How many of the 4.543 billion years have been “directly observed with the eyes God gave us”?
Those who contend for a 4.543B year old earth already have a strong case - why overstate it?
You’re not getting it, Mike.
The HYPOTHESIS (now graduated to theory) that the earth is billions of years old makes entirely empirical, correct predictions about what we will directly observe with the eyes God gave us.
The HYPOTHESIS that the earth is 6K years old makes entirely empirical, incorrect predictions about what we will directly observe with the eyes God gave us.
Real science makes prospective empirical predictions.
Pseudoscience pretends that science is merely retrospective.
Do you believe that Jesus is Lord?
Do you regard the Bible as God’s word written for us?
Yes to both.
Why can’t you admit the simple truth that science works prospectively?
How then do you interpret the behavior attributed to God in Ex 20:11 and Ex 31:17?
Kindly answer my question first, Mike. It’s very straightforward.
I’ve admittedly repeatedly that I don’t even know enough about science to call myself a novice in it. You say that you believe that the Bible is God’s word, but you want to treat its words as if they are a hypothesis for a science experiment. If you’ve conducted an experiment on Ex 20:11 and Ex 31:17 and decided that their hypothesis doesn’t hold up, what behavior then do you ascribe to God in those verses?
(If you think I’m seeking to make a rhetorical point rather than elicit information, then you are misunderstanding me.)
[quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:35, topic:36240”]
I’ve admittedly repeatedly that I don’t even know enough about science to call myself a novice in it.[/quote]
So why doesn’t your self-confessed ignorance about science stop you from repeatedly misrepresenting science?
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I don’t know how to give it any more respect than I already am. Among other things, it has driven me to this site to ask questions. My whole difficulty lies in the fact that I perceive conflict between it and the Bible I hold most dear. If I didn’t care what scientists thought, I wouldn’t work so hard to reconcile their views with my own.
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It’s not about what they think. It’s about the evidence and how the evidence is produced.
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Of what else is a fellow who can’t even qualify as a novice in this field capable?
I know you may not be following this thread but I just have to inject something here. The geologists that first came to the conclusion that the earth was older than 6,000 years had nothing but their visual observations of the earth to work with. No radioactive dating or other fancy tests that are so common now. It was just good old fashion going to the field and looking at the rocks. Geology can be a very visual field of study. It doesn’t get you to 4.5 billion years but it does get you way beyond 10,000 years.
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@Mike_Gantt… this kind of statement is self enfeeblement.
What would you say about a critic of most Christian creedal positions explaining his habitual distortion of Christian theology as due to the fact he is no graduate of seminary school?!
You don’t need to be a seminarian to get Christian theology 90% correct. And you don’t need to be a professional scientist to define 90% of science correctly.
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This document goes through the historical estimates of the age of the Earth, starting with Comte du Buffon in 1779 getting 75,000 years. 80 some years later, Lord Kelvin extended this to about 20 million years old. A fun quote from Kelvin’s wikipedia page:
Thomson (Lord Kelvin) remained a devout believer in Christianity throughout his life; attendance at chapel was part of his daily routine. He saw his Christian faith as supporting and informing his scientific work
A fun fact about Cosmology is that an embarrassing thing happened in the 1900s is that the age of the Earth according to geology was older than the age of the Universe (by our first estimates of the Hubble constant). This also happened with some stars where the age of some stars was older than the universe. The remarkable thing and beautiful thing about science is that all the dates converged on a consistent date as more information came in. You would think that if science was wrong, the dates would get less and less consistent.
Learning the fundamental nature of science.
How can I expect to experience resurrection and eternal life? I do not have a divinity degree…
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I think you can get one online…
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LOL ROTF! 
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If you were in the vicinity of a miracle you could analyze it just like any other phenomenon. If you were present with instrumentation when Jesus walked on the water you certainly could have recorded it and possibly (depending on the details of the miracle) measured minute pressure variations in the water as he stepped. What you could never do is come up with a viable scientific explanation–otherwise it was not supernatural, but natural. But as a scientist my commitment to methodological naturalism (which I take as a synonym for the scientific method) means that were I fortunate enough to collect data on a miracle, I would essentially die trying to explain it (while wearing my scientist cap.)
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