Wow, that’s a mouthful. I have also spent more than five years investigating these same claims, and came to an entirely different conclusion. I am most surprised by your assertion that YEC “use arguments that have been soundly disproven for 40 years . . .” CMI specifically identifies arguments that are outdated and shouldn’t be used. Can you give a few examples? And fudging data? I really would like to know where you find that. I’ve found it in lots of places, particularly in geological studies, but not generally in YEC.
I guess you are now an evolutionist? Does the rejection of YEC mean that you must also reject OEC and Intelligent Design? Did you consider these? Of course, evolutionists cannot explain the origin of biological information. They’re still working on that. I just finished reading “Biological information: New Perspectives.” 550 pages of hard slogging, with extensive bibliographies, and it raises serious challenges to evolution from genetic studies. How can evolutionary mechanisms produce new and novel information even if they have life to start with. Have you listened to James Tour? How do you explain the challenges he raises?
You state:
“From here we can make a comparison to the fossil record. Which of the two scenarios is most analogous to the fossils as we find them in the ground? Had these fossils been formed as a result of a single catastrophic event, namely, a global flood we would expect to find all sorts of animal and plants fossils, along with human remains all dumped alongside one another like a mass grave. At best, we might expect the fossils of heavy animals to be deposited lower down with lighter animals and plants near the surface.”
Well, you are right that we do not find human fossils with dinosaur bones. But we do find massive fossil bone beds with jumbles of broken bone “scattered about and not neatly layered”, mixing all kinds of species. That is not controversial. What is controversial is this: Dr. Carl Werner claims to have visited many fossil digs, and having seen bird and dinosaur fossils being dug up in the same bed but not ending up in the same exhibit in the museum. (The point being that in the evolutionary scenario, birds evolved from dinosaurs and weren’t alive at the same time, and that evidence is suppressed.)
And if there were a worldwide flood, wouldn’t you expect the largest and most intelligent animals to be able to more easily evade the rising flood waters until later in the flood when all the higher ground was being inundated?
How can fossils form other than with rapid burial? (Hint: they can’t.) So it almost has to be catastrophic.
Wow, you require “unanimity of evidence.” Well, no such thing exists, either for YEC or OEC or ID or EC. So based on your criteria, we can’t know anything. So what we must rather do is look at the cumulative evidence, and see which viewpoint overall has the best explanation.
Yes, God could have created the world through the “Big Bang”, and humans could have evolved, and God certainly would have communicated to the ancient Hebrews in a way that they could understand. He could have also created the world in a different way, could have created humans instantly, and communicated in a way that both the ancient Hebrews and modern man could both understand. So “could have” doesn’t enlighten us one way or the other.
I don’t find the “overwhelming” evidence to be so “overwhelming.” I could as easily assert that the evidence for a young earth is “overwhelming.” Deep time folks dismiss with a wave of the hand the dinosaur soft tissues and the C14 in the dino fossil, holding on to 165 million years minimum. They dismiss with a wave of the hand the rocks from Novarupta which are clearly only 100 years old but in reputable labs are measured at hundreds of thousands of years old. So why believe dating methods when we have no way of knowing the actual date, and when we do know the actual date from history, it is always wrong?
And we can go on and on. If the red shift is really a measure of how fast the universe is expanding, then why is it quantized?
I don’t have time to list them all, but for example, in a book that was recently acquired by a library I use, Convicted: A Scientist Examines the Evidence for Christianity by Brad Harrub, the old “the oceans aren’t salty enough for the earth to be really old” argument was trotted out.
Others that come to mind are claiming that no transitional fossils have been found, or that radioactive dating methods are unreliable.
I’m a Christian. I don’t feel the need to put any -ist labels on myself. I accept the overwhelming evidence that the earth is ancient and the evolutionary model explains the diversity of life on earth. But I don’t see evolution as a belief system.
I have found on these forums that people mean lots of different things when they say “information” and ID subscribers regularly move the goal posts. Evolution can explain what it sets out to explain just fine.
Nope, but I know who he is, and I know his challenges to the scientific consensus have not really amounted to much. I’m not a scientist, I’m a Bible translator. I leave the science to the science people I trust. I no longer trust YEC or ID proponents.
You state: “No one questions that almost all of Revelation is figurative (except the Left Behind crowd) but mention that Genesis could be figurative and people lose their minds.” Well, much of Revelation is clearly figurative because it is clearly apocalyptic literature. Genesis is clearly not apocalyptic, so you can’t use how people view Revelation as any reason to view Genesis as figurative. You will have to argue that from a different point of view.
Wow, you are not a scientist, and you leave it to science to scientist, but you still seem to maintain pretty strong ideas of which points of view are right and wrong.
Of course, if Carl Werner were a trained paleontologist, that would have more impact, but his formal training is a bachelors degree in biology and an M. D. , neither of which is likely to have any training in fossils. It would be interesting to hear what museums have these exhibits of which you speak. Fossils are usually meticulously documented in situ before moving, so it should be easy to document. Birds and dinosaurs should overlap of course, since most feel birds are dinosaurs, but discoveries of them together would be a wonderful find, and quite a career maker.
Well, I guess we come to different conclusions as to which sources to trust. There are examples of a huge area of bent strata, many layers thick, that has no fracturing. I would post a picture, but don’t see how that can be done. Then these strata are planed off, and there is horizontal strata on top. If nothing else, the picture is strikingly dramatic.
I ended up here at the BioLogos website because I am working on a presentation to show the positions of YEC, OEC, and EC, and where they agree and where they differ. So I thought that BioLogos website would be a good place to get info to accurately represent EC. Not sure how I got sucked up into the conversation on the blogs, and not sure that they are the best way to understand EC. But several of the other buttons on the website don’t work from my computer, so this is where I ended up.
And interestingly, when we lived in Nigeria, I lent a book that explained the various views of creation to our Bible translator friend, and he selected “evolutionary creationism.”
If you are interested in viewpoint of the various positions from the EC position, a good place to start would be the book “Origins” by our very own Drs. Haarsma.
That may not be timely for your presentation, but is a good introductory read with problems of each approach fairly discussed.
There are lots of sources on the website, so perhaps if you computer problems resolve you can access them . Here is a link to one of the articles to get you started
It’s easy to say that if your only source of scientific information since you finished compulsory science education at secondary school has been spoon-fed articles by Answers in Genesis and creation.com, but once you learn how the scientific method actually works and get some hands-on experience applying it to real-world situations, it quickly becomes obvious that YECs are clutching at straws here.
The age of the earth is determined by measuring things. There are strict rules and protocols about how measurement works (basically, mathematics), and these rules also tell us how to interpret anomalous results. The rules are very basic and fundamental to every area of science, and you learn about them in the very first half hour of the very first practical class in the first term of any university physics course.
Young-earth organisations do not follow these rules. They blow anomalous results up out of all proportion, greatly exaggerating their extent and significance. They would have you believe that a minority of errors of a few percent in conventional dating methods prove that all such results right across the board are consistently out by factors of up to a million. Such an approach is simply patent nonsense.
Carbon-14 in ancient fossils is contamination, it’s as simple as that. That isn’t a hand-wave: contamination vectors have been well studied, and the levels reported by YECs (up to about 0.5% modern carbon) are fully consistent with known contamination levels. There’s no hand-waving in that whatsoever.
Welcome to the forum, Craig (@cewoldt). It is great to have your voice among us.
In lieu of a response by Dennis, Early Church most often refers to the 2nd Century to the start of the middle ages. Also known as the Patristic period.
I am also happy to provide some sources for you. Craig Alltert’sEarly Christian Readings of Genesis One is an excellent overview of the HUGE disparity between how those in the early church understood Genesis 1 and how we understand it today. Allert examines a range of patristic writers and shows how they have been misused by OEC and YEC writers. He also does a great job of explaining how the patristic writers engaged with scripture (their hermeneutics), the difference between the Antioch and Alexandrian schools, and how this two approaches misunderstood and misused in modern writing on creationism.
If the books BioLogos connection gives you the wiggins (or if you are pressed for time) then you might want to check out this collection of blogs instead (or as well as). As far as I am aware, the blog’s author has no BioLogos connection:
He does a good job of showing how AiG, in particular, misrepresent Patristic views on Genesis 1-3.
Of course, there are other sources, but these will get you going. You’ll also see that the cold reality is that anyone who claims that the Patristic writers were creationists in the modern YEC/OEC sense of the term is either A. painfully misinformed or B. seeking to deceive.
And who is doing this “suppressing”? The Illuminati? The Freemasons? The Papacy/Jesuit? Or the Zionist? I also use to cling to conspiracy theories in my YEC days to explain “modern science and how it was of the devil.” but I saw the evidence as over whelming.
Then get me the data of the universe and show me via the science, not some Bible Adam to Christ chronology stuff and use some real science and show me the universe as 6000 years old.
These threads are open to anyone, so you never quite know what kind of wacky opinions will show up. You have to wade through a lot of pebbles to find the gold dust a lot of times.
The Common Questions pages are the best place to look for general info on the EC position:
In regards to “the adam” as a proper name. That does not occur until Chapter 5 of Genesis. Also, when it is used as a proper name it is part of the genealogies which are known to be patterned after the list of Syrian kings who are given ages of up to 20,000 years. Gen. 1-11 are an ancient form of theology and are the same form of theology Jesus used in the New Testament.
You would prefer that science be doctrine, enshrined in creed and accountable to no observation?
That is blatantly false. The various explanations for the demise of the dinosaurs have been in play for some decades and the evidence has accumulated heavily in favor of the meteor strike.
So on the one hand, the Flood was so awesomely cataclysmic, it broke apart continents (and explains the current landforms better than the continental drift model of tectonic plate theory), but on the other hand, smart animals could have tried to “outrun” it? This is one of the many absurdities you find when people argue for a worldwide Flood.
Come again? Rapid burial is not the way most fossils form. Most fossils form in wet sediment, such as the kind that collects slowly at the bottom of rivers and lakes.
Plus, if fossils were all formed during a massive Flood, it would not matter how high the smart animals escaped to. Everything would be swept up in the flood waters and jumbled together and left at the bottom of where the water eventually collected. This model would not predict fossils in neat layers of increasing complexity.