Inerrancy of scripture and evolution

Those are not presuppositions. Those are all conclusions drawn from evidence.

Yes, otherwise known as science. If you think those interpretations are wrong, then show why. However, they are not presuppositions.

They are alike in the way that they deny evidence.

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@EvD97 Can you point me to the strongest evidence you have found for a young earth?

The reliability of radiometric dating is not a presupposition. It is tested through rigorous and extensive cross-checks.

In any case, the YEC organisations themselves have admitted that squeezing the radiometric evidence into six thousand years would have released enough heat to melt the earth’s crust, if not vaporise the entire planet.

That may be true, but there are strict rules that interpretations of measurements must follow. Rules such as not fudging data, not exaggerating nor downplaying the extent and significance of discrepancies, not quote mining, not having arithmetic errors, peer review, reproducibility, and so on. These are rules that are purely concerned with honesty, factual accuracy and quality control, and as such have nothing whatsoever to do with “presuppositions” or “evolutionism” or “compromise.” Yet every young earth interpretation that I have ever seen flouts these rules, often in ways that descend into total absurdity. Case in point: the RATE project’s 22,000°C accelerated nuclear decay.

In any case, it is not sufficient to hand-wave interpretations as “meh, just an interpretation.” You must explain what those interpretations are, and either (a) why they are flawed or (b) what mathematically coherent alternative interpretation you are proposing.

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@EvD97 (and @Swamidass )

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Gen 2:18-21
"And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.

And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof…" [Genesis 2:18-21]
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But when we turn back to Genesis 1, we read something quite different:

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Genesis 1:19-21, 23-26
"And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good."

Gen 1:23-26
"And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." [Genesis 1:19-21, 23-26]
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So, where do these two creation accounts diverge?

Well, bizarrely, Genesis 1 says that the Birds came out of the oceans!

**And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life and fowl that may fly above the earth…"

Whereas, in Genesis 2, we clearly read: "And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air…

Uh-oh! That’s pretty grievous!

Then Genesis 1 is followed by the famous sequence:
God brings forth all the living creatures " of the earth"…
Then God said: “Let us make man in our image”. And he did this “male and female”!
So: all the creatures, then let us make “man”, or generically, “mankind” or “humanity”.

While in Genesis 2,
God said: man should not be alone, I will make him an help mate for him.

Then: Out of the ground, God formed every beast of the field, every fowl.
Then he brings them to Adam for being named. But not having found a help mate,
God creates Eve from a rib of Adam.

**Conclusion: **
Genesis 1: Birds come out of the waters.
Genesis 2: Birds came out of the earth.

Genesis 1: God makes creatures, then he makes humanity, male & female. Together. No names.
Genesis 2: God makes Adam, then God makes creatures. Then Adam names them.
** Then he makes Eve.**

Two different stories. Two different populations of humanity.
Genesis 1 is about the nameless Pre-Adamites… and

Genesis 2 is about the Adamites.

I don’t know why you say this. Ge 1:20 claims that sea creatures were brought forth in the oceans, but the creation of birds is separate, and God does not say where the birds came from, simply that they were allowed to fly in the sky. Perhaps you shouldn’t restrict yourself to the KJV (I recommend never relying on a single translation). For example, compare it with these translations:

ESV: "And God said, ‘Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.’ " [birds are not said to come from the seas]

NIV: "And God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.’ " [again, birds did not come from the seas]

Even if one goes straight to the original Hebrew, I see no indication that the verse is saying that the birds also came from the seas. The same can be said of 2:19 in regard to the ground. In both verses, birds are associated with hashamayim (sky/heaven), not hamayim (waters) or ha’adamah (ground).

The apparent contradiction of the order of creation has been addressed over and over. I fail to see why people keep bringing it up. The verb used in chapter 2 when God talks about the creation of animals can be translated as “had formed” instead of “formed”, referring to something that had already happened earlier on Day 6 and Day 5. This removes the contradiction, and the order of creation is the same: first animals, then humans.

if you want sources, take your pick: AiG, CMI, gotquestions, etc. … just a simple google search and will get you answers.

Not different stories, but the same story in different levels of detail. The Bible says nothing about pre-Adamite people.

I hesitate to claim anything is the “strongest evidence,” (since evidence has to be interpreted) but if I had to chose I would point to the work of Dr. Russel Humphrey’s on magnetic fields. It is a bit dated, but the results are interesting. He created a model that assumed a young universe of about 6,000 years, and that the magnetic fields were rapidly decaying and not generated by a dynamo. Humphrey successfully made several predictions about the strength of magnetic fields of other planets that were confirmed when the fields were measured by the spacecraft Voyager II, while the predictions made by the dynamo theory were significantly off.

His original work: Humphreys, D.R. “The creation of planetary magnetic fields,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, 25 (December 1984), 140-149.

Evidence form Mercury’s Magnetic Field

Prediction confirmed: Beyond Neptune: Voyager II Supports Creation

From geology, I would point to the increasing evidence that geological processes do not require vast amounts of time, and the right conditions (i.e. a global flood) would have been sufficient to created the landscapes we see today.

Form biology, creationists have provided evidence that evolution (in the sense of molecules-to-man), has not occurred, if you’re willing to examine their literature. If evolution has not occurred, there is one less reason to argue for a old earth.

Ultimately, I don’t think you will be convinced by anything I say. Even if I was an expert in these fields, I still don’t think you would be convinced until you’re willing to change your worldview on the Bible, which I would claim to be the one of strongest evidences (if not the strongest evidence) for supporting a young earth.

Genesis 1:26-31 records the creation of mankind on Day 6. Genesis 2 is a more detailed account of the creation of man. Therefore, Genesis 2 is about events that occurred on Day 6. What evidence in the text is there that it didn’t happen on Day 6?

Over the years, I have read numerous articles from Biologos, Reasons to Believe, and other non-YEC christians, and I made it a habit to check to see if YEC had a sufficient refutation, and vice versa. I have also studied about non-literal interpretations of Genesis. I do my best to kept with recent evolutionary science.

Even when I doubled my efforts to find an reasonable way of combining evolution with the Bible, everything I read – from both science and the Bible – always pointed me back to YEC.

I remember reading that infographic several years ago. I also know that CMI has a refutation of many of the points made on it.

Fair enough. :slight_smile:

Are you sure that is the only valid interpretation?
How would you know if you were wrong?

@EvD97 I have see Dr. Humphrey’s theory and it is a bit more than “dated”. His prediction that the earth’s magnetic field is decaying has been shown to be incorrect. The other problem is he cites a paper in support of his theory but that paper documents that it took 5,500 years for a single magnetic reversal to take place and he claims there were multiple reversals during the year of the flood.

The OEC who do not accept evolution have no problem with accepting the actual age of the earth.

I will admit that I don’t let the Bible control how I view the evidence we see in creation. I accept all of the truth that the Bible contains. That truth just doesn’t include the details of exactly how God got things done. I have read many YEC articles and to be honest most use FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) and are often less than honest in how they frame their argument.

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People keep bringing it up for the same reason that the vast majority of Bible translations use “formed” rather than “had formed”. The whole arc of the Genesis 2:18-25 passage is one of unfolding consecutive action:

  1. God announces his plan to make a suitable helper for the man.
  2. God forms the animals.
  3. God brings them before the man.
  4. The man names them, but when all is said and done, no suitable helper is yet found.
  5. So as the dramatic climax to all this, God creates the woman.
  6. And man exults.

If step 2 was “had formed” the whole flow is interrupted for little point or purpose; the singular mounting drama of creative action, first announced in step 1, is suddenly interrupted with a non-creative, barely-related sideshow from steps 2 - 4, and not really resumed until step 5. There is no reason to translate the narrative this way except over-concern with the preceding chapter - a chapter that in many other stylistic markers diverges from this chapter, so that there already are many other warning flags that the two chapters are not to be read as a fluid union.

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The reason people keep bringing it up is because you are making special pleading. Nobody would write a narrative like that.

The semantics of the sequence is clearly intended to establish a sequence.

If you can insist that Days must be read literally, we can insist that an intelligent writer would not have told the story the way you say he would have had to, in order for you to have the necessary harmonization between the two creation stories.

With your way, there is no explanation for the City of Cain. Our way… there is.

According to this article, Humphreys’ prediction was that the magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune should have been “on the order of 1024 J/T”. A prediction that only specifies an order of magnitude is not a prediction – it is so broad that it has little chance of being wrong.

At the time, the magnetic fields of Earth (7.9 × 1022 J/T), Jupiter (1.6 × 1027 J/T), and Saturn (4.3 × 1025 J/T) were already known. You could have come up with a similar prediction by interpolation based on their respective sizes alone, with no reference to any creation model whatsoever.

We now know the dipole values for Uranus and Neptune are 3.7 × 1024 J/T and 2.1 × 1024 J/T respectively. If he had managed to pin down those values to within 10% or so, that might have been something to write home about.

I don’t know what values the dynamo model was supposed to predict. Do you have any specific details? I see that Humphreys claims that “evolutionists” (please note: the earth’s magnetic field has nothing to do with biological evolution) predicted that Uranus should not have a magnetic field. In support of this, he cites a 1986 Nature article (Dessler, A.J. “Does Uranus have a magnetic field?” Nature, 316 (16 January 1986), 174-175). I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy of this article (there doesn’t even seem to be a publicly available abstract on the Internet) so I haven’t been able to ascertain whether it even says what he claims that it says. However, it should be noted that at the time, the magnetic fields of Jupiter and Saturn were already known, and were not considered to be a problem for the dynamo theory, so I strongly suspect that it does not.

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@jammycakes Here you go
http://www.nature.com/articles/319174a0.pdf

The article discusses what might be found when Voyager makes it’s flyby. Which is kind of a mute point now that we know the prediction of no magnetic field is wrong. Just another example of using FUD.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that many YEC refutation articles published on creation.com and answers in genesis contain blatant errors and wrong information and are written by people with no actual credentials relevant to the topics they discuss. You understand what peer review is right? It is not comparing apples to apples to compare peer reviewed journal articles to creationist blog posts. I pretty much guarantee that the science professionals around here can find numerous mistakes and misunderstandings in any creationist refutation you can find and back it up with peer reviewed studies. I understand that a faith commitment to a certain Bible interpretation is a powerful lens, but at some point, sources should matter. If a source consistently is shown to be dishonest, you should sop trusting them.

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It is not hard for a non-scientist to find mistakes and poor argumentation.

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I don’t mean to pile on, but this issue does come up a lot:

Underlying this way of translating the text is an assumption that the writer had no way to clearly refer to a past event. Apparently Hebrew is so limited that both “formed” and “had formed” must be written the same way. The only way to reconstruct when each is meant is by reading Genesis 1, understanding the proper sequence, then adjusting the verbs in Genesis 2 to fit that sequence.

But this is not the case. The Genesis 2 account has no trouble referring to an event that has already happened. Genesis 2:8 says, “there he put the man whom he had formed.” This “had formed” verb uses a different tense to clearly step out of the narrative sequence recounted by the other verbs.* Similarly, after Adam names the animals we are told that “for the man there was not found a helper as his partner” (2:20). And in solving Adam’s aloneness, “the side that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman” (2:22). All three of these verses mark an action that has already occurred.** They are marked clearly, so they show up in any translation.

By contrast, the forming of the animals does not step out of the narrative sequence (as @dscottjorgenson noted, the plot depends on this being a sequential event). It uses the same tense of verb as other events in the narrative. There is no more reason to say that God “had formed” the animals than to say that God “caused a deep sleep to have fallen upon the man, and he had slept; then he had taken one of his sides and had closed up its place with flesh.”

Placing a “had” in front of some of the imperfect-tense verbs is an arbitrary exercise, as can be seen in how the ESV and NIV both insert a “had” in 2:19 about the animals, but only the NIV inserts a “had” in 2:8 about planting the garden. The NIV translators decided that both the garden and the animals needed to already exist to fit Genesis 1. The ESV translators decided only the formation of the animals needed to be adjusted. Of course, most other translations decide not to adjust either verb, giving the final say on the sequence of events to the inspired writer rather than the translators.

* It uses a verb in the “perfect” tense, as opposed to verbs in the “imperfect” with a waw-consecutive that generally indicates sequential action. But “perfect” and “imperfect” are simplifications based on grammar in our language.

** There’s a fourth in 2:5 about “had not caused it to rain”, but since it occurs before the narrative is in full swing, it’s less clear.

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What I read in the article you posted is that astronomers long believed that Uranus has a magnetic field of approximately 4 - 13 gauss at cloudtop. They were unanimous in believing this until a few weeks before the Voyager’s rendez-vous with the planet, at which point an argument broke out between 2 camps. One camp held that the lack of radio noise detection by the Voyager signified a very weak or non-existent magnetic field; the other camp believed that Uranus did have a magnetic field of the expected magnitude, but other factors prevented detection of the expected noise. The argument would continue until they obtained further and better data, which would occur just a few weeks later.

I am not sure of the point you are trying to make in citing the article. Could you clarify?

Cheers,
Chris

@Bill_II’s point in citing the article was in response to me, when I said I hadn’t been able to ascertain whether or not it actually said what Russell Humphreys claimed that it said.

Humphreys claimed that dynamo theory predicted that Uranus should not have a magnetic field, citing the article in support of this claim. However, it’s abundantly clear that the article made no such assertion. The article only said that preliminary observations suggested that Uranus probably did not have a strong magnetic field. It made no claim whatsoever about the predictions of the dynamo model.

In other words, it’s a quote mine.

At the same time, his own predictions only specified a maximum value for the magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune; they did not predict any minimum whatsoever. This being the case, it was a “prediction” where he could safely claim success for almost any reported value whatsoever. In other words, it was no prediction at all.

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