conditions or about contamination or leakage seemed like a doozy. How blind must “evolutionist” worldviews be if they were overlooking problems that obvious? This must be the kind of thing that Romans 1:20-23 talks about, I thought.
So when I found myself in a Bible study group on those very verses in Cambridge, being led by a geology student, I asked him about it.
He looked at me and said, “I’ve read those young earth claims. They are a joke.” I’ll never forget the way he emphasised the word “joke.” He went on: “They take, like, two shells off of a beach somewhere and make extraordinary wide sweeping conclusions based on just that. It’s laughable.” – His emphasis of the word “laughable” was similarly unforgettable.
Then he told me all about isochron dating.
I sat staring at his lecture notes for ten whole minutes in stunned silence. Here he was, telling me all about a radiometric dating technique that does not make the assumptions that young earthists were telling me that radiometric dating makes. By taking multiple samples and plotting a graph, you can determine the age of a rock formation without having to know anything about the original composition. And you can tell whether or not there has been any contamination or leakage because if there has, then the points won’t lie on a straight line.
I learned two things that day. First of all, that young earthists weren’t coming clean. Rather than telling me about how radiometric dating actually worked in practice in the 1990s, they were debunking an over-simplified version of the technique that had been superseded in the 1960s. In other words, they were debunking a straw man. But more importantly, I learned something else.
If you, as a non-expert, think that you know enough about a procedure to be able to tell that it is flawed, you can be absolutely certain that experts who have been studying the technique in detail since before you were born know all about those flaws as well and have either found ways to work round them, or else determined through further rigorous study that they are not serious enough to affect the integrity of the results.
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Ha! That’s funny because YECs always disallow good evidence. I already did submit some but you dismissed one out of hand with a ‘cursory look’ and you did not comprehend about the rocks in the Atacama.
How about the Hawaiian Islands and the seamount chain? I wish it were amusing that YECs always avoid addressing that exceedingly powerful elapsed time clock.
You even admit you refuse to consider any evidence that does fit your preconceived notions and fallible interpretation of scripture.
Coming from the side of the study of the text (in Hebrew, along with studies of the culture and worldview back then of course) I have to say that the Bible makes no claim about the age of the Earth, and that there is no way of making a realistic estimate. At best, an estimate of when Adam got booted from the Garden might be attempted (assuming one thinks that’s historical).
Ponder this: back even before Galileo first heard of a lens serious Hebrew scholars put their knowledge to work and concluded from the opening of Genesis that:
- the universe began very small, smaller than a grain of mustard (i.e. inconceivably small)
- the universe was filled with fluid and expanded unimaginably rapidly, until the fluid was thin enough for light to shine
- the Earth is also uncountably old, and the six days were divine days because only God was present to measure them – only at the end of day six did time start as measured by humans
In my experience it only causes those to stumble who are erroneously taught that the truth of the whole Bible depends on Genesis being 100% scientifically and historically accurate instead of being taught to rest their faith on Jesus. When someone is taught that Genesis has to be true as measured by science, it is quite logical for them to leave the faith when they find out that it just isn’t so.
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But it isn’t “not consistent with scripture”: it’s just not consistent with a scientific materialist interpretation of scripture.
I’ve asked many YECs this, but here I go again: can you show me where in the scriptures the idea is set forth that they aim to be 100% scientifically and historically correct?
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I’m reminded of this which is not about radiometric dating but a different kind of elapsed time clock:
“Radioactive Atoms — Evidence about the Age of the Earth” Ken Wolgemuth
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Erosion by water is different than erosion by wind or collision, and those boulders don’t show the signs of water rounding.
I’d forgotten about that one.
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Wear from being engulfed in rushing flood water would be more like a lapidary tumbler and certainly not confined to vertical surfaces!
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During and after my education in biology, I saw and read evidence demonstrating the old age of fossils as well as indirect messages about common ancestors in the genomes. Although I originally leaned towards YEC type interpretations, I had to conclude that the evidence for the old age of the world AND life are overwhelming. Any claims that the world is younger than 100’000 years, or even younger than millions of years, do not stand against the evidence. Maybe that is the reason why many previous supporters of YEC have turned to OEC (Old Earth Creation) after learning the evidence.
Evidence for a global flood does not exist. There are plenty of evidence for regional floods but no geological evidence telling that the whole globe would have been under water simultaneously. I have read YEC theories about how waters could have covered the whole globe and how the rock layers formed during and after the flood. None of those hypotheses could stand detailed inspection. For example, some needed changes would have produced enormous amounts of heat but one YEC hypothesis claims that the global flood was followed by ice age. When one type of needed change produces enough of energy to turn the Earth into a glowing globe and another part of the explanation demands that the ice age started simultaneously, there is obviously an internal conflict in the theory.
My observation was that the same mislead claims circulated in different books, written in different languages. My interpretation about that is that someone made a claim, then others read the claim, liked it and the message spread around the globe without critical evaluation. I can understand that. Most of us do not have expertise to evaluate the claims ourselves so we depend on what is told to us. Christians trust some other Christians they know, more than various scientists and experts. When a person we trust tells that this is ‘the correct interpretation of Bible’ or ‘a proof for my interpretation’, we accept it if we do not have good reasons to suspect that it is not true. So, if someone reads from a trusted source a claim that sounds good, that claim is accepted and told to others. When the mislead claim is repeated in many books and talks, it somehow turns into ‘the truth’.
The scientific explanations are also something we read or hear from others and then believe or do not believe. A major difference is that all scientific claims need to be justified in a way that other experts and readers can evaluate. It does not matter if the person suggesting something or the reader is a Christian, a Muslim, an agnostic or an atheist, the strength of the evidence for the hypothesis is what matters. If a hypothesis has sufficiently strong support, it will stand a critical evaluation by other experts and after that, is published in a peer-reviewed scientific publication. Anyone can then read from the publication the justification why the claim is likely to be true. Unfortunately, the hypotheses created by YEC researchers have not survived critical peer review and are therefore not published in mainstream science journals. For example, if the evidence for the young age of fossils or the global flood would be so convincing that a non-Christian reviewer could accept the evidence, the evidence and conclusions could be published in ‘normal’ scientific publications. Has not happened so far.
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I’m sorry you feel that way, as far as I am aware, the finer details of exactly what occurred in creation week are beyond the realm of empirical science. Sure, we can make educated guesses about those details, but they would only be guesses. I’m certainly not avoiding good science. Science is not able to be of any help in this matter that happened way back at the beginning of time.
Regards,
jon
Hi Terry, thanks for your comment:
I do not think I am being magnanimous, though I have no problem with your take that I am, I truly believe that regarding the origins debate no matter what view you take, salvation is a gift to all who call on the name of the Lord Jesus and believe that He is the Son of God, who came to save the lost of this world. Who am I or anyone else to put a stumbling block in the path of anyone for whom Christ died be they an evolutionist, or a creationist, it doesn’t matter, we are all brothers and sisters in our Lord and Saviour.
If you believe it with your whole heart, there is no sin, either origins position is valid for the one who believes it, I am sure our Lord and Saviour has no issue with us. We can debate till the cows come home, but in the end, for those already saved it makes no difference. But to those that are not saved, the matter of dischord in the Church regarding the origins debate likely does have the potential to be a salvation issue if those souls not as yet saved, see the dischord and turn away.
I know nothing about “hunting witches” or dismantling of the US constitutional democracy, but I do know that I am not alone throughout the world with regard to my conviction that the Earth is as old as the genealogies in Genesis clearly testify. And six thousand years is actually a very long time! The constant bombardment of millions of years, desensitises people. A million years is an almost incomprehensible length of time. The fact that many varied types of proteins have been found in bones purportedly tens - hundreds of millions of years old must be addressed by those that adhere to the ‘deep time’ paradigm.
Regards,
jon
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