Yes, the technicalities are what Jason Lisle’s model is built upon as well. It’s like saying… ‘well you can’t disprove my idea, therefore it’s true!’ We also can’t disprove that invisible dark matter unicorns are responsibility for snowfall.
Randy, common! Again it only explains something after the scientific measurement has been done. This is not a new scientific prediticion! This is just like most Creationist writing where ‘everything’ always affirms their particular model.
Another just so story. I mean you can make up as much as you want or imagine how it ‘could have happened.’ You have a lot of research to do in this area as this is another spot where the standard model of Cosmology far outperforms yours- with Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. And the beautiful prediction of metal poor stars in that framework (another thing Creationists used to pick on until we began finding them)… you’ve got to show real publications that are approved by people who are experts in these areas, not a lone YEC conference where even that community fights against your ideas (as with the Australian cosmologist fellow I forget his name at the moment).
Nope, still sounds ridiculous when you put it like that. Synchronized heart attacks? Around the entire globe? What about the dinosaurs already on higher ground?
What, precisely, is higher ground saving the mammals from?
We also haven’t found Elvis Presley, aliens, or unicorns in the fossil record… yet… and probably will not hear of it considering the government is already covering up Roswell. One conspiracy theory is as good as another.
Oh come on. Given the vast number of fossils we’ve found so far, if large mammals and dinosaurs ever had coexisted, we would have found fossils confirming it. And not just a few here and there — lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of them.
And we would hear about them. Remember that you’re talking about tens of thousands of geologists and paleontologists, many of them academics operating under a “publish or perish” ethos, and many of them petroleum geologists operating under intense financial pressure to come up with models that can predict where to find oil.
As I said, on that scale, the idea that there’s some kind of cover-up going on is simply ridiculous.
And paleontologists use evolution to predict where they can find fossils of interest and then go out and find them. Field work is very expensive and grant money hard to come by so they don’t use a shot in the dark methods. It would be impossible to do this if the fossils were laid down randomly in a global flood.
Then you’re not doing science. Your entire argument is ad hoc reasoning to try and shore up a claim for which you have no evidence. Piling guesses upon guesses doesn’t provide any factual support for a claim.
What you can’t explain is why there is a correlation between fossil species and the ratio of parent and daughter isotopes in the igneous rocks above and below them. How in the world does a flood sort igneous rocks so that fossil species correlate with specific U/Pb ratios in zircons or with K/Ar ratios?
What you also fail to mention is that sediments 10’s of millions of years apart are in close proximity to one another.
If God made the flood, and let the flood proceed as floods normally conduct themselves, the finds that we have are impossible to create by means of a global flood, or even a sequence of floods.
You need a Miracle to have the flood prove a Miracle.
Give it up. There’s no evidence that rationalizes what we actually find in the geological stacks.
@r_speir, like other YEC apologists, baked some assumptions into his “eyewitness account” argument that are not necessarily clear to the uninitiate. I am not surprised that you did not discern his unspoken assumptions, but let me lay them out for you as best I can. I invite @r_speir to correct anything that I might be misinterpreting.
The argument goes like this:
God is the eyewitness of everything that has ever happened in history.
Every word of the Bible is God’s message to us.
Therefore, when the Bible speaks from a journalistic/historical perspective, it is the testimony of the ultimate eyewitness, namely God.
I have no disagreement with this syllogism. However, the syllogism does not protect you from making category errors. If a passage is figurative and/or allegorical, but you sincerely but mistakenly interpret it as journalistic/historical, you can create some pretty serious problems. One example of the problems that can be created is the heresy trial of Galileo by Cardinal Bellarmine. Bellarmine was 100% convinced, quite sincerely, that various Scripture passages about the earth and its relationship with the sun proved that, from God’s indisputable and very clearly spoken perspective, the universe is geocentric.
Nowadays we all interpret those same passages in an allegorical/symbolic way. From the textual perspective, Bellarmine was making plausible arguments, but hardly anyone wants to defend the Bible against the “heresy” of a heliocentric solar system today. We have all adopted the figurative interpretation of those passages.
I predict that in 200 years, we’ll all be interpreting Genesis 1-3 in a figurative manner, in the same way that 200 years after the Galileo heresy trial, everyone was interpreting the geocentric passages of Scripture in a figurative rather than a literal way.
There is no misinterpretation, and I have a good handle on what the underlying YEC assumptions are. The problem is that those are not the assumptions that YEC’s present to us. They want to give the impression that the actual, direct authors of Genesis were eyewitnesses, which is untrue even within the theology presented by YEC’s. As the Bible states elsewhere, God inspired humans to write the Bible. Nowhere does it say that God took Moses back in time and had him witness the events, even though I have seen an occasional YEC put forth such an apocryphal tale. Nowhere does the Bible state that God dictated the Genesis creation story. It says inspired, and inspiration has never been synonymous with a literal historical account. In fact, if you see a movie that is inspired by real events you can just about bet that it isn’t a literal re-enactment of history.
So even the Bible does not say that Genesis is a literal account or an eyewitness account, contrary to the claims of YEC’s. [quote=“Chris_Falter, post:54, topic:37536”]
I predict that in 200 years, we’ll all be interpreting Genesis 1-3 in a figurative manner, in the same way that 200 years after the Galileo heresy trial, everyone was interpreting the geocentric passages of Scripture in a figurative rather than a literal way.
[/quote]
That is an interesting piece of speculation. The Galileo Affair occurred about 1615-1620. By the early 1800’s, what were the attitudes towards Geocentrism? I really don’t know, but I would suspect that there weren’t that many holdouts. By the early 1800’s, the new field of geology discovered that the Earth was quite ancient and that there was not a recent global flood. Instead, the geologic record was the outcome of local events over millions, perhaps billions, of years. We are now 200 years past that point, and YEC is still popular among a significant portion of the Christian community in the US. Will another 200 years change things?
Good question, but I think that the next 20 years will change things a lot. There will always be holdouts, but as the current generation dies off in the YEC ranks, I doubt that many will follow their footsteps. Maybe I am wrong on that, but that is my impression, looking at the millennial generation.
As far as the Christian community goes, you could be right. I’m a Gen-Xer, but my baby brothers are closer to the millennial generation. One of my brothers is heavily involved in missionary work and campus ministries, and I get the sense that YEC simply isn’t on the table for him. I also get the sense that his peers have the same distasteful view of YEC. Say what you will about “kids nowadays”, but they may be getting this one piece right.
At the same time we see the rise of climate change denial, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, and a whole host of rather ridiculous but popular conspiracy theories. You would think that having something like the internet, with facts at your fingertips, would be the cure for these types of things, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead, the internet can be a place to reinforce confirmation bias, which I find absolutely fascinating from a human psychology point of view. We humans still have this tendency to accept emotion over reason, and that may not be going away any time soon.
The “soft tissue” dinosaur finds aren’t very soft, and usually a microscope is needed. Compare that to mammoths found frozen whole in the ice: there’s all sorts of mammals from ten thousand years ago with flesh and hair and stomach contents, but not one dinosaur that hasn’t been almost entirely mineralized. I don’t understand your conclusions.
Make sure you get your facts straight about exactly what’s been discovered in the way of dinosaur soft tissue. The findings are simply too rare and too badly degraded to be consistent with a young earth. Furthermore, many YECs exaggerate the state of preservation of what was found.