Interesting…so in the absence of any laws predating the fall of mankind and even Moses at Sinai, may i ask you, what is the very first commandment?
“Thou shalt have No Other Gods Before Me”
What does this mean exactly? It means that Satan, by attempting to elevate himself above his own Creator, was breaking the very first commandment! So in fact, the underlying morality in the story is at odds with your claim here.
Also, please explain to me how the law of God can be eternal if it did not already exist…because we know that God is eternal and the law is a reflection of His character!
Yes – and many of them base those millions of years not on science but on the Hebrew text itself. As I’ve noted before, scholars back before Galileo ever heard of a lens examined the Hebrew carefully and concluded that the earth is old beyond human imagining and the universe is older still.
Most definitely true! In geology classes we did dating of rocks without ever referencing fossils.
No, what they have is archaeological and textual evidence that is interpreted according to the evidence, and in accord with the belief that God is not a deceiver.
No, the basis for the authority of the Ten Words was that God gave them.
In my university days the vast majority of people leaving the faith did so because they had been taught that if Genesis 1 is not literally true then the whole Bible is false, and because honest science shows that Genesis 1 is not literally true. It has nothing to do with “science beating theology”, it has to do with the fact that their parents and pastors were either themselves deceived or lied to them, yet they still believed the idea that if Genesis 1 is not literally true then the whole Bible is false.
This is a logical fallacy and a total cop-out. It’s demonstrably false because there were students who were honest enough to conclude that if their parents and pastor lied to them about Genesis being scientifically accurate, the maybe their parents and pastor were wrong about the whole Bible being false if part of it isn’t scientifically true. Those who made that connection kept their faith and discovered that the Creation accounts are much richer if they are read as the ancient literature they were written as and not as someone’s great-grandfather’s diary of events he observed.
Some of them were even wise enough to recognize where the idea that the Bible has to be scientifically accurate came from – and it doesn’t come from the Bible! No, if you examine history that claim didn’t start to be made until after the idea that science provides truth seeped into the church and Christians unwittingly accepted the proposition that in order to be true something has to be 100% scientifically accurate – a belief that does not come from the scriptures or from tradition or from any theology at all, it comes from the very human philosophy of scientific materialism…a philosophy that is at root atheistic.
You are confusing any science that contradicts YECism with “secular science”. Almost all my science professors in college and university were Christians, and not a one of them used “secular science” or anything similar as their worldview, they used the precept that God does not lie but is faithful and true.
And those professors who were physicists looked at the overwhelming evidence that the universe is unimaginably ancient, while those who were geologists looked at the overwhelming evidence that the earth is astoundingly ancient, while those who were biologists looked at the overwhelming evidence for evolution, and they all saw in their fields the proof of what Paul and the Psalmist said, that all creation tells of God’s glory.
“Salvation is at stake” only when the question is “Who is Jesus?” YECism is poisonous because it isn’t about Jesus at all, and in fact inevitably paints a distorted view of God – and that is dangerous to salvation. God isn’t required to speak science, and in fact there’s no reason he should – as you have said, no one comes to God through science…
But wait – yes they do! A bunch of guys who were atheists and agnostics when I was at university concluded that there must be a Designer behind it all, and they concluded that from studying evolution!
There are also some rocks where that doesn’t work, for instance the following (plausible but hypothetical) example: Layer A has no igneous or otherwise radiometrically-datable fresh grains, but has index fossils (e.g. benthic foraminifera) which can be correlated to Layer B, which can have radiometric dating performed on it.
Fossils are great for relative dating of geographically-separated sedimentary layers, but are infrequently usable for direct absolute dating.
Part of Judaism, not all. I got to learn from some rabbis when I was in St. Louis, and neither of them considered the first half-dozen chapters of Genesis to be meant literally, and one held to the position of Maimonides, one of the greatest of all Jewish scholars, that the universe is unimaginably old and the earth is also uncountably ancient – conclusions he reached from studying the Hebrew text.
Seeing Genesis as foundational is an error I’ve bumped into too many times to count! Jesus is foundational, and everything else rests on Him.
Um,what? I cited Luther about the length of sermons, so I don’t know what you’re talking about here. Though he probably wouldn’t be “on my side”; I would never preach for more than half an hour!
They might claim Luther, but he would be vigorously and heavily against them: he would excoriate them for wasting God-given gifts to engage in efforts that don’t focus on Christ and will never bring anyone to Christ. He saw the task of the church as being about Christ first, Christ second, Christ third, Christ always, and would blast YEC advocates the same way he blasted the scholastics and Aristotelians.
BTW, Augustine was not a Genesis literalist – he regarded the Creation stories as allegory.
The primary difference is that they were focused on Christ as the foundation while the YEC crowd has the strange notion that if Genesis isn’t literally true then the whole Bible fails. A second difference would be that they rejected putting any human philosophy above scripture, while the YEC crowd actually puts science above the scriptures with the idea that the scriptures MUST be scientifically accurate.
Predating the fall? The only commandment was “of the fruit of the tree in the center of the Garden you may not eat”.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. The commandment is a reflection of the reality, and it was the reality that opposed Satan, not a command. You make the command more important than the Name.
All Creation is a reflection of God’s character, and it isn’t eternal – it has a beginning, and it has an ‘expiration date’.
The Law of Moses was replaced, which tells us it is not eternal: Jeremiah taught this when he told us that God said He would make a NEW covenant – and a new covenant can only come into effect when the prior one has lapsed. And the Holy Spirit taught this when He reduced all of the commands of the Old Testament to just four items (Acts 15).
Absolutely. The Gideons (mostly YECs, bless their hearts ; - ) have lots of conversion accounts – mostly about whole Bibles left in hotel rooms, but also a lot about New Testaments given away, many of them to military personnel.
Are you familiar with Gerald Schroeder’s relativity days? He tries to have it both ways, six 24-hour days correlating to the billions of years of big bang cosmology. I think it’s a fun argument, but I’m not at all committed to it nor really suggesting it’s true:
Volcanic eruptions, especially the really big ones, are great for dating, too: lava flows can be dated, and then the ash layer(s) associated with those flows serve as a chronological marker everywhere they appear. In volcanology class we quite literally traced two different ash layers all over central Oregon – though the first time it wasn’t pointed out, our professor just pulled the lead van into a recent excavation and said, “Let’s have some dates”. That told us there was something in the stack of layers that would serve as a chronological marker, and that it was probably but not certainly volcanic.
Ash layers can even provide dating by their absence: at one road cut a major ash layer was missing. It took a bit of looking, but we found a flood layer – almost no deposits, but a LOT of scouring. That scouring told us that everything below it was older than the missing ash layer, but it also served to date the flood because it had to have been soon enough after the eruption that the ash layer was sufficiently close to the surface to get scoured away.
The fun part was that the exact year of that flood could be pinned down because it was reported in native lore that had astronomical data precise enough that the year could be determined – and because that date was solid, we could then use it to date some other volcanic deposits.
YECers love to claim it’s circular reasoning used to date rocks, but it’s far more complex than circular, using volcanics and floods and native lore and desertification and ancient shorelines and earthquakes and tree rings and ancient atmosphere trapped in glaciers, all linking one way or another, back and forth, building up a very nice picture.
Oh – just BTW, the date of that flood? About 7,600 years ago, with people living in North America to note it and remember it in lore precise enough to provide a date.
As has been pointed out, Augustine didn’t believe in a literal creation and many YECs would raise an eyebrow at Calvin’s believe that Adam would have gone straight to heaven if he’d never sinned.
However, when all is said and done claiming that this/that pre-Darwin saint would or wouldn’t agree with contemporary YECs is an argument from silence. Such saints never had access to the scientific information about the nature and the universe that we have and so did not and could not have a view on evolution or the age of the earth. As I mentioned earlier, Calvin’s view of creation (see his commentary on Genesis) is set out as it is for theological reason, not scientific ones.
So when YECs say Calvin or Luther agrees with us it is a giant red herring.
Have them google four views on creation free pdf download. Most of the sites have permission from the publishers to make the books avilable for free. The publishers expect they will be purchased from them if one likes them.
that sweet mention of God’s gifts, nor the fear of punishment, can keep him in his duty. But one asks what kind of death God means here. It seems to me that its determination must be sought in the antithesis. One must need to keep an eye on from which life man has fallen out. He was happy in every way, so his life had meaning for body and soul at the same time. If he had in his soul good judgment and true control of passions, then life also reigned therein. There was no defect in his body, and therefore he was completely free from death. True, his earthly life was temporary, but he would have moved to heaven without death or serious injury. Now death is so much a terror to us: first, because it is a certain destruction as to the body; next, because the soul feels the curse of God. It must also be considered what is the cause of death is the alienation from God. Hence it follows that by the name of death are understood all the miseries to which Adam by his error has exposed himself. For as soon as he departed from God, the source of life, he was decayed
(I think I do see at least two places where an edit is necessary – I fixed one.)
I know it’s a fallacy to point to his credentials to support an argument or to counter yours (you didn’t really have one), but are you familiar with them?
