I refuse to “agree to disagree” because I have seen that YEC is the one thing most destructive of both the faith of people who arrive at college/university as Christians and the biggest reason that non-Christians rejected Christianity – even bigger than the judgmentalism that dominates so many churches and church groups even on campus. It is all too easy to see that the uplifted mountain ranges are at the least hundreds of thousands of years old, among other things, that it was not uncommon for someone being witnessed to to ask how old the Christian thought the Earth was, and if it was six or ten thousand years the person just walked away. And when in a lab class the evidence for an old Earth became obvious, Christians would follow what their YEC pastors had said, that if the Bible has even one error it can’t be trusted and abandon the faith.
I will not support that destructive teaching, and I will not yield on the point that it is not supported by the text.
It can only happen if you have very smooth laminar flow. Very smooth laminar flow is so rare as to be mostly a laboratory demonstration.
In a catastrophic flood there are always “submarine obstacles”.
I’ve watched the same thing at Miami Beach, and it happens because of pulsed flow and material that is pre-sorted to a narrow range of sizes. It’s an interesting phenomenon and one that is rare in nature except in flows heavily burdened with sediment; it does not and cannot apply to most depositional situations.
So under very limited and moderately orderly processes some stratification can occur. But those conditions are rare in nature (St. Helens is one of those exceptions because so much of the material was effectively pre-sorted by the energy of the blast).
As for the rest of your post, you may be right, I don’t know,
I have always respected and considered the Bible to be accurate and trustworthy, and I have spent many years defending the Bible from attack by atheist sceptics.
I’ve always believed the Bible to be true and I still do!
He is just trying to distinguish between litteral text and Theological truth. Abd the two are not mutually reliant or exclusive. The truth of Scrpture does not rely on specific words or even specific interpretations, You can still beleive in the truth of scripture without hanging onto Ancient Myths and understandings that do not fit with modern experience and knowledge. That means both scientific and social.
One of the main arguments about Homosexuality and / or genderism is whether such things could be innate and not the responsibility of the person themselves. The idea being that a female could actualy be trapped in a male shell. There are arguments both ways. Citing Scripture only inflames them.If God is directly responsible then it would seem curel and uncaring. The alternative is mental illness or abhoration which still could be put at the feet of God.
On a similar note, I have never understood how anyone with scientific knowledge and understanding could posibly see any reality in the Garden Narrative, be it magical trees or the whole of humanity deriving from one pair of humans set aside by God. To claim any connection from a Hebrew lineage to European or American people (etc) would seem to be ludicrous. And to do it to justify a sinful or broken race is dogmatism to the htn degree.
I consider my wife of 50 years to be accurate and trustworthy, but she is not perfect. She doesn’t claim to be. She can make mistakes.
The scripture writers were the same way. They are accurate and trustworthy, but they do make minor mistakes.
One gospel wrote a centurion eventually came to Jesus to ask for healing for a servant while another wrote that he did not come and that he only sent emissaries. The story is unaffected, but there is a minor error. The gospels are not inerrant.
The writer of Hebrews (actually Hebrews is thought to be a transcribed sermon) gives a wonderful message, and the message is not nullified by his or her mistake of saying the golden censer was in the wrong place in the temple.
One gospel writer wrote Jesus performed a miracle on the way to a place while another wrote Jesus performed the miracle leaving the place. One of these is an error, but the error does not nullify the good news.
Matthew even records Jesus told the Apostles to bring 2 animals for the triumphal entry, while the other gospels say Jesus told them to bring one animal. It is clear that there is an error. So the scriptures are not inerrant.
To claim the Bible is inerrant and to expect people to believe that is placing a burden on people that requires them to deny what the Bible actually says. And in the First Council of Jerusalem recorded in Acts 15, the Apostles agreed that we should not make it difficult for people to come to the faith.
Dear Richard,
I did not think for a millisecond that he was an atheist, if that is the way you read into it, you misunderstand me. It may be my fault, I apologise if I didn’t word that sentence as well as I should. The Australian culture is slightly different to the U.S. such that literary nuances can lead to misunderstandings.
All of the arguments, to and fro about the rock strata and the flood of Noah are endless, and thus not at all profitable or edifying.
It is curious though, that the theistic evolution believers, weigh in strongly on the beliefs I have, that they see are inconsistent with their holding to theistic evolution, BUT, (although the question was directed at Roymond), it is conspicuous that not one person has attempted to explain WHY an ark needed to be built for a local flood. The picture I pasted from Google Earth in my post above, (at Post Number : 501) clearly shows the enormous dimensions of the ark that God commanded Noah to construct, BY HAND, that is, as you would be aware, meant hand axes, adzes, planes, chisels, hammers, perhaps some hand saws, etc. only to build the ark.
Sure they probably would have employed beasts of burden to drag logs to the construction site, but the work involved to build a seagoing vessel of this size with hand tools and loads of God given ingenuity, would have been immense and I expect would have taken the best part of a hundred years to build.
The work would have been exceedingly difficult and tiring, but I have no doubt in my mind that the flood and the ark are real history as reliably recorded in the Bible.
The unanswered question I put to Roymond is below:
"The why an ark was needed at all, is the question you need to answer; ask yourself, if you truly imagine the flood that covered ‘all the land of the entire Earth’ was merely a local flood. What area extent do you actually believe the ‘local’ flood’ covered at its widest point if you believe it was located some where in the region of present Iraq or Iran? Was it as big as 100 miles across, is that even realistic? So, why would they need to have an ark to save their lives and save the lives of the animals God brought to the ark, if all Noah had to do was travel for a week or two to higher ground and all God had to do was move the animals to higher ground in another area? The whole concept of just of a ‘local flood’ makes no sense at all! The purpose of the flood was to obliterate all life from Earth, or LAND if you wish, it makes no difference. If all the life on land is to be drowned, WHY would God just use a ‘local flood’?"
I must admit that I truly do not know why you would think that.
I have already responded to the claim of ‘magical trees’… in a previous post. on this thread.
Of course ALL of humanity derive from ONE PAIR of humans CREATED BY GOD, that is why people from any nation on Earth can marry and have healthy children. It is precisely because we are ALL RELATED that this is possible.
WE ARE ALL ONE HUMAN FAMILY, EVERYONE ON EARTH IS FAMILY IN TRUTH AS WE ARE ALL DESCENDED FROM ADAM AND EVE.
To believe anything other than that is probably part of the reason why many with evolutionary beliefs throughout history have thought themselves a 'superior race’ and perpetrated appalling acts of barbarism against their fellow humans, by way of cruel slavery, mass murder and eugenics that were believed by the evolutionists at the time as being consistent with evolution and were for the betterment of mankind.
Such evil defies description!
These predate evolution by thousands of years. The OT supports slavery for instance, records mass murder of women and children, and the destruction of entire people groups.
Dear Bill,
Certainly that is correct, as man is sinful from his heart, and since sin and from it Death entered the world in the garden of Eden, it has continued, BUT, that by no means excuses the wholly consistent supporters of evolution, who following their faithful belief in evolution, committed such atrocities believing they were doing humanity a favour!
Furthermore, the slavery in Israel in ancient times is NOT the same as the ‘SLAVERY’ of modern times over the past 500 years or so.
In Israel back then the ‘slaves’ were more like an indentured apprentice as we have today in the trades, they were treated like a member of the family. The word slavery in modern times evokes the evil slave trade where African Negroes and Pacific Islanders and others, were taken at gunpoint against their will and forced into menial manual labour in so called 'civilised[’ western countries, for monetary gain of the ‘slave owners’, again, partly justified by evolutionary belief that those people were somehow sub-human to the white western ‘masters’, so they could still go to church believing that what they were doing wasn’t the vile, evil atrocity it really was and still is.
Again, the list of evil atrocities that were committed by people who accepted evolution as fact is very long and very sad.
Even if this were true (and it’s misleading at best as there are many people who accept evolution as fact but who are every bit as disgusted at genocide and slavery as you and I), it is not a valid argument against evolution. Scientific theories are not falsified by the claim that people use them to do or justify bad things. If they were, then we would also have to reject quantum mechanics and atomic theory on the grounds that people use it to build nuclear weapons. We would also have to reject the Bible on the grounds that people have used it too to justify slavery and genocide.
Scientific theories are only falsified by physical evidence that contradicts them when interpreted within the constraints of honest measurement, accurate reporting, and logical and mathematical consistency.
Yes, there have been wolves in sheep’s clothing throughout the ages and even now. I agree with you, but again that doesn’t decrease the terrible attempted genocides of millions of people by other people acting consistently with their evolutionary beliefs.
Not always wolves. I am thinking the Salem Witch Trials.
Then you shouldn’t have any difficulty in identifying a genocide that killed millions that was actually based on a belief in evolution. And if you actually understood evolution you would see it says nothing that could be used to justify genocide. To be clear, “social evolution” is a misapplication of evolution so it doesn’t count.
It is your beleif, let’s leave it at that. The fact that it is both genetically impossible and is contradicted by Cain in Genesis 4. The lineage of Adam is very specific and doesn’t include any outsiders who might try and kill Cain. Outsiders, by defnition cannot have come from Eve’s loins.
Still, if you want to hold onto your belief? Fine. But You have no authority to insist that I or anyone else believes it also. SHOUTING OR NO SHOUTING!
You are obsessed with Evolution, more than even I am, but you have turned it into the Devil’s greatest deception. Even, or maybe especially, Theistic Evolution. Why you should think God would plant so many erronious fossils I have no idea (The Devil cannot create)
Another of your beliefs that you try and impose on all and sundry.
I suggest you reread Romans 14 and stop arguing over “Personal Opinions” or Trivial disagreements" (Or whatever translation you use)
To be picky, that’s technically called a “discrepancy”. It’s more reconcilable than it appears in English, but it can’t be totally straightened out, and IIRC what’s really interesting is that while one may be reconcilable with a second one, the third doesn’t fit, and that’s true not just of one pairing – which makes it what one of my textual professors would call an “intriguing discrepancy”. Of course some of the attempts at reconciling the differences are laughable, but there is one workable one: different disciples remembered it differently! That implies that one of them at least was mistaken, which turns “discrepancy” into “error”, and we’re back where we started.
Right there is a big aspect of the difference between a modern scientific worldview and the biblical worldview: the former considers the terms “accurate” and “trustworthy” to be equivalent, i.e. something is only trustworthy if it’s accurate, but that was not the case in the biblical worldview: they considered something trustworthy not based on its accuracy but based on the authority of the source; we would ask “Did the writer get his facts straight?” but they would ask “Was this person an authorized writer?”
The truly ironic thing is that the exegetical approach of ‘literalists’ and atheists is the same: both read it as though it was written by a friend’s grandfather in English in a diary of things he observed. That seems natural to us, but it’s because we grew up with a modern scientific worldview.
Have you noticed that so does every Christian here? You’re just using a modern scientific definition of the concept “true” that requires twisting science to make it fit your view of the text due to the above issues; the majority here us a slightly different definition of “true” that says the “book of scripture” and “the book of nature” cannot confict and when science conclusively indicates that something the scriptures seem to say is wrong, then the problem is that we haven’t understood the scriptures; then there’s my view that asks, “What did the original writer(s) mean?” which applies the historical-grammatical method to insist that the writer meant what the text says in its original language, literary type, culture, circumstances, and worldview.
Who says they were magical? To use a YEC approach of making scripture talk science, I could claim it was biotechnology at work!
Huh – this is the first time I’ve heard the idea that there could be a connection “from a Hebrew lineage to European or American people (etc)”. Where did you find that one? After all, if you take the Garden story as history, the Hebrews are just one branch of a whole tree of lineages.
This is what is called “conjecture”. It’s based not on the text, but on an imaginative human tradition about the text.
Except you claim a great deal about the story that isn’t in the text.
No, I don’t. Unlike you, I’m not interested in making the scriptures talk science. It is sufficient to know that God considered that an ark was needed; I’m not in the job of crystal-ball gazing to question whether God’s motives make human sense.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
Ooh . . . that brings to mind a strange concept that says that time began at the conception of Jesus and extended both directions from there! More commonly people count the age of the universe from “and the earth was chaos and desolation” since it’s a bit difficult to conceive of chaos and desolation without time. Some peg it to God’s command to light to come into existence, though since photons don’t experience times that has its own interesting aspects, and others have pegged it to the creation of mankind on ‘day six’ since before that the only one to ‘measure’ time was God.
“It is finished” – Greek τετέλεσται (teh-TEH-less-tie) – is more a phase change for the universe, or the beginning of one.
Not quite. For example, if a master injured a slave’s face, leaving a scar, the slave had to be given freedom; in modern chattel slavery that was not the case. The differences aren’t huge, but they’re there.
This is unfortunately true.
What Burrawang misses is the same thing that most atheists who attack religion miss: it isn’t religion, and it isn’t evolution theory, that drives evil, it is the transformation of those things into ideology.
And oddly, it is the Christian right in the U.S. who advocate for policies the differences of which from social Darwinism are essentially zero, while atheists who affirm evolution push for what is indistinguishable from actual Christian standards.
Quite the opposite! Confidence in evolution would suggest that as many healthy people as possible should be kept alive on the premise that someone among them might have a mutation that will end up preserving the human race in some future crisis.
Every now and then I run into a YEC who insists that all the fossils were put there by Satan to deceive us. They never have an answer to “Where did he get them?” except the occasional “he made them from (stuff)”.
