LOL If He wanted to speed up radioactive decay, that alone would have been an effective tool to wipe out life, no flood needed. So if you want to claim that God made radioactive decay speed up, you have a whimsical, capricious God because the Flood just became pointless.
Yes: biblical miracles are always pointers (or signposts, as N T Wright might say). Superfluous miracles were the province of the magicians of the gods of the nations; the miracles of YHWH_Elohim always had a message, a lesson.
So YEC is very bad theology because it requires a different God than what the scriptures present (besides the fact that it throws most of the meaning of the first Creation story in the trash).
That’s well-put. I chime in on the science aspect when posts make foolish assertions that show they don’t understand even the basics, but my focus has always been the text of scripture, and nowhere in the text is there any evidence of a “capricious and deceitful deity”, indeed not even a whimsical one.
It was a good thing that my drink was finished when I read this; I couldn’t stop laughing for half a minute!
Which reminds me, I need to refill my drink in order to get enough fluids for the day.
No – but I know that those were not capricious demonstrations of power without a message.
Here’s something from the course I took on John (two terms; chs. 1-10, then 11-21) that anyone intending to talk about what the Bible says needs to adhere to: don’t claim things that aren’t in the text! That means don’t invent miracles that aren’t recorded, don’t claim someone had visions unless that is stated, don’t speculate about events that aren’t written down. Since God wants us to know and understand, we can trust that if He needed a miracle then He told us about it rather than leaving it out, and that if He communicated via a dream then He told us so. To do otherwise makes God more like a court jester than a king.
A global flood would be so much simpler!