I was being facetious. My point was, it takes faith to believe in miracles. It takes faith to believe in a young earth. It takes faith to believe in an old earth. It is all about faith, which is the evidence of things not seen (Heb 11:1).
It takes just as much faith to believe in an old earth as it does a young earth (maybe more). Young earthers have as their foundation an ancient history book called the Bible, which is subject to interpretation. Old earthers have new-age sciences, such as evolution, paleontology and archaeology, which are also subject to interpretation.
There is much to agree with here. We all do start from some sort of faith foundation in something before we can embrace anything else, be it belief in anything or be it skepticism toward anything. Others here would push back at you on this, but I think you are essentially correct. However, your comment about one side needing slightly “more” faith than the other may betray a different take on faith that, I think, diverges from the Hebrews 11 passage that you would no doubt wish to site approvingly.
Again … technically correct. All our thoughts and considerations had to pass through some interpretive gauntlet at some point – or maybe more accurately: can only be held inside our culture-shaped interpretive framework. I think you err, though, when you imagine that the ‘old-earthers’ do not also share Bible history in their own foundation. Observations consistent with deep-time began before evolutionary theories were on the scene, and while (perhaps even because?!) biblical worldview still predominated in much of their culture. These people believed that all truth is from God, whether found in the scriptures, or found in creation. And they properly recognized that Paul’s imperative (2 Cor. 5) to “walk by faith, not by sight” does not mean we should then close our eyes and consider our sight useless. On the contrary, along with Jesus – we presume to use such daylight as we are given. They did; and many sciences were born. We trust God [or should] both through what we think we know as well as what we don’t.
I’m glad you’re here as a ‘young-earther’. That position takes the most heat of criticism here, but even so; as brothers and sisters in Christ we can learn to get along and reason/argue with each other constructively and in love. This is a crucible where we can strive to do just that.
[Edit – couple of things reworded to enhance clarity]
I would say subject to fallible, human interpretation.
Geology, astronomy and chemistry are hardly “new-age” sciences since they have history that pre-dates Darwin. And while data may be subject to interpretation that fact that data exists is not.
It is all about context. As an engineer (retired) and a science buff, I see no evidence for uniformitarianism, but widespread evidence for a catastrophic, global flood. That precipitated my view that it may take more faith for the former than the latter.
I must disagree. There is no evidence in either the old or new testament of an old earth.The genealogies from the Hebrew and Greek indicate the earth to be between about 6,000 and 7,500 years old. The unprovable (and therefore, faith-based) assumption that the first few days were longer than 24 hours must be balanced by the remainder of the six day narrative, along with the statements of Christ in Mar 10:6, the genealogies of Matthew and Luke, the narratives of Peter (2Pet 3:3-6), Paul (1Cor 15:45; 1Tim 2:13), and Jude (1:14), and much more. Nothing points to an old earth, other than interpretations of historical data by those within the modern historical sciences.
Science had no problem advancing prior to the creation of new-age sciences, nor since. Some of the greatest scientists that ever lived were young-earthers; and I challenge you to list a single great scientific discovery that relies on an old earth and/or evolutionary mindset or methodology. The greatest scientists seemed to be either creationists, like Newton, Maxwell, and Faraday; or they admired creationists (Einstein had pictures of those three on his study wall). There may have been a few atheist scientists who were also great, but I cannot think of any. Hubble, maybe, but he was more historical. The list of great scientists who are/were creationists is long.
I was an old-earther for most of my life, until about 5 or 6 years ago. Oddly, it was the nastiness of evolutionism trolls on internet blogs and forums that encouraged me to resume my studies. I could not imagine anyone being that nasty, unless they had something to hide.
I dropped my long-held “regional flood theory” when I realized the science did not support it. Suddenly, everything made sense: the fossil record; the massive, inter-continental strata; and even such bizarre structures as polystrate fossils, not to mention geological wonders such as massive salt domes over a mile thick and covering hundreds of thousands of square miles. Now even dinosaur extinction can be reasonably explained.
Everything is subject to fallible, human interpretation. I am not sure what your point is?
My point is, historical data supports both views, depending on how it is interpreted. For example, Geology and astronomy are mostly historical sciences which support both views. Two pioneers in geology and astronomy, Steno and Kepler, were creationists.
Chemistry, Math and Physics are normally considered hard sciences, but even they are subject to interpretation; for example, the steady state vs expanding universe. I have read (or heard?) that Einstein went to his grave believing he was right about a steady-state universe. That is the more biblical view since the scripture states the earth abides forever (Eccl 1:4).
So how does star light which has been in transit for millions of years support your YEC?
How does the record of the changing direction of the earth’s magnetic field recorded in the spreading sea floor of the Atlantic ocean support your YEC?
… until the very same principle is leveraged to support a young earth, you mean? It seems to me that young-earthers only reject it selectively.
Why should there be any? The age of the earth wasn’t even on their radar as anything important to care about. So I don’t look there for instruction in physics any more than I would for cookie recipes. It’s the wrong place to look for that sort of thing. The scriptures are about God and God’s people being called and blessed, ultimately in Christ. Our attention to the mechanics of creation is a modern preoccupation that has ensnared modern creation science enthusiasts just as much as everybody else.
Maxwell and Faraday are excellent examples to list. You left out Kelvin – also a devout Christian (of the more orthodox sort even, unlike Newton). You will probably want to study Maxwell before you keep him on your “approved” list as he was not an anti-evolutionary or anti-deep time crusader that YECs have been misled into believing. But his correspondence does have some excellent content that all should read – especially YECs. Kelvin too … who was more of an anti-evolutionary crusader had it on good evidence of his day that the earth was only … wait for it … 20 to 40 million years old! He had a couple key things missing (radioactivity primarily) that caused his error. But the point is … these are pious Bible based people who made no allowance for sloppy misuse of scriptures to promote young-earth schemes.
I’m with you in being disgusted at so much internet trolling (on virtually any side of any issue.) But if it motivated you to resume study, that’s great! Never stop that.
Here is one of the things that drove me in the opposite direction of your apparent path. Try this experiment. On any given issue where evidence of interest is presented, look up what pro-creationist materials say about it. Then look up what a hostile sources (but level-headed --not social media or trolling sources) says about the same. They will have a rebuttal. It used to be (not too many years ago) that it would be hard to find the creationist rebuttal to the rebuttal. Now they are getting a little better about that I think. But go back and read the creationist answer to the rebuttal – making sure it isn’t just restating the original case or merely slurring their detractors. Go back and forth on these until the rebuttals are exhausted and then weigh who made the most convincing case. On issues (like genetics) where I have insufficient knowledge of to directly evaluate for myself, I take an interest in how the experts are responding to each other. I can’t recall ever finding a single case where the YEC side has come out on top in such exchanges, and it wasn’t for lack of taking an interest. In fact what I do find is that those who answer YEC claims freely link back to any / all YEC sites where the claim was defended by actual supporters; but YEC rebuttals in their major sites rarely (if ever?) link their readers to any rebuttal information that would interest an impartial reader. There is an asymmetry here. One side is afraid of people learning too much, and the other side fearlessly says “please … show us your data!” And that latter side has on it the scientists, the Maxwells, the Einsteins, the Christians who aren’t trying to bolster their faith up with ephemeral proofs. In that spirit, I ask you: Do you have any example to show me … any at all? … where a YEC proposition / rebuttal exchange has turned out in the YEC’s favor? I really do want to see it if it exists. But just finding some as-yet unanswered question doesn’t qualify as a YEC “win”. One can’t presume that all hidden future scores will all be settled in your side’s favor. Is there any argument in which the YEC model does a better job explaining reality than mainstream scientific theories? I do look forward to hearing of any.
It seems to me that it is the YECs who have to most carefully shelter their constituencies from so much of reality – even the Bible --which may be the most dangerous book of all to turn loose on your children unsupervised.
In the spirit of Maxwell, I’ll end with this lengthy quote from his own correspondence that should leave you with a truer view of his (relatively) fearless pursuit of truth… would that YECs (and all of us!) would take this more to heart:
James Clerk Maxwell:
I assert the Right of Trespass on any plot of Holy Ground which any man has set apart … to the power of Darkness. Such places must be exorcised and desecrated till they become fruitful fields. Again, if the holder of such property refuse admission to the exorcist, he ipso facto admits that it is consecrated, and that he fears the power of Darkness. It may be that no such darkness really broods over the place, and that the man has got a habit of shutting his eyes in that field, which makes him think so.
Now I am convinced that no one but a Christian can actually purge his land of these holy spots. Any one may profess that he has none, but something will sooner or later occur to every one to show him that part of his ground is not open to the public. Intrusions on this are resented, and so its existence is demonstrated. Now, I do not say that no Christians have enclosed places of this sort. Many have a great deal, and every one has some. No one can be sure of all being open till all has been examined by competent persons, which is the work, as I said before, of eternity. But there are extensive and important tracts in the territory of the Scoffer, the Pantheist, the Quietist, Formalist, Dogmatist, Sensualist, and the rest, which are openly and solemnly Tabooed, as the Polynesians say, and are not to be spoken of without sacrilege.
Christianity—that is, the religion of the Bible – is the only scheme or form of belief which disavows any possessions on such a tenure. Here alone all is free. You may fly to the ends of the world and find no God but the Author of Salvation. You may search the Scriptures and not find a text to stop you in your explorations.
Well (and correct me if I’m misrepresenting), you seem to be saying that somebody is EITHER:
A young earther who has “as their foundation an ancient history book called the Bible, which is subject to interpretation.”
OR
An old earther who has “new-age sciences, such as evolution, paleontology and archaeology, which are also subject to interpretation.”
It is false, because not only do old earthers (like me) see the Bible as a “foundation,” but young earthers don’t just hold to the Bible but are informed by extra-biblical information and perspectives (for instance, a particular bent of interpretation largely informed by an 1800s philosophical school of thought–something that many don’t recognize; it’s “just the way you read it”).
I appreciate a certain courage that you demonstrate to be willing to come here and dialogue, but I don’t know if you realize that implicitly (and probably accidentally) mischaracterizing some of your “opponents” can come across as arrogant.
Me, for example. I grew up a staunch young earther, and was one for years. My relationship with Jesus is foundational to my life–I have pursued (somewhat unwillingly) a calling to full-time ministry, I have read the Bible cover to cover more times than I can count, maybe even more importantly, I have studied various parts of scripture in a fair amount of depth (maybe not to the extent of some here who have very robust biblical cultural and linguistic knowledge), and there’s very little that I take more seriously. My Bible education was traditional and conservative (I wrote at least one apologetic paper in college based on a young-earth perspective).
But you implicitly dismiss me as someone who doesn’t take the Bible seriously enough so that I am susceptible to deception from unbiblical sources. I assure you that this is nowhere close to the truth.
So your intellectual perspective is in part determined by your emotional reaction to nasty people?
The people here are generally not nasty. Do you think they “have something to hide”?
I find this very confusing. Are you suggesting that regional floods don’t happen? That they are scientifically improbable or impossible?
I don’t agree with your premise that it has been in transit for millions of year, at least not for millions of years outside our frame of reference. This is far above my paygrade, but I believe it is predicted in General Relativity that time rates vary in gravitational fields of different strengths. When God “stretched out the heavens”, as written (Ps 104:2; Isa 40:22, 42:5, 44:24, 45:12, 51:13; Jer 10:12, 51:15; Zec 12:1), the universe could be created in 6 earth days, and still yield the results as withnessed within our frame of reference. There are several competing and/or complementary theories by creation astronomers/physicists, such as Mark Harwood, John G. Hartnett, Jake Herbert, Russell Humphreys, Danny Faulkner, and Jason Lisle.
Are you familiar with research of Coe, R.S. and Prévot, M. “Evidence suggesting extremely rapid field variation during a geomagnetic reversal.” Earth and Planetary Science, 1989?
I found the quote from which I derived my interpretation:
“Searching for what he wished to find, Einstein discovered a solution to his own equations that specified just such a universe, the great thing having been there from the infinite past and destined to be there into the infinite future.For reasons that he could never make clear, Einstein found a universe so conceived particularly satisfying. Friends of his who knew him well have suggested (to me) that to the end of his life, Einstein regarded an expanding universe with a certain fastidious distaste.” [David Berlinski, “The Devils Delusion - Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions.” Basic Books, 2009, pp.76-77]
It was not exactly what I recalled, but perhaps I was combining Berlinski’s statement with this one:
"But the fact that Einstein experimented with the steady-state concept demonstrates his continued resistance to the idea of a Big Bang, which he at first found “abominable”, even though other theoreticians had shown it to be a natural consequence of his general theory of relativity. (Other leading researchers, such as the eminent Cambridge astronomer Arthur Eddington, were also suspicious of the Big Bang theory, because it suggested a mystical moment of creation.) When astronomers found evidence for cosmic expansion, Einstein had to abandon his bias towards a static Universe, and a steady-state Universe was the next best thing, O’Raifeartaigh and his collaborators say. Helge Kragh, a science historian at Aarhus University in Denmark, agrees. “What the manuscript shows is that although by then he accepted the expansion of space, [Einstein] was unhappy with a Universe changing in time,” he says." [Davide Castelvecchi, "Einstein's Lost Theory Uncovered." Scientific American, 2014]
Perhaps in the future you could preserve a little more context from my posting when you make your refutation.
Below is the “point” I was attempting to make:
If there is any thing in the Bible that makes no sense, it is the Global Flood. Even the Six Days of Creation makes more sense than the Global Flood. But YECs will dream up every miraculous intervention they can to explain why the Global Flood was real.
But they can’t produce the millions of Egyptian cadavers that the flood would have made… and even a small percent of the dead, being converted into fossils, would be a Huge and Impossible to Deny reality of the flood… but we have nothing like that. In fact, we have less than nothing … all the evidence shows that there was no global flood at all. And so I tacked on this extra sentence:
And the point I was trying to make is summed up in the last few sentences of the post you so badly quoted from:
[quote=“Mervin_Bitikofer, post:29, topic:5302”]… until the very same principle is leveraged to support a young earth, you mean? It seems to me that young-earthers only reject [uniformitarianism] selectively.
[/quote]
How so?
God certainly wasted a lot of “ink” on something too unimportant to care about.
Thanks for the info. I understand the evolutionists of the day were none too happy with Kelvin calculations. The discovery of radioactivity didn’t change anything, since all such calculations are speculative, and for evolutionists, insignificant. But Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) left no doubt he believed in a young earth:
“I may refer to that old but never uninteresting subject of the miracles of geology. Physical Science does something for us here. Peter speaks of scoffers who said that ‘all things continue as they were from the beginning,’ but the Apostle affirms himself that ‘all these things shall be dissolved.’ It seems to me that even physical science absolutely demonstrates the scientific truth of these words. We feel that there is no possibility of things going on forever as they have done for the last six thousand years. In science, as in morals and politics, there is absolutely no periodicity.’” [William Thomson, “Address to the Christian Evidence Society, London, May 23, 1889.” Christian Heritage Edinburgh, 2017]
Maxwell also seemed to believe in the Genesis account:
“Maxwell was convinced that scientific investigation and the teachings of the Bible were not only compatible but should be linked together. This was reflected in a prayer found among his notes: ‘Almighty God, Who hast created man in Thine own image, and made him a living soul that he might seek after Thee, and have dominion over Thy creatures, teach us to study the works of Thy hands, that we may subdue the earth to our use, and strengthen the reason for Thy service; so to receive Thy blessed Word, that we may believe on Him Whom Thou hast sent, to give us the knowledge of salvation and the remission of our sins. All of which we ask in the name of the same Jesus Christ, our Lord.’” [Ann Lamont, “James Clerk Maxwell: Scientific Genius and Compassionate Christian.” Answers in Genesis, 1993]
I have found that most everything regarding the widespread fossilized strata favors a global flood (I gave uniformitarians the benefit of the doubt by using the phrase “most everything”). I really cannot think of anything in the strata that supports gradualism.
Not me. I believe everyone should study the Bible without ceasing; and I consider those who believe it is their “duty” to protect others from the Bible to be, at best, legalists, defined as those who believe their doctrine is perfect, and no other doctrine should be allowed to “pollute” it. For the record, that has been the standard of all religious rulers, for all time. They are the “dangerous” ones: not the Bible. If everyone lived by the law of the Lord (Matt 7:12), there would truly be peace on earth.
The behavior of radioactive material is not speculative. It is fairly well known… and discoveries of spontaneously fissioned radioactive ore helps establish benchmarks that make estimates far more accurate.
@LXX_Researcher, then perhaps you can explain to me how the global flood managed to arrange all sorts of fossils to be only below the K/T boundary… and all sorts of other kinds of fossils to be only above the K/T boundary?
How is it that giant dinosaurs succumbed before cows and pigs did… but air-breathing proto-whales avoided death by drowning way longer than giant air-breathing marine reptiles ? While alligators that cannot survive any length of time away from the coastlines managed to survive much longer than dinosaur-era marine reptiles, proto-whales and all sorts of ocean-going creatures that should have survived much more easily during a flood episode of global proportions?
LXX, do you think the Global Flood happened before or after the three pyramids of Giza were built? My calculations say after. What do yours say?
From Wikipedia, “More generally, processes close to a massive body run more slowly when compared with processes taking place farther away; this effect is known as gravitational time dilation.”
So where is the massive body that is slowing down or speeding up time?
And are you familiar with what Coe says about YEC that use his work? This is from here.
This is an example of why I take any YEC claim with a large grain of salt.
Einstein was never happy about it, but he did accept it.
One of the problems for a global flood is the sheer number of fossils that are found. Take a look at Joel Duff’s write-up on the quintillions of just one species that are found in just one small region. Quadrillions, Quintillions and Beyond
[in response to my charge that YECs make use of uniformitarianism selectively.]
They freely made use of this same principle when they speak of things like the depth of the dust on the moon (or how far away the moon is), or salinity in the oceans, or anything in which a straightforward linear calculation leads to either a young age or (and this happens a lot) an age that while still ancient, is obviously contrary to the commonly accepted age. And the irony here is … that the very thing they had complained about evolutionists accepting without question [uniformitarianism], actually does turn out to be the weak point in their own objections. (I.e. thinking that oceanic salt influx must have been always proceeding at the same rate as we now observe … or that the moon must always have been receding at the rate we now observe.)
Folks here care about the Bible. All of it. Enough to have the conviction that we should be studying it and not assuming that we can just walk away from it satisfied with a surface reading.
You got that right! They weren’t happy one bit, and Kelvin’s international reputation didn’t allow them to just brush it aside. They did care, though; so such things weren’t insignificant to them. I don’t remember the specifics of where I read of that, but do remember reading it somewhere.
And thank you for your Kelvin quote (and source) which is interesting. It sounds there like Kelvin was objecting to notions of an eternal universe, or one that would wax and wane over the eons. The way I read it, he used scriptures as his source to say everything will come to an end. My vague recollection is that he didn’t have much use for evolution, but I could be wrong about that and would need to research it more. What I don’t see in the quote (and would be very surprised to learn --if indeed it were true) is any indication that he thought the earth was only 6 to 10 thousand years old. He was pretty adamant (indeed cantankerous) about his 20-40 million year conclusion being literally true … hence the evolutionists being all tied up in knots about it!
Regarding Maxwell; nobody disputes his genuine piety and devotion. That seems very well established. He is an excellent example of a scientific thinker who was solidly Christian in about every sense one could wish (though probably not in the sense that YECs might wish). The quote I gave came from the book: “The Life of James Clerk Maxwell” by Campbell and Garnett; chapter 6 (p. 179). You can actually access the full text of the book here online. I confess I haven’t read the whole thing yet myself, but reading the section that includes the quote I shared is interesting enough. He warrants the effort.
I see George and probably others here will probably want to give you grief over that – I’ll leave it be as I think I have enough general knowledge to have a different outlook than you put forward here, but I won’t be able to match their level of research and effort to persuade you in different directions.
Amen to all that! I share and resonate with your passion in this.
I’m being nasty!?