On another post, the issue of whether God would put false evidence of age in the created world was raised. To continue the discussion, will move it here.
So Wookin, am I to take it that your position is that six thousand years ago, God created evidence for 4.5 billion years of events that never happened?
You can take any position you want. I only know what the bible says, and it is plainly written, āFor in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in themā¦ā Whether you believe it to be or not. It is still there, and it will always be there, which is why I am a YEC. Why would I care about the age of the earth? The ONLY reason why I care, is that it contradicts scripture. If it wasnāt in scripture. This would not be an issue
It contradicts your human, fallible interpretation of Scripture. This interpretation is in conflict with Godās natural revelation but you choose to ignore this.
As Sproul said
When you donāt consider the possibility that your understanding of Scripture is incorrect you run the risk of replacing what God actually meant with your own understanding.
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I am a presuppositionalist, not an evidentialist. I do not know what false evidence is. It is just evidence, how one interprets the evidence, and that our presuppositions drive our interpretation of the evidence. I have said it once, and I will say it again. The OEC/theistic evolutionist do not have a biblical leg to stand on pertaining to their scientific presuppositions
I do not think it was 6000 years ago. What happened, maybe 6kya, was Adam kicked from the Garden. The point is Adam was considered to be 130 when Seth was born. There are 2 choices. It was 130 years after the Garden, or Adam was kicked out at the age of at least 125. It may be reasonable to assume that Adam enjoyed 125 years or so in the Garden. Or the reason he kept track of his age, was because he no longer had access to the tree of life. Both are reasonable, however, if Adam did not keep track of Age in the Garden, it could have reasonably been a large amount of time.
How young is a young earth? 500,000 years? What is not clear, is why does the Bible indicate so much time passing between when offspring were born? Nor is it uniform. If humans only had a child every century and only had 7 to 9 total over a period of a 1000 years, how was the planet populated in even a thousand years? Then we have some who accept the Flood was ok around 10kya. I think this needs to be figured out before we can even call the earth young.
As to appearance, personally I think the universe started instantly with a size of 14 billion year appearance sometime within the last 200,000 years. While it grew older in the last 200k, it will never look older, even if it is. We can only see the 14 billion year age, and nothing more. Although in expanding, the universe is bigger now than then, and the universe is being lost to our observation, and we could not reach the end even if we tried.
The earth was made to look like and all data testing would not be older than the 4+ billion year life along with the rest of the solar system. But it was not an exploding star and accretion of planets. It was a working Solar system.
I started to try to respond to your post, but have no idea where to start with any of it. It sounds like you go with āappearance of age?ā
Huh? What are you saying? We see protoplanetary disks all the time but you are saying ours wasnāt like that but rather it was fully formed instantaneously in present form?
From a nice pop-sci article: https://www.quantamagazine.org/stellar-disks-reveal-how-planets-get-made-20180521/
I would agree with most here, and with @jpm and @dol that the world view of the general Biblical authors was not only YEC, but also flat earth, 3 tiered with pillars and a hard dome and an underworld (as in Philippiansāin heavens and on earth and under the earth; Phil 2:10), and geocentric. Calvin, apparently operating from the verses about the sun standing still and that the earth was fixed (Psalm 104;5), said that anything other than geocentrism was of the Devil. However, that shows that God accommodated to the understanding of the time, as I understand it. As Dr Lamoureux emphatically states in his online course about evolutionary creation, āNo!ā-- God didnāt lie to use those images. It would seem to be crazy for him to introduce a truth about the universe that contradicted the common science of the time and distracted from His plan of theology. As Galileo said, āGod gave us the Bible to tell us how to get to Heavenānot how Heaven goes.ā
When I talk to my sweet 5 year old daughter (who is smart as a whipāthough Iām prejudiced), about the sun rising, I havenāt (till recently) started to tell her that we are tilting towards the sun and therefore itās āmorning timeā and time for breakfast. Instead, I tell her that the sun has risen. I donāt know all of Godās reasons, but it does seem to me that He would not deceive usāso that would make the most reason for why He didnāt put in new evidence about science.
Thanks for your thoughts. I enjoyed your name, now I could look it up more. God bless.
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Can you tell me then what is wrong with this?
Other than constantly repeating, āI am a presuppositionalistā, you have yet to actually make an argument.
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I am not saying it cannot happen. I am saying it does not seem to have happened with our solar system. The fact that the medieval church theology accepted God as the creator of the universe shows it was not settled when observation showed otherwise. God did not create the universe because the Greeks logically proved that was the case, and thus it had to be.
We can toss the Greek logic out and say Genesis is only referencing this solar system, and the universe had already pre-existed by 10 billion years.
What is so hard about laying out the case we do know from Genesis? Obviously the way it was written, God wanted to tell Moses something. If it was not to clear up what other nations were teaching their young, what was it for. Moses could just as easily insisted, that Egyptian mythology was ok. Egyptians seemed to be monotheistic at the time, although they did have an hierarchy of lower demi-gods. What Flood mythology about the Nile fits into Noahās account?
Perhaps it could be argued that the original writings of Moses got conflated with Assyrian influence. It seemed though that king David, the second king, seemed to think the Law of God and Moses as the author was still intact giving us the book of Psalms.
Itās the whole young-earth line of reasoning. As I said, they believe that āpresuppositionā, āassumptionā and āinterpretationā are magic shibboleths that let them automatically dismiss any and every argument that they disagree with.
Itās simply another way of saying, āIāve got my fingers in my ears. I canāt hear you. Neener, neener, neener.ā
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I donāt think Timās position is all that well thought out to be honest. The way he writes, it sounds like heās mulling over a lot of things in his mind to try and make sense of it all. He seems to be coming up with a whole lot of different ideas that heās floating here to try and see which one sticks.
@Timtofly - have I got that assessment right?
I think youāre saying that yes, we all have presuppositions, but they are not good thingsāwe are supposed to work our hardest to take our fingers out of our ears and listen to evidence.
It does seem like an uphill battle, but I am not dogmatic, believe it or not. I have no way to prove anything so I guess it comes across as not having a position. Learning new things all the time does not seem to help one bit either. Learning raises more questions than answers.
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What doesnāt seem to have happened in our solar system? That it actually began as a protoplanetary disk and then was subject to subsequent gravitational collapse?
You can have God be the creator of the universe and yet we understand the processes by which nature works.
Greeks did what now? Their models of cosmogony were not so advanced.
Well that makes everything much easier. Just throw out certain ideas (which Iām not following what youāre saying at all) and then just assume the universe pre-existed for the amount of time that we can calculate from the Friedman equations and then other models.
As I moved from YEC to EC, I found part of Hugh Rossās RTB model particularly compelling when answering the idea that God made a world with the appearance of age.
He points out that if the half lives of elements found at their current state were compressed into such a short 6K-10K year creation period, the world would literally have melted due to the incredible release of energy required.
One is left to wonder why on one hand, a God who cannot lie would go through such effort to intentionally make the world appear old at the molecular level, or on the other hand, why we see no evidence of these half lives supporting a short time period.
Age of the earth/evolution vs flat earth/geocentric is a category error. Flat earth and geocentricity were based on one verse, which is why it is a hermeneutical principle not to give a verse itās own context. The book of Genesis is just that, one entire book of the bible.
Calvin, apparently operating from the verses about the sun standing still and that the earth was fixed (Psalm 104;5), said that anything other than geocentrism was of the Devil.
Even though it looked as if John Calvin was a firm believer in geocentricity. What is not clear is that he was basing his interpretation on any particular passage of Scripture. Furthermore there is still a debate on Calvinās other statements regarding special and general revelation.
Note that Calvin eventually came around in his commentary on Genesis 1:6:
āFor, to my mind, this is a certain principle, that nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere."
By āelsewhereā he is referring to some somewhere other than scripture.
okā¦Thatās your presupposition
So you presume.